Before I get into any nitty-gritty of Gothic 1 Remake, I want to preface and say I am an anti-remake person by nature. One of my biggest gripes with gamers, gaming press, and the discourse around video games over the last few years is the notion that a game can be “outdated,” that video games have been on an objective upward trajectory coinciding with technological advancement.

The idea that games today are inherently better than they used to be, that developers from sometimes less than a decade ago (as the gap between release and remake seems to shrink, with games like Horizon Zero Dawn and The Last of Us remade within a decade) were essentially cavemen bashing rocks together, often making excellent games by accident that would supposedly benefit from “modernization.”

I think this mentality inherently devalues the artfulness of video games by positioning them as fickle, easily replaced or easily improved. It relegates them to a piece of tech, a product, rather than a work created by dozens or hundreds of creative minds. Though not in the RPGFan wheelhouse, I just played Halo: Campaign Evolved and was repulsed by some of the changes and their execution, finding it an extremely cheap simulacrum of the classic, seminal title Halo: Combat Evolved.

I won’t get into mudslinging every remake I’ve played that I hold active disdain for (I would probably septuple our target word count). I mention my beliefs to underscore the significance of my point when I say that Gothic 1 Remake is a fantastic game in its own right and an intriguing rework of a beloved cult classic. I have some gripes with it, but overall, it feels like a game made by people who truly understand the appeal and the inner workings of the original, something I don’t encounter very often.

Gothic 1 Remake, in the wake of Piranha Bytes’ closure, was created by a team composed mostly of Gothic 1 modders: people who cherish the original and bring reverence with them rather than commercial potential. People who have had thousands of cumulative hours consumed by a nearly three-decade-old RPG that, on its own merits and without any updates, demonstrates rather definitively that games don’t only get better over time.

Unlike most modern RPGs, Gothic 1 has a level of indifference built into every aspect of its design. Where many contemporary games are afraid to leave the player alone with their thoughts, or scale the world alongside them so they’re rarely too far from a power fantasy, Gothic 1 is notorious for hurling the player into a hostile world and leaving them to figure it out after only the lightest, often diegetic tutorialization.

This is a game where, instead of taking down armed guards or kitted-out goblins within the first few hours, the player gets put down by comically impish creatures like lizards, mutated chickens, and Rufus from Kim Possible. Where the lowliest jabroni in a camp—a miner armed with nothing but a pickaxe and rags—can one-shot them. The appeal here is that the initial wall provides plenty of contextual paths for the player to pursue to grow stronger, eventually leading them to surmount these challenges through progression, which instills a tremendous sense of satisfaction. That friction lurks in every corner and crevice of Gothic 1, including the remake.

In this way, Gothic 1 Remake is absolutely faithful to the original. The unforgiving nature of the early game remains intact, and in some ways even more deliberate. The team patched the routes players have found over two and a half decades to speed-run the progression wall, such as completely reworking the economy so that vendors have limited funds early on. Even if you cheese your way into rare and expensive items, you can’t break the economy by offloading them. Now, a vendor’s buying power increases only after you advance a chapter. Lockpicking has also changed significantly, which I personally don’t think works in execution, even if I agree with the vision.

Before, it was trivial to go around pilfering loads of items from unsuspecting denizens and hawking them to the aforementioned vendors for a huge leg up, as success was determined by your lockpicking skill. Now, it’s replaced by a kind of infuriatingly dense minigame that forces the player to find a static solution for each lock, with some requiring as many as 70 steps (which could take minutes) to solve.

Combat also had a major overhaul, and it is likely the change veterans will feel most immediately and intensely. Where fighting was quick and floaty in the original, letting skilled players swing and kite around enemies, it is now a more “modern” system of heavy, weighty, deliberate inputs. However, I think this is a massive success, as it enhances the progression curve by making the player a little weaker at the outset while introducing a system that lets them learn new levels of prowess with each weapon, unlocking faster attacks and even combos as they achieve mastery.

I only have so much time to discuss the changes. You probably just want to know whether Gothic 1 Remake is a good game, yeah? Well, fret not, because Gothic 1 Remake is phenomenal precisely because of how it preserves so much of the DNA that made the original a standout classic for real PC RPG-heads while folding in its revisions. Developer Alkimia Interactive has done something that seems nearly impossible, a feat only truly executed by the likes of Night Dive Studios with System Shock.

They’ve made something that should please even the most scrutinizing fan (me), while making it more palatable for modern audiences through visual and audio updates.

Instead of looking like Unreal Engine 5 slop, Gothic 1 Remake looks so much like the original, or rather, like how you may have internalized it as looking when you played it years ago. It’s still a dark, grimy, lived-in world, tonally consistent and unmistakably the product of a small studio with a specific vision.

Now, it boasts more detailed visuals, enemy designs that mostly align, and a new voice direction to avoid deterring those who might turn their noses up at the schlocky (if endearing) original English localization. The music is still catchy, if a bit generic fantasy, and the overworld theme and town tracks do undoubtedly worm their way into your head.

The world is still small, handcrafted, and knowable. While you don’t start with a map, you learn your way around simply by traversing. Finding maps that add no markers and force you to read them like real ones only deepens your knowledge of the topography and your immersion in the world.

Your decisions still matter, and you earn your status in the world rather than have it handed to you. NPCs talk down to you, doors are closed to you, and you have to prove yourself and make difficult decisions that shape your entire playthrough. The arc from prey to predator defines Gothic 1 and this remake, which means that the period of frailty and meekness required to become godlike ultimately demands it. Moreover, that “difficulty” is mostly just a knowledge or playtime wall. Getting “better” at Gothic is less about skill and more about simply engaging with its systems, as the increase in power arrives by virtue of experiencing the game.

The developers resolved to include both a harder difficulty and a simplified mode that makes much of the game quite approachable. However, since the “challenge” here is less about player skill and more about your understanding of the systems and the time you commit, with the zero-to-hero arc being the entire point of the experience, I have a hard time recommending that mode to anyone. If you were going to play on easy, I’d honestly just play something else altogether.

I don’t think Gothic 1 Remake completely replaces the original. In many respects, I still prefer the latter. Yet, I do think there is a growing contingent of gamers who are tired of being patronized by placating RPG design, and that’s reflected in the success of Gothic 1 Remake and other games that don’t hold your hand. For those who might get filtered by the jank of the original, Gothic 1 Remake offers a compelling way to return to a time when RPGs respected the player’s intelligence and abilities, or perhaps to experience it for the first time.

And by proving that a nearly 30-year-old design needed reverence rather than reinvention, Gothic 1 Remake quietly makes the case that the best a “remake” can do is trust that the original was right all along.

Much like its vibrant, cyber-grafted cast, Celestial Return stitches together a disparate collage of cyberpunk influences. The game bleeds the gritty attitude of Cyberpunk and Shadowrun through its dialogue and worldbuilding, echoes the internalized psychology and abstract art of Disco Elysium, and still finds room for a slick anime aesthetic in its character design and futurepunk cityscape, as well as a Citizen Sleeper-esque dice resolution system.

While its branching narrative shifts dynamically around the dice outcomes and personality frameworks, the experience ultimately lives or dies by your tolerance for its core thematic dressing and its lack of overall polish. Strip away the love for the neon veneer, and there are times when Celestial Return feels like less than the sum of its cybernetic parts.

As a narrative-first detective RPG, Celestial Return wastes no time establishing the baggage of its protagonist, Howard. You control this grizzled investigator who once belonged to the PID—a specialist squad formed to protect the citizens of Netherveil against “Abstracts,” nebulous, thought-based manifestations that bleed directly from imagination into reality onto the city streets. Following a brief prologue exploring Howard’s past, a routine investigation into a triple homicide rapidly spirals into a surreal, metaphysical head-trip.

Yet, despite this bizarre backdrop, the detective tropes feel instantly familiar. Howard rigidly embodies the cynical, world-weary lawman who has seen too much and felt too little. Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by Disco Elysium, Zero Parades, or even Anachronox, but Celestial Return‘s opening acts ultimately asks you to sift through a case file you may have read a hundred times before, lit by the flickering neon of a cliché.

The prose is undeniably sharp, though it frequently veers into self-indulgent verbosity. By lifting Disco Elysium’s internal monologue mechanic—here divided into Intelligence, Anger-Management, Foolishness, Perception and Virtue—the writing in Celestial Return showcases a decent stylistic range, but it simultaneously traps the game in a shadow it can’t quite escape. Are we officially entering the era of the “Disco-like”?

The trouble is that Celestial Return lacks its inspiration’s mechanical transparency. Outside of occasionally locked dialogue options, the cause and effect of these personality lenses remain frustratingly opaque. Furthermore, the narrative leans so heavily on bloated, noun-heavy descriptions that crucial information regularly suffocates under the prose. You will frequently find yourself staring at a quest notification, desperately trying to reconcile a dry log entry with whatever absurd fever dream you just witnessed—like a lengthy, high-minded philosophical debate with a talking rose flower. I kid you not.

Despite these flaws, Celestial Return maintains a fiercely earnest tone. The developers clearly want to say something profound about identity and self-determination under the thumb of techno-authoritarianism. In utilizing the Abstracts, they find a genuinely fresh lens through which to examine humanity’s slouch toward cybernetic hybridity. Yet, as noted from the outset, your mileage depends entirely on your appetite for the genre. Perhaps that stagnation is inevitable. Decades after Philip K. Dick et al laid the groundwork, our collective anxieties regarding identity, autonomy, and algorithmic control have ceased to be speculative fiction. They have arguably become our reality, and Celestial Return (and other such works) perhaps now suffer more because of how this arc of human progress has shortened.

Graphically, the city of Netherveil amounts to a simple animated diorama. Howard navigates this map where emerging hotspots trigger self-contained scenes—a pretty set of neon buildings that serve mostly as a delivery system for the narrative. It is within these encounter scenes that the game’s rich anime aesthetic and unsettling character design truly feast. The artistic direction here is immaculate. Utilizing everything from stark, monochrome photography and film clips to Escher-like architectural illustrations, the visual direction embraces a minimalist look while keeping a sense of ambient unease and cosmic weirdness at the absolute forefront.

As a marriage of cyberpunk grime and psychological horror, Celestial Return utterly nails the presentation of these mostly static vignettes. Even the bold, oversized title cards that herald each new chapter work to anchor you within its grander ideas. Ultimately, I never tired of seeing exactly how the developers would stage their next bizarre tableau and how it sharpened the tension inherent in the game and in Howard throughout.

The music score is driven by three key tracks that bookend each chapter and straddle the gamut of post-synth retro, heavier techno, and even a spread of death metal. The music videos accompanying these tracks bring together some of the images used during Howard’s exploration, and they work well to bring everything together in an original way. Outside of this, sparse alerts for different personality choices and a very small but effective use of voice-over complete the auditory catalogue.

Once the narrative gains momentum, Celestial Return introduces personality-driven skill checks. While most of these options simply let Howard explore a specific train of thought, others remain locked behind previous decisions or demand a direct dice roll. Howard begins with a pool of dice that act as a bizarre meta-currency, pulling double duty as both his health and his wealth. While you can collect or purchase more dice as you progress, not all dice are created equal. Some dice inject negative modifiers into your rolls—representing Howard’s unchecked anger, for instance—while others grant positive bonuses, and a rare few guarantee an automatic pass. Regardless of the type used, only four dice can be rolled at any given check.

This is where the high-stakes reality of treating dice as health—or “oxygen,” as the game frames it—crystallizes. Because checks permanently consume your selected dice, risk management becomes paramount. Run out of dice entirely, and Celestial Return effectively soft-locks, leaving you with nothing but a prompt to roll better next time.

Navigating this system demands a sharp learning curve; I quickly learned to actively hold back on non-essential checks, hoarding my negative dice to act as cheap fodder to barter with NPCs or secure key items. Some items grant either permanent passive bonuses to specific personality traits or crucial, one-time boosts. Furthermore, as Howard accumulates experience from his investigation, he unlocks deeper personality insights and hidden revelations that grant permanent bonuses, serving to specialise his focus and make specific tests easier.

While the loop becomes second nature after a few conversations, several design hurdles trip up the experience. Inventory management is a finicky chore; scrolling through dozens of dice is a tedious process, and a lack of organization for passive items quickly turns your gear screen into an exhaustive click-fest.

More frustrating is the lack of foresight. Beyond a bare-bones “recommended” dice count for any given dialogue check, the game refuses to telegraph what lies ahead. You never know if throwing your weight behind a massive roll will immediately leave you bankrupt for a gauntlet of subsequent checks. Consequently, in a genre where failure should ideally lead to interesting narrative branches, Celestial Return invites save-scumming simply to keep the game playable. Sometimes, you reload not because you want to see a different path, but because you literally do not have the dice currency to proceed.

All this interplay of personality-locked dialogues, multiple map points, and branching dialogues does mean there’s a healthy number of bugs and non-sequitur moments in the current build of Celestial Return, though the dev seems responsive to reported issues. There are soft-locks on progression when map markers disappear, or won’t interact, and the save/load process does not always register properly. Alongside the inventory issues, there’s a lack of polish to be accepted.

If you can make it through these frustrations, Celestial Return does not overstay its welcome for its bargain price. The three books comprising Howard’s story top out around half a dozen hours, depending on reading speed and attention to detail. Clearly, there are alternative paths and points of view to consider on a replay, and discovering all the secret insights and the vast range of items would take some forensic trial and error.

Celestial Return is an enjoyable narrative RPG, where the simple encounter systems work well enough and the cosmic horror feel to its main adversaries displays enough of a point of difference to make its cyberpunk city worth visiting over so many other similar locations. But the familiarity of the main character’s conceit, issues with clunky inventory and verbosity, as well as buggy cohesion, add some acid to the sweet, hard rain slicking the dark streets. It’s for you to decide whether there’re enough viable parts here for you to assemble into a relatively enjoyable whole, or whether the essence cost in time and enjoyment is just too great. Your move, choomba.

It’s been almost 20 years since The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, still the last traditional 3D Zelda to grace our Nintendos, first arrived in its edgy “T for Teen” glory. While the game has already gotten a proper remaster treatment in 2016 with Twilight Princess HD, it remains solely accessible to the few people out there who own a Wii U. Only the Hylian Goddesses know why. Luckily, fans can do what Nintendon’t: port the game to PC. As someone who’s been eager to replay Twilight Princess for two dang decades, my body was ready to be transformed into a hot wolf once again.  

You’ve either clicked this review familiar with The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess’ recent fan-made PC port or are wondering what the heck “Dusklight” is. In short, it’s a reverse-engineered decompilation of the game rebuilt using original code. In long, you can read more about the painstaking process here.

Twilight Princess isn’t the first Zelda game to get the decompile/recompile treatment, but considering it’s the only 3D entry in the series still unavailable on Switch, it’s the one that fans have seemed most excited by. Do-gooders may be relieved to hear that downloading Dusklight does not even require donning any pirate gear, so long as you own a copy of the GameCube or Wii versions to rip the ROM file from.

Twilight Princess has been through the wringer in terms of its place in Zelda discourse. When Nintendo announced the game, it felt like an uncharacteristic resignation by the company folding to Ocarina of Time stans put off by Wind Waker’s now verifiably timeless cartoon art style and other departures from “the formula.” So, Nintendo said fine: here’s the closest thing to a pure OoT successor you’re going to get, packaged in more superficially “dark” and “realistic” aesthetics.

The mid-2000s were a time in gaming history when Dark was constantly mistaken for mature and thematically strong. Twilight Princess is Dark in a way that befits the mid-2000s Hot Topic era it hails from. An aesthetic that is perhaps best summed up by the fact that Link turns into a wolf wearing a prison shackle as an anklet. But that’s not to say there’s no bite to go along with all that bark.

And that bite comes from the new characters who hail from the Twilight Realm, including the genuinely menacing villain, Zant, and our impish companion, Midna. Midna is immediately a compelling presence, and her interruptions are rarely unwelcome, which is honestly a rarity for companion characters of her ilk. Instead, her early-game teasing and gradual character growth make her feel essential. As with its three 3D predecessors, some of Twilight Princess’ most interesting story elements lie in subtext. There’s a general undercurrent of an idea that one person’s balance comes at the cost of another’s suffering. This subtext just doesn’t feel as developed as it could have to really leave a strong impression beyond its admittedly strong vibes.

My time with Dusklight was spent playing the 1.1.1, 1.2.0, and 1.3.0 versions. I didn’t experience any crashes during my playthrough and barely any technical hitches at all. The extent of wonky interactions came from enabling full camera control with the right stick, which, unlike the originals, allows you to move it vertically as well. Then again, it’s not a surprise that unlocking this QoL feature that was never in the original game led to occasional issues. I’m still glad I was able to do so, and it improved the experience overall.

Engaging with Dusklight’s neat and stylized QoL menu feels like an alternate reality where players are trusted with the ability to create an ideal version of a game’s experience for themselves. These options go beyond accessibility, pulling elements from all existing versions of the game and presenting them as toggles alongside a slew of new conveniences, visual polish, and experimental features.

The default selections when you first boot up Dusklight leverage the vast visual and performance upgrades, throw in a few subtle yet game-changing QoL features, while leaving the other settings as close to the GameCube release as possible. New players can opt to leave these settings as is for a relatively “vanilla” experience, while those of us returning to the game can explore ways to make it more appealing for ourselves.

Among Dusklight’s “default” settings are faster climbing animations and button shortcuts for transforming into Wolf Link and playing howling the Sun’s Song to change day to night or vice versa. If you don’t remember Twilight Princess having a Sun’s Song, that’s because it didn’t. And now that it does, I can’t say I understand why it never did. Still, my top pick for new convenience is transforming into Wolf Link seamlessly by pressing R+Y. Transforming in the original game used to require first calling up Midna and selecting the option from a menu—which I’m sure never helped the common criticism around wolf form’s implementation.

If you want something even closer to the vanilla version (i.e., crank down that framerate and crank up the bloom), then go ahead. You can even import other texture packs into Dusklight, like Henriko’s or TrueD-TPHD if you prefer the redone textures in the WiiU version (I don’t). But you can observe the differences for yourself here. There are no cranky game devs trying to force you into a specific kind of experience like you’re a dumb gamer baby who needs to be limited. While this visual customization showcases the flexible beauty of PC ports, the out-of-the-box package Dusklight comes in offers all you really need with its balance of polish and authenticity.  

So, yeah, Dusklight allowed me to create the exact version of Twilight Princess I wanted for myself. I enabled double damage from enemies and restricted hearts from appearing in the wild to create the Hero Mode conditions from Twilight Princess HD (without the obligatory mirror world flip in that version). When the game failed to scale enemy damage to a satisfying level in the final stretch, I bumped it up again to triple.

I remember Twilight Princess being easy even as a pre-teen who didn’t love difficult games, so the harsher consequences for getting hit encouraged me to experiment with the game’s large arsenal of tools to limit it as much as possible. A fair complaint against the original game is that many dungeon items and the seven “secret” combat skills Link can learn from an old Hero-turned-Stalfos are underutilized. Challenge breeds creativity, though. In my Dusklight playthrough, I was roll-slashing, shield bashing, and ball-and-chain swinging more than ever before.

Twilight Princess has a solid story and cast of side characters to support its epic scope, but it aims more for mood than cohesion. And yet what a mood it is. Turns out I don’t still need to be 13 years old to enjoy the lite edginess the game runs with. Secondary characters like the capitalist baby boy Malo, the deluded insect “princess” Agitha, and those clowns dressed in drag all help build a world with just the right amount of fantastical offbeat energy. This is unfortunately an element of the series that Nintendo would start to sand down going forward in favor of the clean, Disney-like image they’ve been cultivating lately.

There’s a common discourse out there now that slams Twilight Princess’s more “realistic” art direction as misguided and roughly aged. Realism is a poor word for what’s going on here—something which should be immediately clear upon witnessing the playfully deformed character designs. Twilight Princess’ art direction achieves a fable-like quality colored with sharp earthy tones that Dusklight’s textures and reduced bloom make more palpable than ever.

It’s only the expansively empty Hyrule Field that can feel somewhat drab and underdeveloped, though that’s a natural limitation of creating vast spaces for GameCube hardware. While Wind Waker’s Great Sea may have been a more creative workaround for this limitation, Twilight Princess’s horse combat and many collectibles make the most out of the large overworld space.

You know what most definitely hasn’t aged poorly? Twilight Princess’ substantial lineup of quality dungeons. The Forest Temple kicks things off even stronger than I remember with its effortful level design and dense atmosphere. No Zelda game has done a better job making its dungeons feel like part of its world rather than abstracted gameplay challenges.

The run from the abandoned prison of Arbiter’s Grounds, the yeti-inhabited Snowpeak Mansion, the Temple of Time, and City in the Sky may be the greatest in the series. At this point of the game, you’ve already unlocked most of the world map and wrapped up Wolf Link’s Twilight Realm segments, so you’re mainly zipping from high point to high point with only some brief exploration and story set pieces separating them.

On that note, I don’t think critics who target Twilight Princess’ “padding” consider how much these small breaks contribute to the game’s epic scope and help make each dungeon feel like a more special location and experience. You don’t have to love the execution of all of these interludes to appreciate the ambitious purpose they serve, and the amount of gameplay variety the developers try to throw in ultimately works to the game’s benefit.

In retrospect, these are the main design elements that meaningfully distinguish Twilight Princess from the 3D titles that came before and after. The “Ocarina of Time 2” moniker fans have stuck on the game (whether used favorably or disparagingly) doesn’t quite tell the full story. If we never get another Zelda game that iterates on it (or even a proper official port of Twilight Princess HD), Dusklight is here to preserve Twilight Princess as an epic worth returning to while offering ways to dispel some of its flaws.

Over two decades have passed since the humble (and somewhat dubious) beginnings of the Utawarerumono series as an adult visual novel/tactics RPG hybrid, and exactly twenty years since the subsequent console-friendly rehabilitation it received with its PlayStation 2 release. From here, the series evolved into a unique blend of fantasy and science fiction, drawing heavily on Ainu culture to craft a world unlike any other. Developer/publisher Aquaplus handled the storylines and visual identity, partnering with acclaimed strategy RPG aficionados Sting Entertainment to refine the tactical battle mechanics, resulting in a combination of visual novel storytelling and strategic gameplay that carved out a small but devoted fanbase worldwide. 

Between the remake of the original title (Prelude to the Fallen), the incredible Mask of Deception & Mask of Truth duology, and 2023’s foray into traditional, party-based RPGs, Monochrome Mobius, I’ve loved every second I’ve spent immersed in the world of Yamato. However, all good things must come to an end, and Utawarerumono: Past and Present Rediscovered serves as a fulfilling final capstone for one of the RPG genre’s most underappreciated series.

While it doesn’t deliver all the answers fans hoped for, Utawarerumono: Past and Present Rediscovered refines and improves upon the strong mechanical and narrative foundation of Monochrome Mobius, proving that Aquaplus (alongside support studio Design Act) possesses the skills to make a true classic in the traditional RPG genre, and whetting my appetite for their next project.

If you have yet to play Monochrome Mobius, the coming story explanation may be completely unintelligible and/or full of spoilers for that game, so reader beware. This title is a direct sequel and requires familiarity with the previous game to understand and enjoy, much like the connection between Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter and 2nd Chapter.

Utawarerumono: Past and Present Rediscovered picks up right where Monochrome Monobius left off, the initial cutscenes showing the aftermath of Arva Shulan’s invasion of Yamato’s capital, focusing on both our heroes and the leaders of Arva Shulan as they regroup and adjust to their newfound roles. Protagonist Oshtor and his friend and rival Mikazuchi are named Imperial Guards of the Right and Left and formally recognized as Akuturuka, wielders of the powerful masks (Akuruka) that grant immense power in exchange for the user’s lifeforce.

Their friend and ally Munechika returned to Izumo to assist her mother and resume vigil over the pillar that connects Yamato and Arva Shulan, wary of further incursions. Final party member Shunya is left catatonic after the traumatic events in the imperial capital and sleeps peacefully in Oshtor’s home village, Ennakamuy, under the glow of the small Akushana cultivated in Pashpakur’s (Oshtor’s biological and Shunya’s adoptive father) hideout. Once Shunya wakes up and the party reassembles, the Mikado tasks them with awakening the four Gaia Pillars spread across Yamato to prepare for further incursions by the enemy.

Monochrome Mobius largely stood on its own, with some concepts or story beats enhanced by familiarity with past Utawarerumono series titles, while remaining enjoyable as an entry point into the franchise. Past and Present Rediscovered, on the other hand, contains oblique references to events in Mask of Deception, as well as additional background on the science-fiction aspects of the lore and worldbuilding behind Yamato and its ruler, the Mikado.

The addition of a glossary players can reference during gameplay or story scenes for explanations of the various concepts, characters, and proper nouns thrown around is immensely helpful for new and returning players alike. The story is self-contained enough that someone who started with Monochrome Mobius could still understand most of the plot and character moments and would come away eager to see what comes next for Oshtor, Mikazuchi, and Munechika in Mask of Deception.  

Similarly, my attachment to Oshtor, Mikazuchi, and Munechika was only enhanced by experiencing their humble origins across these two titles. Watching their skills grow and their bonds develop proved immensely satisfying, cementing this trio as one of my favorite parties in any RPG. The game takes time to resolve the familial conflicts Mikazuchi and Munechika face, allowing them to overcome their personal traumas and, by the end of the journey, emerge with a more holistic, mature outlook on the nature of loss so that they may accept their roles in society with purpose and clarity.

The contrast between the inciting mentorship role Oshtor plays in Mask of Deception and the greenhorn finding his footing across these two titles is compelling, and this journey justifies itself on the strength of his character development, enhancing the impact of his role in that story. Mask of Deception tells you that Oshtor is a legendary warrior and selfless guardian of Yamato; Past and Present Rediscovered proves it.

If there is any negative aspect of the game’s storytelling, it lies with Shunya and the game’s ending, relating to her origins and the resolution of the core conflict. Series fans had expressed some confusion at the existence of Arva Shulan in the previous game; this RPG duology is set only a few years before Mask of Deception, yet Arva Shulan and Shunya are never mentioned. While I won’t spoil the game’s conclusion here, Past and Present Rediscovered answers these questions with a controversial time travel element.

This narrative choice is a bit of a double-edged sword; it is consistent with the game’s science fiction elements (which are at the forefront in this game more than in any other Utawarerumono title) and allows for the game to explore the origins of the world in greater depth than past games in the series, but it also undercuts some of the narrative weight of the plight of Arva Shulan and Shunya’s character relationships with the rest of the cast.

I enjoyed watching Shunya connect with the rest of the party, and the ending resolution is heartbreakingly bittersweet. I can understand why many fans were unhappy with the direction the story took, but I ultimately came away feeling that the journey was more impactful than the destination. The narrative does not meaningfully advance the series’ plot (an impossibility for a prequel); nonetheless, it endeared me to these characters and fleshes out their origins enough to be worthwhile. 

Utawarerumono: Past and Present Rediscovered truly shines by refining the game mechanics of its predecessor. Monochrome Mobius provided a solid foundation: a strong battle system based around the three-tiered action ring, the ability to assign stat points to build out characters, and adaptations from past titles like Zeal (allowing for extra turns or ascension on the action ring when full) and Morale (a stat shared between friends and foes that strikes a careful balance between offense and defense). Where Monochrome Mobius suffered was in the execution of some of these elements, with many of them remaining invisible to the player, poorly explained, or lacking in balance.

Stat allocation was a strong mechanic to encourage player agency, yet the game balance and skill acquisition system tied to stats encouraged simply dumping all your points into offensive stats. Morale was a novel idea, but there was no way to quickly reference the morale levels of your party members mid-battle, so characters would lose morale without warning and disrupt your entire strategy. The presentation was also two generations behind, with laughably poor character models for NPCs, copious environmental asset reuse, and stiff animations, all culminating in an overall cheap, low-budget experience. 

Past and Present Rediscovered addresses all these complaints and further elevates the gameplay mechanics. For starters, the presentation is a significant step up from Monochrome Mobius. The character models and environments are more detailed, there is a wider variety of monster designs, and every character & enemy model has more visually impressive, bespoke animations for their skills. The user interface received a necessary overhaul, with more detailed and intelligible area maps & mini map that the player can reference at any time, a world map that accurately shows the connections between various areas, and battle menus that accurately track Zeal, Morale, and other player conditions through easily readable bars and icons.

The game even features numerous in-engine cutscenes with impressive animation and battle choreography, akin to the coolest fights from your favorite anime series. All these elements strengthen the presentation and seamlessly convey the game mechanics, getting out of the way so as not to disrupt the player’s focus on storytelling and combat strategy. 

Furthermore, Past and Present Rediscovered adds excellent new mechanics that elevate the game design far above its predecessor. First among these are the Keshin forms for Oshtor and Mikazuchi. As Mikazuchi and Oshtor are now recognized as Akurutaka, they can draw upon the power of the Akuruka at will. However, doing so fully will drain their lifeforce and drive them to an early grave. Thus, the Keshin technique is introduced, a method of partially drawing on the power of the Akurutaka without harming the user (with a visual effect similar to the Susanoo from Naruto).

This provides a diegetic reason why the party has their strength reduced and needs to retrain their skills, and also allows for additional tactical decision-making in combat. When the Zeal gauge is full and the character enters Overzeal, you have the choice between ascending a level on the action ring, using a powerful Okugi skill, or engaging the Keshin form to gain access to powerful attacks for multiple turns. Munechika also receives her own Akuruka later on, which enhances her own similar transformation she acquired in the previous game, making it equivalent to these Keshin forms. 

Utawarerumono: Past and Present Rediscovered further alters exploration and progression through the new Conquering system. When entering a new area, the region will need to be “conquered” by fighting a certain number of battles, after which a powerful individual enemy or enemy group known as a “Ruler” will emerge. Defeating this Ruler enables the player to defeat all other enemies in that region instantly on the field with a simple sword swipe.

At first, I was mixed on this change, as it throws out the typical focus on resource management and combat efficiency across numerous battles, the balance that a traditional turn-based RPG relies on. However, I quickly realized that this system serves a dual purpose: it eliminates the monotony of repeated, low-engagement battles with the same enemy groups in a particular area, while increasing the frequency and variety of high-engagement battles against strong foes. Some of the Rulers end up being a stiffer challenge than the story bosses, so this system keeps the player on their toes and ensures that there is always another interesting fight around the corner.

There are fewer distinct dungeons compared to Monochrome Mobius, but each field area essentially becomes its own dungeon with its own miniboss. The few dungeons that do exist treat each floor as a new area, so they are jam-packed with engaging fights. This overhaul strikes a perfect balance between demanding mastery of the mechanics and avoiding time-consuming, low-engagement battles that plague many other RPGs. 

This dovetails with the changes to game balance, as enemies tend to hit much harder than they did in Monochrome Mobius, and skill acquisition is tied to character level rather than stat allocation. Instead of dumping every stat point into Strength or Intelligence and rocking a glass cannon build on every character, I had to prioritize defensive stats and ensure a healthy mix of stat spread among my party to survive encounters.

This increase in difficulty and refinement of game balance also made consumable items integral to combat strategy, particularly the use of Zeal and Morale-boosting items. Monochrome Mobius introduced a bevy of interesting but underutilized ideas; Utawarerumono: Past and Present Rediscovered realizes the potential of those mechanics to deliver a high watermark for traditional, turn-based, party-focused RPG combat and progression design.

Utawarerumono: Past and Present Rediscovered is a fitting sendoff for one of my favorite RPG franchises. I have my reservations about the narrative direction, the introduction of time travel elements, and how this title fits into the larger tapestry of the series’ narrative ambitions. However, I cannot deny that the journey to that resolution had me invested from start to finish. I love these characters and the world they inhabit, and any sadness I have about closing this chapter is buoyed by the promise this title shows for Aquaplus’s future.

I cannot wait to see the next world and cast of characters they create, and I hope they continue their work in the RPG genre. They’ve more than proven they have what it takes to create the next great narrative-focused RPG series. 

Some of the best and least appreciated games in all of RPGs are what could be called “Eurojank“: Gothic 1 and Gothic 2, STALKER, Greedfall, Arx Fatalis, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, E.Y.E Divine Cybermancy. Many would call these games “so bad they’re good,” while others hold sincere and unironic admiration for them. I’m one of the latter; in fact, I got more joy out of Two Worlds—yes, the first one—than I did out of Skyrim. Keep that in mind for everything I’m about to say about Crimson Desert, a phenomenal game with one significant flaw that it more than earns the right to have.

To my glee, Crimson Desert, the latest open-world RPG by Korean developer Pearl Abyss, carries a lot of that Eurojank DNA with it, and by that I mean the emergent problem-solving within a systems-driven sandbox, something Eurojank games have historically provided uniquely within RPGs.

While many games, RPGs increasingly so, are designed around “intended play” where combat is tuned, encounter design is very deliberate, and the AI is behaviorally scripted, Eurojank games are often more loosely designed because small teams were working at the edge of their technical capacity, shouldering massive ambitions.

For example, I love how in Two Worlds many of the encounters would crush you, especially early on. However, because AI pathfinding is genuinely limited in that game, I can find gaps in the simulation, such as exploiting topography or line of sight to whittle down enemies that are far more powerful than I am.

This is not an intended design. While some would call it cheesing the game, I feel as if it just correctly approaches the game on a layer the developers didn’t actually “intend” for. I learned to read the game, and I got massive satisfaction from problem-solving. Crimson Desert is filled with these kinds of interactions, but it often feels like it’s been designed with that philosophy in mind, all backed by an immense roster of connecting and interworking systems.

More than anything else, Crimson Desert made me feel the way Gothic did. That specific sensation of being genuinely small in a world that doesn’t care about you, and then slowly learning to read that world well enough to punch above your weight in ways nobody explicitly taught you.

The game starts you weak and keeps you that way longer than most modern RPGs would dare. There’s no scaling, which means wandering too far from the starting area will get you killed quickly and without apology. But the same systems that make you vulnerable also give you tools, and figuring out how those tools interact with the environment and the enemies is where Crimson Desert lives.

Early on, I found I could use Nature’s Grasp to pick up a tree and slam it into a boss, dealing damage I had no business doing at that point in the game. Nobody told me to do that. There was no tutorial prompt, no environmental storytelling nudging me toward the solution. I just understood that the world had physics, that the ability worked on objects, and that a tree is a very large object. That’s the purest expression of player-driven problem-solving, but this time it feels done in a way that bridges that gap between emergence and intention.

That’s what Crimson Desert gets fundamentally right, and why the rougher edges never stopped me from wanting to keep playing. But like many of those other games, Crimson Desert eventually allows you to become extremely powerful. The world is littered with armor, weapons and artifacts that will completely alter your combat abilities and more. Eventually, you’ll be able to mow through hordes of enemies like a musou without needing to resort to the emergent systems, with its massively satisfying power curve.

The world in Crimson Desert is nothing short of staggering. The game started out as an MMORPG before Pearl Abyss shifted it to a single-player experience, but you can absolutely still see that scope. The map is segmented into distinct biomes, including your plains area, the swamp/jungle area, the snowy area, a steampunk world, and the titular Crimson Desert and the wastes beyond it. It’s structured just like an MMO in the sense that biomes have specific enemy levels that will usually signpost to a player where they should be relative to their own level.

Normally, “single-player MMO” is a pejorative for a bloated map stuffed with inane busywork. And while Crimson Desert absolutely has checklist objectives for that particular kind of psychopath, a lot of what’s actually on offer is remarkably bespoke and robust. Systems like camp management, cooking, fishing, gathering, and dispatch missions don’t exist in isolation. They feed into each other in ways that make the experience of Crimson Desert greater than the sum of its parts.

During my first few dozen hours with the game, I spent five straight hours of those fishing, and then another chunk of time I can’t fully account for hunting down ingredients and recipes to cook with what I’d caught. Not because a quest guided me towards that, not because I was grinding toward a specific reward I’d identified, but because one thread kept pulling me toward the next. I’d catch something, realize I didn’t know what to do with it, go looking for a recipe, find an ingredient I needed somewhere out in the world, start gathering that, then stumble onto something else entirely.

The fish fed into cooking, the cooking fed into combat survivability, since there are no healing potions in this game, and food is your only source of recovery, the ingredients pushed me into corners of the map I might not have visited otherwise, and everything fed back into the camp.

None of that loop was explained to me (at least not at first). I assembled it myself through play, the same way you figure out that a tree can be a weapon or that a rock can save your life against an enemy that should destroy you. That’s what separates Crimson Desert from the MMO busywork people are rightfully skeptical of. It doesn’t feel like a checklist. The open-world RPG scaffolding is almost incidental to what Crimson Desert actually is, which is closer to a life sim with delusions of grandeur, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment.

The world of Pywel is stunningly detailed and dense for its scope. Vines curl around abandoned roadside houses. Muddy trails bear wagon tracks worn into the dirt. Wildflowers scatter through lush rolling meadows while boulders sit with the kind of natural erosion that suggests they’ve been there for centuries. Dozens of farmhands work visible crop rows with functioning windmills turning behind them. Stone fencing crumbles at the edges. The continuity across the landscape creates the sensation of a world that wasn’t built merely for the player, despite how much freedom it offers and the power fantasies you can experience within it.

In many of these ways, Crimson Desert often feels as if Pirhanha Bytes received a massive budget and made their own Breath of the Wild. It even kind of looks like a maximalist 7th-gen title, like the theoretical ceiling of what a 360 or PS3 open-world was aiming for but never had the hardware to reach. It looks expensive without looking sterile.

The exceptional sound design earns equal credit here, grounding the world in a layer of environmental audio that feels genuinely ambient rather than decorative. Wind moves through reeds, distant metal clashes from skirmishes happening without your involvement, and birds shift in the canopy overhead.

It was baffling to me that so many people were talking about how boring Crimson Desert’s opening hours were; even those praising the game would often say something to the tune of “it gets good after a dozen hours.” It made no sense to me because the opening of the game is very concise and thrusts you into the world very quickly. I was having a blast and sucked into this world for around 50 hours before ever touching the main quest.

And then I started progressing the main quest and realized why people were saying this. Crimson Desert‘s biggest problem is, and I cannot stress this enough, just how terrible the structure of the main scenario and the narrative itself are. On paper, the premise is fine: Kliff, leader of a mercenary company called the Greymanes, is betrayed and scattered after an attack by a rival faction, the Black Bears. The story follows him as he rebuilds his company, reunites his comrades, and eventually confronts the people responsible.

It’s a workable setup. The execution is where it completely falls apart. In ways not dissimilar from something like Red Dead Redemption 2, Crimson Desert‘s main quests are often completely at odds with the life-sim freedom RPG that you’ll experience in the open world. Instead, you’ll be sitting through long, and I mean long, bouts of some of the most banal, if well-voiced, dialogue I’ve seen in some time, for missions that are often nothing more than getting on your horse and following some guy.

Kliff is little more than John Videogame, with about as much personality as a cornstarch pie, and it was impossible to connect to him, his plight, or anything in the game’s scripted narrative, despite how desperate the game is for you to. Granted, the story does have some insanely good cresendos, such as massive battles where you are given complete freedom as a field general of how to advance through a battlefield and what targets to prioritize before seizing a city and fighting the boss, but those moments are few and far between and the narrative feels like the writers had some cool ideas for set pieces but no clue how to develop the connective tissue between those moments.

This wouldn’t be as bad if I could simply start skipping cutscenes to get through the narrative, since the game does admittedly hide some of its best features behind story progression. But the game unironically insists upon itself, forcing you to experience every second because no scenes are skippable. You can, however, use a 2x speed button to speed through them (they later added a 4x option as well, which is honestly a pretty funny way to troll their audience) and that can often result in some hilarious moments that undercut what is supposed to be a serious narrative.

Given how much of the early to mid-game plot focuses on Kliff bringing the Greymanes back together, it spends shockingly little effort in endearing you to the moments of your gang and creating a bond between Kliff and them or really anyone else.

Despite this significant issue, I still loved Crimson Desert because of the stories it allowed me to create for myself. Like the time I was doing one of the laser puzzles in the environment, and while moving one of the mirrors, the laser was cast over a nearby camp, setting all of its inhabitants on fire.

Or when I was in the middle of fighting a boss and fell through the ground, only to discover a massive cavern that led me to a weapon I would use for a decent chunk of time. Or the time I was hunting a bear and was running up to skin it when I thought I had killed it, only to see the game prompting me to hold the A button to “ride” it, and then taking that bear on a spree through some of the Black Bear encampments, watching the grunts run in fear at their rapidly approaching ursine apocalypse.

I spent hundreds of hours in the world of Pywell, dozens of which came after finishing the game, something I find myself unable to do anymore, and it still felt like I had scratched the surface of it. Content Demons? You’ve got a forever game here, and Pearl Abyss has already added loads of free content with a commitment to continue supporting the game for years.

It’s such a dense game that there’s way more than I can realistically fit into a review, but I want anyone reading this to come away knowing that Crimson Desert is a massive game with loads of handcrafted content and systems that will allow you to organically craft a narrative truly unique to you.

The subgenre that gave me some of my favorite RPG experiences has quietly been losing the studios that built it. Just in the last two years, we’ve lost Piranha Bytes and Spiders. The kind of game they made, patient, systemic, built for a specific kind of player willing to meet it on its own terms, has felt increasingly endangered. Crimson Desert, even if it isn’t perfect, carries that torch. And it carries it with a budget that finally matches the ambition.

Just please, for the love of god Pearl Abyss, add the option to skip dialog.

Video games can be a lot of things. They can be funny, they can be fantastical, they can be sad, and they can be thoughtful. I have read, watched, and heard many a story about the inevitability of death, but Schrödinger’s Call has me feeling a certain way that other video games have rarely accomplished.

Schrödinger’s Call came out of nowhere for me. In it, you control a girl named Mary, the world’s last Confidant, though what that means she does not know, and her cat companion, an enigmatic figure named Hamlet, seems unwilling or unable to explain. While you may not know a lot of what’s going on, Hamlet at least tells you what you’re meant to do: make contact with the souls of humanity in the last moment of their life. But what is it that cost them their lives? Well…

The moon struck the Earth, killing everyone.

Schrödinger’s Call takes place during the last 21 nanoseconds of human consciousness, a tragedy so sudden that hardly anyone could have hoped to come to terms with their deaths or regrets before the impact. As the last Confidant, you are uniquely equipped to help them cope and help them regain their memories while attempting to regain your own.

The despair of one’s final moments is something that resonates with me and something that I have been forced to think about more as I grow older and more of my loved ones pass away. I’m still young, but it’s a humbling thing to consider how everyone at one point thinks the same thing, and that someday, I too will feel this way. There’s no amount of time, money, power, or knowledge that can change that. Playing through Schrödinger’s Call and talking to the tortured souls made me feel a lot of empathy, a testament to the game’s high-quality writing.

An early soul we meet is Lucy, a woman estranged from her young son, William, and desperate to speak to him as mother and son. The story did an excellent job of keeping me guessing, wondering why they were estranged and what horrible thing she could have done to him. You are certainly given hints as to what’s going on, but it takes time for her narrative to unravel.

At first, I didn’t know whether Lucy had lost contact because she was a bad mother, but as I learned more about her story, I realized there was far more to it than that. I won’t give away too much, beyond telling you that their conclusion is as touching as it is melancholic.

Schrodinger’s Call, for better or worse, is a linear narrative, its gameplay amounting to progressing through dialogue, consulting Mary’s notebook, and making choices. Unlike something like Ace Attorney, however, there are no consequences to being wrong.

Any choices we make are largely for flavor, as we cannot dictate how the story progress. As “the world’s last Confidant” conveys, our role is to listen to people’s woes and provide support. Much like Mary, we are here to follow these souls’ stories, not make our own. Even the breakdown scenes where a traumatic moment causes a soul to collapse in on themselves are fairly linear, though they are still adequately tense.

Some players may be disappointed by the game’s linear narrative, but I frankly relish it. Given how many games are built around player freedom and choice in how the narrative develops, a game that lets us sit back and enjoy the story as written is a breath of fresh air.

Schrödinger’s Call has some of the best visual effects and artistry I have seen in the visual novel genre, going above and beyond the standard. Rarely does the game fail to be eye-catching. Whether it’s the unusual setting, the fading of character portraits, or the effects from the chaotic moments, these all contribute to making Schrödinger’s Call a game that is never visually dull. The character designs are just as fantastic, the artistry and creativity behind them evident. Mary’s design is cute, and the anthropomorphic animal designs of side characters are lovely.

The music is well composed, creating a haunting atmosphere even when the mood is at its lightest. Whether you’re just chatting with the various souls you encounter or are in triage to keep a soul from losing themselves, the tension is palpable, capturing the feeling of being uncomfortably on the brink of life and death.

Meanwhile, the sound effects are primarily through the “voice acting,” handled similarly to games like The Sims and Animal Crossing, where characters speak a “babble” language that serves as a facsimile of a spoken language. The effects of the voice acting lend it a haunting quality, and the execution honestly made me question whether it was fake voice acting or not at first.

Schrödinger’s Call is a transcendent experience, one that I had to take multiple breaks from due to how heavy and emotional it was. It stands as one of the most thoughtfully designed and written video games I have ever played, and I would recommend just about anyone who is looking to feel something to try it out. If I can ensure you leave this review with one thing in mind: we are only on this planet for so long, so make sure it’s a good time.

Growing up, one of my favorite video game series was The Legend of Zelda, and one of my favorites in the series was The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. The idea of having two item slots was incredibly novel, and while swapping your sword out was tedious, it gave us item combinations we never had before and made dungeons much more interesting.

While Link’s Awakening on Switch helps reduce this item swapping tedium, I still prefer to play the Game Boy Color original. Thankfully, skilled modders have created the best of both worlds with Link’s Awakening DX HD, giving us amazing quality of life features and the classic Link’s Awakening DX experience.

I learned about this version thanks to fellow RPGFan writer Jonathan Logan and was immediately impressed by how it seamlessly transitions the world from a grid-based map to a fully interconnected world. The way Link’s Awakening DX HD flows is surprisingly strong, as if Link’s Awakening was originally designed with this in mind.

An interesting outcome of this design change is that, much like with the 3D The Legend of Zelda games, Link’s Awakening DX HD teases you with areas that you cannot quite get to. For someone who’s already played Link’s Awakening, it’s quaint, but if this were my first time playing it, I imagine I’d have found it exciting. This map structure is also used in dungeons, which makes the dungeons a wildly different experience, with only a few The Legend of Zelda games having such open dungeons.

For those who started with the original Game Boy Color game, Link’s Awakening DX HD feels more or less the same mechanically. You still progress through the game as normal, fighting enemies, solving puzzles, and clearing dungeons. Yet, veterans will notice that there are key design changes evident from the very beginning.

Once you get Link’s sword back, the first thing you will likely notice is that the sword slash properties have changed, allowing for greater reach and a wider hitbox. Despite loving Link’s Awakening, I cannot deny that this is a welcome change, improving flow and pacing.

While the sword change is interesting, it does not compare to how much of a difference the additional item slots make in Link’s Awakening DX HD. Even adding two slots is a massive pacing improvement, meaning you rarely have to pause. Throughout most of my journey, I had the Power Bracelet, Sword, Pegasus Boots, and Roc’s Feather equipped, allowing me to always have my most important movement items and sword at all times. Even better is when I discovered that I could expand it to six, and thus almost never had to swap items outside of specific use cases. It’s such a strong feature that I’m shocked the Link’s Awakening Switch remake didn’t go half as far!

Going into Link’s Awakening DX HD, I knew that it had a lot of customization features, but I never realized just how extensive they were. While many things have changed with this remaster, such as the sword properties and additional item slots, these can be set back to how they worked in the original game.

The customization is highly granular, allowing you to modify numerous aspects, big and small, to tweak Link’s Awakening DX HD to your preferences. Do you want to get rid of the message for picking up a Guardian Acorn? Do you want to increase how much damage you take? Heck, do you want to give yourself a veritable Assist Mode, a la Celeste? This game has settings for all that and more. And if you don’t know what something means, the game includes a handy tool tip for every setting. They even made sure people who hate fiddling with settings are satisfied, including a classic preset and a modern preset!

What I found with the more modern customization features is just how quickly you can beat Link’s Awakening with the right settings. The updated sword, the interconnected world, the reduced menuing required, all this genuinely surprised me by how quickly I beat the game. Granted, it doesn’t hurt that I’m pretty familiar with the game, but you would be shocked by how much time is spent in the original game’s menu!

The graphics in Link’s Awakening DX HD remain true to the original, though with plenty of added effects to help things stand out, most notably the lighting. When Link awakens in Marin’s house, the global lighting is immediately obvious, while the Mysterious Woods adds a fun fog effect. Like all changes made to Link’s Awakening DX HD, both of these can be disabled if you want to keep your visual experience pure!

The music in Link’s Awakening DX HD, meanwhile, is identical to the original, which is a huge plus for me as someone who usually does not love remakes doing new compositions. The Link’s Awakening Switch soundtrack is still strong, but for as much as I enjoy it, I far prefer the original.

One minor issue I experienced with Link’s Awakening DX HD, perhaps the only actual issue I took with this game, is how it handles transitions between areas with different music. The first area this comes up in is the Mysterious Woods, and it really irks me when the one song instantly jumps to the other. It’s nothing that affects my feelings about the game, just something I wish could be fixed by having a beat of silence between songs that the original game has.

As a big fan of fan games and hacks, I believe Link’s Awakening DX HD stands as one of the best that anyone has made for The Legend of Zelda series. You can tell that the people involved have a lot of love for Link’s Awakening and for game development in general! The only real misgiving I had was it was confusing to figure out how to set it up at first, but once I figured it out, it was smooth sailing.

I strongly recommend anyone interested in replaying Link’s Awakening try this. Those who want to try it for the first time may be well served by this version, though honestly, I think half of what makes me like it so much is having already played the original. Whichever version you end up playing, I’m sure it’ll be a great time!

Echo Generation 2 is a prequel to the original Echo Generation, released in 2024. The original led with heart and humor beautifully matched by its charming voxel visuals. Echo Generation 2 attempts to further develop the world and vibe as we primarily follow Jack, the missing father from the first game. I praise the developers for taking a chance by changing the tone to a more serious story while building on a world people fell in love with.

Unfortunately, that’s where the praise ends. Sometimes writers are good at a certain kind of storytelling, and a world is best set in its original intent. This isn’t “I wish this were more like Echo Generation” commentary, but rather a critique of the writing itself. We get to dabble in a couple other stories featuring characters from other dimensions, but the game focuses on Jack. I typically love this style of storytelling because we can experience a universe from multiple perspectives rather than hearing about it through one lens.

In Echo Generation 2‘s 9-hour jaunt, though, we get attempted depth shoehorned in through exposition and forced relationships. Expect to encounter a lot of “Ah, yes, I knew you from so long ago when you were once an agent at such-and-such during that time when you etc.” Developers have a few avenues to take in lieu of this delivery, such as a flashback. Instead, we get the kind of prolonged dialogue that’s all tell and no show in a fashion sometimes joked about in old comic books.

The plot itself piggybacks hard on Stranger Things, but I don’t mind that, as we don’t often see this sort of sci-fi approach in video games. Some of the places the story goes are fascinating in their potential, but the writing doesn’t stick the landing. Even by the end of the game, I could tell the developers wanted the converging storylines to blossom into a deep bond between all the otherworldly characters, but that’s hard to accomplish in nine hours when coupled with the aforementioned critiques.

I enjoyed the variety of characters, such as the animalistic companions with their quirks, but these charming asides only stand out due to the otherwise lackluster storytelling. Simply including these types of characters diversifies the storytelling and contributes to the worldbuilding, but does little to bolster the prose. At the very least, the characters mostly boast unique combat styles to diversify gameplay… somewhat.

Sometimes, combat can accentuate the storytelling in games, though the combat in Echo Generation 2 almost feels tacked on. Expect to run around a map in 2.5D in order to click on objects, fulfill fetch quests, and run into enemies that typically can’t be avoided. Combat involves a turn-based, card-based design that we’ve all seen before at this point. Gaining action points over time with levels, players begin by using one card from their hand to usually hit the enemy, shield themselves, or buff themselves. Then, the enemy goes, and so on.

Again, some fresh, fun ideas are here, but they lack depth or sophisticated execution. Perhaps the aim of the game was to be lighthearted and short, so the design doesn’t demand complexity, but that stands in the face of the attempted serious plot. The cards include standard mechanics like attacking, blocking, healing, debuffs, and buffs; however, cards also include colored symbols which can synergize in some characters. More importantly, they can stagger the enemy who has a random set of symbols over their heads. Knock out all the symbols by selecting matching attacks, and the enemy’s stance is broken.

Now, Echo Generation 2 suggests the stagger system has some magnificent impact on combat so that you can really lay the hammer down, but I never found this to have a momentous influence. I never noticed damage increases, I never gained an extra turn, my character didn’t buff—nothing.

Like a deflating balloon, all excitement petered out. Most fights devolve into attack, attack, attack, and heal when you get a bit too low. Defeating singular foes in multi-enemy combat doesn’t even significantly change combat, because the enemies still take only one turn. The only incentive to knock an enemy out is to avoid them healing from a lifeleech attack. Bleeding, poisoning, and so on don’t have enough of an impact to significantly change the way fights play out, meaning I just used the card with the biggest number. To make matters worse, the branching skill trees across level-ups are just small percent or number increases in various stats.

Echo Generation 2’s visuals stand out above everything else. I’m not typically one for voxel artwork, but it works here, and probably worked especially well in the first game given the light-hearted delivery. The characters have a Minecrafty vibe to them, and the world is reasonably well-detailed across all dimensions presented. Combat animations remain lacking, though, and the skill special effects don’t ignite the imagination. Similarly, the music seems to try to emulate the Stranger Things vibe, which I didn’t mind at all, but the music in no way matches the big emotions or mood of Stranger Things. Like everything else, it feels flat.

I don’t often comment on controls in games because I feel like most games have gotten to the point where the controls are always smooth, but Echo Generation 2 falters here as well. Selecting cards can be a bit of a struggle at times as a card will sort of “stick” and be hard to de-select, which meant that I was playing a card I had not intended. Not the end of the world as the combat’s pretty simple, but this is a needless frustration.

Writing these reviews feels gross, because I know this is a small studio that worked hard on Echo Generation 2, but I have to be honest—I did not enjoy myself much at all. Playing felt akin to biting into a chunky voxel burger that had no flavor whatsoever. Just mushy, cubey goop hanging down the sides of my mouth. I see good ideas here that needed fleshing out, and maybe that the developers were trying to do too many things at once—including taking a chance with the tone shift. I’m hopeful they keep at it and find their stride.

The success of indie farming sims like Stardew Valley and the resurgence in popularity of long-running series like Story of Seasons and Rune Factory have ushered in a new era of farming sim/RPG hybrids seeking to capture the ever-growing community of Cozy Gamers. While most of these titles stick to the 2D pixel art visual style popularized by Stardew Valley, more developers are beginning to tap into the vibrant, polygonal worlds of the PlayStation 2 era.

One such title is Town of Zoz from Studio Pixanoh, a unique take on the farming sim/RPG genre that wears its visual (Radiata Stories, Dawn of Mana, Dark Cloud 2) and cultural (Central and South American traditions) inspirations on its sleeve. Town of Zoz nails the aesthetic presentation and is buoyed by an engaging premise and charming cast, but falters in its technical foibles and combat mechanics, offering an experience full of promise that doesn’t quite deliver. 

Town of Zoz’s narrative is initially promising, with our plucky young hero Ito returning to his hometown (the titular Zoz) after spending a significant period of time in the wilds accompanied only by his spirit companion, Zee. Upon arriving back home, it becomes immediately clear what motivated Ito’s change of scenery; his warm, good-natured mother Eeza is happy to see him, but his gruff, taciturn father Conki seems significantly less thrilled.

This core conflict between Ito and his dad provides the foundation for Ito’s character motivations, as he tries both to win his father’s approval and step out of his shadow. The cause of their rift seems to be Ito’s shamanistic abilities and his friendship with spirits like Zee. Conki is a warrior who previously fought to protect Zoz from unruly spirits and thus views all spirit creatures with distrust. Much of the storyline involves Conki begrudgingly teaching Ito the traditions of their people and the duties he must assume as father passes the mantle to son. Ito bristles beneath the weight of his father’s judgment and expectations, and seeks to find his own path.

While the story in Town of Zoz takes a while to get going initially, and meanders a bit in its later acts, the growth and development of the father-son relationship between the two (and Ito’s parallel relationship with Zee) provides a satisfying journey.

The town of Zoz is a vibrant, lively place full of interesting characters to interact with. Ito has a chummy relationship with Boomi, a courier and athlete who repeatedly helps Ito in his journey (when she’s not getting herself into trouble). He nerds out with Zade, the town’s junk dealer who upgrades Ito’s abilities using soul carts (devices that contain spirit power and look suspiciously like Nintendo 64 cartridges). The local smith Osana acts as a sort of big sister to Ito, looking out for him despite shouldering many other burdens from the townsfolk.

Interacting with these characters was always a joy, and Town of Zoz understands how integral developing a sense of community is for a farming RPG set in a single location. As the story shifts into darker territory in the latter half, exploring the struggles of these characters through Ito’s eyes kept me going, even when other aspects of the game lost their luster. 

The strongest aspect of Town of Zoz is easily the visual design. The game’s cutscenes are impressively detailed hand-drawn animations full of expressive movements influenced in equal parts by anime and Saturday morning cartoons. The in-engine visuals are no slouch either, with the colorful, vibrant South American cultural setting establishing a unique identity while also evoking other low-poly, cell-shaded masterpieces like Mega Man Legends or Dark Cloud 2.

The music incorporates a mix of electronic and Latin American influences to deliver a robust soundscape unlike that of other games in the genre, lending the setting a sense of authenticity beyond mere set-dressing. The character designs incorporate traditional Central American indigenous fashion with modern sensibilities, conveying a social and cultural framework that feels familiar to Latin American culture, yet also suitably fantastical.

Unfortunately, for as polished and well-executed as the aesthetics and narrative elements are, the game stumbles repeatedly in its game design. Although I introduced Town of Zoz by comparing it to other popular farming RPG series like Rune Factory, the distribution between these core focuses is much more lopsided here. Whereas most of the most popular titles in the genre have a healthy mix of dungeon crawling combat and farming/social sim gameplay, the farming and social aspects are an overall minor portion of the overall gameplay experience in Town of Zoz.

Ito has a few small fields surrounding his family home where he can plant crops, but beyond watering them each day, there really isn’t much interaction required. There are a decent number of crops on offer, and you can sell them to raise cash or use them as cooking ingredients. However, they don’t have any use in a larger crafting system, nor are there seasonal shifts or a calendar system to manage. While Ito does have a stamina bar, it’s only relevant during combat, so the addictive day-by-day planning, preparation, and time management that defines the core gameplay loop in most farming RPGs is absent here.

Town of Zoz‘s farming feeds primarily into the cooking mechanics, and although this emphasis on cooking traditional Central American cuisine is thematically fitting, it lacks a meaningful purpose in gameplay. Cooking takes the form of a basic minigame where you must complete a series of simple quicktime event button presses under a set time limit (quite similar to the crafting lives in Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time). All food you can cook comes with its own specific buff to Ito’s stats or abilities, but you can only obtain one buff from food per day. Any additional food you cook and consume will simply restore health until the first buff received fades away the next day. 

This could potentially lead to strategic planning around which foods to prepare and consume, but unfortunately, the recipes you have access to are heavily restricted by your progress in the story. For most of Town of Zoz‘s run time, you don’t have enough recipes where the choices between them feel meaningful, and most days begin with Eeza cooking and feeding Ito a specific meal according to the story, forcing you into particular buffs and eliminating any opportunity for player agency. I found the integration of the various dishes in the story to be thoughtfully done, but the overall implementation of cooking mechanics into the gameplay loop to be rather disappointing. 

The biggest sore spot for Town of Zoz lies with its combat mechanics. Combat takes place from a zoomed-out, fixed-angle camera perspective, and Ito has a basic three-hit combo he can perform with his machete as well as a heavy attack to end combos. You can also freely control his spirit companion, Zee, with the right stick to possess and weaken enemies, or leave him to his own devices to attack and hamper the enemies.

There is a dash Ito can use to dodge out of the way, but it’s rather slow and without invincibility frames (meaning you can still be hit while using it). Dashing out of the way of an attack often puts you right in the path of another aggressive enemy attack with no way to react. The general sluggishness of the controls affects all aspects of the combat, and you cannot cancel out of a combo or heavy attack once you’ve committed to it.

Enemies are comparatively quite agile and hit hard, leaving many situations where avoiding all damage is impossible, and soaking up large amounts of damage is inevitable. To mitigate this, Ito carries a lunchbox storing copious healing potions and food items to restore health. Other than a quick healing animation, there is no real downside to chugging down restorative consumables. These factors all combine to create a combat system that feels sluggish and unwieldy, but is also devoid of challenge in most encounters since it’s optimal to tank hits and heal repeatedly.  

Further exacerbating these combat system woes are the damage sponge enemies. At the beginning of Town of Zoz, it’s not so bad, but about halfway through the story, the nightmare sections are introduced. These locations feature corrupted versions of normal enemies that deal more damage and possess significantly more health. The underlying mechanical problems keep the challenge from becoming insurmountable in these areas, but the increased enemy health (and lack of a damage boost for Ito to compensate) turns battles against the nightmare-infused creatures into sluggish wars of attrition as you slowly whittle down their health while gulping down healing items. 

Town of Zoz tries to incorporate a little more variety into the experience by introducing puzzles and short platforming challenges, but these sections are so simple (or so frustrating) that they do little to break up the monotony of the long, drawn-out combat encounters. Most puzzles are simple box carrying, switch slipping, torch lighting affairs you’ve seen in countless other games.

The platforming is poorly implemented, as Ito does not possess a dedicated jump command and can only jump if approaching a ledge at full sprint (similar to how jumping functions in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time). Since most platforming challenges are located in spaces that double as combat arenas, sprinting requires the use of Ito’s limited stamina, and running up to a ledge just to run out of stamina right before the edge and fall straight off is an all too common occurrence. 

Since the dungeons and combat encounters make up about 80-90% of the game’s runtime, particularly in the latter half of the game, these issues pile up and make the overall experience a chore to play rather than a joy like the vibrant visuals would suggest. Had the farming and cooking mechanics been more robust, or if there were more variety in the gameplay loop beyond the core combat and dungeons, I might look on my time spent in Town of Zoz more fondly.

As it stands, these core design problems, coupled with a host of technical issues (frequent crashes, bugs that softlock the game, textures loading improperly half the time, etc.), leave me unable to give a wholehearted recommendation. Perhaps if the developers tweak the combat system and iron out some of the technical problems, a trip to Zoz will become one worth taking. For now, it’s better to spend your summer vacation elsewhere.

For decades, Irem’s R-Type series has stood the test of time thanks to its well-established shoot-’em-up credentials, complex bosses, and diverse weapon upgrades. In 2007’s R-Type Tactics, the franchise flipped this legacy on its head, swapping fast-paced action for a turn-based strategy RPG packed with Earth technology and vicious Bydo adversaries, alongside a fiendish difficulty curve. While 2009 brought a sequel, R-Type Tactics II: Operation Bitter Chocolate, it was never localized and remained exclusive to Japan. Now, developer Granzella (formed by former Item staff) has remastered these entries for modern platforms, including a new series of encounters, as R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos. This collection’s new graphical sheen and interlocking strategic systems make it easier than ever to enjoy the demanding and evocative strategy. However, a lack of onboarding, slow pace, and a barebones story sour this call to arms.

In R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos, you command the Earth Space Corps during a desperate interstellar crusade to eradicate the Bydo Empire—a terrifying, ever-evolving biomechanical alien armada. As the fleet pushes deeper into hostile space, victory demands a heavy toll. Without giving too much away, the second half of this campaign shifts to the Bydo perspective, forcing you to wage war against humans. The sequel expands the narrative scope by introducing human factionalism. A brutal civil war erupts between the Earth Allied Armed Forces and the Granzella Revolutionary Army, a faction fighting for independence and weaponized Bydo technology. This more complex political strife is further explored through branching paths and shifting moral alliances.

It all looks fantastic: the upgraded scenario cutscenes, R-Type unit rosters, and Bydo adversaries stay true to the original designs while delivering modern visual pop. It’s easy to identify brooding Striders, deploy distinct Force designs, and navigate massive, complex Bydo platforms. Capital ships and towering bosses dominate the screen with lethal, finely animated details and limbs. Sumptuous background and level designs showcase a mix of biomaterials, floating Bydo structures, as well as eye-popping dimension effects. Sharp colors and shading enhance the ship models, which shine during the animated 3D combat vignettes. While you’ll likely skip these cutscenes during longer encounters, they add immersion to the turn-based actions. Voiceovers and a driving, tense soundtrack complete the strong visual and auditory experience of R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos.

Overall, control and selection work fine, and either controllers or keyboard/mouse can navigate the menu-driven action. However, the gameplay loop frequently slows to a crawl. Even at maximum animation speeds, managing a large army is a chore; clicking through dozens of individual units to move them and assign actions reveals the clumsy, dated bones of the 2007 original. While the developers spruced up the user interface and added helpful tooltips for various units, onboarding remains one of the game’s glaring weaknesses. The title completely lacks an interactive tutorial. Instead, it expects you to wade through a dense, dry, lore dump of text. Compounding this issue, the game fails to explain critical combat keywords and unit statistics well, leaving you to learn their actual battlefield impact through trial and error.

During the tactical combat phase, you command your entire army before handing the turn over to the enemy. Each unit can move once and execute a command—such as launching a direct assault, deploying a defensive decoy, or utilizing specialized support skills. Tactically, R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos relies on familiar genre staples, yet it deploys mechanics that delightfully resonate with its shoot-’em-up roots. For instance, fighters can attach deployed Force modules. This homage to the original shooters demands forward-thinking, as docking a module consumes an action but unlocks broader attack and defense configurations on the following turn, depending on the Force configuration. There’s more: your fleet always advances from left to right, with unit models maintaining this rigid orientation. It’s more than just a visual nuance, too: charged shots are only generated to the right of your units, and vice versa for enemies.

R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos’ tactical innovation lies in these franchise-specific mechanics. Balancing long-range artillery units, support craft that resupply ammo and repair hull damage, and multi-attack dreadnoughts transforms the battlefield into an engaging, high-stakes puzzle of positioning and resource management.

As these unit options expand, the true depth of the game’s positioning and tactical tricks comes to the forefront. Success requires mastering specific battlefield counters, such as using weak, harrying attacks to disrupt and cancel an enemy’s devastating charged strikes. Formation management is equally critical; you’d do well to scatter fighter wings to prevent a single enemy line attack from wiping out entire squadrons. Larger ships take more deployment space, often in odd shapes, so there’s further consideration as to whether a large, bulky cruiser will be as effective as several fighter craft. These fundamental principles manifest early in the campaign. Ultimately, Granzella deserves immense credit for how perfectly this strategic dance mirrors the rhythm of the original arcade games: you must constantly calculate when to push forward, when to withdraw, and whether to unleash a devastating strike or defensively deny the enemy their own.

Later levels demand sensible resource management, forcing you to deploy mobile bases to establish vital supply posts deep within enemy territory. The introduction of “desync” craft and phasing abilities radically expands tactical options, allowing ships to pass through solid terrain. This promotes plans to bypass lethal bottlenecks and ambush unsuspecting foes, though it demands a tight supply chain since phasing consumes fuel more rapidly.

Further variations soon mix up even these expectations. Fog of war, water-based levels that significantly reduce movement, and even vertically-aligned levels to render charged shots less useful are just some of the challenges R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos throws at you and your fledgling fleet. When combined with strict turn limits, these mechanics create an incredibly demanding experience.

Like its arcade inspiration, failure in R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos is part of the progression loop; losing a mission but retaining mined resources to reinvest in your fleet is the order of the day. Defeated leaders also slowly accumulate experience, earning minor boosts to health and evasion. Consequently, the game requires far more grinding than it initially lets on. Because the UI provides little direction, you can easily waste precious materials upgrading the wrong ships or unlocking dead-end tech trees. In many ways, the game hearkens back to a punishing, old-school era of design where you’d fail a level just to learn the required loadout and strategy. While not an outright dealbreaker, this trial-by-fire approach becomes tedious as the battles grow longer and more involved.

There’s plenty to sink your teeth into across both games included in R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos, and the three campaigns themselves are dozens of hours long, with an almost endless variety of approaches possible, assuming you have the time and inclination to collect resources and develop new ship designs. Given that part of the campaign involves playing as the Bydo, the options here literally double the possibilities. The sequel includes more visual novel elements, branching mission paths, and dialogue choices during briefings that alter your campaign trajectory, though the narrative is not on a Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics level.

Like a swarm of Bydo filling the screen, R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos is beautiful and compelling, but difficult and overwhelming at times. It’s evidently a huge labour of love, and long-time fans who know their Arrowhead from their Cerberus will have a lot of fun with the game’s clever nuances. For the standard strategy RPG enthusiast, it will require a significant time investment and a willingness to overlook clunkiness in the UI, as well as a rather threadbare story, even in the sequel, where the branching plot points and enhanced characterization are welcome. All those years ago, R-Type initially challenged gamers with, “the fate of two races depends on you. Blast off and strike the evil Bydo Empire!” You’ll have to decide if that fate truly compels you to the far reaches of space and back again. Buckle up: you’re in for a hard fight.

Return to Azure City following a terrible fire as paper clerk and part-time rookie sleuth Justina Smith gets caught up in a mystery that’s far more than it seems. Justina is aided by jovial yet jaded and experienced robbery detective Ernest Hunt, cheerful speed-addicted rookie homicide detective (as well as Justina’s current crush) Sophie Swift, and newcomer arson detective Johnny Fineman. Can this colorful group help Justina solve her latest case? You can discover the mystery’s answer for yourself in the Ace Attorney-inspired visual novel Paper Perjury‘s free DLC expansion, Case 6: Regrets & Perjury.

Paper Perjury‘s Case 6 begins with Justina following up on the paperwork regarding an investigation into a home fire that claimed the life of the exceedingly wealthy socialite Joules Wattson, noticing a discrepancy that indicates the tragedy might not have been an accident. Justina’s no-nonsense, by-the-book boss, Sue P. Earl, gives permission for Justina to go to the crime scene for a follow-up investigation, hoping to confirm her plausible theory.

This soon balloons into a full-fledged murder investigation as hard truths, incongruities, and newly uncovered evidence come to light. Justina and Sophie need to figure out what happened on the night Joules Wattson died by gathering clues and reviewing statements, but they’re going to have to do it while an experienced criminal defense attorney with a stellar win rate breathes down their necks.

Aside from the returning faces of Paper Perjury’s first five cases, Case 6 introduces several new-but-equally memorable and colorful characters. Fineman brings a Detective Gumshoe-esque character trope into the fold, as he sincerely means well but takes most things at face value. The three Wattson brothers, Kelvin, Raiden, and Donner, each have a distinct personality, and their individual storylines go in surprising directions by the time the case runs its course.

Real estate attorney Miriam Corbin and her raven partner Nyx bring a fun sense of the macabre, and I sincerely hope they get expanded roles in future Paper Perjury outings. Kelvin’s partner, Amber Bahn, is an aspiring baker, and her earnest demeanor makes her quite endearing, too. That being said, the most important of the new characters is no doubt defense attorney Wolfhard Huntsman, aka The Bloodhound, replacing on-and-off again rival Ferris Eubank at the interrogation table opposite Justina. He’s given surprising depth and insight later on in the narrative, and is made all the more memorable by his loyal dachshund companion, Krampus.

While the case’s mystery reveals and cast are equally compelling, it should be noted that the gameplay is largely unchanged from Paper Perjury’s first five cases. You, as Justina, go over paperwork during “Clerk Time” segments to figure out discrepancies, which opens up the investigation’s talk and travel segment, in which you get statements and acquire clues. You can also dispute claims made during character statements to amend evidence and intel as needed. Eventually, you’re brought to the interrogation room where you must directly question a witness’s statements either by disputing them or asking questions that lead to amended statements. You can then press on these statements using evidence to show the contrary.

The gameplay loop is solid, and while it’s still sometimes difficult to figure out which lines of dialogue exactly may need to be pressed on or disputed, the system is quite forgiving of mistakes. Anyone who’s played the base game will be able to easily navigate its VN and point-and-click elements. The game also offers a helpful rewind option should you need to go back to a previous text box, and you can manually save at almost any point.

Visually, Paper Perjury‘s pixel-sprite work is a joy to behold, featuring several unique and expressive character animations. Justina’s exasperated eye roll during interrogation sequences never fails to amuse me. While the UI is simple, it does the trick well enough with easy-to-read text. I played on a laptop and found the controls are perfectly suited to either keyboard or game controller layouts. The sound effects and soundtrack also continue to delight, reminding me that I love how the background music speeds up and really captures the sense of the high-speed back-and-forth of interrogation questioning. The script is also quite well-written, with nary a grammatical or typographical error.

Paper Perjury Case 6: Regrets & Perjury is a delightful DLC expansion to a fun, Ace Attorney-inspired mystery VN. I loved seeing Justina, Sophie, and the other returning characters again, as well as meeting new Azure City residents. The case is pretty much a standalone story add-on after the events of the first five cases, but it also throws in some interesting lore and character bits that could potentially hint at things to come in Paper Perjury‘s future.

To top it off, it’s a longer case in four parts total and takes about 3 to 4 hours to reach a conclusion. Plus, it’s entirely free to those who’ve already purchased the base game! Paper Perjury is a lovely indie title, and Case 6 is definitely a return sure to leave fans feeling satisfied and, dare I say it, perhaps even giddy.