This is a game where the triumphs come from tiny marvels of efficiency and careful planning rather than kinetic skill.

A traditional third-person shooter feels like the logical foundation for a John Wick game. And just like the films, there’s enough going on beneath John Wick Hex’s surface to elevate it above most games where the relentless shooting is the only point. The latest from developer Mike Bithell both functions as an opportunity to embody the Baba Yaga at his most unrelenting and as a deconstruction of everything about how he operates while he’s on the job. Nonetheless, while there’s immense value to this approach, there’s also a nagging sense that John Wick has lost something in the transition from the big screen.

It helps that John Wick Hex managed to find a narrative conceit to divorce itself from the ongoing narrative of the films. The game takes place some years before John Wick met his wife and left the murder business behind. A supercriminal named Hex (voiced by Troy Baker) has kidnapped Winston and Charon (Ian McShane and Lance Reddick, respectively) from the Continental Hotel, putting High Table’s power in check, and John—sporting Keanu’s likeness but not his voice—has been sent on a globe-trotting mission to take out Hex’s network of underlings before coming for the man himself at the Continental. Freed of the ongoing pressure of the films to find new ways to keep John tied to his former life, the game’s narrative is instead something of a running conversation between these three powerful figures on the forces that put John in that position to begin with. It’s not pushing a new twist to the narrative, but it works to give us a new appreciation of what’s already there.

That ethos also applies to the gameplay, which eschews the immediate thrills of a twitchy first- or third-person shooter for the constant deliberation of a grid-based strategy game. The lifeblood of it all is the timeline, stretching across the top of the screen, representing how long it will take John and any enemies in range to complete their actions. The key to everything is being able to take enemies off the board before they get a chance to react, and players get all the time they need to coordinate the exact dance of death required to eliminate everyone in range without taking hits. Both ammunition and health are scarce commodities, which also factor into the budget, as does Focus, the stamina stat required to pull off physical maneuvers such as close-quarters combat and rolling. Two shots from a gun will kill most enemies, but will that leave you short on bullets and too far away when other enemies come into view?

As a translation of all the things we know John Wick has done, the game is a weak facsimile. The cel-shaded minimalist noir art style is reminiscent of Suda 51’s brilliantly subversive Killer7, but the game’s minimalism results in the loss of visual stimulus we associate with the John Wick universe. There’s only so many times you can watch John perform the same judo flip to take down close enemies before you start wanting for something more impactful, given the much more innovative and diverse range of combat arts we see him utilize on the big screen.

Indeed, we never see the same takedown twice in any of the films, and it doesn’t seem like it would have taken much for this game’s engine to replicate that lack of redundancy. While landing shots with a gun feels suitably punchy, more often than not, the sheer kinetics of every stage feels more like a studio pre-visualization of a fight scene from the films than the definitive experience that allows you to inhabit a hitman at his most unstoppable. Even when, at the end of each stage, you get a stitched together composite of your run, without the pauses to sift through your menus and select options, the game comes off as cinematically broken.

There are games out there that deliver that experience on a gameplay level, most notably Superhot. John Wick Hex approaches that game’s design ethos of time moving when you do from the opposite direction: as a strategy game executed with action-movie sensibilities, where thought and deliberation can be strung together to create scenarios where your opponents don’t even get the chance to fire back. Every action costs more than just the wherewithal to press the right button at the right time. This is a game where the triumphs come from tiny marvels of efficiency and careful planning rather than kinetic skill.

Developer: Bithell Studios Publisher: Good Shepherd Entertainment Platform: PlayStation 4 Release Date: May 5, 2020 ESRB: M ESRB Descriptions: Blood, Strong Language, Violence Buy: Game

Its characters already lacked personality, and the 3D makeover is mostly successful at bringing that deficiency into sharper relief.

The original Trials of Mana, released only in Japan as Seiken Densetsu 3, may have been a revelation way back in 1995, and in spite of its underdeveloped villains and trope-laden plot, but no amount of polish can change the fact that the remake feels stubbornly stuck in the past. With Square-Enix’s other April release, Final Fantasy VII Remake, you could see the love and care that went into not just recreating but reevaluating and deepening a classic. By contrast, this remake of Trials of Mana, which was re-released in its original Super Nintendo format as part of last year’s Collection of Mana, is all surface.

The facile nature of this remake is most apparent in the way it sticks to its original structure: You can pick only three of six protagonists at the start, which means that if you want to experience the others, or hear different dialogue combinations, you’ll need to replay an already repetitious game. Actually, you’d have to play through three separate times, as there’s a unique antagonist for each pair of heroes. Choose either Hawkeye, the spry dagger-wielding rogue from the desert thievedom of Nevarl, or Riesz, the tough spear-swinging amazon from the Wind Kingdom of Laurent, and you’ll go up against the Dark Majesty.

The other two evil factions are anticlimactically written out almost entirely off camera around the halfway point, making the whole thing feel rather meaningless. That this narrative is retained, without any embellishments to make each path feel more substantive, is profoundly frustrating, especially when you consider something like 2019’s Resident Evil 2 remake, which successfully differentiated between each protagonist’s overlapping playthrough.

The old Trials of Mana boasted richly textured pixel art and lighting that helped to set it apart from other video games of its era. Now it’s been given a cartoonish 3D makeover that somehow comes across as a flatter, more generic take on the cell-shaded anime adopted by such titles as Ni No Kuni and Dragon Quest, not to mention other Trials entries. The original game’s cast of characters already lacked personality, and the new visual redesign is most successful at bringing that deficiency into sharper relief. It’s an unnecessary makeover designed to brand the game as “new,” which only more starkly calls the old-school conventions into question, especially with key features like co-op play being stripped out of the remake.

That said, the revised combat is competent enough, and the characters boast varied fighting styles, from Hawkeye being able to nimbly leap between foes so as to exploit critical back attacks, to Angela unleashing massive area-of-effect spells from afar, to Kevin shifting into his lycanthropic form in order to literally go full beast-mode on enemies. It’s just a shame that big, splashy class strikes are what the game’s developers lavished the most attention on. Instead of improving the fundamental Trials of Mana experience, the remake just tacks on a moderately challenging but equally underwritten post-game scenario that opens up additional tiers of the core game’s class system, giving each hero a total of nine potential roles.

Would that the dungeons had received similar attention. These are still brief and samey regions that—occasional hazards like momentum-sapping sands or slippery frozen surfaces aside—serve almost exclusively as combat arenas. And the 3D rendering, again, only works to remind one of just how lacking it all feels. At the very least, the remake could have inserted a few new cutscenes to better fill in the motivations of villainous cyphers like the Dragon Lord, who wants to absorb the Mana Tree’s power because, I guess, that’s what bad guys do?

The game is at its best when pitting players against massive, colorful bosses, like pumpkin god Mispolm, who lashes out with scowling gourd-headed vine arms, or ghost ship captain Gova, who swims beneath the surface of his vessel’s wooden deck, popping up to unleash dark matter at you. But you’ll spend the majority of Trials of Mana going up against the same cutesy enemies, particularly in its repetitive, backtrack-heavy second half, where it’s not unusual to face room after room of wide-eyed baby dragons of various elemental types. The whimsy of these creatures with their punny names—the glittering Gold Bulette, the smiling pink Prime Slime, the half-hatched Eggatrice, the adorable Petite Poseidon—quickly dulls from repetition. That’s Trials of Mana in a nutshell: endearing, but not for long.

Developer: Square Enix, Xeen Publisher: Square Enix Platform: PlayStation 4 Release Date: April 24, 2020 ESRB: E ESRB Descriptions: Mild Cartoon Violence Buy: Game

Nivalis is a sprawling, futuristic metropolis, its skies crowded with flying cars, massive structures, and neon billboards soaked by a never-ending downpour. Its streets are populated by malfunctioning androids and humans with cybernetic implants quickly going out of date. Which is to say, Cloudpunk is certainly conspicuous about its devotion to cyberpunk. As Rania, a driver for the illicit delivery service that gives the game its title, you’ll consistently run into one staple of the genre after another. But beyond its impressive sense of place, few other aspects of the game feel nearly as considered and complex.

Much of Cloudpunk is dedicated to serving up that most familiar of sci-fi images: vehicles flying across a city skyline according to totally inscrutable traffic laws. And for as much time as you spend on the “roads” of Nivalis, traveling them doesn’t make the rules any more coherent. Beyond certain altitude limitations, you’re largely free to drive your vehicle, called a HOVA, wherever it will fit and at whatever height will help avoid collisions. Highways with speed boosts are more of a suggestion than a requirement, since you can take shortcuts by bobbing and weaving between the spires, the skyscrapers, and the neon signage. And if you crash, well, that’s okay, too, as the only real penalty is a rather lenient repair bill.

Not that you have much incentive to drive quickly. Despite its intimidating setting, Cloudpunk is incongruously easygoing. Its missions have no time constraints, with many of them largely designed as jumping-off points for absurdly ponderous conversations. These exchanges are all long enough to feel like some kind of bizarre punishment for reaching a destination too quickly, given how often you may find yourself sitting and waiting a minute or two for the voice-acted dialogue to finish up. Sometimes the game’s talkiness even holds up the start of a mission, leaving you hovering idly inside your HOVA until the game finally reaches the point in the dialogue that tells you where to go. Though areas you traverse on foot include shops and side characters, you often can’t access either one because the dialogue is still prattling on.

Nivalis has its share of amusing details, like an entire building of androids named “Anderson” or an elevator convinced that it eats people. Which makes it a pity that so many of Cloudpunk’s baffling design choices sap the game of any momentum, mainly by conflicting with the story’s overtures about struggling under the boot of tyrannical corporations. Rania is meant to be fighting against debt, to the point where she once had to sell the body of her robotic dog, Camus, for cash and has nowhere else to house his AI except inside her HOVA. A game like Neo Cab may not have an intricate city at its center, but it uses gas and lodging to approximate the desperation of a bad job that doesn’t pay enough much more effectively than the rather negligible repair and fuel costs across Nivalis. In fact, you’re less likely to run out of funds than end up with more than you know what to do with. For Cloudpunk, hardship is merely the wallpaper for a pretty yet thinly conceived gaming experience.

Developer: Ion Lands Publisher: Ion Lands Platform: PC Release Date: April 23, 2020 ESRB: M ESRB Descriptions: Drug Reference, Strong Language Buy: Game

It’s the best kind of retro throwback, reminding us how hard these kinds of games could hit.

With side-scrolling beat ‘em ups quietly enjoying a renaissance, it was a matter of when, not if, Streets of Rage would make a comeback. And like Sonic Mania before it, Streets of Rage 4 suggests that Sega knew that the best way forward for the series was to look to the past. Indeed, this game feels as if it’s taking care of unfinished business, as it doesn’t chase modern glory in order to prove itself. In short, Streets of Rage 4 is the gratifying sequel that fans of the iconic series should have gotten 20 years ago.

The game is set 10 years after the events of the divisive Streets of Rage 3. Series baddie Mr. X is now dead and his two silver-haired children have taken over the family business, letting street gangs run amok, buying off the police force, and amassing incredible amounts of stolen wealth. But standing in their way, as always, are ex-cops Axel Stone and Blaze Fielding. They’re also joined by series favorite Adam Hunter, his hard-rocker daughter, Cherry, and wrestler Floyd Iraia, the newest cyborg creation of Streets of Rage 3’s Dr. Gilbert Zan.

Visually, Streets of Rage 4 diverges from the Sega Genesis-era dance-club aesthetic of prior games in the series, adopting a hand-drawn animation style straight out of a graphic novel, recalling another Genesis beat ‘em up, the wildly ambitious Comix Zone, in the process. The game’s art style manages to hold onto a lot of the urban roughness that has always defined the titles in the series, while also managing to heighten the wilder flights of fancy when it comes to eclectic enemies and the characters’ special moves. All of these elements feel more at home here than they would have if Streets of Rage had suddenly decided to ape Max Payne.

As in the prior games in the series, the soundtrack goes a long way toward elevating Streets of Rage 4 above its pulpier elements. Beginning with 1991’s Streets of Rage, composer Yuzo Koshiro has been integral to the success of these games, infusing ‘90s dancehall beats, jazz, R&B, and 80’s-action-film ambience into his scores, grounding the games in a modern, urban soundscape even as the content took itself less seriously. The same heavy lifting is on display here, though Koshiro is only one of a half-dozen composers responsible for the soundtrack. If nowhere else, Streets of Rage has very much been brought up to modern standards with this release, with an EDM/hip-hop-infused soundtrack that could be playing out of a tent at Coachella at three in the morning, and without ever feeling out of place.

Otherwise, Streets of Rage 4 is mostly business as usual for the series, with players needing to walk left to right and smack the hell out of anyone in their path. The vast majority of enemies are cut and pasted from the prior two entries in the series, but the core combat still feels impactful, with success relying on getting close enough to enemies and maximizing the opportunity to inflict incredible amounts of screen-shaking, window-breaking damage.

In the end, there are only a couple of new elements thrown into the mix: enemies can be juggled in mid-air through combos, each character has a flashy new area-of-effect special move that can clear a room, and a bit of lost health can be regained by fighting without taking new damage. Those are welcome additions, but they don’t represent a fundamental shift in how you play the game. Of course, that’s not necessarily a complaint, especially given that Streets of Rage 3 represents the last time this series strayed too far from a winning formula.

What that ultimately means is that all of this game’s strengths and weaknesses are largely the same as those of Streets of Rage 2, the series’s strongest entry. Though Cherry and Floyd are well-designed—Cherry in particular is the kind of character people of color don’t usually get to inhabit—there’s no denying that they’re basically Skate and Max from Streets of Rage 2 but with a fresh coat of paint and one or two new moves. The surprises here lie mostly in some imaginative art direction; for one, an art museum halfway through the game takes some fun liberties with item placement, not to mention item validity. A riot at a police station with corrupt cops facing escaped criminals is impressively executed, even if it represents a kinetic peak that the game doesn’t quite replicate again until the last two or three stages. Nonetheless, what Streets of Rage 4 lacks in ambition, it makes up in attitude and style. It’s the best kind of retro throwback, reminding us how hard these kinds of games could hit.

Developer: DotEmu, Lizardcube, Guard Crush Games Publisher: Sega Platform: PC Release Date: April 30, 2020 ESRB: T ESRB Descriptions: Cartoon Violence, Mild Language, Mild Suggestive Themes Buy: Game

Moving can be a tedious affair, but thankfully, Moving Out is far from a realistic moving simulator. Across this fast-paced co-op—which charmingly leans into carefree, chaotic, over-the-top gameplay—you’ll travel from unusual suburban homes to muddy farms and trap-filled factory floors. At each job, you’re actively encouraged to break furniture, and rules of etiquette, if it helps to more rapidly load your truck: Why lug a burdensome copier into an elevator when you can just chuck it over the balcony?

Moving Out doesn’t just de-emphasize the boring, serious parts of moving, it turns the entire process into an absurdly comic one. Your team of Furniture Arrangement and Relocation Technicians includes such colorful characters as egg-headed Sunny and ramen-cup-faced Ramone, and your journey through the aptly named town of Packmore is peppered with delightful puns: The Aaahtari Offices are haunted by a ghost, the front lawn of 21 Slick Street is covered in oil from a leaky nearby tanker, and so on.


Like the gameplay, the story also proves itself to be more than capable of indulging the bizarre. The plot, delivered as dialogue between overenthusiastic employees at the start and end of each job, shifts away from a focus on the day-to-day grind of moving, sprinkled with the characters’ light commentary about their work, to a showdown with the evil, alien Pack Rats who’ve secretly been using your movers to steal all of Packmore’s furniture. Having a more active goal than just taking on new clients paves the way for action-heavy, non-traditional jobs, like a heist in which you steal back packages hidden aboard a runaway train, flinging them across the tracks and onto your truck, and a boss battle against a mech-suit-wearing adversary who uses missiles, lasers, and flames to keep you from repossessing his stash.

The only downside to the game’s action-heavy second half is that it largely lacks for the Untitled Goose Game-like appeal of the earlier levels, such as the Pepperoni Palace, where pizza is strewn across tables and floors, and the luxe Summer Chalet, whose hills are dotted with adorable snowmen. These locations subtly communicate a sense of day-to-day life with their atmospheric details. By contrast, there’s less lived-in charm to the later levels, like the Sealed Storehouse, but that’s inevitable, given that they boast wide open floor plans that are littered with deadly mechanisms, like lava-covered floors, instead of colorful tchotchkes.

Then again, this variety in level design keeps the game feeling fresh, especially when you factor in hidden bonus objectives that may require you to adopt entirely different approaches, like avoiding staircases, or finding and packing all of a client’s lawn ornaments. Changing the number of players further shakes things up: In a solo campaign, you’re strong enough to drag an object on your own, but when playing with others, you’ll have to work together.


Developer: SMG Studio, Devm Games Publisher: Team17 Digital Platform: PC Release Date: April 28, 2020 ESRB: E ESRB Descriptions: Mild Cartoon Violence Buy: Game


Given the status of Final Fantasy VII, the act of remaking it is one of emotional stewardship. And it’s obvious from the loving and meticulous opening minutes of Final Fantasy VII Remake that the developers at Square Enix were aware of the weight of that task. It’s evident in the first sweeping overture of Nobuo Uematsu’s score and the painstaking photorealism of the neon-green nuclear metropolis of Midgar and its struggling populace, though the setting is still stylized enough to situate the game in the realm of the fantastical and not the uncanny. If only for satisfying basic expectations of being able to return to Midgar in a more extravagant manner, Final Fantasy VII Remake operates on a high plateau of artistic success.

Veterans of Final Fantasy are intimately familiar with the Midgar-centric stretch of this iconic game. They’ve walked through its slums, ridden its trains, and looked over its steel-black industrial cityscape, facing myriad enemies along the way, but until now, only in a low-poly, pre-rendered fashion. Indeed, the Midgar of this remake is astonishingly lived in and tangible in ways that will make your memories of the city in the original game seem like a distant dream. And the grim beauty of Midgar’s environments is richly complemented by the grandiose soundtrack, the original game’s thin, synthesized MIDI instrumentation now supplanted by new orchestral arrangements of several of the score’s most memorable tracks, their motifs remixed and repurposed in order to give the game an even more impressive musical identity across every scene.

The remake’s level of realism also emphasizes the inequality that plagues Midgar. You’ll spend much time in places of extreme poverty that lie below where the upper crust lives, and the game doesn’t flinch when it comes to foregrounding that poverty. If the idea of a megacorporation using massive power plants to literally suck the life out of the planet isn’t enough reason to side with our heroes, who are a ragtag group of eco-terrorists known as Avalanche, it’s impossible not to after seeing how the rich live in blissful opulence while you’ve been traipsing around for hours through slums whose squalor and sickness are rendered here in such vivid detail.

Final Fantasy VII is just as much about a populace caught in a class war as it is about Cloud Strife’s adventures as an ecological mercenary. And the larger events of that story are on every NPC’s lips. They talk of supporting the shutdown of every Shinra reactor, about what will happen when there’s no more electricity flowing through the city as a result. They’re prone to spouting conspiracy theories about everything being a plot by the nation of Wutai—this game’s analogue for real-world East Asia—but they mostly just spend their time trying to figure out how to live normal lives should Cloud and his friends bring their world crashing down.

If all of those details and ideals were garnish in the original game, they’re very much the text of the remake, whose sense of expansiveness is evident right down to its gameplay: battles that thread the needle between the deliberations and patience of turn-based combat and the satisfaction of having real-time control over every aspect of how a character develops and protects themselves across the campaign. Final Fantasy VII Remake’s refined battle system feels like the one that Square Enix has been trying to perfect for two decades.

That’s a smaller leap from the original game than how much work went into scene-setting and characterization for the remake. It’s worrisome in the early going to hear one-armed radical Barret Wallace speak. The character by and large suggested an embarrassing Mr. T archetype in the text-based original game, a jive-talking caricature defined by his anger, and now he has a voice that brings to mind Robert Downey Jr.’s character from Tropic Thunder but minus the satirical purpose. Still, that initial misstep weighs less and less on the mind as the game progresses. We come to see how knowledgeable Barret is about the history of his planet, hear him tell of how he was radicalized by the suffering around him, and see him find the exact perfect words to comfort his young daughter before going in to fight the good fight. The remake makes more room for the sort of small, intimate moments that allow these characters to transcend their function as fighters with unique abilities.

This is par for the course for almost every character here with more than one line of dialogue, most notably the lesser Avalanche characters—interchangeable redshirts in the original game who are now endlessly endearing and sympathetic, with their own troubles and unique ways of dealing with their lot in life. But it’s Aerith Gainsborough who probably benefits the most from the game’s newfound depth of characterization. She’s gone from a caricature of your typical JRPG’s kindly chosen girl to a presence of such innate light and charity for everything and everyone in her path. Here, we get to follow her around her hometown across a full chapter, adored by everyone and caring for those less fortunate than her, and for no other reason than the fact that they’re her neighbors and she has the means to. We’re shown, not told, the good person that Aerith is, and we’re given ample opportunity to see why and how she turned out this way. Which makes the very idea of the character walking on the path toward becoming gaming’s most infamous martyr feel all the more wrenching.

That’s assuming, however, that the storyline will even remain faithful to that of the original game. You see, Final Fantasy VII Remake has a subversive card up its sleeve, beginning with the fact that it ends before the midpoint of the original’s campaign. The major through line of Final Fantasy VII, then and now, concerns people juggling what they’re destined to do versus what they can and will do. But that theme feels more resonant in the remake given how it makes that struggle about whether destiny even matters in a universe where anything is possible. Throughout, visions of the future and past haunt the player, with Aerith often reminding the other characters that their fates are in their hands, that they have the choice to will the events of the original game into reality—or not. No longer can Cloud afford to be a dispassionate drifter through as much of his own story as he was in the original. He can possibly create a better world by guarding himself against future failures, even if straying off the beaten path gives Sephiroth another chance to achieve his goals.


It’s not that the developers at Square Enix don’t care what Final Fantasy fans think—quite the opposite, given how hopelessly devoted to certain aspects of the original game this remake is—it’s that they believe there are more riches to be mined from this material. And if we can embrace what Final Fantasy VII Remake is doing, even while it plays havoc on our expectations, perhaps we’d be willing to pull on this thread a little further. Aerith literally extends her hand to an adventurer willing to take a wild leap into boundless unknown freedom late in this game. There are so many reasons to take her up on that offer now.

Developer: Square Enix Publisher: Square Enix Platform: PlayStation 4 Release Date: April 10, 2020 ESRB: T ESRB Descriptions: Language, Suggestive Themes, Use of Alcohol and Tobacco, Violence Buy: Game

Greatness is about the way a game can capture the imagination regardless of genre or canonical status.

Two years doesn’t sound like a long enough time to justify updating a list, but as a medium, video games move in bounding strides. Trends come and go, hardware changes, and brand-new games emerge as towering influences on the medium. When we published our initial list of the 100 Greatest Video Games of All Time in 2014, the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 were only a year old. The same can be said with the Nintendo Switch and our 2018 iteration of the list. If four years is just about an eternity, two years is only slightly less so. The medium continues shifting, regardless of when we decide to stop and take stock.

Some games from the two prior iterations of our list have shifted positions, while others are absent entirely; old favorites have claimed the spots of what we treated as new classics, and vice versa; and some of the ones that vanished have triumphantly returned. Those changes speak to the fluidity of an evolving medium as well as to the broadness of experiences to be had within it. How can the same narrow handful of games, the accepted canon that looms large over every games list, hope to represent that diversity? How can a list of the greatest ever be anything but constantly in flux?

When compiling this list, my colleagues and I elected to consider more than historical context. Greatness, to the individual, isn’t just about impact and influence. It’s as much about feeling, about the way a game can capture the imagination regardless of genre or release date or canonical status. The titles on this list come from every corner of the medium—represented for the precision of their control or the beauty of their visuals or the emotion of their story. We’ve chosen to cast a wide net, so as to best represent the individual passions incited by saving planets, stomping on goombas, or simply conversing with vivid characters. Steven Scaife

Editor’s Note: Click here for a list of the titles that made the original incarnation of our list on June 9, 2014.

Single-player video games are lonely. Ico made loneliness feel magical by giving you a companion, even as it constantly reminded you how alien her mind must be. Just like Princess Yorda’s gnomic utterances imply a story that she just can’t share with you, so does the game’s environment imply a vast narrative of which this story is only a part, creating a potent illusion of context through the very act of withholding backstory. While the gameplay itself is basic puzzle-solving and crude combat, it’s the mood that makes it special, the constant sense that there’s something vast just outside the frame. Daniel McKleinfeld

The Talos Principle articulates the conflict between skepticism and the order of God. This juxtaposition comes in the context of a series of puzzles, implying that human and deity have a natural interest in making sense out of chaos. Without moralizing about sin or catering to secularist values, the game implies that inquisitiveness mechanically binds humanity to a common fate. This conflicted but life-affirming perspective trumps the adolescent nihilism that oversimplifies player choice as an illusion. Even if the philosophical angle in The Talos Principle didn’t exist, the game would still be outstanding. The world design allows you to bounce between puzzles while also requiring a certain degree of completion to try higher challenges. Developer Croteam’s gradual integration of several puzzle types is as accessible as it is shrewdly brain-twisting. Jed Pressgrove

The ever-shifting sands of Dubai make for a good setting in Spec Ops: The Line: It’s an unreliable environment that matches what turns out to be the game’s unreliable narrator. The military, squad-based action also fits with the theme of responsibility, frequently forcing players to choose between two equally unsavory options. The game’s “Damned If You Do” and “Damned If You Don’t” achievements, earned from killing either a soldier or a civilian, make it clear just how blurry that titular “line” is. Spec Ops: The Line never permits players to rest easily in the distance or abstraction of a long-range war or the novelty of a video game. Players can only focus on the beauty of a blood-orange sandstorm for so long before it dissipates, revealing the gruesome consequences of your violence within it, just as the bird’s-eye view from a dispassionate drone eventually gives way to the revelatory moment in which your squad must wade through the charred bodies of the innocent civilians they just mistakenly dropped white phosphorus upon. The horror, the horror indeed. Aaron Riccio

In the exclusive VIP room of the Isle of Sgàil castle, the five members of the Ark Society council gather to discuss their plans to hold power over the world. During this Illuminati-esque gathering, the members of this privileged elite wear masks to conceal their identities—to discuss how they will profit from fixing the climate change disaster they created. But unbeknownst to them, one member isn’t who he seems. The elusive Agent 47, having earlier tossed member Jebediah Block over a balcony, has infiltrated their ranks, and he sets out to murder them all, dishing out his unique brand of darkly comedic justice. Hitman 2, a fusion of escapist wish-fulfillment and satire, has the player deploy its familiar and new stealth mechanics across inventive scenarios. Whether in an exotic jungle or a Vermont suburb, 47 exploits the hyper-detailed nature of his surroundings to complete his executions, and frequently in hilarious disguise. The game gives players the tools to make their own amusing stories within various open worlds, from choking an F1 driver while disguised in a flamingo outfit, to blowing up a Columbian drug lord using an explosive rubber duck, to reprogramming an android so it can gun down an MI5 agent turned freelance assassin played by Sean Bean. Ryan Aston

Considering the reason so many of us play video games, it’s odd how often most titles follow a very specific set of unspoken rules. Not so with Conker’s Bad Fur Day, a recklessly unfiltered romp through a parody of inanely inoffensive titles like Banjo-Kazooie. Conker cursed and solved puzzles by getting drunk enough to extinguish flame demons with his piss, blithely sent up pop culture as diverse as A Clockwork Orange, Saving Private Ryan, Alien, and The Matrix, and still had time to lob rolls of toilet paper down the gullet of a giant operatic poo monster. For sheer balls, lunatic ingenuity, and crass charm, there’s never been anything like it. Riccio

The N64 was an awkward era in Nintendo’s history, as the company was getting its sea legs as it was transitioning into 3D gaming. And because of that weird third leg protruding obnoxiously from the center of the system’s controller, it wasn’t exactly easy to play the second title in the Star Fox series. But the controls were responsive, meaning it was at least easy for players to endure Star Fox 64’s steep learning curve. Reminiscent of games like 1985’s Space Harrier and 1995’s Panzer Dragoon, this compelling on-rails space shooter gave us anthropomorphic animals piloting what were ostensibly X-Wing starfighters in a galactic battle against Andross. The game featured local co-op, which made it even more enjoyable because of the multitude of additional explosions on screen. And though it came out toward the end of the 20th century, Star Fox 64 was very clearly inspired by cubist art, making it a perturbing and exciting departure from the vibrant and richly detailed worlds players were exploring in other Nintendo titles. Unsurprisingly, we’re still doing barrel rolls to this day, so we can thank Peppy Hare for the tip all those years ago. Jeremy Winslow

Ninja Theory’s Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is unusually sensitive for a horror game, rejecting as it does the trend of using mental illness for cheap scares. As disturbing as the contradictory voices in the titular protagonist’s head might be, her fractured psychological state doesn’t exist to leave players feeling frightened, but to serve up a philosophical inquiry with universal resonance. Between fights with scores of mythic beings (the one-versus-all war in the Sea of Corpses is among the most ominous action spectacles in gaming history), the player learns that Senua loathes the voices within her as much as she does anything else—and that self-hatred must be recognized and managed in order for her to attain some form of peace. This dark but life-affirming parable amplifies its emotional power through mesmerizing audiovisuals, where hallucinatory whispers argue over whether you’re ever going the right way and motion-capture graphics ironically seem like reality when juxtaposed against full-motion video. Pressgrove

Video games usually de-personalize business management. They shift the perspective upward, letting us look down on workers and customers as they go about the mechanical tasks we designate from on high. Designer Richard Hofmeier’s Cart Life keeps things street level, building a life sim around its business management. Its monochrome characters barely scrape by, stretching cash as far as they’re able while making time to feed cats or pick daughters up from school. Though the game can easily wear you down, it also gives weight to the small victories, like selling enough to keep going. Video games have considerable power to communicate experiences to the player, and it’s used most often for saving worlds and amassing collectibles and jacking cars. Cart Life is a reminder of the humanity the medium is capable of. Scaife

The standard shooter tasks players with dodging enemy fire and collecting power-ups while unleashing a steady torrent of bullets at one’s foes. Ikaruga masterfully bucks that trend by introducing a polarity system, wherein your ship can only be damaged by bullets of the opposite color of your ship. The game stands apart from other titles in the subgenre of shoot ‘em up known as bullet hell by, well, leaning into the hell of gunfire. This bold choice, which turns like-colored bullets into tools, stylishly revitalizes the genre, forcing players to unlearn old habits and adapt to new ones that see them boldly flying into a stream of white lasers, swapping polarity, and then releasing a barrage of fully charged black homing missiles on one’s foes. Everything in these often claustrophobic corridors becomes an elegant puzzle, one where players must, judo-like, turn the enemy’s barrage against it. High-score runs and harder difficulties require even more elegance and precision, as these modes now also expect players to pinpoint foes so as to kill identically colored targets in combo-creating sets of three, or to recharge ammunition by bathing in enemy bullets. Every single bullet is an opportunity in Ikaruga, assuming the player is bold enough to make them count. Riccio

Xenoblade Chronicles, like fellow 2012 JRPG revivalist (and Chrono Trigger-indebted) Final Fantasy XIII-2, cleverly uses the thematic components of shifting destinies and humankind versus higher powers as ways in which to depict the oscillating mental states of its central characters. You won’t be likely to find a more fleshed-out batch of heroes than 18-year-old sword-swinger Shulk and his ragtag group of Mechon-battlers. Creator Tetsuya Takahashi clearly understands that a great RPG starts and ends with its cast, and how well players can identify with their specific, often extrinsic, ambitions and dreams. Monolith Soft’s ambitious epic is beautiful, challenging, emotionally gripping, and, above all, effortlessly transporting. Mike LeChevallier

House. Museum. Town hall. General store. In previous Animal Crossing games, these establishments are already in place when your character arrives on the scene. Players enter a space constructed before their arrival, the lone human going off to live a calm, idyllic country life among a community of anthropomorphic animal neighbors. Which makes Animal Crossing: New Horizons instantly notable for shipping your character, alongside racoon entrepreneur Tom Nook and a few other animal cohorts, to a deserted island, where the layout and design are ultimately up to you and your imagination.

The prior game in the series, New Leaf, gave you the office of mayor, but such a title pales in comparison to that of “resident representative.” The island you’ll call home here is practically a blank slate: Neighbors ask where you think they should pitch their tents, and there’s no museum until you donate enough specimens to designate the island as a place of interest and choose where the building goes. Later, when there are bridges across the rivers and inclines leading up into the cliffs, it’s because you paid to put them there.

Animal Crossing has always entrusted players with a unique amount of power among the townsfolk: Though your animal neighbors have their own opinions and interests, only players alone can make bigger decisions like donate to the museum or cut down trees. But in spite of that division, the series has always taken great care to emphasize its beautiful illusion of community rather than give way to some individualistic fantasy. It thrives on getting you to consider its larger context, the idea that you belong to this greater whole and any changes will benefit that whole as much as the individual. Through minutes that pass by in real time and activities that change based on month or time of day, the games cultivate a sort of relationship between players and the virtual space they eventually inhabit. We come to know its layout and its occupants, moving around the place and helping to maintain it rather than cutting some chaotic swath through the middle. Especially in video games, such consideration of the world around you is too often a foreign concept.

By consolidating so much power in the hands of an individual player, New Horizons threatens to upend the Animal Crossing vision of community living. Initially, though, this game’s emphasis on building a hometown from scratch meshes surprisingly well with the franchise’s uniquely relaxed pace. Though the new customization options—including a robust interior decorating menu and the ability to place items outdoors around the island, essentially creating parks and playgrounds at will—represent some of the most seismic changes to the series in nearly 20 years, the tweaks you make to the island feel as consequential as ever because the game still imposes limitations. The store still only sells a certain number of items per day, at certain hours. Some of the furniture must be built from scratch using the new crafting system, which depends on tool durability and the availability of resources. These are the boundaries you have to respect, and the solitary chair you might set out on the beach truly seems to mean something, especially early in the game.

You put in the work without losing sight of others’ needs; you’re supposed to interact with the animals and keep the whole place looking nice because it’s what they want too. The process of building a town remains incremental, even tedious in spots, and that’s important for balancing the new suite of options available to the player, for ensuring the little things still matter. You work at this slower pace to do one thing rather than pump the world for loot and resources as quickly and myopically as possible. Small UI quirks appear tuned to discourage really putting your nose to the grindstone, as in how the game prevents you from crafting items in bulk. Even the helpful Nook Miles system, which more directly guides players to tasks via currency rewards, isn’t conducive to sorting and hides many of the tasks until you already perform them independently.

But regardless of how much players are encouraged to pace themselves, the more task-oriented nature of the game wins out. Resource requirements can be steep, particularly for one early effort involving crafting a ton of furniture to populate three prospective homes. While it’s possible to gradually accumulate the necessary materials for such an extensive job, the game nudges you to consider another option: randomly generated islands that are all but created for the express purpose of being razed to quickly get more wood and iron.

New Horizons isn’t oblivious to these destructive overtones, even poking fun at them with how a dodo pilot remarks that “no one has to know” what you do to the random, conspicuously nameless islands. But the generally pleasant atmosphere keeps any real sleaziness at bay, making such moments more like small cracks in a carefully cultivated façade. Your actions have no real consequences: The pillaged islands disappear forever once you leave, after all, while the default axe will even get you wood from trees without the ugliness of actually cutting them down. And if you do fully cut something down, there’s no reason to worry; entire trees can be dug up and transplanted elsewhere, without the trouble of waiting for a tiny sapling to grow. No matter what you do, you encounter few problems or pushback, few obstacles to basking in Animal Crossing’s characteristically endearing dialogue and atmosphere. It’s all out of sight and out of mind.

But the cracks add up, allowing an ugly reality to seep into an otherwise friendly fantasy. The game inadvertently becomes about the cost and upkeep of civilization, about what actions we’re willing to turn a blind eye toward just as long as things keep running smoothly. And through that solipsistic lens, even the most innocuous actions begin to look less like the incidental elements of a simulated life and more plainly transactional. Rather than simply showing up on Saturdays as a wandering musician like in prior entries, guitar-playing dog K.K. Slider first visits the island explicitly in recognition of your efforts for sprucing the place up; he’s something to be acquired, a goal to work for at the behest of Tom Nook. Castaway bird Gulliver repeatedly demands an exchange of labor: Bring him five communicator parts buried in the sand. When animals have just one briefer-than-usual dialogue snippet the very first time you speak to them in a day, is that to slightly hasten your progress toward the eventual Nook Miles reward for speaking to multiple animals?

Eventually, you get game-changing terrain tools to freely remap the cliffs and the water, and at that point the only thing holding your island together is any attachment you’ve fostered with the way things have looked for the many prior hours of play. And maybe we choose to keep things the way they are, despite the power to reshape and remake however we please. Enough of Animal Crossing: New Horizons is still measured and thoughtful enough to foster those connections that make the series so refreshing and vital. But it also feels tainted, with its world so much more blatantly at your mercy. Rather than a newcomer to a simulated community that was there before you, you’re now the god of the sandbox.

Developer: Nintendo Publisher: Nintendo Platform: Switch Release Date: March 20, 2020 ESRB: E ESRB Descriptions: Comic Mischief Buy: Game

The game offers a refreshing focus on its sense of place rather than ease of play.

The alien ecosystem of planet Gliese 677Cc is vast, an underwater expanse of flora and fauna in symbiotic relationships. Some creatures feed from the forest of sentient stalks that grow on a reef, while others thrive within a deep abyss of toxic yellow brine. In British developer Gareth Damian Martin’s In Other Waters, xenobiologist Ellery Vas witnesses and catalogs these new, awe-inspiring forms of extraterrestrial life while searching for the missing Minae Nomura, who mysteriously called Ellery to this remote world.

You play the game as an A.I. within Ellery’s diving suit, a sentient being that can only perceive that beautiful world through a two-color user interface. The things that are so striking to Ellery are dots and lines to the A.I., and they’re brought to life primarily through Ellery’s descriptions, which are displayed in a text readout on the UI alongside the map, depth counter, and meters regulating power and oxygen. The toolset is limited but intentionally so; think Subnautica but filtered through the interfaces of Nauticrawl, Duskers, or your average text adventure. Similar to the life on the planet itself, the A.I. and Ellery are dependent on each other, both of them like separate senses working in concert to navigate the ecosystem.

Even the parts of the interface that feel clunky feed into the methodical experience. It’s hard to multitask since pulling up the inventory will, for example, minimize Ellery’s descriptive text; there’s a certain rickety, tactile satisfaction to paging through the spare menus this way, pinging the environment for scannable objects and switching to the navigation function when you must move quickly (though certainly not too quickly) across the ocean floor.

Beyond the magnificent interface, the world of In Other Waters is thoughtful in a way few other games can claim. The relationships between the plant life and the animals feel considered and sensible, rather than all over the place; there aren’t a lot of obstacles strewn about with explanations dreamt up after the fact. The game offers a refreshing focus on its sense of place rather than ease of play, though the systems for cataloging the world take that ethos far enough that the overall pacing suffers. As you bring samples from the field back to a home base, Ellery’s taxonomy records are gradually and accordingly updated, first with rather verbose descriptions and theories of behavior and then, finally, with a sketch.

While it makes all the sense in the world for the characters to parse information only in a safe place, in practice the delay between collecting in the field and analyzing at home base mostly just inundates the player with an intimidating amount of text all at once. Likewise, the way In Other Waters gifts the player a sketch only after fully updating a creature’s record contradicts how Ellery’s descriptions gradually cultivate a mental image, sometimes upending what you might have pictured in your head. But because a sketch is the most significant prize compared to paragraphs of behavioral theory, the sketch must naturally come last in the manner of familiar-seeming tiered video-game reward hierarchy.

Much of the game’s naturalism similarly conflicts with design that’s overtly linear and story-driven. Though some areas are longer and roundabout with multiple paths, In Other Waters gates progress in rather typical fashion: If you hit a wall, you have to come back to an area later with the appropriate upgrade. The more elusive samples you need to complete a taxonomy are located on side paths, as the optional collectibles of this video game world. If the ecosystem of a game like Subnautica seems much more fantastical by comparison, its open nature nevertheless weaves a more coherent sense of place. For as much as In Other Waters cultivates an impressive, often beautiful feeling of exploration and discovery, its design is too neat and sequential to totally obscure how constructed its “natural” world truly is.

Developer: Jump Over the Age Publisher: Fellow Traveller Platform: Switch Release Date: April 3, 2020 ESRB: T ESRB Descriptions: Mild Violence Buy: Game

The element of fear that Resident Evil is known for isn’t as fully baked into the mechanics of this remake as it could have.

After two games in the Resident Evil series that do revolutionary work in bringing the horror back to survival horror, it’s a little disappointing to encounter a title in the series that feels so safe and expected. Nonetheless, it’s a disappointment that many would still kill for, as Resident Evil 3, then and now, doesn’t lack for spectacular frights.

Set a few days before the events of Resident Evil 2, the game follows original Resident Evil protagonist Jill Valentine—now bearing an odd, uncanny resemblance to Natalie Portman in Annihilation—on the night the T-virus outbreak kicks into high gear. Raccoon City’s fires are still burning and survivors are still running for cover. Jill is holed up in her apartment when she’s brutally confronted by Nemesis, a massive abomination of calcified flesh and teeth that’s deliberately hunting the surviving members of her squad. She goes on the offensive after she joins up with a squad of Umbrella mercenaries trying to find a way out of the city.

This new but not so improved Resident Evil 3 feels closer to an extended DLC package for Resident Evil 2 than a major advancement of its ideas. Graphically and mechanically, not much has changed between the two except the characters involved, as this remake also uses a third-person, over-the-shoulder camera, features stronger-than-usual undead ghoulies, and places in your hands weapons that, while they hit hard, necessitate ammo that’s hard to come by. And it all leads to an eventual showdown with the hulking monstrosity who’s hunting you down.

This does mean that Resident Evil 3 shares its predecessors strengths: The game is phenomenal at making not just gore, but tried-and-true jump scares, deeply effective and unnerving, while also showing off some truly inspired and terrifying creature designs in the process, especially when the more mutated behemoths start showing up. Of particular highlight here are the Gamma Hunters wandering Raccoon City’s sewers, whose gaping maws can gruesomely swallow characters whole if they get close enough to them.

But the fear that this game instills in the player isn’t all-encompassing, and that’s in spite of the hard-hitting action set pieces involving Nemesis. They’re well-executed, for placing the giant brute where he can best send an impromptu, panic-stricken bolt up the player’s spine, but he’s not utilized nearly as well as the all-seeing, all-knowing, all-hearing Mr. X was in Resident Evil 2. This Resident Evil 3 can be hair-raising, but there’s a sense of predictability that keeps you from being truly unmoored and paranoid throughout the campaign. There are a few moments of abstract terror—the most intriguing of which is a particular sequence early on where Jill must navigate a power grid maze while being pursued by spiders that infect her with hallucinatory parasites—but these moments are brief and rather self-contained.

In the end, the element of fear that Resident Evil is known for isn’t as fully baked into the mechanics of this remake as it is in prior entries in the series, and it’s up to the rest of the game to pick up the slack. This is, yes, a Resident Evil with a flimsier storyline than most, and the developers at Capcom at least knew that leaning harder into the action side of being a horror-action title was an admirable direction to go in. Indeed, the action here is consistently frenetic and bloody, and there’s still a gruesome, wet streak to the design of this urban-apocalyptic hell ride. It’s just that, overall, this new Resident Evil 3 offers a more fleeting experience than Resident Evil 2, out to electrify in the moment than truly stick in the mind.

Developer: Capcom Publisher: Capcom Platform: PlayStation 4 Release Date: April 3, 2020 ESRB: M ESRB Descriptions: Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language Buy: Game

The game is limited by the static nature of its mission-based structure and the protagonist’s severe lack of motivation.

Hide, the half-human, half-Yokai protagonist of Nioh 2, fights against both a slew of historical figures from the late Sengoku period and a horde of colorful monsters. But bigger than any battle in the game is the one Team Ninja fought behind the scenes in trying to follow in the footsteps of 2017’s Nioh without getting too repetitive. It’s a goal they don’t quite achieve. The core gameplay of the original has been expanded upon, with fun new weapons like a scythe-spear hybrid called the switchglaive and terrifying new monsters like the Ippon-Datara, which bounces toward you using its massive sword as a pogo stick. But the level-to-level design remains disappointingly the same, however much Nioh 2 tries to distract from it. Even the game’s extra dimension—a surreal Dark Realm—does little more than add a splash of magical color to each arena and provide bosses with a wider range of attacks.

All of these new features are just wallpaper over the same repetitive loops. You get all of the methodical, punishing combat of Dark Souls and the loot collecting of Diablo but none of the freedom offered by those titles. Without the illusion of progressing through a larger, interconnected world, players are essentially resetting between each mission, over and over again. Visual variety and the occasional gimmick—a burning multistory foundry, a river that can be dammed, a haunted forest with spectral spotlights that must be avoided—cannot fully paper over the game’s inescapable linearity. Whether you’re manipulating a massive mining elevator or pushing through an enemy encampment in the valleys of Anegawa, each area mainly serves as a gauntlet of escalating encounters. Side missions are even more linear, and the way that they recycle smaller areas of the main missions, but at different hours or seasons, at times makes Nioh 2 feel like the world’s slowest racing game.

Nioh 2 admirably attempts to cover a large chunk of Japanese history, beginning in 1555 and ending (for the most part) in 1598. But to do so, the game veers toward broad depictions of historical figures and events, and it assumes that players are familiar enough with Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi to fill in the missing context and motivation for what’s shown, like the raid on Inabayama Castle. Worse, the protagonist is largely treated as a mute bystander, inexplicably doing the bidding of their bumbling employer, Tokichiro. The story is so emotionally shallow and poorly presented that even big narrative cutscenes, like the one in which Hide confronts their father, are only clearly laid out in the in-game synopsis.

Thankfully, the game’s combat is never anything other than crystal clear. Each melee weapon has a low, medium, and high stance, and players can use a purifying pulse to chain together combos from multiple weapons or poses. Managing one’s ki (or stamina) is more fluid than in other Dark Souls-like games because of the ways in which it can be recovered, and this leads to a faster, more balletic form of battling, one that has learned all the right lessons from Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, right down to its high-risk, high-reward form of Burst Counters.

The wide variety of Yokai also forces players to keep adapting the way in which they approach foes throughout the game, and the weapons used to do so; a spear, for instance, does well to keep the ember-winged Koroka at bay, whereas a pair of agile hatchets may be the better counter against the snake-headed Rokrokubi. Best of all, players can appropriate the special attacks of these Yokai by gathering and equipping their cores, Pokémon-style. If anything, the game’s so flexible that it devalues the blacksmith and shrine attunement options, as there’s rarely a need to spend resources leveling up existing gear or cores when you can instead simply keep swapping to newly discovered, fresher options.

Nioh 2 has also made it easier to recruit allies, which helps to alleviate the game’s overall difficulty. You can still challenge evil versions of other players at Revenant Graves, hoping to win a piece of their gear, but now you have the Benevolent Graves, where you can summon good versions of those players to fight alongside you until they die. It’s a nice concession to those who want a little more control over the game’s high difficulty, and while you can still go it alone for maximum challenge, these extra units can provide some valuable breathing room.

For as much as Nioh 2 has improved the variety and accessibility of the original’s combat, it’s still limited by the static nature of its mission-based structure and the protagonist’s severe lack of motivation. Worse, the environments and story now seem more visibly to be coasting in a post-Sekiro world. In short, we’ve seen all of this before. Ultimately, while the in-game fighting against samurai and Yokai works well, it’s impossible to ignore the many ways in which Nioh 2 seems to be fighting against its own framework.

Developer: Team Ninja Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment Platform: PlayStation 4 Release Date: March 13, 2020 ESRB: M ESRB Descriptions: Blood and Gore, Suggestive Themes, Violence Buy: Game

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