Reviews

As I peer out from a ventilation shaft to catch sight of the unspeakable horror in search of me, I prepare to toss a wrench I lifted from the ground in the desperate hope of distracting it. I step out of the shaft, throw it, and then immediately dart for the door. But I get […]

Hours into playing Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, the massive, singular expansion for FromSoftware’s award-winning 2022 action RPG, I realize it’s paralleling my real life. Until Elden Ring, I avoided Soulslikes. Their punishing difficulty and rigid boundaries frustrated me immensely: I hit a wall in Dark Souls: Remastered and gave up, barely touched Bloodborne,

Taking a break from unraveling the mysteries of the stars in my repeated trips across the Unity into parallel replications of the universe, I encounter a new group that promises credits in exchange for dangerous and hopefully exciting quests hunting down the galaxy’s most wanted. I take up the challenge and…I lose the thread. Rigid

Sometimes when I sit down to play MultiVersus, it kinda feels like I’m a child reaching into a cookie jar. Part of me knows, if I want to be a good boy, I shouldn’t be doing it. But cookies taste good as hell. That rush of mind-melting bliss when biting into a gooey, sugary treat

The world has been plunged into darkness. The dead persist violently among the living. What remains of humanity following a cataclysm I helped trigger is now at each other’s throats. I carry my share of the blame, but it’s clear the gods must pay for what they’ve done to us. There’s a path to seeking

In musical theater, sequels are few and far between, and when they do exist they usually aren’t very good. For example, you’ve probably heard of Phantom of the Opera, the massively successful show from Andrew Lloyd Webber, but you probably don’t know anything about its sequel, Love Never Dies. There’s a reason for that—it kind

There’s a moment in Black Myth: Wukong that would be the perfect visual metaphor for the game’s hopeful, proud ascension as China’s big breakthrough into the Western AAA pantheon. Unfortunately, that moment is restricted, and we can’t talk about that. There are moments in Black Myth: Wukong of such enthralling beauty and visual poetry and

Madden needs a year off. The annual NFL simulation juggernaut has been a late-summer mainstay for the video game industry for over 30 years now, bringing with it the most realistic portrayal of National Football League action there is to be found. The teams are here, the players are here, everything a football fan could

As a big Star Wars fan and video game lover, I’ve long dreamed of a game just like Star Wars Outlaws: a massive open-world action game set in the Star Wars universe that would let me rub shoulders with Jabba the Hutt while freely exploring every inch of a planet like Tatooine. It’s wild that

There’s no outfit in gaming with a stronger history of telling tales about picking fights with God than Square Enix. Literally or metaphorically, from Final Fantasy Legend/SaGa and Star Ocean to Xenogears and even some Final Fantasies, a foundational narrative in which our heroes push back against a cruel, manipulative creator is like a spinal