A first person shooter in which you won’t get a gun for the first 50 hours and there is only one enemy: Canada.

By the time you do find a gun, you will feel quite foolish to be holding it. For one, you won’t know how to use it, and you’ll have only four or five bullets to learn; your aim will sway and shake from the cold as you look nervously down the sights. For two, what are you going to do, exactly? You can’t shoot a Canadian winter to death.

And by this point, perhaps you won’t want to kill Canada anyway. The snowscape is haunting and beautiful, and every time you stop to get your bearings, each frozen scene looks like a perfectly painted postcard… except for the wolves moving like shadows at the far treeline… except for the thudding of heavy snow from the pines that might instead be the thudding of a bear just over the next hillside… except that every moment spent admiring the scenery is bought with your calories, with heat, water, fatigue… and now there are terrifying gray clouds scudding in from the west…

Do you truly want to take that shot now? With those wolves nearby, with the blizzard coming on?

Or do you break for your cabin, and try to survive another long night, hungry in the dark?

The Long Dark might well be my favorite game of all time. It came along in the post-Minecraft boom of lonesome survive-em-ups, but after a decade of constant development it’s still unsurpassed in the genre. Every time I install, for instance, a survival mod for a game like Skyrim, I find myself thinking “I see you’ve stolen a bunch of stuff from The Long Dark, but I wish you’d stolen more.”

Here the basic mechanics are tuned as taut as violin strings, working in concert and in conflict with each other to always leave you feeling pressured, and make every small gain feel like a hard-fought epic win. The sound of the snowy woods is wonderfully authentic, the art style is painterly and original. Mass Effect’s Commander Shepard [i.e. Jennifer Hale or Mark Meer] plays the Canadian voice of your internal monologue, and it’s weirdly perfect. Much like the real Canada, it’s occasionally monotonous but sometimes breathtaking.

I played over two hundred hours on the early Steam builds before switching to the PS4 version, since it looks gorgeous on a big tv and it feels more fun to chase for trophies on a console. I think the game is best on the second-hardest difficulty (“Interloper”) though I dial it down to play on the slowest day-night cycle, because I like to have a bit of time to think and chew the scenery between life-and-death decisions. (That said, it’s worth noting that nearly all of the games trophies can be unlocked on any difficulty level. Faithful Cartographer, here I come.)

You may not enjoy it as much as I have, but I absolutely would recommend this to anyone. It’s been a five-star game since about 2014, and Hinterland’s ongoing updates just keep making it better.

I respect it-- as an extremely bold, confident, and vital shake-up of the open world genre. Particularly, I respect the way it re-imagines progression as a thing that ebbs and flows, instead of a bar that just slowly fills up over time. I just wish I enjoyed playing it more.

Turns out, my lizard brain kinda liked that dopamine drip of ever-forward progression better, which is why I've put twice as many hours into Genshin Impact already while my Switch is over there gathering dust.

In the long run... well, in the long run it's all just pictures on a screen. Play the games that make you happy.

I've got a lot of respect for games that produce a lot of joy out of a tiny ruleset. Threes and Agar.io come to mind.

Unlike those, it's obvious that the act of playing Wordle is mostly secondary to the fun of sharing your scores, though. Hard to assign an exact number of stars to the mild pleasant feeling of getting these predictable, almost-but-not-completely-informationless status updates from all your good friends every morning. I too am glad to know you're okay, guys, and that you are still good at knowing English.

So uh let's call it 3 outta 5.

All praise the New Weird. The New Weird will never die but when it does I will track down its killer and catalog the crime on my Nightmare Computer.

For a solid week, this game is the only thing I could think about. It infected my dreams. Along the way, it had me tossing and turning over not just its mystery plot but thoughts about dead malls and beach vacations, economic inequality and clique-ridden virtual communities.

Also, there’s some jumping puzzles. You don’t have to do the jumping puzzles. (I did all of the jumping puzzles.)

Just an amazingly strange and singular game. Easily one of my favorites of the past few years. Possibly one of my favorites ever. I’ll have to think about it a bit more. Not just because I want to; I have to.

Got the platinum months ago, there's a dozen other games on my backlog, and I'm still playing this instead. Do I need to say more?

I mean, I can say more, if you want. OK, I'll say more.

How 'bout this: If the first Remnant was "Dark Souls with guns", this one is "Bloodborne meets Destiny". Takes the best parts of the soulslike genre and infuses them with all of the best parts of a modern looter-shooter-- smooth aiming and movement mechanics, semi-random dungeons, simple mission-based quest design, swappable classes that each have their own skill progression-- while leaving behind all of the parts of Destiny that I find incredibly annoying. There's no microtransactions or gatcha BS, no need to grind for random drops, and you can do everything as solo or coop instead of all the good stuff being locked behind 6-person raids. It's a chocolate + peanut butter combo that I'm finding irresistible.

This is my GOTY 2023 by a country mile and, if their DLC plans pan out, it could be a solid game-of-the-generation contender.

A better-than-average Doom clone based on a better-than-average cereal.

Good level design, sound design is on point, all the weapons are just cheeky reskins of the Doom arsenal so no problems there. Dead-ass I think a kid today would probably still have fun with this, though they might be baffled as to why they can’t look up.

It’s a rare example of a kid-ified, colorful shooter that was actually decent— a genre that sat weirdly empty until Splatoon and Overwatch came along decades later, and that Fortnite eventually turned into the mother of all cash cows.

Gamified bubble wrap. Tunes my brain to static within 5 minutes of starting a new run, guaranteed.

Which also means that it feels genuinely unhealthy to play this for more than 30 minutes at a time, like the government should intervene before it allows you to start another round after finishing your first one.

So I’m giving this a brisk 4 out of 5 stars but deleting it from my Switch before I have forgotten what the faces of my family members look like.

shoulda just been called BROWN

ever looked at Fallout 3 and thought “ehhhh this could be more monotonous”? well Tim Willits did and so Id Software made this: a PS3-era unnecessarily-open-world shooter at Absolute Maximum Brownness. Just the brownest thing going.

I couldn’t handle more than a few hours of looking at it.

I may never have the reflexes to git good at Smash, or the stone-cold cunning for Among Us, or the actual singing talent for Rock Band… but goddamned if my brain hasn’t been marinating in lousy pop music for the last 30 years to the point where I can absolutely flex on some bitches when playing Name That Song.

So, SongPop Party is a fantastic take on one of my favorite party games. The music selection is great, the visual presentation is cheerful & friction-free, and the multiplayer mode is still hoppin’ any time of day (which is super surprising for a years-old title buried in the iOS back catalog).

UPDATE/PLOT TWIST: After playing a bit more, I realized that the multiplayer mode is fake, and seems lively only because it’s populated by bots presented as real players. Eff me for being a rube, I guess, but… smdh. C’mon, devs. That’s so grimy.

Lowkey would be one of the very best things in Apple Arcade, if I didn’t hafta deduct stars for egregious trickery.


\ [Apple Arcade ranked \]