Sprawling level design, thrilling combat, and masterful indirect storytelling make Dark Souls 3 the best Dark Souls yet.
Doom Eternal is a ceaseless, panicked nightmare that pushes you to point and click with more skill and style than ever before.
Apex Legends is a quiet revolution in how we communicate in games, and an excellent team-based battle royale I can recommend to anyone, caveat-free.
Cruelty Squad celebrates feeling bad in surprising ways, all of them fun.
Rainbow Six Siege is a pretty dopey military FPS at first glance, but insists players learn to work together with minimal error. Further, it invites a maddening cycle of thought—it makes me think about how I'm thinking the more I play. We were constantly disrupting our own habits.
Aquatic Adventure distills the Metroidvania into its most essential parts and says something meaningful with it.
Despite a drab multiplayer mode and limited level creation tools, Doom is a cheeky and fulfilling return to pared-down acrobatic gunplay.
There are few games quite as curious and beautiful as Abzû, and fewer of its kind on the PC. It’s a short, dense journey filled with intense wonder and inherent beauty, and every inch is worth seeing.
Jesse's telekinesis joins Half-Life 2's juiced gravity gun in the videogame physics toy hall of fame.
Red Dead Redemption 2's stark, slow depiction of America's fading frontier is a monumental work straining against stubborn mission design and stability problems.
A stylish mix of bullet hell and deft swordplay, Furi is only held back by rare bugs and poorly designed difficulty spikes.
Monster Hunter: World's thrilling fights with fantastic beasts never get old, even if they require tiresome item management during downtime.
Stealth and pursuit haven't changed much in Outlast 2, but it excels as a beautiful, brutal journey through extreme spiritual anxieties.
Lovely Planet Arcade is a fast, challenging deconstruction of old school FPS design that can be frustrating, but makes up for it with heaps of charm.
Light performance problems and a poor loot box system can't quite distract from Forza Motorsport 7's accommodating difficulty, stunning beauty, and lavish racing options.
Youngblood's gorgeous, terrible world is worth exploring, despite a slight narrative and oppressively boring progression systems.
Shadow Warrior 2's combat is gleefully expressive and varied, but undermined by tired, dated humor.
Some nice characters and stories nested in an astounding open world, undercut by jarring bugs at every turn.
Gorgeous but empty, challenging but not always fair, The Ringed City is a weak reflection of the series' best traits.
That Dragon, Cancer tells a valuable story despite its uneven delivery.