Reviews

There’s a lot to admire about Layers of Fear, Polish studio Bloober Team’s new reimagining of its (relatively) excellent surreal, psychological adventure horror series. Developed alongside Anshar Studios, which previously assisted Bloober in expanding its sci-fi horror Observer in 2020, this new version of Layers of Fear compounds the original 2016 game, its DLC, Layers […]

After hours of dodging orcs and ducking spiders, I found Shelob’s lair. I’m a slave in The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, performing tasks like collecting tags and herding animals for maybe a bite of rotted bread. I was aching to escape. Meeting Shelob seemed like the first real attempt at bargaining for freedom. So,

Atlas Fallen is a classic jack-of-all-trades, master of none. It’s an open-world action RPG Metroidvania platformer with co-op that tries to do so many things it rarely does any of them well. That doesn’t make it a bad game, just, more often than not, a forgettable one. I had some fun surfing its sandy dunes

Halfway through the Toronto-based story mission that’s part of Overwatch 2: Invasion, things get a little scary. Omnics, Overwatch’s in-universe sentient robots, are under attack from a terrorist organization called Null Sector, and you’re there to help them—but as your squad of carefully curated heroes (you can choose from a smaller roster in each PvE

Dragami Games announced this month that its Lollipop Chainsaw remake release was getting delayed to 2024. Never having played hack-and-slash Lollipop before, but eagerly awaiting the remake, I decided to cope rationally: I spent $40 on a game made 11 years ago, and hauled my friends’ grimy Xbox 360 to my apartment. I had known

IIt’s 3:30 a.m., my palms are sweaty, my heart is pounding, and a small mech riding on a tank blows me up for the 11th time. The rubber nubs on my controller’s thumbsticks had started rubbing off long ago, but now they’re completely decimated. The PS5 DualSense was not built for this. Armored Core VI’s

Fort Solis feels like running into a barely-remembered ex at the grocery store—nice to look at and unbearably boring. Through its sprightly voice actors’ sheer will, the third-person adventure game sometimes succeeds in its aim to shock you, to do Mars à la Denis Villeneuve, but its story is overall too bovine and garbled. Your

I sometimes hide disappointment behind a meek observation that, well, “it isn’t for me,” but I’m sure that Dauntless developer Phoenix Labs’ life sim role-playing game Fae Farm, out on Switch and PC on September 8, is for me. Calm and uncomplicated “cozy gaming” is heavily associated with women, I’m one of those. Fae Farm,

Lies of P frustrates me. The first Soulslike from developers Neowiz Games and Round8 Studio, this gothic action-RPG keeps kicking my ass no matter how many times I level up. It’s aggravating. And yet, I keep pulling myself from the comfort of my Starfield spaceship to descend into the chaos of “Pinocchio Souls” for one

I hit a roadblock about three-fourths of the way through Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. There was a frustrating platforming section that required I dash and jump through hazardous obstacles: thorny spinning wheels, spiked pits and walls, falling platforms, and invisible auras that shot out magenta arrows. I can’t tell you how many times