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Hiking in the digital wilderness of A Short Hike is a reminder of the small joys of stretching your legs out on the trails. Its pixelated habitat is saturated with the familiar sights and sounds of the backcountry in real life--like the bubbling of a sluggish stream through the woods or greeting fellow hikers as they trek along the steep edges of grassy plateaus. As a young canary named Claire, one of the first characters you'll come across is a pint-sized frog at the beach in Hawk Peak Provincial Park, who's clearly struggling with building a sandcastle. Her problem, unfortunately, is that she's heaving a full-sized shovel about, a clunky tool unfit for the refined job of sand sculpting. You can hand her a toy shovel, and over time, see her modest sandcastle gradually expand into a sprawling sand empire--simply a charming, heart-swelling sight. This is just one of the many minute scenes you'll embrace in A Short Hike, an exploration title about trudging across a park...

Project Cars 3 really stretches the definition of a sequel. It bears no resemblance to previous Project Cars games, tossing aside the franchise's traditional tough-as-nails racing for a more approachable formula that a wider range of players can enjoy. The result is a racing game that leans heavily into territory that should be familiar to Forza players, meaning you can enjoy its racing without extensive knowledge of the inner workings of each car you drive. But it's also a racing game that struggles to bring together all of its new elements cohesively. Core to Project Cars 3's transformation is its overhauled handling system. You'll have more than enough downforce in the front to bend around each corner with the right amount of car, only briefly having to counter-steer to prevent the back from whipping out from underneath you. It makes racing faster and more action-packed, and it's exhilarating when you're chaining together one perfect corner after the other....

There was a naked man in my court. On June 14, 1073 AD, my steward, vassal and knight, Earl Muiredach mac Carthach of Desmond arrived at the meeting of my small council dressed only in, well... his birthday suit. This was the man I'd entrusted to manage the paperwork of my realm, to ensure taxes were being collected. Was this newfound fashion choice a portent of his impending madness? Was it some bold power move designed to put me off my game? A sign of the contempt in which he held his ruler? Or was it a bug, a highly specific graphical glitch that just happened to leave one of my councillors undressed? I didn't know. Perhaps it's a credit to Crusader Kings 3 that I didn't have an immediate answer, a sign of the depth and complexity of its simulation and its capacity for surprise. Perhaps it was also a failing, a breakdown somewhere between the calculations of a mass of colliding gameplay systems and how their results were communicated to me. Perhaps it's both. R...

Madden NFL 21 is a tale of two games, really. It introduces The Yard, the best new Madden game mode in more than a decade, situating itself nicely alongside the breezy and fun Superstar KO mode that arrived last year. But outside of these exciting inclusions that are well-suited for short sessions, Madden NFL 21 feels all too familiar, even for an annual sports sim. The tentpole modes that require a deep investment haven't received meaningful updates, and the on-the-field gameplay doesn't do much to move the series forward and is hampered by surprising technical issues. EA Sports has done well as of late with recognizing that not every player wants to sink a dizzying number of hours into Franchise or Ultimate Team. With Madden NFL 20, EA added Superstar KO, a sudden death overtime mode where each player gets one possession. It returns in Madden NFL 21 largely unchanged, retaining its excellent high-stakes matches. With Madden NFL 21, EA has added a second casual game mode tha...

Alan Wake had a problem. He'd been teased as being a big part of the final DLC expansion of Control , dubbed AWE, and with that came expectations. Fans of Remedy Entertainment's 2010 psychological horror/thriller shooter had been waiting about a decade for the next phase of his tale. Wake worked furiously to make himself part of the AWE story, appearing in twisted cutscenes that captured his fractured mental state. But in the end, it wasn't enough. Though his writing had the power to alter the very nature of reality, not even Wake could make AWE more than an unsatisfying addition to both his story and that of the game he'd invaded. Control's AWE expansion ultimately is an underwhelming addition and a thin follow-up to the Remedy cult hit it's invoking. Especially following The Foundation , a DLC drop that added a lot of variety to Control with new powers and a new location that felt very different from everything else in the game, AWE comes off as more of a s...

Windbound is an excellent island. It's just a shame that it's a poor archipelago. For my first few hours with the new roguelike survival game from Five Lives Studios, I walked a knife's edge--blissful relaxation on one side, speedily encroaching anxiety on the other. You would be forgiven for being lulled into a false sense of security. The sunny skies and gorgeous ocean are inviting. The art style charmingly stakes out a familiar middle ground: cartoonish gloss, realistic proportions. The monsters are memorably designed, and even the most imposing are at least a little cute. But as welcoming as it can look, the red and yellow gauges at the top of the screen are a constant reminder that this world isn't friendly. You'll stumble around early on, unable to do much of anything. Okay, you have grass, but what can you do with grass? Okay, you crafted a grass rope, but what can you do with a grass rope? You may try to wade into the water in hopes of swimming to the clo...

Thousand Threads opens outside a tent in an unknown land, a dirt path presenting one potential way forward. If you stray from it, odds are a wolf will take notice and attack; you might fend it off with a stick, you might outrun it, or you might accidentally lead it to a house and watch in horror as it attacks the two randomly generated occupants that were sitting calmly a moment before, minding their own business. You might seek out more people and start performing little odd jobs for them; you might also return to the path and find the dead body of the region's mail carrier, still carrying a sack of undelivered letters. It's a hell of a setup for Thousand Threads, a first-person exploration game that, over several hours, delivers on few of the promises these opening minutes set up. Nothing I experienced in the game after quite matched the excitement I felt in those opening minutes up to the point where I found the dead mail carrier. That's not to say the game isn't ch...

It’s rock versus EDM in a bid to bring equality and electricity to all the people in Vinyl City and yes--it’s exactly as ridiculous as that sounds. No Straight Roads is an action game that is pure punk rock down to its soul and DNA. Much like punk, it’s kind of a mess at times, and not always in a way that works in the game’s favour. It reminds me of a talented and good-natured garage band who really believe they can make it but need a bit of support to reach the top. That's part of the charm, though, and No Straight Roads features a lot of really good concepts and some absolutely excellent music to back them all up. In No Straight Roads, you play as the rock duo Bunk Bed Junction. The band is made up of the hyperactive lead guitarist Mayday and chill technical drum wizard Zuke, who live in the sewers of the futuristic Vinyl City where electricity is powered by music. No Straight Roads (NSR) is the name of the governing company which controls this power, and thus also music, and i...

Next Stop Nowhere gets off to a promising start. You play as Beckett, a sci-fi courier who pilots a spacecraft and is best friends with an AI program. While visiting a bar, he meets Serra, and gets embroiled in her family drama when he learns that she’s trying to track down her wayward thief son before the authorities can get to him. The game is framed as a sort-of road trip through space, where the choices you make will change how the story plays out. At first, the charming characters and intriguing plot are enough to pull you from one location to the next. But unfortunately, a lack of meaningful consequence and a plethora of horrific bugs make for a trip not worth taking. Next Stop Nowhere is, by design, a very simple game. You guide Beckett by touching where you want him to go, and the points you can interact with in each map are highlighted with big white circles. There are, essentially, no puzzles--moving forward is simply a matter of interacting with every object signposted in a...

Despite its gothic horror visuals and heavy metal-inspired soundtrack, Othercide is, at its core, a heartfelt story about having empathy and compassion for someone who has suffered intense trauma. It's a game about sacrifice and hard choices, of accepting failure with the knowledge that you'll rise again stronger. Othercide's turn-based combat can be brutal, but at its best, it's also intensely rewarding to master. Though it suffers from some repetitive maps and technical issues, Othercide is an impressive strategy game with an otherworldly atmosphere and rich underlying story worth diving into. From the very start, Othercide pulls you into a grim world on the brink of collapse. A city, already devastated by plague, has now been overrun with nightmare creatures called Others and becomes the site of an apocalyptic event that shatters time and space, resulting in an in-between place called the "Dark Corner." Together with a ghost-like being known as the Red Mo...

Whenever I board a passenger jet to go somewhere, my stomach sinks and my brain says, "Well, I guess you're gonna die now." But the thought of flying is still magical to me. Whether it's fighter jets in Ace Combat 7 or TIE Interceptors in Star Wars: Squadrons , the idea of a hunk of metal flying through the air (or space) is an exciting, fantastical idea. Flight is very real, of course, even if a lot of science behind it can initially seem magical. With the return of Microsoft Flight Simulator, a game that is built to mimic reality as best as current technology will allow it, I can wield that magic for myself, operating and flying a plane with the understanding that the actions I'm performing have a strong basis in real life. It is terrifying. And it is absolutely phenomenal. Microsoft Flight Simulator's greatest boon is how easy it is to start experiencing the magic of flight. It's a simulator first and foremost, of course--the amount of buttons, knobs,...

It's been nearly 30 years since the original Battletoads, and my memory of it boils down to three things: 1) It was made like an Arcade coin-muncher even though it came out on the NES. 2) The toads' eyes bulged out of their heads when you got to a boss. 3) There are hoverbikes, and they are loads of fun right up until the moment you start screaming. The 2020 version of Battletoads isn't afraid to mix things up. It's a nostalgia bomb that takes one of the original's core tenets, switching between beat-'em-up and platforming gameplay, and expands on it, while adding cartoon visuals and some story that introduces extra depth. Some aspects of the reinvention fall flat, but Battletoads is playful and inventive, and worth checking in on for old time's sake. The new Battletoads deftly channels its original vibe and silly conceit into self-referential ‘90's-style cartoon. The cel-shaded art and neon graphics are a pitch-perfect throwback to the Saturday mornin...

Sports games generally tend to be more arcadey than simulation, with easy-to-learn basic mechanics that make the experience breezy off the bat while also having enough depth to appeal to competitive players. HB Studios' The Golf Club series has consistently defied that mantra by embracing the exacting challenges and unpredictability of golf since its debut title in 2014. With the 2K Games rebrand, I thought PGA Tour 2K21 might aim to be more like EA's defunct golf series. Instead, what's here is a refinement of The Golf Club 2019, with welcome new features and mechanical tweaks that make for a smoother experience on the course. For those unfamiliar with the franchise, PGA Tour 2K21 is technically the fourth entry in The Golf Club series that was originally self-published by HB Studios. It's the second title to be published by 2K Games following The Golf Club 2019 Featuring PGA Tour, which 2K helped polish ahead of its release in 2018. The transition to the 2K Sports n...

The Aegean Sea is a raging inferno. You may have heard tales of a great war between the ancient Greeks and the Trojans, a feud kindled by divine intervention, stoked by love and betrayal, and finally extinguished in an epic siege. In the newest Total War Saga, the Paris-Helen-Menalaus love triangle is the spark that doesn't just ignite the Trojan War of legend--it turns the entire eastern Mediterranean into a tinderbox. As a more focused, more specific take on Total War, Troy has an epic tale to tell. But to the benefit of the series' strategic legacy, Homer's writings set the scene rather than deliver a script, leaving plenty of room for those of us who haven't memorised The Iliad to enjoy crashing one enormous army into another and watching the world burn. At first, Troy seems a bit small. There's just the one map upon which the campaign is played. But that map is absolutely massive, taking in all of mainland Greece, a hefty slab of the western coast of modern-d...

Things come easily to the Spiritfarer because everything they do is to help others. This utterly marvelous game charges you with the most precious of cargo: spirits making their last pass through a fantastical world between ours and the next. As the Spiritfarer, it's your duty to aid these souls in their final moments before crossing into eternity. That duty quickly becomes a pleasure as every inch of this spirit world unfolds into joy and wonder. For a game all about death and letting go, Spiritfarer is joyous, full of light and life, while still remaining impossibly true to its raison d'être. Spiritfarer is a 2D platformer with a heavy dose of crafting and management. Your job is to sail the oceans, visiting islands, landmarks, and anomalies to gather and expand your abilities by finding shops, resources, and even ability-granting shrines. Your life as the Spiritfarer is not just a simple ferryman for wayward souls. Instead, you're there to help. It's more than just ...

It's hard to separate talking about Mortal Shell from discussing the Souls games-- Dark Souls , Bloodborne , and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice --because developer Cold Symmetry has obviously created a love letter to From Software's work. But Mortal Shell isn't a simple retread. It adds ideas and mechanics that shift your way of thinking about its duelist-style combat. Mortal Shell is a small-scale Souls-like game, demanding less of an investment of time and frustration. It feels tuned for more casual players--people who have been interested in this brand of experience, but who maybe struggled in the twitch reactions department--while still striking all the same essential nerves. You play a faceless, voiceless being dubbed "The Foundling," more akin to a spirit than a person, who leaves what seems to be a sort of astral plane in order to venture into a decaying, poisonous world known as Fallgrim. There, you meet various characters who give typically spooky, cryptic s...

After a rough launch in 2016 and many years of updates, Dead by Daylight has evolved into one of the best horror games you can play today. When everything works there's literally no game like it--where else can you play as iconic film and TV characters like Ash Williams or Nancy Wheeler as you run away from villains like Ghost Face, Freddy Krueger, or Michael Myers? The premise might seem silly, but Dead by Daylight turns it into one of the most thrilling multiplayer experiences around, pitting one terrifying Killer against four hapless Survivors as they scramble to escape the map alive. As the Killer, your job is to sacrifice the four Survivors to the Entity, the malevolent god in charge of the nonstop forced competition that is each "trial" in the game. And while you're outnumbered, the odds are heavily lopsided in your favour. You move faster, you have access to more immediate information, and, most importantly, you're the only one capable of dealing any dama...

"Well, crap," I mutter, as I begin to run. It's far too late of course. My pursuers have seen me and are now riddling my backside with bullets as I try to duck and weave among the environmental cover that's slowly deleting. And then I see it: my salvation. Around another player's corpse is a Hack pick-up with a circle on it. I quickly slide into it and pick it up, cackling with glee as I transform into a giant ball and bounce away from the squad chasing me. My laughter stops as I turn around and realize, to my horror, that every one of my pursuers has the Ball Hack as well. I continue to flee but I can hear the quiet thumps of their murderous bounces keeping pace with me. If you've ever played a battle royale game before, then the goal of Hyper Scape is an old song and dance by this point. Players begin each match by dropping onto a battlefield with nothing to their name, forced to survive by any means necessary--whether that's searching for the best we...

The world is full of spots. They invite you, seducing you into skating on them. A great skate spot encourages you to nail a line of tricks on it, pushing you to keep trying after every bail. An expertly placed ramp that leads you to a rail and down a flight of stairs is one of the many Mona Lisas that skaters strive for. The idea of successfully conquering said spot is what drives them to push themselves, learn from their mistakes, and grow. It's all about the location, something some skateboarding games have nailed for over two decades. And while newcomer Skater XL has a good foundation for its trick system, it fails to inspire the practice of those mechanics on its small number of largely lacklustre levels. Skater XL's trick system is easy to understand and rewarding to learn. Each analog stick is assigned to a foot, and your job is to twist and push those sticks to pull off a cavalcade of tricks. A kickflip requires you to pull the right stick (your right foot) back, snap ...

As we prepared to take on Risk of Rain 2 's final boss, we took a moment to take stock of our Survivors. My co-op partner had three syringes filled with glowing green slime jutting out of his hip, a sword at his side and a crown on his head. A leech was suctioned onto my head, a teddy bear stuck to my shoulder and John Lennon glasses stretched around the front of my domed helmet. Each of these baubles represented a perk we had acquired over the course of our headlong rush to the final boss. This is the kind of game Risk of Rain 2 is. At the end of a run, you can see every advantage that you have collected, all hanging off of your once-simple character model like fuzzy dice on a car mirror. And, as it launches into 1.0, Hopoo Games' third-person shooter roguelike has a year-and-a-half of early access in its rearview. I didn't play the game during pre-release, so I can't testify to how much content this version adds to what was already there. But I can say that Risk of R...

Battle royales have only been around for a handful of years, and for the most part they've strictly stuck within the same genre of games. Whether you're playing Warzone, Fortnite, or Apex Legends, you're always shooting a gun and running from an encroaching circle, with the differences kicking up in the small variations to their established formulas. Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout , an extremely colorful and whimsical battle royale, is a great example of the genre growing outside of its roots. It's a far more approachable take on the multiplayer format, with simple controls and a variety of mini-games giving this competitive game show as much charm as they do tension. Playing as one of 60 multi-colored, jelly bean-shaped contestants, you compete in a joyous and comical race to be crowned the winner of Fall Guys' 15-minute matches. Each one is broken up by various mini-games, with handfuls of players eliminated after each one. These games all take on a variety of them...

It's hard to make a platformer stand out in 2020. Skully , a 3D platformer about a reanimated rolling skull imbued with magic clay that can create and control mud golems, can't shake the baggage of its genre's history. Though it has some distinctive details--like a surprisingly cute, bouncing skull-ball for a protagonist--Skully's mild platforming, item collecting, and puzzle-solving often elicits the feeling that you're just going through the motions. While it isn't without charm or challenge, there isn't enough of it to make a profound impression. Skully the bouncing skull-ball is actually an elemental avatar created by the earth deity of an isolated island. In his natural form, Skully is a small, quick ball that can roll and hop across forest streams, wind-swept mountains, and lava-filled caves. There's a satisfying kinetic feeling to rolling down a path and picking up speed, which makes gracefully jumping through platforming challenges feel good. S...

In Te Reo (Māori), "umurangi" means red sky--a perpetual sight in this first-person photography game, and a sign of the climate anomaly plaguing the city of Tauranga Aotearoa. You'll see this when raising your camera towards the flock of seagulls gathering at sunset, or a distant view of Mount Mauao amidst the billowing clouds of crimson and orange. Inspired by his personal experiences around the Australian bushfire crisis , Maori developer Naphtali Faulkner envisions a cyberpunk future that's so much more than a neon-soaked dystopia. As a result, Umurangi Generation becomes a shining example of what cyberpunk media should be; it boldly confronts the themes that underpin the genre, from its condemnation of capitalism to rebuking the corporate structures that govern its cities. Umurangi Generation makes its statements not through dialogue but by letting you explore its themes through the exploratory lens of photography--and its through this framing that the game's...