The Land Beneath Us is as sleek and sharp as a blood sword. The game’s systems favor careful consideration over needless fuss, paring back layers of potential boondoggles to the bare essentials: your weapon, your enemies’ movements, and the terrain. Every mechanic layered on top relies on those fundamentals instead of superseding them Despite its generosity of information, The Land Beneath Us doesn’t compromise its difficulty. You may know what’s coming, but that just means your failures are your own. A few structural blemishes affect the game’s flow, but it is still very much worth fighting for. I send Sven through the warp point one more time, determined to see it through.
Please Leave Me Alone, I Need To Poop pulls off a royal flush: the swirl of surface humor reveals the foul infrastructure underneath. This team has stared into the cubicle abyss. The indignity of needing to poop but being unable to is more than a comedy pratfall, it’s a smaller fracture in a widening human rights chasm.
Riven 2024 is a true labor of love, a direct result of fan efforts to render the game in a modern style. Character models, puzzles, and other touches have been dramatically streamlined, and barring a few hard knowledge checks, my time in Riven sped by. Graphics hiccups and captioning omissions are tiny blemishes on Riven’s triumphant return. I’ll be thinking of it, pun intended, for ages.
Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip succeeds because of its manageable scale. Sprankelwater feels gloriously off-center, with a limited toolset that hits the perfect balance of freedom and constraint. The game’s open-ended nature and surreal worldbuilding won’t be for everyone, but the humor lands with oddballs like me. Alternately deadpan, tender, and zany, Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip should be held in the same high regard as A Short Hike and Lil Gator Game. Sometimes it’s worth it to push past pure “cozy.”
Like that test demo, FLATHEAD falters when it adds too much detail too soon, undercutting its own tense atmosphere. The game has taken noticeable (and welcome) steps back since its early days, but can’t quite overcome the urge to overexplain. I chalk it up to a developer finding their voice and their footing. I’m confident that with time, they will make something that can truly rattle me. They got perilously close this time.
Sunset Visitor’s debut stretches the clean lines of video game metacommentary into a concentrated ludonarrative taffy. There is no gotcha moment, to 1000xRESIST’s credit. The struggle for meaning is long but not fruitless. Characters slowly learn to survive in—and maybe even love—the fractured world they’ve been given. 1000xRESIST will leave you with questions, but ultimately the resolution is yours alone. The game is infinitely better for it.
Let’s! Revolution! is a satisfying fusion of systematic deduction and no-holds-barred risk. Player abilities give you enough power to take powerful swings or lethal risks. If you’re looking for a puzzle game that’s all logic, you won’t find it here. But those willing to play inside the game’s initial constraints will find that with great risk comes great reward. Let’s! Revolution!‘s commitment to character and choice are what make it a rare treat. You can’t have a revolution without getting a little messy.
Here’s what it felt like at Tekken 8’s best: relatively smooth online play dissolved the bicoastal time difference and immersed me in a flashy and silly fighting sandbox. Boxers and martial artists clashed in fast-paced, bombastic matchups. My collected knowledge and frantic improvisation sent me into a flow state, laughing at each win or loss. Ultimately that feeling, not shareholder-induced rot, keeps me coming back. Tekken 8 can be tough to love, but for better or worse, I do anyway.
Tamarak Trail‘s compelling art style and battle system are ultimately weighed down by poor design choices. If you can push past the thicket of mild annoyances, the well-honed dice-rolling mechanics shine through. Despite my hesitations, I kept rolling through tough bosses, mystifying character traits, and other less-polished moments. Hopefully, a little additional work bring Tamarak Trail a devoted audience. While frustrating, the journey through the woods is worth saving.
Fight Crab 2 is a mix of deliberately cumbersome and cutting-edge, lobbing control schemes, art styles, and weapons with relentless abandon. It may not aim for graphical prowess, but the game’s charm and option to upload VRoid models as your avatar give it legs within an admittedly niche audience. Performance and frame rate issues are the only thing that had me in a pinch. Fight Crab 2 will delight B-movie mavens and frustrate those expecting more traditional controls or game structure. It won’t be for everyone, but that’s largely by design.
Born of Bread’s narrative and mechanics soar despite some perplexing quality-of-life choices—and a slew of minor bugs that will hopefully be fixed soon. Although I’m always happy to see a tag-team turn-based RPG, the game sometimes hews too closely to structural and mechanical tropes better left in the distant past. Born of Bread overcomes these setbacks through sheer force of will. The game isn’t afraid to take some wild swings, either. It’s more than a simple Mario and Luigi homage and absolutely the funniest game I’ve played all year. Consider this a weighted Taylor-based average; I’m scoring Born of Bread based on how highly I recommend it, warts and all.
SUPER 56 invokes the best and worst of its microgame lineage with short, bizarre snippets, a narrative framework as joyful as it is inessential, and a central control gimmick that occasionally outstays its welcome. Small accessibility issues aside, Onion Soup Interactive avoids the major pitfalls of its contemporaries by limiting the experience entirely to single-player with online leaderboards, tapering what could have been an overwhelming sprawl into a smart, snappy collection.
Jusant's reach never exceeds its grasp. Smart use of player tools, generous checkpointing options, and a full spectrum of sound take a simple premise to its absolute peak. The deceptively simple climbing and exploration constantly reminds you that you are a single point in a larger ecosystem.
Robodunk is a scrappy, lively take on side-scrolling basketball hijinks, but refinements to control defaults and campaign unlocks could send it soaring to even greater heights. For now, it plays best with friends, but nothing a few post-launch tweaks couldn’t fix.
THOSE GAMES carries on shared cultural memory in its own way, unable to completely avoid the crude undertones and punishing scaling of the source material. While the collection is far from perfect, it’s what we have now. Please go play it. I need the stinky girl and wild makeover games in the sequel.
Despite a few minor hiccups, Video Game Fables is a joy. While it covers familiar territory, the narrative and systemic liberties Matt Sharp applies to well-worn RPG systems transform them into something more forgiving and freewheeling.