It doesn't bring me any joy to write this. When Spiritfarer is a Work that's About Things, it's exciting and fresh, thoughtful and tender. Unfortunately, most of the time it's not about anything at all.

I will readily acknowledge that this is, in part, a 'me' problem. There's long been a disconnect between me and games like Stardew Valley and Harvest Moon. What is intended to be a gentle day-night cycle of reaping and sowing becomes a stressful exercise in efficiency. An hour is something that has value to me, and games that cannot balance a calculation against that value quickly begin to grate. And most of the time, that's just fine. I simply do not play games that are about those kinds of experiences. The trouble with Spiritfarer is that it is striving to be something else.

Spiritfarer claims to be a game about grieving, about the experience of being around for the end of someone's life. It promises to explore this from myriad angles, to allow you to genuinely grow close to characters in their brief afterlife, and to experience what it's like to farewell them. As much as a video game can, I do think it succeeds on this front. The charming, diverse character designs are immediately fun to watch, and the premise allows the writers to cut to the chase. Where other games might need to work harder to earn moments where characters reminisce on their life to the player, here it just, like, makes sense. They're dead. Why wouldn't they be preoccupied with the life they've lost?

It's that diversity of character that really drew me in. I was looking forward to seeing so many perspectives on this very real, significant experience, and the few chances I got did not disappoint. There was an initial period where the fantastical seascapes and vague allusions to the player character's history did not make sense, but after receiving a Spirit Flower - a parting gift from the passengers you ferry to the end - I was immediately on board with what the game was presenting me with. It felt genuinely exciting.

In a moment of pure tastelessness, you then immediately use up the Spirit Flower as a crafting ingredient to upgrade your boat so it can drive through ice.

Which brings me to the two biggest problems with Spiritfarer, and the things that will probably keep me from going back to play more of it; the progression, and the overabundance of 'mechanics'.

Let's start with the latter. There's a question hanging over Spiritfarer as a concept; what do you, the player, actually do? What does a Spiritfarer, one who accompanies the dead to the end of their existence, actually do? The answer that the game provides is deeply unsatisfactory. Sure, in principle, providing comfortable housing and tasty food is a wonderful thing to do in that role. What that looks like in practice, however, is primarily the accumulation of resources through extremely dull, extremely repetitive busywork. For example:

You plant a cotton seed in your garden. That seed, exactly like all the other seeds you plant, needs watering three times a day. Naturally, when you wake up in the morning, about a third of a day has passed, so your plants need water. You water them by pressing the interact button - each instance takes a few seconds of watching an animation - and do so again at about midday. You water them just before you go to bed. This cycle continues more or less as long as you're playing the game, so pretty much every night, you'll water the plants, go to sleep, wake up, and water the exact same plants again. Every single in-game day, if you want to play efficiently.

Or, let's say you need metals. To get the ore, you have to stand next to a rock and hold the interact button for the correct duration. Hold it too long, and you sit there for several seconds while an animation of your character falling over plays out. Once you have the ore, you can take it to the smelter on the ship, where you engage in a slightly different variety of busywork by running back and forth between two different interact button presses to keep a needle in the sweet spot on a dial.

You get the idea. None of these things really have anything to do with being a Spiritfarer. There's the distant idea that the fruits of your labor will make the people you're ferrying happy, but the actual act has nothing to do with them. You're tucked in a corner away from them, waiting for animations to finish. There are moments where they're arguably involved - happy passengers can provide you with small, infrequent benefits to these systems - but for the most part it's just, like, pressing the interact button and waiting for an action to finish.

This wouldn't be too much of a problem, if it weren't for the fact that the hours spent in these activities drastically outnumbers the time spent with the story. I have played for 14 hours - about halfway through the game, as I understand it - and maybe two or three hours of that have had any bearing on the characters I'm meant to be playing the game for. It's not impossible for a game to spread the story out between activities that aren't specifically related to it. Hades does an excellent job of a similar approach. The difference is that when you're playing Hades, you get to play Hades. Here, it's just pressing buttons and waiting.

And, unfortunately, you do need to engage with these mechanics. Each passenger on your ship has a questline, of sorts. They have objectives that they'll want you to complete to help them get comfortable, to help them overcome whatever's keeping them anchored to this plane of existence, to take care of their needs when they can't do it themselves. While arguably video-gamey, this is, in itself, a fine way to structure things. The problem is the tangled knot of progression that prevents you from pushing ahead with any aspect of the story. They obscure it, but there is a hard, harsh order to which you must progress the game. A character's demands will require obtaining a specific resource, which can only be obtained at specific locations, all of which are behind a specific obstacle that requires a specific upgrade, which cannot be obtained without completing the stories of two other characters, which have their own endless series of requirements, waiting periods, etc. etc.

It creates a situation where you are mostly progressing a single objective at a time, in a game where doing a single thing at a time is incredibly, insufferably boring, and means most of the people aboard your ship have nothing to do but ask you for food and remind you that they're waiting for you to finish something you can't even start yet. Sometimes the single thing you're doing is just waiting for the next story event to happen! When a story does progress, it's rewarding and interesting, but the things you have to do dig up that small piece of actual art are so insufferably, endlessly boring.

I find it frustrating, because none of this feels like an accident. It feels like this progression, these activities were deliberately crafted to be this way. Spiritfarer is described as a 'cozy' game, which puts it in a specific trend of games that, inspired by the aforementioned Stardew Valley, share many of these problems for me. Again, that's normally just a matter of taste, but in the pursuit of 'cozy', however one may feel about it, the developers have left behind the things that are actually special about what they were making. They didn't fall into it accidentally. They deliberately made a game that is deeply at odds with itself, that fills the time you give it with meaningless chaff that does nothing to further it as a work of art. Spiritfarer does not need gathering and crafting - or at least, does not need this much of it. There's something real special here, a wonderful and rich cake that I'd be all too happy to devour if it weren't for the unconscionably thick shell of fondant around it.

There is nothing wrong with a 12 hour game. If I can spend that much time with a game and enjoy even just most of it, that's time well spent. Spiritfarer could be an excellent 12 hour game. Instead, it promises twice that, and spreads what excellence it has far too thin to stomach. I'm profoundly disappointed.

This is maybe more of a review of the concept of 'dandori' than it is strictly a review of the game, Pikmin 4, a mere vessel for that ethos.

Sometimes there simply isn't a word for the type of work a work of art is. Attempting to take genre classification seriously leads to either the insufficiently academic and endlessly debatable, or mashing together words into meaningless ad-libs. Is Pikmin a puzzle-game? Is it a puzzle real-time strategy with survival game elements? Probably, but neither of these things say much about what the game is. There's no game it's particularly *-like either. We laughed when Hideo Kojima coined the 'strand-type' game, but sometimes, that's all you can do.

The word that the developers of Pikmin 4 decided to use to describe their game is 'dandori', and it's a word that the localizers of Pikmin 4 struggle to translate. Broadly speaking, it's left as is. They describe it in-game as "[organizing] tasks strategically and working effectively to execute plans", which is not inaccurate, but also isn't exactly helpful either. However, the brilliance of Pikmin, and of this game in particular, is that to understand dandori, you don't need words. Pikmin is a game built to teach it to you, the way that Mario teaches you timing and spatial analysis, the way XCOM teaches you to manage risk.

If I were to take a stab at explaining it, dandori is about time management in a workplace. In that workplace, you have tasks, and workers. Those workers take time to complete those tasks, which are varying in nature, and spread out across the workplace. How can you complete as much of what you need to get done as possible before the day is over? Well, you might consider;
- Avoiding idleness. Time spent not working is time wasted (fortunately, in Pikmin your workers do not have needs and never tire, so any ethical concerns with this are neatly sidestepped)
- Knowing your workers, and assigning them the tasks they are best suited for. (Pikmin are pleasingly color-coded, and as of Pikmin 4, have diverse and overlapping strengths. They are also, while error-prone, perfectly obedient)
- Prioritizing tasks that make future tasks easier (You start each day surrounded by a tempting bouquet of flowers, a quick method of bolstering your Pikmin count)
As you can see, the answer is not a number, or a silver bullet. It is a series of principles, applied to each new situation as necessary, taught directly through simply playing the game. The answer is dandori.

And dandori is good. Let's assume, for a moment, that there is an inherent joy in the efficient completion of tasks - or at least, that you're the kind of person who thinks so. Pikmin 4 is a wonderful game for getting a lot of stuff done. Your ultimate goals are very straight forward, but the means by which you achieve them involve many different obstacles, cleanly broken down into assignable, varying tasks. They sit there, waiting for you to come and untangle them, wrapped in an overall game structure that wields a gentle, but unwavering time pressure to urge you onwards without ever forcing you to take drastic, unplanned action. That inherent joy I mentioned is found here in spades, and presented to the player with the immediacy typical of Nintendo's flagship titles - aside from a few minor quibbles with controls and pacing.

(There is an awful lot of talking throughout the game, which is time spent not doing dandori. I also found that it was harder than I would've wanted to send more Pikmin to help with a task than were required, which was noticeable, because that is a something you consider doing any time you do literally anything)

These small things cannot keep Pikmin 4 from being an outstanding, enjoyable adventure, that's simple and intuitive to get started with. The Nintendo design philosophy of simplifying player actions and pushing the complexity out into the world works wonders here. Assigning tasks to workers in most any game is at least a couple of interactions. Here, you just mash one button to throw your lil guys at the thing you want until it starts happening. Feedback on the progress of tasks is immediate and clear. Outside of some of the more challenging instances of combat, thinking about something is as good as doing it.
There's next to no barriers between the player and their engagement with the organisational thinking that dandori benefits.

In truth, every Pikmin game has been about dandori, even if the term was freshly coined for the fourth. Every Pikmin game changes the things around that core concept - new tasks, new workers, varying degrees of co-operative gameplay - but dandori has always been there. In all three prior games, you are explicitly graded on how quickly you completed your tasks, which is a direct consequence of how well you managed your workforce, which can only be improved through the application of the principles of dandori. Though the consequences of working too inefficiently have perhaps become gentler in recent games, it is still the thing that drives the player forward.

This is the sort of thing Nintendo has always done, for better or worse. Take some gameplay that's fun and approachable, put class-leading kid-friendly character design on it, and spend the next two or three decades examining it in new contexts, finding new ways to get at that core. Here, in Pikmin, that core is not movement, or combat, or even exploration.It's not any of the actions you perform in-game, though those haven't needed to change much over two decades. The core is the philosophy of dandori, how you think about the actions you're performing in that broader, more malleable context. And unlike previous Pikmin games, Pikmin 4 finds a way to demonstrate how it comes from outside the world of games, exists wherever work and organisation do.

See, Pikmin 4 is actually about half a dozen Pikmin games. Or, it's more like one really big Pikmin game, with a bunch of smaller auxiliary games in its orbit. Each game is presented to you piecemeal as you progress through the story, one level at a time, spread out through a larger story. Most of them are even optional, if you don't like what they're cooking. But all of them, again, rely on dandori. Whether it's a compressed, five-minute version of the base experience, or a survival horror wave defense, or messy competitive battles, you use the same core principles in each and every additional game. Where a game series might normally take entry after entry to explore its core conceit so thoroughly and from so many angles, Pikmin 4 leaps past its predecessors to do it in one. Not only does it teach you dandori - it universalizes it.

That's the wonder of Pikmin 4. It's not that there's so much of it, or that it's so lovingly rendered. It's that it really, truly wants to teach you how fun it can be to make and execute a plan. It wants you to learn dandori, and it will gently hold your hand and lead you directly to it, if you let it. It'll show you dandori from each of its distinct perspectives, whichever ones you find fun enough to dig into. If you're really taking to it, it won't hesitate to let you take the challenge as far as you want. 'How could you apply these concepts in your daily life?' Pikmin 4 asks, in one of many load screen tooltips. Once you've played the game, it might be hard not to look for answers to that question

The mid-budget character action game is having a strong few years! Sifu is a very strong contender in the space of 'Sekiro-parrylikes', thanks to a really striking aesthetic and a genuinely quite novel take on progression. It takes some effort to understand, and isn't explained all that well, but it breaks down like this:

- Each time you die, your death amount goes up by one, and your age increases by your death amount. Once you are 70 or older, any death forces you to restart the current level.
- When you beat a level, your age is saved, and you start the next level at that age. Because of this, you can get to later levels and be old enough that you only have a couple of chances to die, making the level much more difficult.
- To make later levels easier, you can go back to any previous level, and beat it without dying as much. If you do that, the subsequent level will be easier to beat, and if you beat that one at a younger age, the one after that will be easier too, etc.
- Basically, the better you get at earlier levels, the more comfortable later levels become.

There's other things that intersect with this system in slightly more complex ways, but in essence, it's always valuable - sometimes to the point of necessity - to increase your mastery of a level, as it gives you more room to master later levels. The shortcuts and gentle branching paths of the levels make this process relatively painless, but it's the satisfying way that a clean run helps you push the entire game forward that's the real draw. Mastery has a purpose, outside of inherent appeal, or making an arbitrary score number bigger, or some cosmetic reward.

It's a theme that's very much aligned with the aesthetic, though I wouldn't say it necessarily builds up to much. The story is brief and interstitial, with the impact mostly coming from killer visuals and presentation. While they can sometimes draw a little too strongly from obvious influences (they get their Oldboy corridor fight in halfway through the first level) the character design and animation really stand out, and the way enemies collide with walls and surfaces when you take them down never stops being impressive. It would be nice if there was more to chew on in a narrative sense, outside the well-trodden ground of whether or not revenge is worth it.

Perhaps my experience with the game is undermined by the fact that I am, despite some experimentation, clearly missing some key element required to obtain a 'true ending'; without that, it doesn't manage much more than to translate some clear, maybe-too-obvious influences into a very pretty, well-paced experience of martial mastery.

I'm not normally one for JRPGs - this is the first Final Fantasy game I've seriously played that didn't charge me a subscription fee - so it was surprising to see how far I took this one, stopping just short of the final two optional superbosses. One of the first things that caught my attention was the realisation that unlike a lot of video games, I wasn't playing the story of a single protagonist, but rather, a much broader story of a moment in Ivalician history, presented through the trials and agencies of the six characters that make up the party. The game opens with a lengthy montage of military invasion, multiple royal deaths, betrayal and schemes. It's a lot, and there's a certain passion one needs to have for excessive fantasy worldbuilding to immediately get much out of it (I loved it, obviously)

With all of that swirling around, we sensibly draw back to Vaan and Penelo, passionate and principled, but powerless in the face of an imperial occupation of their home. From there, we have a stable grounding from which we can expand back out, capturing pirates and princesses, floating fortresses and resistances, until we're out of the footnotes and into the annals of history. An excellent balance is struck between the immensity of Ivalice's inter-imperial politics and the individual, personal story that acts as the immediate, played narrative. It all connects and coheres, without needing to hold back on introducing characters and locations. Even if it does, at times, feel like the events that are happening on screen are filling space between things that are actually important, and two of the three women in the party have very little to do or say about anything important, it's a remarkable progression that suits the game well

That progression, as with most RPGs, is at the heart of the game, but not in the way I expected. Here, the typically time-consuming and dull number scaling of experience points happens without input - you don't need input, because all of the interesting decisions are on the license boards, where you specialise your characters and find that satisfying synergy that makes building characters so entertaining. Since you (mostly) can't miss any license board upgrades, you're always building your characters up from a sensible baseline, and simple completion of the story has plenty of room for building inefficiently. It takes off a lot of the pressure that normally comes with such decision-making, and creates a wonderful, intrinsic incentive to pursue side content and see how well you do. Not only that, but the gear that you get from pursuing that side content, delving deeper into each of the story's dungeons, is often the best and most interesting in the game.

Which is where we come to my first big issue with this game, and a broader issue I find I have with the genre. As I've discovered in wiki-diving, there's a lot of gear that you'll simply never get, because it only has a slim chance to be obtained from an enemy you only have one chance to fight, or it has a slim chance of appearing in a room you have no reason to walk into more than once. I couldn't tell you what rare items I obtained, because I couldn't tell you if they were rare or not. From my perspective, I just opened a box. Any perceived rarity has nothing to do with what I actually experienced. I earned the gear, certainly, but who's to say what I never even knew I missed out on?

The same philosophy applies to the game's approach to much of its optional content, however. I did my best to take the game as it was, but if your curiosity is peaked by the promise of a new fight or area, there's a good chance you'll have to look up what you're supposed to do to actually get it. For example; there's an optional boss fight in a locked room hidden behind a puzzle, which you can open by getting a key by trading an item (that you got from an unrelated sidequest) to an NPC you've never heard of, who you can't see, in a corner an area that is nowhere near the locked door and you have no reason to revisit, much less thoroughly examine every corner.

I think the intent is that players learn about these things through methods other than just, like, playing the game. Maybe there was a time when hearing about a legendary sword at the peak of the Great Crystal was something significant, and being fortunate enough to find it was a story worth telling. Unfortunately, whether or not it's a fair criticism to put on the game, what that looks like now is just skimming any one of a number of guides available online. There's simply no other way to engage with, frankly, sizeable chunks of the game, even if you do want to take it at its terms. It's a frequent occurrence, and unsatisfying every time.

This method of obfuscation seems to me a very deeply held part of the genre. The nature of Final Fantasy XII is that it's always throwing you at new enemies, new problems to solve with your party of heroes, all without telling you exactly what you're in for. It's something of a double-edged sword; the downside is that every new problem is met with a brief period of experimentation, where you find out what exactly it is you're not allowed to do. So much of the challenge in the game centers on this; the more you delve into the game's Espers and Hunts, the more you encounter enemies who refuse to be Slowed, or Sheared, or affected by most any of the tools at your disposals. Some bosses enter lengthy phases of invulnerability, where you're left more or less standing around and waiting for them to finish. Of course, they have no trouble including enemies who cast spells that simply kills your entire active party as soon as you start the fight. It's often exasperating, and I can't help but wonder if there isn't - in a completely different game, mind - a better approach they could have considered.

The developers do need to do something to force players to change their strategies, though, otherwise we'd just find something that works and stick to that the entire game, which would be a tremendous waste. Developing a strategy in this game is an exercise in flexibility and improvisation, aided by the wonderful specialization of license boards and the frankly brilliant Gambit system. They're so pitch-perfect for this style of gameplay that I'm surprised to not have seen them elsewhere. All of the non-decisions of picking targets to attack, juggling obvious elemental advantages and healing are taken care of, leaving you to focus on the edge cases and complexity that actually make combat interesting. Between that and the generous, welcoming progression systems, it really does feel like developing a party of competent heroes, who have a place in a story of such scale.

There's other things to talk about, like how it's easily one of the most gorgeous games of that entire console generation, or the refreshing and inspired Ivalician aesthetic, or the wonderful blocking in the cutscenes, or how they really didn't have to make all the men in the game as hot as they did, or how fucking ICONIC Fran is, etc. I really wasn't expecting to find so much to love. It's mired in an often frustrating philosophy of obscurity that permeates every minute of actually playing the game, but without the pointless busywork of random battles and grinding, the worst moments are over quickly, and the moments of triumph feel like a direct result of careful planning, quick thinking and versatility.

A perfect example of a game that knows exactly what it does - and does not - need to have. There are so many games I've played that are bloated with half-baked gestures towards mechanics, purely for the sake of satisfying convention, and I couldn't count the amount of totally extraneous jump buttons I've encountered. It's really refreshing to play something that's pared back to the strengths of its premise, and the creative behind it. Those presumably self-imposed limitations - the visuals being limited to a UI and a topographical map, the comparatively tiny text boxes, the distance between the player and their actions in the world - really help slow things down, and make room for the space to be filled with that most precious of experiences in video games: contemplation.

The story unfolds steadily, and somewhat predictably. There's a degree to which it's stifled by the monologue format, and the degree to which the player has any input of expression drops off severely later in the game. It's a style of writing that grabs my attention much more in the short bursts of description and commentary you get while exploring the ocean than in the grand gestures or academic notes. 'Stuff' 'happens', but it's nothing terribly special, and doesn't need to be. More could have been done, even with the mentioned creative limitations, but what's here is easily enough to be enjoyed.

Like with many other brief, distinct titles, I really don't have any good reason not to recommend it. There's several reasons to bounce off it, sure, but it sets out to do something unique and intriguing, and it does it well.

This review is as spoiler-free as it gets. I definitely recommend playing Prey with as little advance information on the specifics as possible, even if some things are obvious from the marketing materials alone.

Arkane Studios has a relatively specific niche; players explore detailed, intricately crafted spaces in a first-person perspective, using a variety of synergistic tools both intrinsic and extrinsic to their character, with a focus on reactivity and a living world. Even though it could be argued that this perception only came about with their first major attempt at it with Dishonored in 2012, effectively giving us exactly one example of their talents in making this kind of game, the pedigree of the creatives who work there and the sheer readiness with which Dishonored embodied and advanced the traditions of other games in that vein solidified their claim to it immediately. The fact that each follow-up to Dishonored (its DLC, and the sequel) managed to equal or even surpass it, was confirmation enough that this was their forte.

Prey, then, was a very interesting case in that it was the first time we'd seen the Arkane style applied to a new world, and though it was clearly still within the same niche, held different goals to the sneaky, magical power fantasy of Dishonored. Developed out of one of their two studios in Austin while the first worked on Dishonored 2 in Lyon, it took on the name of Human Head's 2006 shooter, Prey, as Arkane's parent company (Zenimax / Bethesda) owned the rights to that. I haven't played Human Head's Prey, but it seems apparent that Arkane's Prey doesn't have much in common at all. In fact, I suspect that a working title for Arkane's Prey would have been 'Psychoshock', since it appears to have more similarities with games like System Shock, and others that have adopted the '-shock' suffix.

The differences between Prey and Dishonored, then, are not so much about making a very different type of game as they are about using the same tools to accomplish different things, in a way that mirrors the use of tools in the games themselves. Dishonored's level-based structure uses Arkane's unique talent to develop spaces to give you a whirlwind tour of Dunwall and beyond, presenting the player with levels that provide individual challenges and allow for a self-directed pacing, while Prey's singular, interconnected area can feel cramped, and builds familiarity in a way that isn't present in Dishonored. Dishonored's singular objectives can be approached from a variety of ways, much like Prey, but where Dishonored gives you a single clear point to work towards, and a narrative with a solid structure, your goals in Prey are especially unclear at the beginning, and it takes some time before you have a full understanding of the 'bigger picture'.

These departures from Dishonored are largely because of Prey's different aesthetic goals; Prey begins in a similar state to a horror game, giving you a limited toolset, limited spaces to explore, and a limited understanding of the game's world. It makes you feel these limitations keenly, making a great first impression to work with later. As the game progresses, you start to push back these limits in various ways, exploring new areas with new abilities, until you've finally built yourself a very capable character. It gives the game a more traditional, character-dependent arc, but the consistent introduction of new elements keeps a playthrough from getting stale. These new elements are often very significant departures from one another, instead of just having bigger numbers to deal with, like many RPGs. In these ways, you're less embodying an existing character, like the Royal Protector of Dunwall or an Empress, and more building your idea of who your character is, now that you're in charge. It's a fun sense of progression that manages to keep the adrenaline going through much of the game, supported by the themes of the narrative, and the number of different twists the game's story takes.

The aesthetics bear this out, helping create a space that feels hostile, empty and lived-in all at once. You rarely have much in the way of verticality or freedom of movement, but as you learn the intricacies of the different abilities you have, and develop strategies, you also develop an understanding of the game's setting and location. The game's setting and aesthetics aren't just a coat of paint on top of the blocks making up a level, the architecture provides reactive elements and wildly varying structure to individual moments of gameplay. They're not just beautiful spaces, they're beautiful interactive spaces, that breathe history. The game's setting is fun to move around in and explore physically, sure, but it also rewards you for developing familiarity and understanding of what this place was, who lived in it, and what happened here.

A number of aesthetic traditions carry over from other Arkane games here beyond that. The game has plenty of diverse bodies in it, more than just depicting characters that belong to various different ethnicities. The protagonist's gender can be selected, and multiple queer relationships exist in the game. Music and sound is a high point, capturing a variety of emotions ranging from retrofuturistic hopeful sci-fi, to creeping dread, to the totally alien. The voice acting is all superb, and in true Arkane style, the voice credits are always surprising, in that they manage to rope in a handful of notable actors for relatively minor roles. Benedict Wong is an exception, lending his considerable talents to one of the main characters, but there are a couple of others you might've heard of, or seen before. Keep an ear out; or more likely, look at the credits when you've beat the game, and wonder how you didn't recognize the Academy Award winning actor who had a minor role as an sidequest NPC for all of five minutes.

All in all, while Prey owes a lot to its forebears, the inimitable talent of Arkane Studios means that instead of a rote recreation of something we've seen before like System Shock, we get a unique, modern story delivered in lavishly designed visual detail, anchored by some of the strongest emergent gameplay yet designed. Arkane has their niche, but as Prey proves, that's far from a limitation.

If you need more proof of that, Prey's Mooncrash DLC provides a single-player experience that's close to a roguelike, relying even more heavily on the procedural aspects that Prey championed over its predecessors. Where Prey holds the structure of a largely static set of goals, Mooncrash transforms that into an ever-shifting, laser-focused series of 'runs'. It's experimental (to a degree) and a very good time, though maybe not as endlessly replayable as they might have hoped.

Chants of Sennaar stands side by side with all the wonderful puzzle games of the last four-five years that people keep mentioning in the same breath, without ever being subservient to them - part of a lineage, not chasing a trend. That said, where those games live in the contemplative or sardonic, Chants is bright and joyful. It may not be as complex or deep, but finding new solutions made me feel happy as much as I felt clever. Making discoveries is a full-bodied delight, which leads to that initial aimlessness at the start of each new puzzle / area being more of a chance to breath and take things in than something to rush through.

While it's mostly content to let the player work at their own pace, there's a point at which the story picks up underneath the puzzle and starts to carry the whole experience along faster than before. The puzzle of cultural exploration and translation is sidelined pretty hard. It's a low point that would ruin the experience entirely if it weren't followed by an ending that feels earned and built up to, if perhaps a little bit out of nowhere in that way games tend to end. The stealth segments too feel more textural than substantial, but they don't last long enough to cause a problem.

An absolute highlight of the game are the vocabulary tests - when the developers ask if you've really been paying attention, if you understand the glyphs as a means of communication. They're short and sweet puzzles, but rewarding in a way that few of its peers have managed. Solving them feels like more than just figuring something out or filling out a catalogue - it's having an impact on the world, making a real difference to its people.

If you like Heaven's Vault, Return of the Obra Dinn - two of the best games released in the past five years, you will likely consider Chants of Sennaar a worthy companion piece. More than that, though, it ties their core mysteries together and builds a world around how nice - how meaningful - it is to simply solve a puzzle, to figure something out, to make a connection.

Really good! Definitely worth your time and attention. Take the content warnings seriously.

The mystery unfolds nicely, for the most part. Familiar VN features like memory loss and differing routes are used to explore things like the impermanence of identity and what that can mean about relationships and self-image. The romance between the two principal characters is definitely in the realm of the stylized and fantastical, thanks to the horror (which I normally don't go for) and magic, but it doesn't leave behind those relatable questions and difficulties. Altogether it's much more than just giving you a pretty face to smooch on - not that I don't mind that, and not that the faces aren't pretty. If that weren't enough, the world outside the game is intriguing, bolstered by gorgeous art and environments. It really begs to be explored in more detail, though I think the restraint is very appropriate for such an intimate story.

Structurally, the story suffers a little from the way that you explore the game's mysteries; replaying the game several times to find new content. The ending is buried behind a lot of digging, and while some of it is very satisfying and thematic, other parts get caught up in leaps of logic that are easier to solve with trial and error than anything else. It all makes sense in retrospect, but when you're trying to tackle the puzzle without that foreknowledge, in a game with endless possible combinations of dialogue options and a dedication to keeping things as diegetic as possible, it's hard to know where to look. Totally doable, just occasionally frustrating and time-consuming, especially for people who don't play a lot of VNs. If I cared about the star rating I would probably dock one for this, but I don't, so

It's wild to me that this is the devs first game; the voice and style here are so fully realized that it feels like part of a long-running series. Even if it doesn't become one (and I sincerely hope it does) I'm going to be keen as hell to see more from them.