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For some reason, the act of cleaning in video games is oddly satisfying. Tidying up might be a monotonous chore in everyday life, yet games like Viscera Cleanup Detail, PowerWash Simulator, and Unpacking turn cleaning into a surprisingly engaging activity. Maybe gamifying burdensome housework with rewards and goals is enough, or perhaps it boils down to the fact that these games can make you feel productive even when you're procrastinating. Either way, The Gunk takes this formula and applies it to an alien planet in the far reaches of space. There's more to developer Image and Form Games' first 3D title than simply cleaning, but for all of the other ideas it brings together, ridding the planet of its titular mess is its most enjoyable. Upon discovering that black malevolent goo is sapping the planet of its lifeforce, protagonist Rani goes about removing the Gunk to restore the world to its former beauty. This is achieved with an arm attachment she affectionately calls ...

This review features spoilers for Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker. Read at your own peril! Endwalker had a tall order: It needed to satisfactorily end an eight-year running storyline and put the final touches on the narratives woven in A Realm Reborn, Heavensward, and Shadowbringers. It also needed to wrap up the Scions' stories, the organization as a whole and even more--nine individual members' character arcs. In other words, Endwalker needed to do a lot in one expansion--and this ambition both propels it to its best moments, but also strains the expansion's seams. When Endwalker soars, it leaps up into the heavens to deliver incredible, startling fights that feel truly exhilarating. In the last trial of the expansion, you--the Warrior of Light--get to battle against the cosmic embodiment of despair, Meteion--who is the vessel-like cause of the Final Days--while on the back of your archenemy, Zenos. It's surreal, fun, and an incredible final exclamation point. A hero...

With Ruined King: A League of Legends Story, developer Airship Syndicate finds itself in an unenviable position. The studio behind 2018's Battle Chasers: Nightwar has been tasked with taking its critically-acclaimed approach to the JRPG format from that game and adapting it for League of Legends (LoL), one of the most popular video game brands in the world. Battle Chasers proves the developer can make a solid JRPG out of a short-run comic book, but League is in a different, uh, league thanks to featuring more than 150 champions and having a decade's worth of lore and worldbuilding to reference. Conjuring a story worthy of the name sounds like a monumental task, but not only did Airship Syndicate do LoL justice with Ruined King, the JRPG mechanics bring the LoL experience to a whole new genre in an engaging and unique way. Ruined King: A League Of Legends Story takes us to the pirate city of Bilgewater, a sprawling behemoth of wood and salt occupied by swashbucklers and sea dog...

For a character with only one official game release, Shovel Knight has certainly gotten around. The hero from Yacht Club's retro adventure has appeared in countless other games, has been immortalized as an Amiibo, and enjoyed a healthy stream of DLC. Shovel Knight: Pocket Dungeon marks the first completely new game for the character since his debut. And though it's a huge departure from the original action game, it expands on the franchise's range with a clever blend of puzzle and rogue-lite mechanics. The result is one of the most inventive puzzle games I've played in years. Right from the start, Pocket Dungeon's core mechanics defy easy categorization. It's a tile-matching puzzle game, but rather than a cursor, your character is its own tile on the board. You ram yourself into enemies to eliminate them, which means your own movement around the grid is a large part of the strategy. You're often looking to eliminate large groups of enemies at a time, but y...

The complex relationship between Halo protagonist Master Chief and his AI partner Cortana has always been one of the strongest driving forces for the franchise--it's a genuine bond, but one born out of manipulation, as Cortana (an AI based on the mind of the woman who kidnapped Chief as a child) is gifted to Chief as a perfect companion to ensure he maintains peak efficiency as a super-soldier. In this way, Cortana has always been the more dominant voice in the partnership. She tells Chief where to go and what to do, and Chief's single-mindedness coupled with the ability to solely rely on her means he never has to develop emotionally healthy bonds with normal human beings. Halo Infinite is the first time we've seen that kind of relationship dynamic flipped. Paired with a new AI, simply named "the Weapon," Chief takes on a more fatherly figure in Infinite. Where Cortana was assertive, quick-witted, and mature, the Weapon is awkward, overly trusting, and silly. Sh...

Solar Ash is built like a skatepark in a lucid dream. The ground you skate across looks and acts like an ocean-sized mattress pad--blue and bumpy and bouncing as you pass. Floating islands are connected by grind pipes, which only emerge after you transport glowing spores from one mushroom to another. Red, bulging eyeballs act as the locks on gates made of black ooze, which you slash to gain passage. Much of what you see in Solar Ash makes little sense, but you move through it so quickly, the boss battles you fight are so exhilarating, and the puzzles you solve to reach them are so satisfying, that the dream logic of this world's construction feels like the necessarily slight distance to keep the good times rolling as you move from Point A to Point B. The second game from Heart Machine, the developer of 2016 indie gem Hyper Light Drifter, retains that game’s color palette--expect plenty of pastel blues, pinks, and purples, with the occasional threatening red--but changes just abou...

In the heyday of the DS and 3DS, Nintendo dedicated itself to a "blue ocean" strategy of attracting a wider audience than traditional gamers. Headlining this effort were games like Brain Age and Big Brain Academy, puzzle games targeted toward non-gamers that promised regular mental exercises to stay sharp and enhance your focus. More than a decade later, Big Brain Academy: Brain vs. Brain recenters itself around Nintendo's new strategic priority: social features and competition. And while the puzzles in Brain vs. Brain work just as well as ever, the competition aspect is an awkward fit that runs counter to a game series that has always been friendly and non-judgmental. The main appeal of these brain-training games has always been to run your own race. Chipping away at daily exercises with Big Brain Academy's fictional Dr. Lobe lets you see the progression of slow, steady improvement as you sharpen your mental acuity. In previous games, over the course of a week or a ...