Each and every one of us has experienced true guilt at some point in our life. Shame because of what we did or didn't do, whether it was our fault or not. Some of you may be able to call to mind a moment in which innocence was lost, in which you saw that your actions had consequences. Neversong is a journey of that singular feeling, that moment of realization, in carefully crafted pieces. It's an adventure unlike any I've gone on before, showcasing the worst elements of the human experience alongside the best ones in pursuit of proving we are more than our baggage.

Neversong, originally titled Once Upon a Coma, sprouted from a Kickstarter by Pinstripe developer Thomas Brush as a sequel to his flash-game Coma. The story eventually developed into something else entirely and grew into new characters, settings, and mechanics inspired by a wide array of games; elements of Undertale, Night in the Woods, Inside, Hollow Knight, and The Legend of Zelda click together surprisingly well in this authentic journey into the monster we call Guilt. Anyone interested in playing this game need not worry about playing the first game to understand it - Neversong does a wonderful job establishing this mysterious and outright scary world in just minutes. This review will be completely spoiler-free, and I advise anyone who wants to play to avoid spoilers elsewhere as well.

12-year-old Peet wakes up alone in a gloomy, dusty room. The walls are laden with pulsating membranes, soft piano music echoes down the corridors, and a shadowy figure smiles in the distance. Neversong launches the player headfirst into the world, giving them just a taste of the supernatural peril they'll come to fear hours later before tossing them into a decidedly normal suburban town. Peet finds himself in his girlfriend, Wren's, decrepit and abandoned house. A single playable grand piano sits in the living room next to an empty grey fireplace. The player steps outside and encounters a whimsical suburban town similar to Night in the Woods, only even more charming. The air of the empty town strikes me with an atmosphere similar to Neil Gaiman's Coraline and Neverwhere.

I cannot stress how beautiful, heartwarming, and relaxing the art of Neversong is. The minimal detail on the character's faces only serves to add to their personalities. Things as simple as menus and the dialogue UI are a pleasure to look at and navigate, and even the sound effects are welcome to the ear. The colors strike me as bright and vivid but restrained as if a colorful Alice In Wonderland-like world has been suddenly drenched in sepia tones. The creatures encountered along the way are, for the most part, quite cute. Every now and then a true monster will rear its ugly head, and at these times the range of the artist's abilities becomes obvious - Thomas Brush has created a world that is so charming it's absolutely terrifying. Brush cites artist Eyvind Earle as his main inspiration, but the best praise I can give Neversong is that it is heavily reminiscent of Tim Burton's masterpiece James and the Giant Peach in artwork, music, and general vibes.

Upon speaking to the charismatic and snot-nosed bratty kids in the neighborhood, Peet discovers that a monster came and abducted Wren. Instead of protecting her, Peet fell into a coma and has just awakened. The adults of Red Wind have gone out to search for and rescue Wren, leaving the village full of only children for an indeterminate amount of time. Joined by a sarcastic fairy companion named Bird, clearly inspired by Tatl from The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, Peet ventures out into six disturbing yet welcoming worlds to find the truth about what happened to Wren. The Booty Bum gang clearly weren't fans of Peet and Wren, and their sarcastic and derogatory remarks make for some great entertainment amidst the awfulness.

The story is framed by a narrator perusing through an old storybook, wickedly laughing as he recounts the events of Neversong in an almost-rhyme with a constantly changing meter that only adds to the creepiness. As the story unfolds, more details about past events will come forward, connecting dots in a clever and thoughtful way. The player feels as if they are learning more about how the world works every step of the way. Nothing is as it seems, no one can be fully trusted and the strange mastermind Dr. Smile seems to be three steps ahead of Peet at all times. This isn't a game for short bursts of play over a week - you'll want to get to the ending as soon as possible.

The single-button combat is simple at its core, and that's why it doesn't get old. Peet's only armament is a baseball bat, later gaining nails to fight off the increasingly disturbing monsters in Red Wind. Peet has a forward, up and down slash technique that propels him in the corresponding direction, very similar to Hollow Knight (who also happens to use nails as weapons). Basic monsters are usually not too difficult to beat, and every enemy you slay yields a heart, making it quite difficult to actually die. Each area houses a boss which yields a new item to take on the new dungeon. This method of unlocking items paired with the environmental dungeon puzzles calls to mind a 2D version of the 3D Legend of Zelda games. I got lost two times during Neversong and the game didn't make it clear how to progress - this is likely a plus for many.

Each boss fight is unique and relies just as much on platforming as actually fighting, which is a mark of great game design. The combat itself is nothing innovative or groundbreaking, but the bosses are another matter entirely. Each one must be defeated using the item Peet acquired for their dungeon, and upon defeat, Peet will obtain a new song. In another callback to 3D Zelda games, playing that new song on the piano will unlock a new item. The final boss fight was quite a large difficulty spike, but as there's a save point right before it that wasn't unwelcome. The ending brings some closure to this excellently-crafted story while leaving a few things to the player's imagination.

Neversong is an adventure that will resonate with anyone who has experienced true, unadulterated guilt. This is not the guilt of breaking a jar your mother loved or forgetting to feed a friend's cat for a day; this is the guilt of destroying something, someone, that is precious. The loss of innocence, the terror of creeping into adulthood, the end of who you were as who you will become begins to manifest - these universal themes pervade Neversong in a haunting choir. Songs of death, life, and all the things in between can be found here. If you know true guilt, you are not alone. This must-play title sits alongside other indie greats such as Inside and Undertale and is recommended for anyone who wants to look Guilt in the eyes, stand tall, and defy it.

My brother and I used to mess around with Pikmin as kids, and I always loved the little guys, but I think I was not prepared for the level of challenge it brings when I was 8 years old - I'm not sure we got past the second world. Pikmin 3 is one of my favorite games of all time, and Pikmin 4 is not far behind, so I thought I'd head back to the roots of this franchise now that they've made their way to Switch.

Pikmin is held back only by the AI, which I am sure is the best we had available back in 2001. The fact that you can effectively control 100 soldiers on a map for an RTS game with a controller was already a miracle. Pikmin 1 is best described as a well-executed proof of concept - over time, this basic idea blossomed into a masterpiece in later titles. I was thoroughly addicted and stuck to the screen for the 8 hour adventure, looking for new strats and racing the clock to retrieve all my rocket parts. I'm so glad this game exists and existed when it did, and it holds up quite well on its own.

Pikmin 1 is brutal and tests your survival abilities in a way that has faded out of the series, and it's something I think I can live without. The racing clock is stressful, with the threat of permadeath looming over you, but I managed to escape with all 30 parts on day 28 due to careful planning and knowing when to replay the day once or twice (or eight times). I wish the Pikmin were smart enough not to constantly drown themselves, or know when to pick up items, or even know the shortest way back to camp, or understand they can't dive into pits of fire, but that's just life innit. It's interesting to see how Pikmin evolved in this game from mindless, expendable drones that you're expected to lose hundreds of to cherished friends you'll die protecting in Pikmin 4. I can't wait for Pikmin 2! Coming soon.

Without a doubt the worst narrative focused game I've ever played. The main character is insufferable and the fact that anyone was able to put up with her for a full 10 hours is beyond me. Everything she does is entitled and she makes herself the victim of every social situation. She does nothing to rectify the issues that she creates in her own relationships and expects them to be solved because of the universe or whatever. Mae is a toxic individual on every level and worsens the life of every around her, and then complains and realizes she needs to change, and then doesn't.

There's also very little gameplay to speak of, but games like that are usually cushioned by having a pretty compelling story. I found literally no way to relate to the main character, or any of the characters, and about 8 hours in I gave it up altogether. I hated pretty much every character in this game outright. Guitar mini game was fun and music was good though. Cannot believe the universal praise it received.

I have had some serious ups and downs with Hollow Knight. On one hand, it's built on a flawed design document, encouraging free movement and exploration with the story but all the while doing everything it can to stop you from doing the thing the game is supposed to be about. The end result is frustration, slow paced navigation, and a loss of anything that could be considered "exploring". The fact that the map is locked away and even when you get it is nearly unusable is just inexcusable. There's never a way to truly understand where you're going or why you're going that way. It doesn't teach you how to get stronger or leave even a tiny hint as to where to get upgrades. There is no natural pathing; just an eternal labyrinth.

The lack of direction and scarcity of checkpoints are totally unfair and stacked against the player in every way. Most boss fights don't' have a checkpoint anywhere near them, so by the time you get back to the boss you're back to 1 health. It's very easy to loose all your souls and very difficult to collect more. Fast travel is a total joke, and it's so useless and spread out it may as well not even be in the game. Hollow Knight is basically artificially lengthened by the extreme difficulty which is mostly the result of the checkpoint system.

The reward for finding anything in Hollow Knight is typically just death, and losing the items and money you've been so meticulously collecting. However, 20 hours in now and having picked it up again after 3 years I do want to keep playing it. After using a bunch of guides to find all the level ups and get my guy up to snuff, I'm much more confident traversing the underground. I still maintain this is a flawed design because the game didn't guide me to any upgrades or even indicate I should be looking for them.

On the other hand, the little cute bug people almost make it worth it. You're constantly finding weird things which is cool, but it's less cool because everything in this world is trying to kill you. There aren't any moments of silent contemplation and just looking around, but the ones that exist are wonderful. Typically though, If you're not in a resting room you're fucking running from point A to point B. It doesn't leave a lot of room to admire the scenery unless you clear every room as you go, which isn't how i like to play games.

Hollow Knight seems to do everything it can to stop you from enjoying it. Other people clearly like it though, so what do I know. None of the boss fights were fun, as they all resort to insanely fast attacks to get to you that are impossible to block or dodge without hours of practice. And then you're back at a checkpoint halfway across the map, and you're more than likely going to die just walking back to the boss. It suffers from all the same problems the Souls games do, front to back.

Inescapable: No Rules, No Rescue is the worst game I have played this year for a one major reason: it has no idea what it is trying to do. The writers have no consistency in themes, storytelling, or even basic dialogue interactions. I'm kind of impressed that they wrote these many lines, because it is tens of thousands, and almost all of them are so, so bad. I hated every one of the characters more and more as the game progressed, especially my own character, and having no agency over him as he became a misogynistic human dumpster fire was frustrating to say the least. Having full voice acting that ranges from catastrophically bad at worst to passable at best does not help in any way, and the game insisting at the end that it was so frustratingly bad on purpose the whole time was insulting. I do not recommend Inescapable to anyone under any circumstances.

When I was eight years old back in 2001, my brother and I received a copy of Sonic Adventure 2 Battle for the GameCube from my dad for Christmas. I wasn’t really familiar with Sonic at the time, being that I was a hardcore Nintendo kid, so I’m not sure what prompted him to get this game for us. Still, intrigued, I remember sitting down with my brother to venture into this strange land that Mario had kept us locked away from in the great console wars of the 90s. I fell in love instantly with the colorful cast of characters, the over-the-top anime madness, the frankly incomprehensible story, and, most importantly, the concept of just going fast. Since then I’ve played nearly every game in this incredibly inconsistent series, including the spin-offs, even during my teen years when I was “too cool” for most video games. Sonic the Hedgehog has been a part of my life for much longer than most anything else, and in a strange way it’s one of the few connective tissues that ties together the person I was as a child, the angsty teen version of me from high school, and the adult me in the present.

As I’m sure you’re aware, since the days of Sonic Adventure 2 the 3D games in the franchise have struggled. Some of them, like Sonic Forces and Sonic Boom, have been offensively bad, and even the best ones like Sonic Colors and Sonic Generations were just okay. 21 years later, I find myself, mouth agape, as the credits roll on Sonic Frontiers and I am… ecstatic. The mere sight of Knuckles or Shadow or the Chaos Emeralds always brings me joy, and that’s why we Sonic fans have survived this long. But no. This time, I am ecstatic not because Sonic Frontiers is a masterpiece (because it is very, very much not). I am ecstatic because Sonic has, after two decades, matched the enthusiasm that I bring to the franchise.

Sonic Frontiers is undeniably a mess of ideas. Sure, it takes a lot of inspiration from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which I firmly believe is one of the best video games ever created. But there are also moments where I swear I’m playing Nier Automata, Xenoblade Chronicles, Skyrim, Super Mario Odyssey, Shadow of the Colossus, Final Fantasy XV, or even Marvel’s Spider-Man. Sometimes all at the same time. So, how do all of these disparate visions for what Sonic Frontiers actually is fit together? Truthfully, a lot of the time, they simply don’t. But in those moments that they do, when it all comes together - those moments outshine the highest points of even the best games I played this year.

The story, written by Ian Flynn of the much beloved IDW comics, brings Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and Amy to the Starfall Islands, tracking down where the Chaos Emeralds have bounced off to this time. Of course Dr. Eggman finds his way there hunting down the same thing, and our old friends stumble onto the remains of the lost civilization of a race called The Ancients. If you’re familiar with Sonic, you’ll likely remember Chaos, the water monster that was the primary antagonist of Sonic Adventure and who has appeared numerous times since then.

In a pretty interesting turn, Sonic Frontiers actually explains the origins of the Chaos Emeralds and Chaos himself as lost artifacts of the Ancients in a pretty organic way. It was a bold move to base the story around lore that we’ve been desperately craving since Sonic Adventure since 1998, but it paid off. While the actual dialogue is pretty mediocre and stilted, Frontiers still clears the incredibly low bar of having the best story in the franchise based on providing this extensive, detailed lore. Taking us to the homeland of a villain from decades ago is just the first piece of the payoff to the longtime fans present in this game.

What is it that makes this game tick? Why are the Sonic fans so excited? It may sound insane to those outside the fandom, but this is the first Sonic game in a long time that is actually built around “going fast.” Sonic games have been riddled with careful, precise platforming for 20 years that runs totally counterintuitive to the whole idea of the Blue Blur, and I personally believe it’s been because they are trying to capture some of what makes Mario so great. Sonic is not Mario and is never going to be Mario, and I think Frontiers is the first time that Sonicteam has openly admitted this in their design strategy.

Sonic Frontiers takes place across 5 contained open world zones, each one themed around a different biome and with different cyberspace levels, enemies, challenges, and lore to unpack. Each of these zones is packed with stuff to do, and yes, I mean packed. Everywhere you look, you’ll see an Unreal Engine default landscape with dozens of springs, wires, balloons, rails, pulleys, rings, platforms and dash panels. You know, stuff that you might see in a Sonic game. Except it’s all just floating there, just pasted over a world created in a completely different art style. And you know what? I don’t care. This game world is so incredibly fun to play in that I just could not care less how hilariously dumb everything looks. Deal with it.

The core of why Sonic fans are clicking with this game is that Sonic has never, ever felt this good to control. You get the sense of speed that comes with combining the two past styles of momentum and boost movement, but you also feel the precise control needed to do the actual platforming. As I said before, precise platforming and going as fast as possible have always been at odds, but there’s a beautiful meeting of the two principles in Sonic Frontiers that I had started to believe was impossible. Utilizing the multitude of rails and springs and such, it’s easy to manipulate the physics of the Hedgehog Engine to get around the open world at lightning fast speeds you feel like the game never intended.

Holding down the right trigger turns on your boost, which has a set amount that recharges very quickly, and using this boost along with your homing attacks and developing series of abilities you can work your way through lots of these miniature obstacle courses while making your way from Point A to Point B without interrupting your pace. Filling up your rings to maximum turns on a second boost that lets you move twice as fast, and that’s when you really feel the lightning. Sonic was always meant to be moving faster than even the player can see, and this giant open world is finally the place he can do it while still maintaining a sense of control. These obstacle courses typically yield a memory token, which I’ll get to later. Suffice it to say, this is the most fun I’ve had moving in a game since Spider-Man on the PS4. It’s perfect.

I have seen a few different videos of the PS5 version, which I played as well, having severe pop-in for the floating obstacles and rails. I did experience some pop-in, but it was never close enough to affect me no matter how fast I was going. I have to comment that this game is pretty bug free, although I’ve seen a few videos saying otherwise. All I can say is that my experience featured no major bugs and only a handful of minor ones. It’s one of the more functional launch AAA games I’ve played recently.

While you’re running around you’ll encounter little Koroks, uh, sorry, I mean Cocos, that are just little guys. They’re just little guys! The Cocos are the current inhabitants of the Starfall Islands, and only the Elder Cocos are able to speak to you directly. The others set you up for random minigames that feel so totally out of place they may as well be a different game, even removing abilities seemingly at random to try and make them make any sense. It’s jarring to be blasting through the desert at 200 mph one second and then the next trying to carry a stack of 10 cocos you’re balancing that are vomiting bombs into Knuckles waiting arms. Once these mini games are complete, the participating Cocos inexplicably drop to the floor as their souls feel the sweet release of death while the others celebrate. I still have no explanation for this. Even when the mini games are fun, it’s impossible to not feel like they very much do not belong in Sonic Frontiers.

In addition to the Shrines, you’ll find miniature overworld puzzles very much akin to the ones that net you a Korok seed in Zelda. Completing these unlocks more of the map, so you’ll definitely want to do each one as you come across it. None are particularly hard, and while some are laughably easy, most require a little bit of thought.

Collecting Cocos across the overworld and taking them to the Elder Cocos will earn you extra ring capacity or extra top speed. I opted for speed every time, because heightening your ring capacity actually just makes it harder to reach max boost. The only reason you’d take that upgrade is for the boss fights, which we’ll get to soon. The Coco can also use the attack and defense upgrades you receive from the map puzzles to boost your stats for combat.

Dotted around each of the zones are seven or eight shrines, each of which transports Sonic to a Cyberspace level. Think of it as a miniature dungeon, each one taking anywhere between one and four minutes to complete. I actually grew to love these, and I think there’s exactly the right number of them. The shrines are certainly less plentiful in Sonic Frontiers than in Breath of the Wild, but are also very replayable. Each shrine contains an old school 2D or 3D Sonic level from a previous game reskinned and fitted to work with the art style of the Frontiers cyberspace world. Longtime fans will notice about 30 seconds into a level “Am I in Sky Rail right now?”, which is another sort of subtle way to pat us veterans on the back.

Each Cyberspace level has four missions: complete the stage with any time, complete the stage with S rank time, collect X number of rings, and collect all 5 red star rings. I actually really got into the swing of replaying these until I got all four missions complete, and left only two shrines in the game uncompleted. Going back and trying to beat your time is actually quite fun in these very short levels. You’ll be rewarded with vault keys, which are needed in the overworld on each island to unlock the chaos emeralds. Most of the levels come from Sonic Adventure 2 and Generations, which I remind you are the good ones, so they already feel great to play and are very conducive to this new movement Sonic has in Frontiers that lets you move both faster and with more control than ever before.

I’m sure some of you are thinking right now “is it lazy for Sonicteam to just recycle old stages they know we like instead of making new ones?” For me, I actually see it as more of an homage to the series as a whole and to its longtime fans, and it’s not like they didn’t create a massive totally original gameworld outside of cyberspace anyway. I quite enjoyed the pacing of cyberspace and only found a handful of the levels to not be fun.

One lucky shrine on each island takes you to a parallel world where Big the Cat is inexplicably just fishing. By trading him the fishing tokens you find lying around the overworld, you can borrow his fishing rod and get to work on this quaint minigame. It’s a very simple case of clicking the button at the right time, but I ended up liking it a lot. It’s a little disorienting when Sonic pulls a full sized real Unreal Engine crocodile or squid out of the water and proudly holds it up, but this is when Sonic Frontiers is at its best. When it proudly declares how serious everything is and leaves the audience to revel in that silliness. The fishing minigame also has the huge benefit of allowing you to trade your catches for memory tokens, vault keys, leveling items, rings, cocos and more in case you get stuck.

Sonic Frontiers is the third game in the franchise to feature combat, following the woeful execution of the idea in Sonic Boom and Sonic Unleashed years ago. Well, they actually nailed it this time, much to my surprise. Besides the classic homing attack, punches, and kicks, you start with the new cycloop ability. While running, you can hold Y or Triangle to leave a path of light behind you. Connecting the light trail with a loop sends a wind blast inwards, damaging enemies, flipping switches, and producing rings. In addition, holding L1 and R1 together allows Sonic to parry. I like the addition of the parry, which is very necessary to defeat certain enemies, but the parry window is much too wide, lasting up to 5 seconds from when you hit the input. It almost doesn’t feel like you’re even doing it. If this system returns in the future I’d like to see a decreased window to give the player more of a feeling of control.

While spamming your main attack to build up combo points, you’ll use the new abilities you unlock from Sonic’s small skill tree to finish off the fairly wide variety of enemies in the overworld. Most of them require a specific and different technique to overcome as well. There is also a dodge ability, which is quite important when fighting stronger enemies. Speaking of which, dotted around each zone are four to five mini-bosses. Each one holds a gear, which is needed to unlock a shrine. These mini bosses are unique and fun, and all get a splash screen when they first appear to let you know they mean business. All enemies drop skill tokens when killed, which are of course traded in at the skill tree for new attacks. My main read on combat is that it’s not just impressive for a sonic game, it actually feels good in the grand scene of action adventure games. I hope to see Sonicteam build on this system in the next game.

The other main feature of the overworld is the aforementioned memory tokens. Sonic’s friends, as well as the new character Sage, have been trapped in the cyber world and are only able to break through as holograms on each island to speak to sonic. By collecting memory tokens and taking them to a hologram, you’ll basically unlock a cutscene, chaos emerald, or mini boss fight that moves the story along. While I understand the idea here, and I think the pacing works well for what Sonic Frontiers is trying to do, I think it misses a huge part of why people love Sonic.

We LOVE these characters. We do. We want to see them all hang out, interact, and fight together. Separating out the supporting cast into single 1 on 1 interactions with Sonic was a big mistake. We get a single scene at the end where we see Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles all together, which is all any of us want. Although this is the first Sonic game written originally in English, the cutscenes are also a bit strange in how spaced out the dialogue lines are , and I wonder if it’s to account for the Japanese dub that had to go over this game later. Regardless, although the performances and delivery are excellent, the dialogue in Frontiers feels stilted because of these gaps in a way that reminds me a lot of Kingdom Hearts 3.

I have been carefully saving the best part for last - the boss fights. You may have seen videos or gifs of them going around, and it’s because this part of the game nails what the fans want from Sonic more than anything else the franchise has put out. This, this is the vibe. This is what we were waiting for.

[Video]

There are four titans like this you’ll face, each one accompanied by an original metalcore song by Sleeping with Sirens, where you become super sonic and get to unleash the shounen fury that has always been relegated to a final boss fight in the past games. Finally, this is it. I grinned like a big dumb idiot as the music kicked in and I snatched the last chaos emerald off the head of the first boss to take my own final form. These fights are largely spectacle but do ask for a decent amount of precision as well. This first boss fight with Giganto 5 hours in is not only my favorite boss fight of the year; it is the best one in franchise history. This is a hype moment that is going to stick with me forever.

This leads me to the absolute best feature of Sonic Frontiers - the music. This OST is unbelievable. It features excellent music in every genre spanning from soft piano twinkles to hard house to EDM to metalcore to symphonic ballads and of course to the classic Sonic butt rock sound that we legitimately love. Every track is great, and most of them are exceptional. It was composed by Sonic music veteran Tomoya Ohtani, who’s been working on Sonic Soundtracks for decades. On top of his solo compositions, when you hear the result of his work with groups such as Sleeping with Sirens, Dangerkids, To Octavia and One OK Rock to produce something more than the sum of its parts, I hope you’ll recognize He’s one of the most talented composers out there today. Take a listen to the soundtrack. Now!

Sonic Frontiers is a mess of ideas that I’d maybe give an award to for “least directed” game. Most of the time, it’s barely holding itself together as a mass of ideas from other, better games, with Sonic pasted onto it. But when it hits, oh my god it hits. When the music swells and Kellin Quinn is blasting your eardrums with a guttural scream while you plunge a 300 ft sword into a titan the size of a skyscraper, it won’t matter that you’re doing it in the most artistically dissonant game I have ever seen. It won’t matter that there is literally no explanation for the presence of the Sonic items in this world. It won’t matter that you have to rack up 5 million points in a terrible pinball mini game to progress the story for no given reason. The heights of Sonic Frontiers are the highest highs Sonic has ever seen, and while casual players may not enjoy the game as much as longtime fans, I had more fun in this mediocre game than I had in all the many, many better games I played this year. The blue blur is back, and I cannot wait to see where he goes next. One thing’s for sure - always to new horizons.

Pikmin never grabbed me as a child quite as much as Nintendo’s other franchises, and returning to the series as an adult I know why: Pikmin 1 is brutal. How children are meant to make it through a survival RTS game that has actual permadeath and requires you to burn through hundreds of soldiers to make a dent in the enemies, I will never know. But one thing that you may not know if you’re not a fan of the franchise is that every Pikmin game is wildly different, not just in the maps and mechanics, but in the core conceit of the game design. After the brutal survival challenge of Pikmin 1, the dungeon-crawling treasure hunt of Pikmin 2, and the mind-bending open zone puzzle tests of Pikmin 3, literally no one knew what to expect from Pikmin 4.

While not reaching the heights of Pikmin 3, one of my favorite video games of all time, Pikmin 4 delighted and surprised me by providing several campaigns and modes, each built in a different style, each one testing another part of my brain to its limit. After finishing the relatively easy 25 hour main campaign of Pikmin 4, you may be tempted to put down your controller and touch grass – not so fast! The postgame of Pikmin 4 offers some of the best content in the entire series, including a 4 hour Olimar campaign featuring the return of the permadeath clock and only the original 3 Pikmin types in a genuinely heart-pounding survival challenge. Add on the amazing treasure hunts, the dandori challenges, and the horde mode challenges and you’ve got another 30 hours of incredible real-time strategy fun that never takes its foot off the gas. Pikmin 4 features over a hundred enemy types, 10 Pikmin types, and some of the most creative and lovely level design I’ve seen in years.

Pikmin 4 is, without question, the most accessible game in the franchise. I don’t say that because the challenge of the previous games is gone, per se, but because Pikmin 4 aims to test every part of your resourcefulness in bite-sized chunks, rather than focusing the game’s design around one grueling type of challenge. In many ways, it’s a beautiful culmination of what Pikmin started as and what it is now. Pikmin 1 tests your survival skills on a permadeath ticking clock, Pikmin 2 tests your dungeon-crawling prowess against labyrinths of enemies and traps, Pikmin 3 breaks your mind by making you control three different characters at the same time across the map and constantly weighing opportunity cost of time to solve puzzles – Pikmin 4 does every one of these things over the course of the adventure, and it does them all really damn well. After 100%ing this game, all I can do now is sit here and ponder what wonderful new challenges Pikmin 5 will bring us one day.

Dredge was and still is my favorite indie game of the year, but this new DLC was pretty disappointing in comparison. I 100% completed this new area in less than two hours, but the lack of scares and interesting narrative bothered me more than the lack of content. I would probably recommend waiting until all the expansion are out to revisit Dredge, because I finished this in one sitting before my tea got cold and was left feeling a little disappointed. I still enjoyed The Pale Reach, but if I had to rank every island in Dredge this one would be dead last.

Death Stranding is possibly the best video game ever made. It certainly has impressed, exhilarated, and stayed with me more than any other game before or since.

Death Stranding has completely reinvented social interaction in games. Although Death Stranding is a single-player campaign, it necessitates a connection to the internet. It is here that Kojima's purpose begins to take shape; the theme of "we are stronger when connected" bleeds into every aspect of gameplay. As Sam reconnects the chiral network and puts America back online, portions of the map connect to the grid. This means that the player can build structures like generators, rain shelters, player homes, zip lines, bridges, roads, etc using a PCC kit to 3D print structures out in the world. Once another player connects that same area to the grid in their own game, there's a chance that your structure will appear in their world, and vice versa.

You can also collect lost cargo from other people's games and request deliveries from other players. Once, I desperately needed a floating carrier but didn't have the resources. I estimated I'd arrive at the Distro Center West of Lake Knot City in about 30 minutes, so I requested that someone deliver a floating carrier. Lo and behold, it was waiting for me when I arrived! I felt loved at that moment; some stranger had put aside what they were doing and spent 30 minutes of their time bringing me this carrier for no reward or recognition.

Each structure has the name of the player floating above it, and you can "Like" other players' structures if they helped you. I cannot begin to count the number of times other players' structures saved my life. BTs are chasing me - I come upon a shelter. BB is crying, and my exoskeleton is sputtering out - there's a generator. My boots have worn out, and the MULEs are charging at me - but someone has left a motorcycle at the edge of the road for me. A ladder to cross a chasm, a belaying hook to scale a cliff, all left by strangers for strangers.

I felt truly connected to everyone else playing Death Stranding because everything I did had real-world implications. These were real people out there, with real goals and real aspirations. This infinite loop of everyone in the world delivering packages to each other, Liking each other's structures, and positively affirming each other was beautiful. If we all give, no one is left wanting.

Before beginning The Last of Us Part II, I jotted down some of my quick thoughts on worries and hopes for what the game would present to me. The meta-narrative surrounding The Last of Us Part II has dominated the internet for months since the story leaked, and I must acknowledge that even though I avoided leaks, it’s possible my experience with Neil Druckmann’s seminal work was compromised by toxic online discourse. Nevertheless, this is just a journal of my thoughts on my time with Ellie and Abby. I have very mixed feelings about The Last of Us Part II, but ultimately it’s a game about how severing connections brings out the worst in people. You are your worst self when you are alone, and you are at your weakest when you refuse help from others.

Setting aside the story for a moment, The Last of Us Part II is a technical masterpiece. Naughty Dog has definitively pushed the industry forward with their latest game, and all action-adventure games will be held to this standard for years to come. I genuinely couldn’t believe it was running on my base PS4, and moreover that it never once dropped in frame rate. I could sit here listing everything spectacular about The Last of Us Part II… so I will.

The Last of Us Part II features the most intelligent AI I’ve ever seen in an action game, and the cinematic nature of my actions left me awestruck that it was all being generated on the fly. Every action you choose to make looks like a cutscene, regardless of how random you felt your decisions were. Every time I struck someone with a crowbar or threw a grenade at a horde of clickers looked like a movie. This video is a great example of what I mean. None of this was pre-programmed — you’re living inside a procedurally generated movie.

When I was playing as Ellie and accompanied by Jesse, I left a building, walked out in the rain, and pulled out my map. After about 30 seconds spent studying it, I folded up the map and turned to find that Jesse was standing about 30 feet away under a covered awning, waiting for me to finish. Just a few seconds after I started walking, he jogged out to join me in the downpour and asked where we were going next. It’s such a basic thing — humans don’t stand out in the rain while waiting for someone — but this set of data struck me as so human in that moment. There are hundreds of instances of such humanity in the AI in The Last of Us Part II, from characters choosing to passively stand in sun patches after getting wet to absentmindedly petting horses or dogs while in gameplay.

I haven’t even mentioned the lighting effects of running through the forest with a torch, again adapting to whatever way the player wishes to run. I’ve never seen lighting that real, maybe not even in real life.The way that Ellie and Abby actually take apart and modify guns at the workbenches is amazing, and that reminds me that the sound editing is also astoundingly well done. You can hear the individual clinks and clanks of bolts as they modify the guns. On a much more morbid level, you can hear bones and tendons snapping when you kill people. If your headphones are good enough, you can hear the gums separating from teeth as you bash someone’s head in with a pipe. You can hear the waning gurgling of a cultist as you slit their throat wide open and try to hold their organs inside so as not to leave a trail.

Which leads me to my next point. The Last of Us Part II is the most dementedly violent game I’ve ever played, and if there is a game anywhere in the world that revels more in its own violence I do not know of it. More than once I felt so physically ill while playing that I had to shut down my PlayStation for the night. In excruciatingly accurate audial and visual detail, both the player and the NPCs showcase the most sadistic, animalistic violence in our lizard brains when killing one another. If you bash someone’s head in with a bat, pieces of their brain and skull will come flying out. If you cut someones stomach open, their intestines will begin to spill out. Blood spatter patterns are rendered in unbelievable accuracy. At one point, cultists were torturing a woman by breaking her arm with a hammer until the bones visibly came out and then using her own bones to cut the rest of her flesh. I believe I’ve gotten the point across, so I’ll stop here, but The Last of Us Part II has slipped into the “uncanny valley” of video game violence, completely by intention. That is to say, we as humans can disconnect from video game violence because no matter how “realistic” games are, they don’t want to make you uncomfortable. The Last of Us Part II wants to make you sick, and will celebrate when it does.

Alas, we can avoid it no longer; after taking a few days to reflect on it, I still feel that the story of The Last of Us Part II is incredibly stupid. The thesis statement of The Last of Us Part II is that we are weaker when we split apart — we are all weaker when we fight. Yes, I believe that is true. It also tells a story of how revenge will consume you, it will destroy you, it will control you. Yes, that is also true. However, The Last of Us Part II is quite simply a story about a girl who refuses to learn or grow.

Ellie, our protagonist, sets out on a revenge mission, killing hundreds of people indiscriminately to get a chance at killing Abby. When she reaches Abby and attempts to kill her, Abby fights her off and shows mercy by sparing her. Abby, having killed Joel at the beginning of the game, has learned her lesson. She has grown. She is capable of the very basic human process of understanding how her actions were a mistake and that she needs to change. Abby ends this story as a compelling protagonist, and someone who’s story of finding justice in mercy needs to be heard.

Ellie, our beloved deuteroganist from the original The Last of Us, is the villain of the sequel. Over time she has grown hard and cold, and despite the number of people in her life who love her and want desperately to connect with her (Joel, Tommy, Jesse, Dina etc) she has become something else entirely. Spending the last few years in Jackson, surrounded by loving friends and family and a structured life, I have a very hard time believing this is the woman she became. Consumed by hatred, revenge, ready to lead anyone who loves her to slaughter. The Last of Us Part II treats Ellie’s singular act of mercy at the end as some sort of act of heroism — it is not. This is where the story’s fatal flaw comes in. Ellie is irredeemable. She is despicable by the game’s own design.

Ellie is unable, even after a year of time to learn, grow or change in any way, to let go of her need for revenge. And it isn’t reactionary. The woman she loves tearfully begs her not to abandon her and their son in the name of avenging an evil man she outwardly hated. But Ellie goes. Remember in Game of Thrones when Jaime runs back to Cersei at the end, even after supposedly learning and growing? Ellie’s story is that for video games. The Last of Us Part II wants the player to believe that Ellie has learned not to rely on hatred and anger to drive her when she and Dina retire to the farm. Then it “subverts expectations” by having her go out and fuck over the only person patient enough to still love her. It’s so wildly out of character I can barely put it into words. Ellie’s actions are for the sake of pushing the narrative that Druckmann wanted, not the other way around. At the end, I found myself asking how I could possibly care about Ellie at all anymore. She failed me, and through her Naughty Dog failed me. Yes, I am being dramatic, but I was very much looking forward to this game.

But, at the end of the day, this is just a video game, and a damn impressive one at that. Many reviewers felt it was something more, but I assure you it is not. While parts of the story were brilliant (such as the opening and Abby and Lev’s story), any positive commendations for the story as a whole unit are completely beyond my comprehension. Druckmann has presented himself to be sort of the anti-Hideo Kojima once again: Druckmann’s broad story beats are almost nonsensical, but his line-to-line writing is some of the best I’ve ever seen. Contrast that to Kojima, whose line-to-line writing borders on gibberish, but has produced some insanely intelligent story maps. By the time the credits roll, Druckmann has nothing to say except “don’t kill hundreds of people in pursuit of killing one person. Killing is bad.” Thanks Neil, I missed that day of Kindergarten, I guess.

You may be surprised after my very cynical review of The Last of Us Part II, but I wholeheartedly recommend it to fans of the genre. I get it. It’s just a sad story about a miserable woman, but that doesn’t mean it’s badly written — it’s just not a story I want to hear or consume. I’ve realized that what I really don’t like about the story is all stuff that other people have imposed on it in discussions. Not anything that the actual game says. I think I’ve just been angry at people who are calling this the greatest thing of all time and don’t understand the story and I’ve been taking it out on the game itself.

As I stated before, it will most certainly push the entire gaming industry into the future. If I were to discount the story altogether, it might even be a perfect 10. But that’s not the world we live in, is it? Maybe The Last of Us Part II, a cynical look at how a pandemic will cause people to revert to their animalistic violent tendencies, could have come out at a better time. I’m trying not to blame Naughty Dog, as they obviously didn’t know, but this story must be analyzed as a product of this time. The Last of Us Part II delivers a message that we’ve all heard a thousand times before and then pats itself on the back for doing so. This should have been a story about Abby and Lev in the universe of The Last of Us; I strongly believe Ellie didn’t need to be a part of it. She’ll go down in gaming history as one of our most sadistic villains ever, and I hope Druckmann feels that using her as a vehicle for his weird art piece was worth it.

In Fall 2016, I arrived at the College of Charleston for grad school and was coming off some bad times. I had no friends, and I was eager to make some. I found my way to the Quidditch team, which was exactly the large group of cool nerds that I had been looking for, but still couldn’t quite call any of them my friends. However, on Halloween weekend that year, I decided to cast a broad invitation to people to come to my apartment and try out this game I had been wanting to play that I needed a group for. That game was Until Dawn.

That night, our group was formed and I met a few people who would go on to become the closest friends I’ve ever had. I want to stress how incredibly important Until Dawn is to me, because I want the weight of this statement to come through - The Quarry is, finally, a worthy successor to Until Dawn.

The Quarry features a cast better than any of Supermassive’s previous games, and it feels much more cohesive than the casts of the three Dark Pictures games. I think the difference in tone between those games and this are the dynamic between a group of close friends trying to survive a B-horror movie versus a group of reluctant strangers trying to survive a self-serious horror movie. The Quarry features Ariel Winter of Modern Family, David Arquette of the Scream franchise, Grace Zabriskie of Twin Peaks, Lance Henrikson of Aliens and Terminator, and of course Brenda Song of The Social Network and The Suite Life of Zack and Cody. This incredible cast pulls out all the stops with great facial and body motion capture and realistic face physics that far outdo the quality of Supermassive’s previous games.

The Quarry sets up a similar premise to Until Dawn - you’re given a selection of CW-attractive 18 year olds in the summer before they head off to college (or not), and your job is to keep them all alive until the next morning. This time, however, the game’s UI is built for couch co-op. My partner and I chose the couch co-op option and I streamed the game to her over Discord, inputting her decisions for her characters. This is a great and easy way to play the game with a group without buying multiple copies of it.

With Until Dawn, the way most people played was to divvy up characters between players to make decisions and to pass the controller around when someone’s character came up. In The Quarry, Supermassive cuts out the middleman and has you assign each character to a real life player in your group and prompts you to hand the controller to that person when their character comes up again.

There isn’t too much I can say about the story without spoiling it, and the story is the entire game, really, so I’ll try to keep to generalities. Your teens are 18 years old and packing up after 2 months being counselors at Hackett’s Quarry Summer Camp. It’s that turbulent time in your life where everything is changing and innocence is coming to an end. There’s of course some of that hot CW-level drama that I know you’re craving, and lots of deep relationships and friendships will be formed and/or tested throughout the night.

There’s a separate storyline happening featuring a playable character named Laura, who’s life is turned upside down after swerving off the road to avoid a ghost on her way to Hackett’s Quarry. The multiple storylines provide some relief without breaking up too much of the story, and Laura, played by the fantastic Siobhan Williams, holds up the weight of her own storyline with grace.
The decisions that you make throughout the game feel like they both have immediate repercussions and have you questioning for the rest of the game whether what you did back then is still affecting what’s happening now. It’s even more fun when a decision your partner made on one of their characters seems to have negative repercussions on your own character, and accusations begin to fly about who’s to blame.

The Quarry is designed to turn players against each other while having them stay on task to cooperate and try to keep everyone alive, and it balances this difficult line well. For instance, there was a segment where we had to choose to take a wrench or hammer. My partner was nervous about this decision even leading into the final hours of the game, wondering how and why it mattered that we had chosen the wrench and if it had been to blame for the deaths of some of our compatriots. This was of course followed by a thorough roasting of my choices that got 4 characters killed, which was well earned.

I am issuing a public apology here: Max dying was my fault, and I was wrong to doubt you Kristen, O Great Knower of All Things.. Regardless, all of our decisions felt like they had weight, whether they were active ones like yanking a gun away or shooting someone, or just choosing to go up or down a set of stairs. I began a 2nd run with my friends from college last night, and I’ve already seen things playing out differently.

In between chapters, you’ll be greeted by Grace Zebriskie as Eliza, the witch who acts as a narrator and 4th wall-breaking host similar to the psychiatrist in Until Dawn. She turns in what I believe is the best performance in the game and definitely one of the best of the year, guiding the players through the story and reading the tarot cards they find to show them glimpses of the future that only make decisions more confusing. She’s scary, warm, welcoming, and threatening all at once and holds the story together for its 9.5 hour runtime.

Overall, the Quarry does exactly what it sets out to do. The characters control much better than in Until Dawn, the graphics are impressive, and it ran extremely smoothly on ultra settings at 60 FPS on my RTX 2060 Super with no frame stutters. Besides a few audio desyncs, I had no bugs to speak of. My partner and I genuinely wanted to keep these kids alive through the night and felt real disappointment and guilt when we didn’t, questioning our decisions anywhere from a few seconds ago to hours ago.

The third act gets a little messy and drags a bit in chapters 7-9, but outside of that it’s the exact tone, gameplay, and most importantly vibes that fans have wanted from Supermassive that the Dark Pictures Anthology and Hidden Agenda just didn’t deliver. There were a few segments where I felt a little like I had been trapped and neither decision would save me, and whether it was earned or not the feeling of a loss of control is never fun in these kinds of games. I will admit I became a bit irked when a single decision killed two of our remaining characters at once with just half an hour left in the game.

I believe the loss of the newness factor also makes The Quarry a tad less exciting than Until Dawn, which was a totally new idea at the time, but factoring all that in it’s still an amazing experience that you and your friends are going to love. I do not recommend trying it solo, as the story and even interface aren’t built for it. This is a co-op game through and through, and ironically one of the jolliest in years.

The Quarry manages to, after all these years, harness the things that made Until Dawn a classic and replicate that feeling almost perfectly. Besides a few story hiccups in the last act, these characters and performances are going to keep you and your friends eyes glued to the screen all night long.

This game blew me away. What an incredible step up from its predecessor. Almost every level in this game was a masterpiece, and although the ending and last level felt a little shaky, it didn't take away too much from the absolute high I was riding.

Story was fine, but with some great voice acting and gorgeous visuals to back it up. Music wasn't too shabby either. I have very, very few comments for IOI on this. You did it, you sons a bitches.

Finally a game has made me feel that exact sensation that Dishonored does - there are, dare I say, some levels in Hitman 3 that rival or even outdo some of the ones in the Dishonored series. And from me, that is the highest praise I could give an immersive sim. Off to Deus Ex!

Last February, we were shocked and amazed to find that Luigi was on his way back! With the first game launching as a GameCube launch title back in 2001 to tentative critical acclaim and the sequel coming to 3DS in 2013 to less critical acclaim, many of us assumed this franchise was dead. Not so! Like the ghosts Luigi so diligently traps, Luigi’s Mansion is back from the dead. The first game is an absolute classic and I suggest you play it. The second game is good but nothing to write home about. The headliner for LM3 is that it takes all the best elements of both games, enhances them, and adds enough new content to make it my game of the year for 2019.

It seems downright impossible that you’d be unfamiliar with the Luigi’s Mansion theme by now, but regardless I encourage you to pop it on and get spooky. Still an absolute bop.

Luigi has of course always played backseat to his brother Mario, and the infamous “Year of Luigi” (2013) brought about the worst financial year in Nintendo’s history. But now, it’s his time to shine! If you’re not familiar with the basic plot of the first Luigi’s Mansion, Luigi gets a letter that he’s won a mansion in a contest he didn’t enter. He arrives to find that the whole thing was orchestrated by King Boo and that Mario’s soul has been locked away in the ghost world! Luigi must clear the mansion of all its ghostly inhabitants, solve some fun puzzles, and take down King Boo to rescue his brother. It’s an absolute blast, even though it’s only ~5 hours long.

This game has a similar premise — Luigi, Mario, Peach, and the Toads are invited to an all expenses paid resort in another contest they did not enter (yes, it’s been 18 years and he still hasn’t learned). The hotel manager welcomes them in and all seems well… until tragedy strikes! King Boo appears at the very beginning of the game and tries to consume your soul. Kind of a crazy start, but I’m in it right away. You’ll need to make your way up 17 distinct floors of the hotel, each with their own theme (varying from greenhouse to medieval castle to actual pirate ship), collect ca$h money, gems, and power-ups here and there, and reach the roof where you’ll finally have the big face off. You know what? King Boo > Bowser. King Boo is literally dragging Mario to hell to get revenge on Luigi.

Your friends are sealed away inside paintings (similar to how Luigi seals away ghosts) and King Boo swears his revenge on you. It’s kind of flattering, honestly. Finally, Luigi has a real, bona fide nemesis! A Bowser of his own. You then enlist the help of longtime Mario Bros. collaborator Professor E. Gadd (the scientist who made the original Poltergust as well as FLUDD from Super Mario Sunshine) as well as your ghost dog, Polterpup. Yes, you can pet the dog.

The great thing about LM3 is that it is just fun. Pure, uncut Colombian fun. This is one of those games where it’s immediately evident that the team absolutely loved what they were creating. The fully destructible environments are all gorgeous and so distinct from floor to floor you’ll barely be able to tell you’re playing the same game. The developers are clearly proud of their product, and their pride comes through in just how silly they’re willing to get in the pursuit of fun.

Luigi has lost his elemental abilities from before, but he’s been given new abilities to make up for it. Somehow, the devs managed to make each of these powers equally useful and had sections on every floor that required many uses of every ability in strange combinations. The Darklight (which for some reason I kept calling the Psychoscope) allows you to see invisible things or peer through ghostly illusions. The strobulb is the classic flashlight burst. The plunger can be shot and tugged by the Poltergust and used in an insane variety of ways. There’s a new burst attack for AOE stun when you’re surrounded or need to dodge attacks, and of course the big new mechanic of slamming ghosts to do damage, destroy the environments, and damage/stun other ghosts. It all comes together so seamlessly. But I would be remiss to not talk about the newest and most important mechanic — Gooigi.

Many, including myself, thought that Gooigi would just be a gimmick when first revealed, a way to shoehorn in co-op play. Absolutely not the case. Gooigi is essential for solving most of the puzzles in this 20 hour adventure, and is necessary for a good chunk of the boss fights as well. When you switch to controlling Gooigi, Luigi sort deactivates and will continue doing whatever you left him doing, and vice versa. This makes it possible to play the entire game either solo or co-op, and have roughly the same experience. No spoilers, but the penultimate boss fight required me to control both Luigi and Gooigi at the same time, switching between them every 2 seconds or so, and holy shit was it a blast. I am in awe of how cleverly designed each and every boss fight was.

Brilliant game design. Hats off. Anything that can possibly support co-op should nowadays, but you should be able to play games solo too. For the record, I played the bulk of this on my own but played co-op with my brother for about an hour. The game is probably more fun co-op, but if you don’t have a partner it can still be a 10/10 experience.

There is multiplayer as well, and it’s surprisingly … good? You can play online with friends or randos in the Scarescraper, a procedurally generated mansion that keeps on spookin’. There isn’t a ton of replayability to it, but the 2 or 3 hours you get out of it are actually a blast. I played with my friend online and we really got into it, coming up with strategies and ideas and coordinating with the randos we were paired with through emotes. Highly recommended, it doesn’t feel tacked on at all. I have heard that no single player DLC is coming for the game, but multiplayer DLC is on the way. It’s kind of just a nice icing on top of the cake of the campaign though.

Luigi’s Mansion 3 absolutely reeks of that Nintendo polish. I’d venture to say that it’s their best looking game yet, perhaps right up alongside Mario Odyssey. If you like having fun, you absolutely owe it to yourself to experience this firsthand, either with a friend or flyin’ solo. Every boss fight totally distinct and is a healthy mix of puzzles and combat, so you’re using all of your brain all the time. The ghosts have a real personality to them, so you’re not just sucking up endless mobs of blue dudes. The fully destructible environments are beautifully crafted and you can see the love and care put into them. This is my game of the year for 2019. If you have a Switch, this game is an essential right alongside Super Mario Odyssey and Zelda Breath of the Wild. Plus, the feeling of sucking up everything in the room into a tiny vacuum will never not be amazing.

Since I picked it up (and couldn't put it down) in 2017, NieR: Automata has remained one of my favorite games of all time. It's one of those that has stuck with me in a way that I don't think I'll ever grow out of, nor do I think I will I ever quite understand the depth of its impact on who I am and what I value. I had always thought about going back to NieR (or NieR Replicant, or NieR Gestalt, or whatever) to see where it all began, but every consensus I saw was that it was too clunky and unpolished to be worth revisiting. Very Mild Spoilers for Part 1.

Over time, I think that has proved to be true; so when Yoko Taro, the game's director, announced the remaster, I nearly wept with excitement. NieR Replicant Ver. 1.22 drifted closer and closer to the top of my hype list as we approached the release. One and a half months later, I've reached Ending E, and I am not quite the same person I was when I began. And that's for the better!

NieR Replicant Ver. 1.22 is a strange hybrid of a remake and remaster. The main character models have been rebuilt from the ground up and textured like 2021 models, while the world and items have been uprezed and tuned up a bit. Combat has been completely redone with consultation from Platinum Games, who made NieR: Automata, so it's much smoother and faster than before while still not being quite as fast as what Automata presented. The original game also had four endings (A-D), but a fifth Ending E loosely based on the companion novella Grimoire NieR that released alongside the original NieR has been added to the story. I won't spoil Ending E other than to say that it connects the story directly to Automata, and serves as the true ending of NieR.

NieR Replicant Ver. 1.22 sets the player into an almost suspiciously tropey JRPG fantasy world. Nier wakes up in a quaint village, has a younger sister and no parents, sees an encroaching threat of demons moving towards the village, has a mysterious power bestowed upon him and takes up arms to save his sister's life. Very standard JRPG fare. Or, that's what Yoko Taro wants you to think…

As a teenager, Nier ventures through a semi-open world to complete inane and innocuous fetch quests (which the characters openly complain about) in pursuit of finding a cure for the Black Scrawl, a mysterious but fatal disease that has beset his younger sister, Yonah. The two of them were raised by the village, but especially by twin sisters Popola and Devola, who treat them like family. Popola is wildly intelligent but reserved in decision making, while Devola is a singer who prefers to stay in the background during important conversations. Neither are overbearing nor shy, and by the end Popola had become one of my favorite characters. The twins really give off a "big sister" vibe when interacting with Nier, and I thoroughly enjoyed their dynamic.

Nier is a mild-tempered boy - innocent, optimistic, unabashedly kind. He's never one to turn down a request for help, and before long his errands bring him to the first member of the party that joins just an hour into the story, Grimoire Weiss.

Weiss is a magical floating book that stays at Nier's side through to the end, and as the player unlocks the Sealed Verses he gains more and more magical powers for the player to use. He's also a grumpy, prim-and-proper old man who just might have a heart of gold underneath his dismissive exterior. He has a bone to pick with his evil twin, Grimoire Noire, and accompanies Nier on his quest to find the Book of Darkness in the hopes that a cure for the Black Scrawl can be found. He's one of my favorite companions ever in a game, and what's crazier still is that the rest of the party is just as endearing.

Nier and Weiss search for the rest of the sealed verses while meeting a host of colorful characters along the way (special shout out to the Ferryman and the Masked King), and are eventually joined by a foul-mouthed mid-20s woman named Kaine. Kaine lives just outside the Aerie, a village built over a chasm in between cliffs, and has been an outcast from the day she was born. Kaine is intersex, and although she's a woman she was deemed a monster. Abandoned by everyone but her grandmother, Kaine's life became a living hell after the death of her only family. She dedicated her life to killing shades, in some vain hope that she will one day avenge her grandmother and put the world to right. Until she meets Nier.

Soon, the squad is complete when we're joined by Emil, a young boy with cursed eyes that turn everyone he looks at to stone. He has never been able to get close to anyone, nor has he been able to see the face of anyone he meets. Emil is the epitome of kindness. Despite drawing a cursed lot in life, he knows nothing but compassion, optimism, faith and an open heart. When Nier and Kaine adopt him into the party, you'll already be tearing up for fear of what might happen to this precious found family.

The reason I go into such detail here is to impress upon the reader that this group of Nier, Kaine, Emil and Grimoire Weiss is the most beautiful and endearing party I've ever come across in a video game. I love them; plain and simple. In a way that far outpaces 2B and 9S from Automata , these characters became real to me over 40 hours like no other game has accomplished (save perhaps Final Fantasy XV). While Automata relies on theme and allegory to drive its story, the characters are the true strength of Replicant. It's been just a day, but I miss their banter already. I can still hear Weiss angrily calling Kaine a "hussy" with just a touch of admiration, and see a smile echo across Nier's face while Emil chuckles softly.

Combat is solid; it never felt tedious, although I also wouldn't list it as a top feature of Replicant Ver. 1.22. Players will switch between one of 37 unique upgrade-able weapons, each of which handles just a bit differently, alongside nine magic spells that they can switch between freely. Replicant Ver. 1.22 features Platinum Games' signature perfect dodges and perfect parries too, alongside aerial attacks that provide enough variety to keep things interesting. Combat is definitely slower and a little more methodical than Automata, but overall the movement keeps the octane running high. Enemy variety is just enough to keep you from getting bored, although they are all some form of shade. You'd be forgiven if it gets too samey for you eventually.

The world is very beautiful… for a 2009 game. The remaster doesn't do too much to make the actual landscapes look better, but does wonders for cutscenes and character interactions. Looking at it as a "version update," as Yoko Taro has specified, makes a bit more sense than calling it a remake or remaster. Regardless, the world is kept alive by colorful NPC's, grazing animals, and shades galore. And of course, we can't forget the soundtrack.

Many people say that NieR: Automata has one of the best soundtracks of all time. That is true. Against all the odds, however, I think the score of Replicant slightly outdoes it. I found myself humming nearly every track in the game (especially the overworld theme) during the day, and it made me even more excited to return to the game that evening. Keiichi Okabe, who scored Automata as well, is one of the most skilled composers of our time. His fusion of upbeat strings and melancholy vocals is strange, exciting and unmistakeable. Okabe returned for Replicant Ver. 1.22 to remaster the score and write new music for the new ending as well. Regardless of which one edges the other out, the NieR games boast two of the most impressive scores in video game history.

You may be wondering what's so truly special about this game; why do people call it a masterpiece? It's something you'll need to experience on your own. NieR Replicant Ver. 1.22 is perhaps the slowest burning game I've ever played, but once the burn starts it does not let up. The game will be tedious at times; put it out of your mind and continue the main story. What you are doing will make sense in retrospect. I highly recommend you check one of the Ending Guides (here is a spoiler-free one) to ensure you don't waste any extra time to get all the endings. You will be playing parts of the game 2–3 times (NOT the entire game), but each consecutive playthrough keeps your weapons and levels so it becomes easier and faster. I encourage you to play this game slowly. Putting in 1–2 hours a day over the course of six weeks proved to be a perfect pace to play at. If you try to binge this game, you will wear yourself out.

NieR Replicant Ver. 1.22 is probably not going to win a lot of Game of the Year awards, and that's okay. It is tedious at times, and doesn't respect the player's time ocassionally, and moves the plot along very slowly.

This is a story about finding what it means to be human. Our inexplicable ability to let down the walls around our hearts with the knowledge that we will be hurt someday - this is what it means to love, and that is what it means to be human. The magic of it is in finding you've fallen in love with these characters, watching them fight for what they love, and having your own heart ripped apart and stitched back together alongside them. Replicant overall has a few more flaws than Automata, but I still feel good calling it a bona fide masterpiece. While it hasn't cracked my top 10 like Automata did, it has earned a safe place among my all-time favorites. I implore you to give this game a try. I understand it may not be for everyone, but if it is for you… well, I hope you can feel what I felt. Now get to it, hussy.