For many years, System Shock 2 was one of gaming’s white whales, at least where digital distribution was concerned. A combination of rights issues and a hunt for the source code spearheaded by dedicated fans meant that the game would not see an official release, digital or otherwise, until 2013. At this time, Stephen Kick of Nightdive Studios acquired the rights for it and negotiated to get the game put onto GOG, a store that is famously the home of older, previously forgotten classic PC titles.

Since then, Nightdive went on to release an ‘Enhanced Edition’ of the original System Shock, followed some years later by a full-on Unreal Engine 4 remake, to moderate critical and commercial success. Meanwhile, fans of the second game eagerly waited to see it get a similar treatment, as Nightdive promised in 2019. Though it took a couple more years to finally come to fruition, the System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster (technically 26th, but who’s counting?) has landed!

So, is it the best version of this game? Well, it certainly seems that way! Truth be told, System Shock 2 has been my personal gaming white whale as well. I bought and played the re-release on GOG as a teen, way back when it came out, but I was a little too overwhelmed by the game’s systems and gameplay to fully engage with it properly. I put it on the back burner for many years.

Cut to now, and having just completed my first ever playthrough, I can safely say that System Shock 2 holds up in 2025, and then some. What’s more, Nightdive’s 25th Anniversary Remaster does a (re)masterful job of preserving the original look and experience while adding more than a few little touch-ups here and there.

System Shock 2 takes place 42 years after the events of System Shock, with the destruction of Citadel Station and the supposed defeat of the rogue AI, SHODAN. While on its maiden voyage, the starship Von Braun, accompanied by a UNN military vessel, the Rickenbacker, responds to a distress signal on the planet Tau Ceti V. There, they encounter a parasitic alien collective who call themselves “The Many.” The Many then proceeds to infect almost the entire crew of both ships, even the Von Braun’s onboard AI, Xerxes.

You play as an unnamed soldier, whose training and assignment(s) you choose during the game’s opening act. As one of the last remaining people on the ship unmolested by The Many, the Von Braun’s lead scientist, Dr. Janice Polito, tasks you to excise this threat before it has a chance of using the ship as a conduit to infect nearby human settlements.

As you journey through the ship’s many steel corridors and weave through sections of dangerous machinery and scattered debris, all the while fighting or fleeing from the mutated hordes, you hear the stories of the ship’s once-human crew before, during, and after the discovery on Tau Ceti V.

These audio logs are, for the most part, well told and well delivered, with a few sketchy performances here and there. You may get attached to certain crew members and their stories, and can potentially even find them (or what remains of them anyway) during your travels across the ship, which makes the logs all the more captivating to hunt down, floor by floor.

There is, however, one especially notable point, besides the fact that the Von Braun is an excellent setting to inhabit. It is, after all, one of the most, if not the most, famous things about System Shock 2, so much so that I was already aware of it before playing. That is, of course, the story’s big twist.

As it turns out, Dr. Janice Polito, the woman who has been guiding you and chaperoning you throughout the Von Braun, has been dead the whole time. The voice on the other end of the comms belongs to none other than SHODAN, the rogue AI that terrorised Citadel Station in the first System Shock and who was presumed destroyed.

It truly speaks to the quality of System Shock 2‘s narrative that, despite being aware of that twist ahead of time, it didn’t lessen my enjoyment of the story, nor the impact of that reveal. If anything, it only highlights how cleverly and sneakily they hide it from the player, leading up to that moment. Since you’re hearing audio logs from the ship’s crew, that also includes Janice herself. You start to notice that her voice on the tapes sounds starkly different to the voice that is guiding you over your comms, which may well clue you in ahead of time, or just slip by you and make the reveal hit harder.

There are a lot of systems and mechanics at play in System Shock 2, a fact that initially intimidated me and prevented me from playing it for many years. Now, with more RPG and immersive sim experience under my belt, especially having just played the remake of the first game, I came to see that, while playing System Shock 2 may seem like jumping into the deepest end of a freezing cold pool, once you adapt to how it feels, you’d be surprised at how quickly you become acclimated to it.

The opening hour of the game is tutorials and building your character in a very immersive, diegetic way. Since you’re a soldier stationed on the Von Braun, you’re taken through several training courses, easing you through the three main pillars of gameplay: Weapons, Technical, and Psi Skills.

The first is your standard first-person shooter crash course, acclimating you to the game’s arsenal, how weapon skills feed into your proficiencies with them, and explaining functions of the different types of weapons you may find throughout the Von Braun (Standard, Energy, Heavy, and Exotic). The second is a crash course in hacking, which allows you to bypass keypads and access locked rooms, hack vending machines to give you discounts and/or more items, and let you break into locked chests to (very occasionally) get lucrative loot.

The third and final training is a crash course in Psi abilities, which are new to the sequel. Using a strange metallic orb that’s hooked right into your arm, you can use psionic abilities like telekinesis, or you can conjure an energy shield around you for temporary protection. Psi skills are quite the investment, with a very involved, multi-tiered skill tree attached to it, so it’s generally recommended you either specialise in armaments or abilities for maximum enjoyment. You can, of course, mix and match, but you may have more fun going all-in ahead of time.

At least, that’s what I did. I played just under two hours of the game at first, specialising in Psi skills, before starting over and changing gears to weaponry. Not that the Psi skills didn’t seem fun to play with, far from it. It just seemed to me like more of a second-playthrough investment, and I was seeking more of a basic boots-on-the-ground gunplay experience for my first run.

Right after getting acclimated to the game’s systems and mechanics, you have the choice of which branch of the military you’d like your character to be a part of: Marines, Navy, or O.S.A. (Orbital Systems Agency). To put it plainly, they break down into gunplay, hacking, or psionics, respectively, as to what your character will get a head start in. Outside of the initial gameplay elements, it’s a largely arbitrary decision, serving mostly to fuel further roleplaying for the protagonist, if that’s your jam.

I initially chose the Marines, but changed to the Navy after realizing that hacking was much more my speed and seemed lucrative, aligning with the immersive sim experience I preferred to achieve in System Shock 2.

I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about what is perhaps my favorite, and the most consistently high-quality, part of System Shock 2: the atmosphere. If we’re talking about immersive settings in video games, where everything comes together in such a way that you cannot tear your eyes away from the screen for a single second because you’re so captivated by what’s fed to you, then the Von Braun in System Shock 2 would be near the top of that list, and I say so boldly, proudly, and with no hyperbole.

The sound design in this game is immaculate, from the terrifying screeches and groans that the mutant cyborg enemies in this game make as they come charging towards you to the unnerving creaks, bumps, and eerie ambient humming that the ship makes as you navigate its corridors, unsure of what horrors await you around every corner. This is further enhanced by Xerxes’ occasional announcements over the ship’s intercom, either eerily reading off bulletins as if nothing’s going on, or pleading with remaining crew to join The Many and become part of their hive.

Top it off with a toe-tapping, pulsating techno-synth-drum & bass score that matches the intensity of the game’s look and gameplay, composed by Eric Brosius, Josh Randall, and none other than Ramin Djawadi (who would go on to craft the iconic scores for Game of Thrones, Westworld and the Fallout TV series), and it becomes all too clear why System Shock 2 has been revered over the 26 years since its release, and why it’s re-release was the subject of such high demand and fervor once upon a time on the internet.

With all of these intertwining gameplay elements combining, it might surprise you that this remaster is compatible with controllers, which is how I played it. Yet, full credit to Nightdive here—despite a few hiccups along the way, they do manage to make it mostly work. There are quite a few UI elements to keep track of in System Shock 2, and it can be a chore to cycle through to the one you want, especially in tense situations. However, I still enjoyed their translation of the original’s mouse-and-keyboard experience to the controller experience.

The game’s crummy weapon degradation system highlights the mild frustrations. It still feels like a chore, even if you’re maxed out in the maintenance skill. It’s not exactly game-breaking by any means, but it can be irritating to constantly re-up your weapons’ condition, especially since they don’t last quite as long as you’d like them to last at full condition.

Visually, it still looks like a game from 1999, but in the best way. I wouldn’t have complained if it were a straight port and it looked exactly the same, but it seems Nightdive spent a lot of time and energy making System Shock 2 look fresh and crisp, while still unmistakably like a first-person RPG from the turn of the century. As I understand it, they even incorporated fan-favourite mods of the original game into the remaster to help achieve this nouveau-retro look, which is a decision that I’m always a huge fan of (provided there is respect to and permission from the original mod authors).

It’s truly a wonderful feeling when you get around to a game that you’ve put off for so long, especially one as revered as this, and come to find that it is every bit as incredible as you’d been promised for all these years.

Cheers to you, System Shock 2, for living up to your own hype. And cheers to you especially, Nightdive Studios, for bringing it back in such a loving, passionate way so that others may experience such a titan of gaming once again, or for the first time.

After 15 years in the making, Freehold Games’ Caves of Qud finally left Early Access in December 2024. After half a year of playing, I finally finished the campaign and feel qualified to review it. Many reviews I’ve seen of Caves of Qud begin similarly: the writer tells a fun anecdote particular to their playthrough. Such stories help highlight the game’s complex emergent and procedural systems, the breadth of gameplay possibilities it offers, and the variety of original experiences that can stem from that.

Caves of Qud is not the only game to captivate players in this way. Some obvious comparisons include titles like Kenshi, Noita, and of course Dwarf Fortress—games that a player might have barely scratched the surface of after fifty-plus hours of investment, but seem to become “Overwhelmingly Positive” (in Steam parlance) for those able to break past the enormous and intimidating tip of the iceberg.

I have a complex relationship with games like these. When I read anecdotes like the ones I mentioned, or see how people create full-fledged fiction based on Dwarf Fortress instances, I want nothing more than to experience that appeal for myself. Then I try the game. I get overwhelmed by the sheer number of immediate options, lose motivation from the lack of direction and necessary time commitment, or even struggle to figure out how to interact with the damn software. “Maybe I’m an idiot,” I think. But then I remind myself that not all games are for all people, and that it’s no sin not to gel with ones that require extensive research just to get started.

Word on the digital streets was that Caves of Qud is different. More accessible. Could be enjoyed simply as an RPG. I wanted to believe this, and I’m delighted to report that this is a (mostly) fair assessment. After getting used to the wacky control scheme—whether playing on keyboard or with the arguably superior(?!) gamepad controls—you can quickly get going on seeing what the richly imaginative yet apocalyptically hostile world of Qud has to offer. Like the original Ultima games, game objects move and react in tandem with your actions. You melee attack by bumping into enemies and can mix in skills or ranged attacks. The basics are simple enough. Thing is, you have a lot to learn beyond the basics, and you will do so by dying.

In its default setting, Caves of Qud is a roguelike. I imagine this is the default because the developers want players to treat death as a beautiful oops. For example, if you receive a message that an enemy on the screen has started “sundering your mind” and you do not immediately rush to kill it, your head will explode. Oops!

Death is a way to gain knowledge of Qud’s fascinating alien logic. It’s also an opportunity to try something new through the phenomenal character builder. In terms of vast and tangible variety, Caves of Qud is a contender for the best character-building I’ve seen. Beginners can try out the many thoughtfully crafted presets while veterans can get as weird as they want with it.

Alongside weapon specializations and the potential of non-weapon skills like Tinkering and Cooking, the key element of most character builds is their mutations. Mutations can involve anything from extra limbs (with equippable slots), status-inducing excretions, teleportation, mole-like digging claws, and about 70 other wildly creative perks. Say you want to play a gunslinger: how about one holding pistols in each of their four arms with the ability to unload full clips in tandem through a forcefield? Or an axe-wielder that shoots a freezing ray, rushes in for close-quarter combat, and starts savagely dismembering your enemy’s limbs? Every character I tried in Caves of Qud felt distinct and playable, although some builds were certainly easier to get started with than others.

You can get new mutations as you level, but RNG will decide the limited selections to prevent players from reusing the exact same busted build they discover every time. This also helps ensure every run and character you play with feels uniquely memorable. There’s also a second character type, True Kins, who have compelling lore and gameplay differences from Mutants. Instead of mutations, you build your True Kin by finding cybernetic implants that you can modify yourself with. It’s a cool, alternative playstyle, but I wouldn’t recommend starting with it.

I know there are RPG fans out there who get more out of frequently restarting a game with a new build over focusing on completing a campaign. Caves of Qud is built with them in mind. And yet, as someone who falls into the completion camp, I never felt like I was playing the wrong way by opting for the alternative Roleplaying mode. This setting is exactly what it sounds like: playing the game as a more conventional RPG.

Instead of starting anew when you die, in Roleplaying mode you end up back in the last settlement you visited. This helps immensely if you want to prioritize getting through the game’s difficult main questline. Yet there’s still enough punishment for death to make every step you take (“every move you make~”) a thrilling, involving affair. While the world of Qud features virtually endless explorable dungeons underlying its surface, each main quest features unique challenges that test your knowledge of the game’s logic and systems. The deaths you face when first confronting these challenges will sometimes feel cheap. However, persevering through them with creative workarounds provides a novel sense of reward.  

But Caves of Qud isn’t all about the creativity and variety of the gameplay. It won this year’s IGF award for Excellence in Narrative against some worthy nominees, and I can understand why. Behind the labyrinth of space, systems, and procedurality is a carefully crafted main story, set characters, and expansive lore. A salt-and-chrome-drenched world where rare fresh water is both a necessity for survival and the main currency. A world where species of humanoids, robots, plants, animals, and everything in between have their own sense of cultural identity and make up factions you can win the favor of or become despised by. It doesn’t feel quite like any fantasy or sci-fi world I’ve engaged with before, and that’s a remarkable achievement.

Visually, the world of Qud feels Ultima-like in its minimalist graphics, Night Mode aesthetics, and grid-based layout. Even with these graphical constraints, though, the atmosphere oozes character and arcane intrigue. It helps when the writing is so original and evocative. NPCs and lore texts will describe aspects of the world to you with word combinations that are based more on stimulating your imagination than logical exposition. And yet these descriptions don’t feel completely illogical either. There is tangible worldbuilding here, don’t get me wrong. It’s just based far more on vibes than the plainspoken (and often boring) writing you’ll find in so many other RPGs.

Another contributor to the dense atmosphere is the bonkers OST. It’s like the composer learned about music composition by listening to nothing but the original Fallout soundtrack on repeat until they spiritually transcended. The soundscapes range from the psychically violent to the anxiously serene. Alongside the writing, the OST does some heavy lifting in providing the world its aesthetic flair to compensate for the necessarily simple graphical style. I only wish there were more tracks, considering how much game is here.

These stable narrative elements join the developer’s innovative approach to proceduralizing history. Freehold Games invented code to modify the descriptive text of certain bits of the world of Qud’s history every playthrough. For example, there are always five sultans that are foundational figures in Qud’s past, but their names and historical achievements are malleable. Conflicting accounts can also exist across sources—lending an aura of historical mystery and authenticity. Each run therefore results in a new gameplay and narrative experience. This system leads to discovering evocative and amusing flavor text like, “The villagers of Damor laid offering at the feet of Batul, legendary feral dog, in exchange for wisdom about finding the ideal place for hissing under the Beetle Moon.” The developers have essentially executed the peak creative function of GenAI for videogame storytelling without even using GenAI.   

Despite the degree of care that went into the main story progression, some unavoidable truths come to light when looking at the Steam achievements. Less than 20% of players completed the first main questline. The second main questline? Less than 10%. And less than 2% have earned the achievement for completing the game. Granted, much of the community likely got sidetracked having the kinds of experiences covered across the other 140 achievements—like “Wear your own severed face on your face,” or “Project your mind into a goat’s body.” Fair enough. But it highlights what is simultaneously the game’s greatest strength and weakness: there’s a lot to take in. 

Of course, an essential part of the appeal here is that each player, and each playthrough, really will result in unique stories to tell. You don’t have to dig deep on the net to see a community full of fans excitedly narrating a unique, amusing, and/or tragic experience that Caves of Qud’s deep simulation allowed to happen. This procedural brilliance, combined with the lovingly vibes-based worldbuilding, leaves the door open for endless possibilities of emergent gameplay moments and narrative interpretation alike. Caves of Qud understands and confidently leverages the unique strengths of this medium towards its own ends.

As someone generally more motivated to complete a playthrough than get caught up in a cycle of experimenting and restarting, I’m not sure I’m the main audience for Caves of Qud. This makes me even more impressed by what a good time I had with it. Whether you’re signing up for one playthrough or one hundred, it’s hard not to be captivated by its depth and imagination once you get a sense of how the world works. And if I were the type of player who liked to invest the bulk of my gaming time in one single-player experience, this would be a rabbit hole worth falling into.

Sometimes, a name hides far more than it suggests. Dice Gambit sounds like a modest, digital board game built around simple bets. So imagine my surprise when close inspection uncovered a cleverly designed tactical RPG packed with interlocking dice-based mechanics, sharp class-based combat, and nuanced visual flair. Though the game offers a limited variation in level scenarios and a fairly basic story, Dice Gambit brims with dense decision-making that encourages experimentation with strategies and combinations, accompanied by the satisfying clack-click of virtual dice. Ready your bones—this gambit is well worth the risk.

Dice Gambit unfolds in the Italian-esque city of Neo-Talis, where three ruling families each control a different aspect of urban life. You play as a custom-created scion serving as an Inquisitor: a member of the city’s security force tasked with clearing out Chromatics. These mischievous, amorphous blobs of color wreak havoc among the city’s residents whenever they spawn. Most of the narrative centers around running missions for each faction as they gradually pull the Inquisitors into their political schemes and personal agendas. The story holds together well, written with a comic, tongue-in-cheek tone that keeps things brisk. While family members can die permanently, individual losses carry little dramatic weight, akin to a rogue-lite. Narrative certainly is not the highlight of Dice Gambit although the level of customization (including different positive and negative traits) for each family member is impressive, as is the dynamic portrait art.

The Inquisitor’s home base functions as a hub for selecting quests and managing character progression. From there, you use the city map to choose missions aimed at clearing Neo-Talis of its chromatic infestations. Most missions unfold in the three main factions’ territory, ranging from bustling docklands and gritty city streets to sleek corporate high-rises. Dice Gambit shines with a distinctive art style that favors bright colors and exaggerated character expressions, giving each faction a unique visual identity through their livery and trim. Combat maps follow a painterly aesthetic, reinforcing each faction’s theme with similar, cohesive color palettes. The soundtrack mixes perky R&B, lite techno, and synthwave to keep the energy levels light, while scattered voiceover work adds some character.

All of this serves as flavorful side dressing—the Dice Gambit main course is the class and combat systems, which fully capitalize on a smooth, satisfying dice-rolling mechanic. Missions play out on hex-based grid maps, with characters and enemies acting in turn order based on initiative. To take any action, you roll dice to generate icons: Movement, Defense, Attack, Chroma, or Signature. Your available actions depend entirely on the results. Rolled a bunch of Movement and Defense? Maybe it’s time to reposition and play it safe. Movement and Chroma? That’s your cue to either dive into the fray or hold off—Chroma can substitute for any icon, but comes at a cost. It gradually empowers enemies. Bad roll? Use one of your limited rerolls to shift the odds. The system is fast, intuitive, and surprisingly deep. Even in its simplest moments, the decision-making feels empowering, and the complexity that unfolds only makes it more rewarding.

This core system ties seamlessly into character progression, where active and passive abilities unlock over time to use in battle. Each character has a set of stats to upgrade, directly influencing dice outcomes and ability effectiveness. For instance, Dice Power determines how many dice a character rolls per turn, and reaching each multiple of ten adds an extra die. Attack Power and Buff Power increase the potency of offensive and support abilities through a percentage of their value. In addition to a class-defined Signature ability (more on that shortly), characters can learn up to three active abilities and a variety of passives, assuming they survive. Active abilities require specific dice combinations to trigger. The devastating Lethal Strike, for example, demands four Attack icons, while the armor-boosting Inspire needs just a Movement and Signature die. It’s a smooth, elegant extension of the core dice mechanic, and one that enriches strategy without adding friction.

Stamina works differently from other stats and can’t increase in the same way. It measures a character’s level of exhaustion, and all stats take a percentage-based penalty as it drops. Overusing the same characters significantly lowers their combat effectiveness, making frequent rotation essential. Regaining Stamina also costs more than restoring Health, so swapping characters strategically becomes key to their survival and effectiveness. That said, the Stamina loss mechanic can feel overly punishing, even with a decent-sized roster. Don’t be surprised if the developers adjust it in the first few weeks or months post-launch.

Things get even juicier when you start combining interlocking abilities. Some attacks ignite the terrain or stack damage based on how far an enemy moves. Pair that with a character who can forcibly reposition enemies, and you can rack up serious damage, during and outside of their turns. Another strategy involves stacking armor buffs from one character onto another who deals damage every time they receive armor. Once again, damage can be outside the usual turn order. And that’s just a glimpse of the many combinations you can create.

Each family member’s ability and class progression depends on their core character class. You unlock these classes by raising reputation with different factions, so your choice of missions directly affects which classes become available and when. Early classes focus on simpler roles. The Berzerker excels at dealing heavy damage to multiple enemies and can restore health through active and passive abilities. The Vanguard specializes in defense, with smart ability synergies that reward stacking Armor. Later classes introduce more tactical depth. The Sniper deals high damage from long range, but often at the cost of movement or a wait time to the trigger, while the Translocationalist thrives on mass mobility. From the mid-point of the game, matching the right class to the right mission becomes essential. Once a character maxes out their first class, they can take on a new one. With careful planning, you can create hybrid builds like a glass-cannon Sniper who later pivots into a more defensive Vanguard.

Missions in Dice Gambit unfold as branching encounter points once you select them and choose the team. Each mission map is procedurally generated, giving the experience a rogue-lite feel. You encounter a mix of combat nodes, health recovery points, wealth nodes, and map-reveal nodes along the route. On larger maps, planning becomes increasingly important, since your party has a limited amount of Energy to move before reaching the final encounter. While some nodes can replenish Energy, finding them depends on the path you choose. Unfortunately, running out of Energy starts means losing character Stamina in order to move, or potentially leaving the mission early and wasting a week of time.

Chromatics make up most of the enemies in the game, appearing in mission types like clearouts, escort runs, and timed “grab-the-macguffin” objectives. Since the original demo, the developers have introduced a variety of new opponents. Now, you face chromatics that summon swarms of smaller units to overwhelm you, mobs that retaliate against melee attacks, and others that boost their allies’ armor. While the tactical variety keeps combat engaging, many enemies and maps start to blur together and lose their distinctiveness by the second act. This is partly due to their design—amorphous, chromatic blobs don’t naturally lend themselves to highly unique or visually striking appearances, but identifying their type is difficult on a busy battlefield. Would a little more distinctiveness hurt?

Dice Gambit deserves significant credit for its difficulty options, especially in supporting the game’s relatively short campaign and encouraging multiple playthroughs. While default settings exist, the developers built a nuanced system of customizable modifiers to allow players to fine-tune the challenge. These settings contribute to an overall difficulty rating and let players tweak specific aspects, such as increasing XP gain, weakening enemies, adding more dice, or boosting the number of rerolls. Players can activate any combination of these and the dozen or so further options, offering many permutations. Easier settings make it much simpler to build and maintain a consistent core family team. In contrast, higher difficulties require careful management of the family bloodline and a strong grasp of class synergies to succeed.

There’s much more worth a quick shoutout: the faction relationship awards to unlock classes and boost new character development; the way chromatics mutate with each Act, ramping up the difficulty as the story moves forward; and the terrain effects that can either teleport you across the battlefield or grant extra dice if you land on them. Once again, everything feeds smoothly into the core mechanics—it never feels like something thrown in just for the sake of complexity. And like the rest of the game, these elements roll out gradually, giving you time to adapt your strategy and learn each new twist as it comes.

A few criticisms arise from Dice Gambit’s ambition and complexity. While the tutorial covers the basics, it doesn’t offer much guidance on family or stat development. It’s easy to overextend by recruiting too many scions or, conversely, over-invest in just a few while still learning the systems. Mission crew requirements only appear once the missions show up on the map, so early runs can leave you over- or under-prepared without realizing it. Another issue is the environments. By Act Two, the same office floors, Renaissance-style streets, and docklands start to blur together. They look great, but the repetition makes them forgettable. More variety in map design or art assets would go a long way, in the same manner as the Chromatic enemy design. The randomization system is a barrier in this, but greater terrain variation would really help. Finally, I ran into the occasional soft-lock during turns, usually after alt-tabbing. These weren’t frequent, but when they happened, I had to restart the encounter from the beginning.

Honestly, these areas aside, Dice Gambit is a near-jackpot for me. With its combination of rich character and ability design and the smooth way it integrates rolling and manipulating dice, it’s proven an addictive presence. The original Italian Renaissance art style is the finishing touch that drives home Dice Gambit’s unique style and approach, even if it does outstay its welcome. Excited as I am to see where the developers and the game go next, I’m off to try a new run where, whenever dice are spent, all remaining dice are rerolled. Crazy! But hey, this is the way Lady Luck dances; let’s roll the bones.

OFF is one of the preeminent forbears of today’s wide variety of narratively off-kilter, classic JRPG-inspired indies. The original game, made in RPG Maker 2003 and released in 2008, ignited a creative spark whose radical flame burns in many hits to follow: from Space Funeral to LISA: The Painful to Undertale to Omori and countless lesser known passion projects. A lot of time has passed since then, and RPG Maker games and their spiritual kin have produced some of the most personal and thematically coherent RPGs of the last 15 years. As a newcomer to OFF, I was most curious whether this remaster still feels as fresh and impactful in retrospect as it must have been upon release.

I won’t beat around the switch. OFF doesn’t quite reach the heights of its most significant descendants, but it is fascinating to finally play one of their most blatant inspirations. It inducts the player into the story as Undertale does. It imports hand-drawn and other real-world assets into its aesthetics, like Omori. And, together with its spiritual cousin Yume Nikki, uses horror and the grotesque in a way that now feels signature to the RPG Maker canon yet wasn’t when it first released. Playing OFF for the first time in 2025 feels most rewarding as a history lesson full of “aha!” moments of creative recognition.

The game’s rich history is also important context for this rerelease. The original OFF was created primarily by Belgian solo developer Martin Georis (who goes by “Mortis Ghost”), with assistance from a few friends and the crucial work of composer Alias Conrad Coldwood. For Mortis Ghost, who aspired to be a comic book creator, it was just a freeware side project. In the following years, OFF earned itself a cult following with fans completing an unofficial English translation in 2011, as the original script was in French. It then proliferated on forums like Tumblr, where it captured the imagination of many young RPG fans (and future developers) ready for something so different and weird in the genre.

And weird it is. OFF’s story focuses far more on atmosphere and abstract expression than a coherent plot and characters to invest yourself in. You (the named player) are thrown into the cleats of The Batter. The Batter is an enigmatic and stoic protagonist who doesn’t offer much characterization beyond instinctively bashing every obstacle in his path and rehearsing plainspoken lines about how he must “purify” the world. Bit of a red flag, if you ask me. However, this world is frankly a mess, so maybe he has a point?

OFF’s fractured world is divided into levels simply named Zone 1, Zone 2, etc., that you progress through linearly. A tyrannical Guardian rules each one, deceiving and exploiting the Elsen, NPCs that work for them. Every Elsen has the same dead-inside salaryman appearance and doesn’t show any sense of individuality. There are Spectres causing havoc in the zones, who are depicted as hand-drawn assets in the game’s random encounters and can be impressively unsettling in their visual appearance. The Batter and Elsen believe that purging these Spectres will fix things. As the player, you quickly get the sense that something feels off about all this.

And now, you can experience The Batter’s journey in repackaged Unity form for $15 USD! Aside from the obvious appeal of playing an indie RPG on Switch, you may be wondering if anything else about the package warrants not downloading the totally free original from its wiki. Between an official English translation, revamped combat mechanics and balancing, nibbles of new content including secret bosses, and a redone OST, I’d say Mortis Ghost and publisher Fangamer have done enough to ask for some money—even if they could have swung higher.

Nevertheless, I don’t begrudge the decision to focus on preserving OFF while touching up its gameplay for a wider audience. Combat is quick, snappy, and demands a light yet satisfying degree of strategy throughout most of the game. The game adapts Final Fantasy’s ATB system, with visible bars for allies and enemies filling to determine turn order. Unlike the original release, time now pauses once any of your party members’ command menus pop up. There was also an effort to fine-tune the health and damage numbers. They also added a fun extra mechanic where your bar sometimes turns yellow, charging faster and signifying an upcoming critical. From what I’ve seen of the original game, combat is straight-up improved here. Are the mechanics overly familiar? Sure. But they’re executed well.

When you’re not “purifying” Spectres, you’re solving puzzles in the overworld. Pushing boulders, memorizing and inputting numbers, inserting lost pages into books: you know the drill. A few puzzles stuck out as particularly inspired, while some others were plain tedious. They work best as minor challenges that effectively add flavor to the exploration and background of each zone.

Aside from the remaster’s fresh coat of polish, the new content advertised here amounts to a slightly expanded endgame with secret bosses. The bosses themselves are a welcome inclusion that provides more narrative clues (though certainly not answers) and dramatic tone-setting before the finale. I only wish that Mortis Ghost used this as an opportunity to revise and/or expand the endgame further, as it ultimately feels underdeveloped and unrewarding.

The endgame involves backtracking through each of the game’s main zones. The zones are now streamlined, emptied, and full of encounters with only one enemy type each that you inexplicably are not allowed to escape from. As a result, what could have been a seamless and fleshed-out buildup to the game’s climax becomes a tedious, repetitive sequence.

This portion even fails to provide the usual dopamine draw of a good endgame. The equipment I found off the beaten path was usually worse than what my team was already using, so my only reward was more random encounters. And the boss fights, while cool, did not provide any truly demanding superboss thrills or unlock a new ending path. I’m usually the guy who’s willing to excuse this kind of thing if there’s a narrative justification—and I suppose there is—but as the venue for this release’s new content, I hoped for more.

The most significant, and potentially divisive, creative difference between the original version of OFF and the remaster is an entirely new soundtrack. I imagine existing fans will feel attached to Alias Conrad Coldwood’s OST, which I’ve gone back to listen to in context. There’s no denying Coldwood’s OST suits the game. Its homegrown mixing, contemporary lo-fi stylings, and haunting soundscapes feel perfect for a freeware solo dev indie project. A curious Redditor reached out to Coldwood seeking answers regarding why their original OST wasn’t used. Apparently, it came down to not owning the license to the samples they used (which is problematic for a commercial release as opposed to a free one) and being generally distrustful of these kinds of contracts (fair enough).

With that said, the new OST—courtesy of Toby Fox, Morusque, and a few other contributors—was one of the highlights of my playthrough. The tone may not feel as consistently coherent as Coldwood’s work, but the songs hit harder. As examples, here’s the original battle theme versus the new one, and the original Zone 1 music versus the remaster’s interpretation. For me, the new OST is generally more robust and enjoyable, while the original excelled with its uniquely twisted ambiance. There’s no easy either/or pick here. Fortunately, Coldwood’s vision will always remain available in the game’s freeware version.

I already touched on OFF’s story a bit, but I want to circle back to it. After all, the reason people like me gravitate towards a game like OFF isn’t for the joy of playing yet another traditional, mechanically indistinct turn-based RPG. It’s to see what the developer thought to do with that framework to provide a unique narrative experience. It’s to find out that the four elements of this world aren’t Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water; rather, they are Metal, Smoke, Meat, and Plastic. Or that recovery items have names like Luck Ticket, Silver Flesh, and Moloch’s Meat. I love that.

Why are those the four elements here? Why is our angel-of-death protagonist decked out in baseball gear? What are we accomplishing by purifying the Spectres? Why did the developer decide to make our party members simple circles named after letters of the Greek alphabet? If you want to think about these questions without having any of them lucidly answered, OFF is the game for you! I’m not even throwing any shade. While I was sometimes skeptical of the story’s stubborn obtuseness, it won me over within a day of finishing it.

OFF‘s writing is near average, other games have far surpassed its fourth-wall knocking, and the characters are barely developed. Despite all this, OFF’s story ultimately has enough going on to linger in the mind like a benign tumor. Everything from The Batter’s goals to those of his adversaries remains barely intelligible. Maybe the story is metaphorical; maybe it’s literal. Beneath all the subverted RPG trappings, there seems to be some sort of familial psychodrama informing OFF’s world. If you ask the creator, many of these details are arbitrary. The important thing is it doesn’t feel that way, though. Like a classic surrealist film, I found OFF’s greatest strength to be that I spent time wondering what all this could mean after having soaked it all in.

OFF deserves a lot of credit for its creative accomplishments. I’m pleased that this remaster gives us the opportunity to pay it its dues while acknowledging the ways it has been artistically surpassed. It’s the type of creative project that lights a torch for others to carry into even more daring places. Still, with its arthouse stylings that resist easy interpretation, OFF retains its own identity enough to make it well worth recommending to this day. Whether you’re more interested in the game out of historical curiosity or to bask in the dread oozing from its presentation, OFF still has a lot to (don’t do it man, don’t do it)… offer. 

Persona 5 certainly has an impressive list of titles under its umbrella, with both the original “vanilla” version of the traditional RPG and its upgraded Royal counterpart co-existing alongside numerous genre spin-offs, including Strikers, Tactica, and Dancing in Starlight. By this point, it only makes sense for a free-to-play mobile game based on P5 to enter the fray. But is the alternate universe gacha title Persona 5: The Phantom X simply a pale imitation of the original, or does it manage to carry a hidden spark? The answer lies somewhere in between. I found The Phantom X has a solid enough foundation to be a relatively decent standalone Persona spin-off. Still, its gacha roots hold it back, especially if you’re attempting to play without putting any actual money into it.

Persona 5: The Phantom X starts, much like the original P5, in modern-day Tokyo, only instead of focusing on the protagonist Joker and his crew of The Phantom Thieves of Hearts, a new main character and his allies take center stage. Code-named Wonder, our hero is a high school student living his life while a strange sickness spreads throughout the city, taking away people’s desires and hopes. It isn’t long into the game before Wonder uncovers a secret world of demons and shadows just beneath the surface. Together with an enigmatic talking owl named Lufel and others who become aware of Tokyo’s dangerous situation, Wonder forms a group of Phantom Thieves wielding powerful Persona in battle to steal back everyone’s hope. Is this a heist they can pull off, or are these other Phantom Thieves doomed for obscurity?

Narratively, a lot is going on in Persona 5: The Phantom X. The plot presents itself in a manner that immediately brings to mind the original P5, with a storyline conveying thoughtful social commentary and comprising a surprisingly memorable cast of characters. While the first Palace dungeon villain and his motivation are arguably the weakest of P5 thus far, even the Subway Slammer has roots in a very real and somewhat troubling issue in Japan. Fortunately, if you have the patience to advance it, The Phantom X‘s plot does improve.

Which brings me to a big caveat of Persona 5: The Phantom X. Patience plays a key role, especially if you intend to play for free like me. While the story is meaty and extensive, be prepared to hit that all-too-familiar “gacha wall” every time you advance. You gain Persona to use in battle and party members to fill out your roster by progressing in the story, and you’ll occasionally receive special tickets that allow you to try and pull for specific characters. But like with traditional Persona titles, you’ll want an assortment of party members with various elemental affinities to help you advance through the game’s dungeons—elemental weakness exploitation is often a crucial key to victory during its turn-based fights lest you face a prolonged and uphill battle. As you advance, your progress will also freeze at fights where certain character levels are required or recommended to safely proceed.

Leveling up can be tricky, as Wonder is the only character who gains experience points through certain fights, advancing through the story, or dungeons. Other party members gain experience through the use of special items procured while playing, but only up until they reach Wonder’s current level cap. There are also items for strengthening Persona abilities and a robust skill tree for Wonder to help reinforce his versatile stats. If you happen to run out of the items needed to level up characters, you’ll be left waiting for the next game day so they can replenish somewhat before beginning the cycle again.

These instances of having to wait around also bleed into the everyday activities side of things, as The Phantom X only gives you so many activity points to spend around the city in your free time from dungeon exploring and fighting. Activities encompass studying, working various jobs, and hanging out with friends, along with additional social stat meters to contend with in terms of initial gate-keeping for higher-level activities. Once you exhaust the activity points for a given game day, you have to wait once more for them to replenish.

Playing the game entirely for free simply means having to wait once you hit the “gacha wall” before you can successfully advance the story. It’s a shame that it has to be so slow-going, as the narrative itself is more interesting the further along you go. The bonding events Wonder can engage in are reminiscent of Social Links in the original P5, helping to flesh out the characters and their dynamics. You can also raise Synergy levels for certain story characters that raise various abilities and stats. Persona acquiring and strengthening, alongside the always helpful Fusion option, is certainly fitting for a Persona game. It’s disheartening that the blending of all of these gameplay mechanics and storylines behind the telltale “gacha wall.”

Visually, Persona 5: The Phantom X utilizes the visual presentation and UI of the original P5 to significant effect. This title truly feels like a spin-off in a graphics and artistic sense. The character designs are detailed and expressive, and I also enjoyed the anime cutscenes spliced throughout the game, including the fantastic opening animation. Sound-wise, the Japanese voice acting is top-notch and highly emotive, and the script’s English localization is phenomenal. I love the soundtrack, which has that distinct and bopping P5 vibe. Besides the “gacha-ness” of it, my biggest other complaint with the game is the wonky control schematics when playing on a PC, as I found myself constantly switching between a gamepad controller and mouse to access specific menus.

Persona 5: The Phantom X is a free-to-play traditional RPG Persona 5 spin-off boasting a surprising amount of depth in terms of gameplay, storyline, and characters. Besides some wonky PC controls, the “gacha wall” you inevitably run up against if you’re trying to play it for completely free is the only thing truly holding the game back. Nonetheless, in a lot of respects, it’s a strong Persona title and one of the better free-to-play RPGs I’ve tried out. I enjoyed my time with the game, and can see myself playing it for a while into the future too. For me, that speaks volumes as to how decent a game Persona 5: The Phantom X can be.

Editor’s Note: This review contains spoilers for the base game of Chained Echoes.

Chained Echoes felt like a game creator Matthias Linda needed to make. Without a doubt, Linda knows and loves the classics, but Chained Echoes’ cohesion and vision make it stand out from the “retro-inspired” pack. It juggles tons of systems to create a fresh, tight, near-perfectly calibrated gameplay experience that rewards exploration and experimentation all the way to the end of the game. It has a story that, while sometimes clumsy, has something big, important, and personal to say. Chained Echoes feels urgent, feels whole, and it’s special.

Ashes of Elrant, Chained Echoes’ new DLC, doesn’t grab me by the throat and shake me like the base game. To be clear, much of what I love about Chained Echoes is still here—it’s still a lot of fun—but the gameplay adjustments make the systems fit together a little more awkwardly, and the story lacks the philosophical and emotional weight of the base game.

This isn’t to say that Linda doesn’t dip into some big ideas narratively, but since Ashes of Elrant takes place right before the final dungeon with the same party, there are only so many places the story can go. A group of scientists approachs the Crimson Wings to help clear out the remnants of Fredrick’s loyalists in a small town. The party soon learns this is a trap and is sucked into another space and time. Lenne quickly realizes that this is Elrant, an ancient city that began the fight against the Harbinger and where she began her journey many lifetimes ago. The party tries to find and discuss the situation with the mysterious leader of Elrant, the “White Wolf,” and discovers not all is as it seems along the way.

It’s hard to say anything beyond that without spoilers, but as you can tell, the story has potential. Elrant is ripe for exploring Linda’s philosophy. But like much of Ashes of Elrant, the narrative feels like a collection of good but half-baked ideas. The villains could be interesting, but all we get is evil cackling. The people of Elrant struggle, with good reason, but outside of a single solid side quest, they’re mostly treated like an odd collection of gags. 

Linda wants to focus more on the characters and humor this time around, but the stilted writing (Chained Echoes‘ key weakness) becomes even more of a sore spot. Interestingly, the “White Wolf” is easily the best character Linda has written, and the NPCs around Elrant are often quite amusing, but it’s not enough. Ultimately, none of this would bother me much if it were a quick three-to-four hour side quest, but it takes twice that long, even if you’re beelining Ashes of Elrant, and it falls a little flat.

Of course, I didn’t storm through Ashes of Elrant; only a monster could do that. While I am a big fan of Chained Echoes‘ story, what I truly loved was filling out that sweet, sweet Reward Board by poking around every corner and tinkering with my combat builds. Luckily, you get a brand new Reward Board with multiple full areas to explore. And these new zones are interconnected in clever ways and absurdly packed with secrets, puzzles, and superbosses. You can even find new “Power Pools” to increase your stats, sort of like Scadutree Fragments in Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. Honestly, exploration is one way Ashes of Elrant is even better than the base game, and the satisfaction of finding that last item to fill out that spot on my reward board is unlikely to be matched in 2025.

Even with the Reward Board, some cracks start to show. You still get rewards, but they’re not nearly as useful as in the base game—you can purchase almost any crafting material in a shop long before you unlock it on the board. The other currency you get from each unlock is “PP,” which is a new party-wide currency that lets you power up the party by unlocking fishing, increasing a party member’s stats, or even widening the green section of the Overdrive bar in combat. I ended up with more than twice as many points as I needed to unlock every skill, but some of the “rewards” took some strategy out of the game. Starting out a fight in Overdrive makes the bar far less interesting to manage, and other rewards make Sky Armor combat a total joke, even against superbosses. The adjustments are fine on paper, but Linda needed to overhaul some of his systems to compensate for less friction in combat, and he doesn’t, so it’s not as tight or satisfying.

Other changes in Ashes of Elrant range from the inoffensive to the maddening. As an avowed hater of all things angling in video games, the new fishing minigame is fine. The crystal system is significantly simplified from the base game. Now, you only get one power level, removing some of the grind for materials, which is nice, but there’s a little less build variety. 

The absolute worst adjustment, though, is to Class Emblems. I always looked forward to the challenging minibosses and the absolutely rocking track that accompanied those fights. This time? You have to do a terrible timed digging minigame that involves sonar (I think? It never worked for me) or, if you’re like me, digging randomly around in a circle. Depending on the RNG, it can take almost 20 minutes to find that Emblem. The fact that they’re much more powerful than any base game Emblems means you need to put on your excavation hat, tedium be damned. 

It all adds up to an odd, slightly askew collection of gameplay systems. Consequently, it feels like Linda didn’t know exactly how to make some things work, how to recapture that beautiful sense of progression that was so carefully calibrated in the base game. Instead, we get a collection of disparate solutions to problems that cropped up during development that ultimately seem a bit haphazard. 

Chained Echoes felt like an obsession, a product of many, many years of careful labor and planning. Ashes of Elrant feels like a set of solutions to problems. It comes across as something Linda wanted to make, but didn’t have to make. After spending 18 hours uncovering every little secret and poking around in every corner, some of the sloppiness wore on me. 

Don’t get me wrong: there’s still more than enough of the base game’s DNA here to have a great time. Exploration is still a blast, it still looks good, and it sounds incredible, accompanied by some beautiful new tracks from composer Eddie Marianukroh that fit right into the already stellar OST. But, like the new Reward Board, Chained Echoes: Ashes of Elrant looks the same and often feels the same, but the payoff just isn’t as strong.

It’s no surprise that HoYoVerse titles such as Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, and Zenless Zone Zero dominate the gacha market given their absurdly high quality and seemingly infinite budgets. Yet, is there room on the world stage for an unproven competitor to swing at the king and make some waves? Wuthering Waves is an open-world action RPG emphasizing stylish character action combat, much like its predecessor, Punishing: Gray Raven. At first glance, the game appears similar to the immensely popular open-world action RPG Genshin Impact. However, Wuthering Waves adopts a more modern sci-fi approach to its world-building and design while focusing on incorporating Chinese aesthetics and mythology into every nook and cranny. In terms of world design, Wuthering Waves has more in common with the Xenoblade games than Genshin Impact, thanks to its focus on a logistically plausible world following an apocalyptic event.

Players take on the role of an ever-so-important fish-out-of-water named Rover. While the character’s name (or title, more accurately) is meant to evoke similar thoughts as a Wanderer, Traveler, or even Trailblazer, it comes off as feeling more akin to the stereotypical dog name. The title feels more apt by the minute given how the citizens of the world constantly need help fetching items, guarding their communities, and guiding those in need. After an introductory cutscene with a mysterious woman (who totally isn’t Lucia from Punishing: Gray Raven), Rover is dropped into the world of Solaris-3—the third planet from the sun that is suspiciously similar to Earth. After a messy and confusing introduction sequence, it’s soon revealed that Rover is most like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s Hero of Time—someone called upon to help thwart an evil force with no memory of their past lives.

Wuthering Waves stumbles right out the gate with its introductory storyline as the developers scrambled to rewrite, adjust, and shuffle story beats in the game’s first three chapters after receiving a substantial amount of feedback on their closed beta tests. The feedback essentially boiled down to players wanting to feel special, being frustrated that the citizens of the world were hostile and suspicious of them, and finding the concept of gradual world-building to be less than exciting. A hasty rewrite followed to make NPCs practically worship the player, as well as reducing world events to Proper Nouns and technobabble. While this misstep makes the initial portion of the game slightly awkward, Chapter Four smooths out considerably as the narrative dives into its original version rife with drama, political intrigue, and darling characters.

Although the story flounders initially, it has an almost constant upward trajectory afterward. Mercifully, Wuthering Waves’ combat starts on a high note and continually climbs skyward. When looking at Punishing: Gray Raven, it’s quite obvious that Kuro Games are unapologetically massive fans of NieR: Automata and Devil May Cry. The stylish character action, soft genre shifts, and over-the-top set piece bosses show the developer proudly wearing their influences on their sleeve. To add to that, every single unit in Wuthering Waves has a wildly unique kit with a dizzying amount of depth. The move lists, gauges, and conditional systems would make a fighting game fan grin wide.

Every unit has its own moveset and playstyle, yet the Forte gauge is what makes each character feel that much more unique. Characters build Forte in their normal attack chains that they can then use for a variety of stronger moves. Some Forte gauges drastically change the playstyle, while others enhance the core abilities while adding simultaneous new ones. The icy Sanhua does a small amount of damage with her normal attacks, yet upon casting her ice skills or finishing her chain, she can create large fields of ice that detonate to deal massive damage. Yangyang, on the other hand, adds wind blades to her attacks while strengthening her aerial moves. The player character, Rover, can essentially swap elements and enter a Devil May Cry “Devil Trigger”-esque mode.

It’s easy to find a unit to fit any particular playstyle due to all the unique character kits. Some excel at aerial combat, while others focus on defensive counters. Some rain down hellfire at range while others ensure the party remains alive. My favorite—the bloody sword-wielding Danjin—consumes her own HP with each attack, pushing her closer and closer to the brink of death as the battle unfolds. The heightened risk in combat leads to some very exciting and incredibly stylish close calls and near misses, all for the sake of setting up allies to unleash powerful attacks with a bevy of buffs. With Wuthering Waves focusing on a three-character party, team synergy is crucial. Characters tagging out unleash an outro effect while incoming characters attack with unique intro attacks. Players should know their kits in and out while making choices between damage and survivability.

Another piece that sets Wuthering Waves apart from Genshin Impact is the Echo system. Echoes are the remnants of defeated foes. Once collected, players can equip them to characters in place of armor, accessories, and charms. Each Echo has a cost to prevent filling all five slots with boss Echoes, but only the topmost slot allows players to either summon or transform into said Echo for a brief period. Wuthering Waves‘ Echo system encourages both experimentation and exploration, alongside making the bestiary feel more lively and familiar. While the monster-catching aspect is fun and intriguing, I wish there were more uses for Echoes beyond the equipment and combat utility, such as battling other players or sending them out on missions to get materials. Much like Genshin Impact, farming and rolling for stats feels akin to smashing one’s face into a slot machine and hoping for more than a headache. Thankfully, materials to re-roll main stats have since arrived.

The cast of characters is vast and impressive, yet it’s clear the premium characters (five-star characters on timed/limited banners) get a lot more love than their standard four-star and launch five-star counterparts—some of which feel underpowered or far too niche. One of these forgettable characters is Lingyang, a young performer in a lion dancing troupe who has an awkward playstyle that feels experimental. Baizhi, a free standard healer, also has a few awkward abilities in her kit that make her offputting to use in combination with her lackluster healing. Verina, on the other hand, is a powerful healer and a staple in most teams, though this is due more to the lack of strong support units in Wuthering Waves than anything. Hopefully, the new four-star characters will get as much love as Punishing: Gray Raven‘s four-star equivalents.

Kuro Games is blessed with an incredibly talented art team. While the character designs and visual effects are top-notch, the game’s art direction is nothing short of stellar. The vistas found in the world of Solaris-3 are nigh-immaculate visual spectacles, ranging from ruined cities with floating remnants of skyscrapers above a field of burning flowers to jaw-dropping skyboxes with the most haunting moons imaginable. I found myself stopping time and time again to admire the world around me while taking dozens of pictures. The city of Jinzhou and its surrounding areas comprise the 1.0 region, and it’s easy to see that an immense amount of time and care went into polishing the world to be as awe-inspiring as possible.

Of course, the areas in the game’s patches expand the horizon and elevate the environmental beauty. Mt. Firmament is a gorgeous take on a winding mountain, while The Black Shores archipelago offers some of the most stunning skies above paired with intricately designed and displaced elements beneath. Naturally, with a full number version update to 2.0 comes a new region to explore: Rinascita. While slightly smaller than Jinzhou in width, Rinascita offers more verticality with its striking world design. Much like the launch region, Rinascita is awash with beautiful landscapes and stunning set pieces. Every new location feels like it has its Breath of the Wild moment, mixed with Elden Ring‘s design philosophy as far as populating the world with secrets.

Given Wuthering Waves is all about the concepts of vibration and waves (hence the title), one would hope the game sounds as great as it looks. At first, I was concerned with the absence of GhostFinal and Holoweak because their contributions to Punishing: Gray Raven resulted in some of the most fantastic and memorable soundtracks to date (such as Narwhal and Hikari). The soundtrack in Wuthering Waves is solid and exciting, but it initially lacks tracks that stir the heart. Of course, as the story progresses, the OST becomes elevated as dramatic moments and setpiece boss battles take the stage. Though there are fewer standout tracks in the beginning, the soundtrack soon finds its footing and develops an energetic identity that carries throughout the game.

While I’ve been largely positive on Wuthering Waves, the game is not without flaws. To start, Kuro Games is frankly notorious for rocky launches, embarrassing typos, and numerous minor bugs that mar the average player’s experience. Although it’s possible to forget or fix typos, bugs, and messy launches, some long-standing issues remain even a year after release. Most notably, the English voice cast is a collection of great European voice talents forced to do awful American accents. While this improves in later patches with more freedom in the voice direction and acting, early scenes remain blighted by poorly directed performances easily confused with bad acting.

Many of these issues are the product of intense crunch and hasty rewrites, but Kuro Games has gone back and re-recorded voice lines for Rover, so there is precedent for improvement. Now, if only they’d do the same for Yangyang—the game’s primary lore dump and story commentary for most of 1.0. Additionally, while the controls on PC and PS5 are solid, save the awkwardly mapped utility or two, the mobile touch screen controls are messy at best. Mercifully, native controller support mitigates this issue.

Lastly, regardless of how gorgeous the game looks, how fun and exciting the combat is, and how great the writing becomes, Wuthering Waves is a gacha game. While much can be said on the predatory nature of gacha games, I want to touch upon the ephemeral nature of live-service games. There’s a high chance of this game reaching end-of-service within the next decade, preventing access beyond that time. The only reminders of its existence will be the mass grave of game-specific wikis, obsolete theory-crafting videos, and the astounding number of fanart pieces that serve the same role as paintings of long-dead aristocrats. Therefore, it requires caution and care before investing time and money into Wuthering Waves. We’ve seen it time and time again: a hot new gacha comes out, tops the charts, and then sinks into irrelevance and shuts down after a year. That said, Punishing: Gray Raven is still going strong almost six years later, so there is precedent for long-term support from Kuro Games.

Wuthering Waves is a fantastic game and one of the best current gachas from a gameplay standpoint. While the shift to a more HoYoVerse-style gacha system is disappointing (pity of 80 pulls versus PGR’s pity of 60, 50/50 coin flips on banner characters with a 100% guarantee after failure versus PGR’s 100% guarantee with no coin flips), Kuro Games remains relatively generous with free currencies (often as an apology for some kind of screw up), log-in campaigns, and events. Overall, the game is gorgeous, a treat to listen to, and a blast to play. Lovable and endearing characters and an intricately detailed world make Wuthering Waves one of the most high-quality games in its specific market.

Solo developers hold a special place in my heart. Seeing one person do the arduous work of multiple disciplines all the way to release is nothing short of inspirational. Home runs like Papers Please are also easy enough to praise from the consumer’s perspective, with the developer’s dedication shining through in the final product’s polish. While Tunguska: The Visitation (Tunguska) falls short of the remarkable heights of the indie hallmarks, it remains a notable effort by Rotorist Workshop.

Set in an alternate history where the Krasnoyarsk Krai region of Siberia became a hotbed for “treasure” hunters in the decades following the Tunguska Event, you take the role of an independent journalist sent to interview these hunters and investigate rumors of a miraculous cure-all. Despite the initially straightforward mission parameters, you quickly find yourself entangled in the area’s politics as you complete favors for locals while traveling between smaller, instanced segments of the Tunguska Exclusion Zone.

Although many NPCs remain ready for conversation, interactions outside of dedicated quest givers are barren. There is a veneer of a community in every hub area, but trying to talk to anyone outside of the main NPCs results in little more than repeated filler dialogue. Sitting around campfires sometimes yields a piece of gossip you can report to your sleazy boss in Manhattan for a chunk of change, but does little to fill out the narrative gaps in worldbuilding.

Quest completion rewards you with narrative tidbits that shed some light on the history of the Exclusion Zone and stories you can also report for better cash rewards. Quest givers occasionally throw in special items and inventory upgrades for your work, but notable rewards are few and far between. Thankfully, you usually stumble upon some fantastic loot while completing these favors (especially if you take the scenic route), making for some great emergent gameplay moments in otherwise run-of-the-mill fetch or kill quests.

Unfortunately, the moment-to-moment gunplay you engage in during quests leaves something to be desired. Despite the satisfying feedback for landing shots, the default controls make gunfights an almost unplayable experience. I highly recommend switching over to auto-aim in the settings, as you otherwise waste even more ammo than your character naturally does with their shaky aim. Even with these changes, gunplay remains finicky, with shots often missing stationary targets.

This starkly contrasts with the human AI, which often has far superior accuracy or gangs up on you in the blink of an eye, shredding your health bar in seconds with focused fire. However, their distinct inability to flank or execute complex combat behavior makes it surprisingly easy to funnel them to their deaths. This gives Tunguska a nostalgic, early 2000s feel, where gaming the AI in this manner was fairly common, enemy firepower nonetheless feels over-tuned to compensate for this lack of complexity.

Adding to this frustration are some diabolical map instances that felt unbeatable. Ghouls—humans who have turned into blue, zombie-like monsters from prolonged exposure to the supernatural “Vistation” event— spawn freely in most hostile map instances, trying to overwhelm you with numbers alone to compensate for their limited attack range. This balance falters towards the endgame with the appearance of elite ghoul variants. Getting some key items requires engaging with these forces, but to say it’s a slog would be an understatement. Despite my best efforts to kite these elite variants into a zombie train, I frequently fell victim to their high attack range and absurd tankiness, despite my high-end gear.

Skills and weapon attachments somewhat address the gunplay issues, but many of the skills should have been baked into the baseline gameplay. Consisting mostly of gun handling upgrades for different weapon classes, large overlaps in the early skills (lower recoil, better stability, etc.) make these upgrades feel like fluff more than meaningful investments of your hard-earned points. Looking at this in a positive light, early combat skills aren’t significant enough to hamper experimenting with weapon classes you haven’t invested points into. But then there’s the question of why these early skills exist, given their minimal impact.

Survival skills fare far better, with more varied aspects of gameplay like crafting, fitness, and serum (Tunguska’s version of potions) efficacy. Though I initially dreaded that these skills were a method of managing arbitrary, constantly dwindling resources typical of survival games, I was pleasantly surprised at Tunguska’s ability to strip away much of the tedium associated with these mechanics.

Basic bodily needs, such as hunger and thirst, are consolidated into a generous and slowly draining energy bar, which eating and resting easily restores. Radiation poisoning and T-Syndrome are the two big environmental hazards to manage, inflicting debilitating debuffs if left unchecked and requiring initially rare serums to fully cure. Health is the most difficult resource to get a proper handle on, as HP-restoring serums are your only source of recovery beyond taking a nap in a safe zone. The catch here is that these serums, due to their experimental nature, poison you with trace amounts of radiation for every injection. This small feature loops back to add an appreciable depth to the combat, rewarding forethought and supply preparation as much as your ability to think on your feet under fire.

However, skills that affect crafting and serums are so strong as to almost discourage engaging in these mechanics until you are close to maxing them out. Making stronger, more efficient consumables is one thing, but octupling production for the most powerful serums in Tunguska only brought out the worst of my RPG hoarding sensibilities. The fastest way of grinding all the points necessary to max these skills out is a dull affair of planting and harvesting plants (not too unlike iron dagger crafting in the early days of Skyrim), but ready access to console commands lets you skip the grind if it becomes too much.

Aesthetically, Tunguska excels at capturing the drab, post-apocalyptic vibe you might be familiar with from the Metro and S.T.A.L.K.E.R series. Admittedly, the color palette is a bit too brown for my liking, but the map instances make up for this with their unique layouts and landmarks. My only gripe was the oddly restrictive fast-travel system involving vehicles. The motorbike was the strangest to use, as you cannot travel too many map segments at once, despite the bike itself being able to go to most places in the game. As you can imagine, sitting through loads of loading screens got old quickly, which is especially frustrating when backtracking to home base for items you forgot to take from your stash.

That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if Rotorist Workshop is already acutely aware of these issues, as they are one of, if not the most, active developers I have ever seen. Steam forum posts generally get responses within minutes, from lending a guiding hand to newer players to sifting through copies of save files to debug issues. Though this doesn’t fully dull the blow of the aforementioned game design issues, Rotorist Workshop’s sheer commitment to improving the overall experience is inspiring. With a recently announced sequel in the works, I hope they can continue this energy into that project too.

Tunguska: The Vistation leaves a strong impression, though it’s not always the right one. It gets the more esoteric game-feel aspects, like combat feedback and satisfying exploration rewards, down pat, but struggles with fundamental design elements like control schemes and narrative. There is an undeniably large amount of jank in the game, which will either endear you to the experience or turn you off it entirely. Still, Tunguska is an enjoyable enough experience on its own that it’s worth giving a try to find out for yourself.

I can’t believe we finally have a complete set of the remastered Neverwinter Nights series.

After the accomplished rework of the original CRPG game, Aspyr has brought the classic follow-up, Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition—a game some believed unlikely to make the journey—to modern devices. But now with a heavy +1 shield in hand, an ancient evil to destroy, and a band of rudimentary AI companions in tow, Neverwinter Nights 2 strides purposefully into the hinterlands like an old soldier with a newly polished set of armor and plenty of tales to tell. Yes, players may face the rather archaic Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 Edition rules and some cliched creatures and story beats, but they’ll have a bloody good time out there regardless.

Aspyr haven’t skimped on the basic package with Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition. Alongside the base game, all three of the premium expansions (Mask of the Betrayer, Storm of Zehir, and Mysteries of Westgate) are included and remastered. With all the modules, options are now updated to provide greater control over the visual fidelity of the upgraded graphics, and there’s support for modern resolutions across the board. There’s also cross-play support, Steam Deck compatibility, and the promise of Steam Workshop mods in the future. Everything boots and runs smoothly; loading times can seem a little long, though this is something that tweaks to optimization before launch may well fix.

After the reworked intro movie and splash screen, character creation for the selected adventure offers a large range of options that draw from the 3.5 Edition rules of the time. This means there’s a wide range of class options (expanded from the original game) as well as a huge number of feats, spells, and race ancestries. Players can freely build everything from basic fighters and clerics to more nuanced classes, like swashbucklers and favored souls. Theorycrafters will have a great time min-maxing the heck out of every possible multi-class option and feat combo, although the opaque class systems still pose a significant barrier to newcomers. The remaster offers no additional class build tutorial, so it’s entirely possible to build a cool character who is mechanically weak in combat or social situations. The default difficulty is pretty unforgiving, and considering there’s no way to respec your PC or your companions, it can feel punishing for players who aren’t familiar with the ruleset or with experience in similarly crunchy titles.

The original narrative remains untouched and, much like its predecessor, the story still doesn’t resonate too strongly. Players embody a young orphan from the small village of West Harbor who discovers a connection to a powerful artifact, the silver shard, and the looming threat of the King of Shadows. The path to understanding the shard and how it links to this ancient evil forms much of the heroic journey in and around the grand city of Neverwinter. There’s no sweeping social commentary here, but there’s something to be said about how the traditional story beats fit the system and the pastoral setting of the Faerun. It’s perhaps a reminder of where the genre was nearly twenty years ago. You’ll find plenty of incensed bandits, displaced refugees, and closed merchant roads as the story gets moving. Having said all that, the presence of githyanki in the narrative leads to some unexpected and satisfying connections to the most recent Forgotten Realms tale.

The vanilla game’s hackneyed moments notwithstanding, the writing and pacing remain effective, and the occasional voice-overs add verisimilitude even when some line deliveries are very flat. Heck, it’s a lot more traditional and internally consistent than some recent genre offers. In a manner akin to its earlier stablemate, Knights Of The Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights 2 does a much better job of writing and developing party companions, and it’s a pleasant surprise to remember the sequel allows more party companions than the lonely henchman system of the original. The morally reprehensible ranger, Bishop, provides a rich contrast to the do-goodness of the main plot. Others, like the wizard-spy Sand, are rooted in a deep sense of the world’s lore and history. Speaking of the audio, little else has changed. The sweeping orchestral soundtrack remains the same, and though it’s not one of the more memorable of the genre, it does fit the action seamlessly enough.

Once the familiar tutorial level of the core campaign spins up (the damned nostalgia of that village fair!), the camera options and reworked controls immediately stand out. Although it occasionally gets caught in ceiling rafters or shoved into a character’s cranium during large-scale combat, the camera generally behaves much better than previously. Graphics look sharp overall, with new textures, shadows, and luminosity bringing a noticeable boost. Foliage and water reflections show improvement, and the level of detail on smaller assets—chests, books, a cleaver embedded in a slab of meat—makes a real difference to the world’s vibrancy. Character clothing and facial details are equally crisp, aside from noticeable texture stretching. While performance is mostly stable, a few issues persist: occasional clipping, texture bugs, and rare instances where character models display grotesque distortions of their jaws and eyes. At times, upgraded textures give flat surfaces an oddly rounded or inflated appearance. New particle effects—like flaming weapons—add to the ambient detail. These enhancements don’t always carry over to the wider environment, as seen with the fireplaces and general flames still relying on basic animation loops. Overall, the remastered graphics succeed in enriching the world and revealing details that were either missing or obscured in the original. With time, it’s likely that some of the rougher visual glitches will be patched out as well.

Unlike the original Neverwinter Nights, Neverwinter Nights 2‘s zone areas feel smaller and more focused. While a few branching paths exist, they don’t offer the broader sense of discovery or exploration found in the first game or the even earlier spiritual predecessors. This is where the additional expansions shine more brightly. Their richer narrative nuance and the chances to travel through more varied locales—beyond simple druid groves and musty swamp caves—help elevate the experience. Given the party’s painfully slow movement speed, at least the zones don’t overstay their welcome. Still, the sluggish jog between locations to advance a quest chain is an unwelcome throwback to simpler times.

Gamepad control has been added, and it’s mostly a positive experience. Some of the menu nesting and triggers take some getting used to—I lost count of how many times I hit ‘Back’ trying to open my party menu—but I spent most of my time playing with the pad. Setting up the hotbar is easy enough, and the spell and ability sections work well as an extension of the d-pad. Don’t expect much beyond these conveniences, though: there’s no option to run, and targeting enemies or objects still sometimes means dancing around like a lunatic when your party crowds around you or when multiple loot drops are in play. The age of the systems also shows in the lack of tooltips or right-click functionality. Checking gear and moving it between companions remains as clumsy as ever, aside from some basic drag-and-drop features. Unfortunately, you can’t edit gamepad bindings, so you’ll need to manage any inefficiencies in the control throughout the game or rely on keyboard and mouse, which work almost identically to the original Neverwinter Nights 2.

When combat begins, the real-time-with-pauses system kicks in, and you’ll find yourself selecting abilities from the hotbar and manically clicking on enemies to attack. You can adjust companion behavior, and they’ll try to make smart decisions, albeit with an irritating compulsion to trigger as many fights as possible in a confined area, or provoke pointless attacks of opportunity by changing targets randomly. Besides damage numbers, there’s not a great deal of useful feedback in combat either, unless you follow the logbook assiduously. Much of this comes down to the older elements of the UI: it’s not immediately clear how to identify or cure effects that reduce ability scores or stats, and the conditions for sneak attacks remain a bit of a mystery. Ultimately, I found that setting combat to ‘puppet mode,’ where companions respond only to direct commands, offered the most tactical control, though battles ran significantly longer. The challenge and complexity of the creatures and critters evolve over the story, and this serves to keep the combat varied through the mid- to late-game. There’s no doubt Act 1 feels like a bit of a slog through countless thugs, orcs, and undead who don’t offer much strategic depth. Despite these frustrations, the sheer volume of available strategies and actions is staggering, and it’s genuinely rewarding to carefully prepare for a tough encounter and emerge victorious.

As well as the social and combat challenges, Neverwinter Nights 2 retains a detailed crafting system for both equipment and alchemy. You’ll need to scour zones for recipe books, base moulds, and source the right components. With the appropriate crafting skill, a character can then use a workbench to attempt creation. Aside from a few basic puzzles and companion quests, the game otherwise sticks closely to the core elements of the 3.5 ruleset. There’s some limited roleplaying, but given the limited resources of the time, these options mostly guide players to the same point in the story rather than allowing for major deviations. There is a simple influence system to keep tabs on, where companions view your actions against their own moral compass, but it doesn’t have much effect other than unlocked conversations and the chance they may cease to travel with you. Combat is the primary focus, and there’s plenty of it.

The bundled expansion and adventure packs add more variety to the core systems. In addition to continuing the main plot, Mask of the Betrayer retains the extra abilities and the ‘spirit-eating’ mechanic from earlier content. The challenge remains as punishing as ever, but the expansion provides a different perspective on both plot and gameplay. The overland map in Storms of Zehir and the enhanced party customization and collaboration also contribute variety, though the story feels a bit tepid. Finally, Mysteries of Westgate returns to urban-mystery storytelling, adding another dozen or so hours of content.

It’s fair to say the whole package offers solid value. Completing every expansion and experimenting with different builds, narrative branches, and companion combinations provides dozens upon dozens of hours of content. Add in cooperative multiplayer and Steam Workshop integration, and it’ll be fascinating to see how much traction Neverwinter Nights 2 gains this second time around given the continued success of the original (and its remaster) within the modding and player-creation community.

This is now the best way to experience Neverwinter Nights 2 in its entirety—whether you’re new to the game or returning after breaking your old copy with countless incompatible mods and error-strewn patches. Gamepad support and enhanced visuals and audio bring it much closer to modern expectations, while the lived-in world and even greater range of character options offer plenty to explore. The expansions, included here with the same level of polish, significantly enhance the package. Yes, there are archaic frustrations that cannot be ignored, but they have a less significant impact on the experience as a result of all the other improvements. Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition rekindles a game that never quite reached the heights of its legendary bloodline. But now, with a degree of acceptance and patience, it can step onto the stage with all the confidence of an old soldier, sharing stories of how adventures used to be. Are you ready to listen?

Actions speak louder than words, and they can even jumpstart much-needed conversations. The language of flowers embodies that sentiment, allowing for hidden meaning and symbolism behind the seemingly simple act of choosing a bouquet for someone. Such is the premise behind the visual novel Hanako’s Flower Shop, where the titular main character helps customers express their feelings through flower arrangements. It’s a charming VN centered around a recent high school graduate and her loving grandfather’s flower shop nestled within a close-knit community. I delighted in the game’s varied and diverse narratives while appreciating how thoughtfully and sensitively the title delves into serious subject matter. The plot’s beginning and middle portions are engaging, while the heartfelt ending made me tear up.

Hanako’s grandfather devotedly raised her after her parents moved away from their small city in Japan to live abroad, and helping him at the shop has been her lifelong dream. To help settle into the routine and find her rhythm, her grandfather makes Hanako take charge of the day-to-day activities of running the shop, all while offering a supportive shoulder for Hanako. It isn’t long before she comes into contact with many memorable customers, all wanting different things from the bouquets they seek to purchase. Can Hanako ensure the family business continues even as she tries to help those who visit it? What happens when an unexpected tragedy hits close to home? Hanako’s Flower Shop deals with universal themes of love and loss, joy and grief, pain and healing in equal measure. Because of this, the game has a content warning disclaimer that players should note.

To say more about the roughly twelve-hour plot would spoil it, so I’ll refrain. Suffice it to say, Hanako’s Flower Shop delves into some surprising territory at times, but it’s tinged with a sense of realism and care. There’s a core message that it earnestly wants to convey, and I feel it largely succeeds in doing so, given the game’s final moving portion. The realistic characters in Hanako’s orbit all have understandable situations and problems, some of which are easy fixes, while others aren’t. It’s endemic to what you come across in real life. The narrative manages to be both bittersweet and hopeful, as well as soft and powerful. Those with whom the story resonates will carry its poignant themes long after the credits roll.

A game day in Hanako’s Flower Shop begins with Hanako preparing for what lies ahead and entering the shop. From there, you can do several activities: listening to the radio for helpful weather forecasts or mood-improving music; visiting the garden; taking a walk to gather flowers should the weather permit; ordering extra seeds or flowers with your funds; stocking up on emotion-boosting sweets at the candy shop; getting two young neighbor kids to retrieve extra flowers for you; or waiting for a customer to arrive.

Of course, like in real life, even excellent customer service cannot solve every issue with sympathy and well-intentioned messages alone. Some of the problems the customers bring inside the shop are too big even for the helpful Hanako to tackle, and sometimes she allows customers to vent. There’s also an emotion meter that factors into the gameplay. If Hanako makes a mistake at work, the emotion meter lowers. Eating sweets or listening to music helps recharge the meter so she can begin anew. It’s relatively easy to keep the meter high, given all the break opportunities you get on a given game day.

Restocking your supplies is vital to ensuring you always have enough of a particular flower to meet customer demand, though each procurement method has drawbacks. For example, the twins can only gather so much at a time, and their picks are random. There’s also the fact that you’re limited to seven bushels of flowers to carry during walks, and the different flowers available change constantly. The colors differentiating flowers during walks can be similar for various types, so you’re never sure what you might pick up. Any seeds planted in the garden take a few game days to grow before harvesting, and getting orders delivered to the shop also takes time. Managing the different ways to collect flowers can be especially tricky in the beginning phases when you don’t have robust funds and when things like the weather impact how often you can go outside. Hanako won’t go out to the garden or for a walk if it is raining.

The game’s bouquet-creating portion is when the language of flowers and communication generally become relevant. When a customer enters the shop, a conversation begins between them and Hanako. You must listen carefully to what’s said, picking up vital clues about what they’re looking for in their order. Fortunately, you have access to a notebook to highlight key words that you believe are worth remembering, and there’s a dialogue log as well, should you need to go over things in more detail. Hanako then begins creating a bouquet using her stockpile of flowers, all of which have three “flower language” descriptors applied to them that will be added to the bouquet’s inherent message/meaning should you add a particular flower into the mix. The descriptors and the bouquet message remain handily displayed throughout the process, so you’re never unaware. Once the bouquet is complete, Hanako gets a monetary reward for her work, and the entire process more or less repeats with a new customer until she calls it a day.

Beyond the game’s flower shop simulation elements, visual novel mechanics also play a significant role. You play as both Hanako and her grandfather at different story points depending on the scene. What you decide and how you choose to respond to queries during these VN portions impact how other characters view you or how a future scene might play out. I was honestly very impressed by how often my choices came up throughout the plot, even after other things had occurred between them. Depending on how things play out in the story, the customers’ plotlines also evolve fascinatingly. Not only will they occasionally visit Hanako at the shop to tell her how things are going with them, but you also get lengthy and detailed letters from customers. It’s a nice touch that makes the world feel more lived in.

Because Hanako’s Flower Shop‘s story has an underlying message it wishes to convey, I’d say the game’s biggest weakness might be the copious amount of handholding to try and get players to the finish line. You’d have to work to “fail” at the game, as it provides numerous opportunities to restock supplies and improve Hanako’s mood. Yes, you do lose some points in the emotions meter should you make a mistake when flower arranging, but so long as you keep the emotions meter high enough, it isn’t a problem. Hanako gives you substantial clues as to which flower needs replacing and which substitutions would work. I imagine those wanting a less casual gameplay loop might find it too easy and forgiving. For the many initial tutorials, though, I found it extremely odd that the game doesn’t mention how to manually save (hint: the pause button in the corner of the screen is your friend!). Given the ease of the gameplay mechanics and the heavy realism of various scenarios, I feel Hanako’s Flower Shop has a story cycle best served by playing in short bursts rather than trying to complete it in one go.

Visually, Hanako’s Flower Shop is a mostly bright and colorful game with some creative and artistic reasons to go darker during specific story points. It isn’t a high-budget VN, but it creatively uses animation effects and expressive character sprites to counter that. The character designs are reminiscent of Studio Ghibli, beautifully conveying the characters’ reactions and emotions. The visuals are eye-catching and clever, helping convey the story’s emotional elements.

Soundwise, Hanako’s Flower Shop‘s BGM is lovely to listen to and helps players resonate with the emotional context of a given scene. I credit the game because it is fully voice-acted, with the English voice actors giving dynamic performances. The English script is easy to follow and understand, with only a few typographical errors and the odd occasion where a spoken line doesn’t completely match the dialogue text. Sometimes, the script’s English translation comes across as too stiff and formal for everyday speech, but it still manages to convey the emotions at work. The game’s entirely playable with just a mouse, so it’s easy enough to get into from a control schematic sense, even if you don’t have a controller for your PC.

Hanako’s Flower Shop is a VN that leans more into the simple side with its gameplay mechanics and overall presentation, but it has a lot of heart and a surprising amount of depth beneath the surface. Those looking for a more casual gaming experience that manages to bring a lot to the table in terms of thoughtful and universal narrative themes should give the title a chance. It communicates so much through what it says directly and what it has you inwardly think about, all in a language very much its own.

Covenant of Solitude is a KEMCO-published RPG from developer Magitec that was first released on mobile devices back in 2013. Now, it’s made its way to other platforms, including Steam. Covenant of Solitude unabashedly hearkens back to the 16-bit era of RPGs from the 1990s, but does it do enough to stand out among such a crowded field of retro-inspired games? 

Communicating with and summoning monsters is a rare ability that is misunderstood, feared, and exploited in Covenant of Solitude’s world. Those born with this power are called genies, and protagonist Fort is an orphan with genie blood in him. Fort resides in an orphanage in a remote village, where he gets bullied and outcast by its strongly anti-genie residents. His two best friends, a burly guy named Legna and a sympathetic girl named Elicia, protect and support him as best they can.

Life goes on until, in true RPG fashion, the evil empire razes the village, causing Fort’s latent powers to awaken. Unfortunately, Fort cannot fully control them, and tragedy befalls his friends as a result. Fort is then locked up in an imperial prison and sentenced to death. The day before Fort’s execution, a sassy demon named Wicca appears and offers him a new lease on life. With Wicca to help him figure out his genie powers, a skeptical Fort’s adventure of self-discovery in a war-torn land begins. Covenant of Solitude’s story may have an unremarkable premise, but it’s surprisingly dark and touches upon some heavy themes like prejudice. The game’s second half is far stronger than the first, thanks to some tense plot twists.

I admire the dynamic Covenant of Solitude has between emotional-roller-coaster Fort and Wicca’s cooler, more objective counterpoint to keep him grounded. Wicca is supportive and understanding, yet has a firm hand when needed. She also avoids the nagging and bickering typically associated with characters of her ilk, making her an ideal companion and my favorite character in the game.

The story, while good, has a rough localization that has not been updated from its original form. Conversations read awkwardly due to questionable sentence structure and word choice. The copy-pasted text affects non-story aspects as well. For example, one NPC talks about needing to use real-world money to buy “Solitude Points” to redeem for certain convenience items in a special shop (a.k.a microtransactions). Microtransactions do not exist in this version; you gain Solitude Points through battle.

Covenant of Solitude’s DLC does require real-world money, though. A few easy mode features (like a modifier to triple EXP gained) are available as paid DLC. I would have liked those easy mode features available in the base game, particularly given that many comparable retro-inspired J/J-style RPGs in Covenant of Solitude’s price bracket include those convenience options at no additional cost.

If you’ve played a retro or retro-inspired RPG of this style, Covenant of Solitude’s traditional gameplay is old hat. Progression and exploration consist of the usual town-overworld-dungeon loop with loads of battles throughout. Dungeons feel longer than they really are due to a high random encounter rate and some sudden difficulty spikes causing a need for level grinding. I finished the game in about 16 hours, but it felt longer than that.

Covenant of Solitude’s most interesting gameplay aspect is creating Fort’s monster companions using a simplified version of Final Fantasy V’s Job system. Monsters come in four classes (tanky Dragons, offensive speedster Beasts, support magic Fairies, and offensive magic Vampires) and can take up one of several jobs (Fighter, Healer, Thief, Wizard, and some hidden jobs). Approaching party creation similarly to how I’d create generic troops in SRPGs is fine, but because every new monster starts at level one, changing a job resets the monster’s stats back to level one, and the special job-change items are expensive, there is little motivation to make more than three companions at the very beginning to see you through to the end.

The menus provide all the necessary information an RPG fan needs, but navigating them feels clunky due to unintuitive arrangements. For example, the quest log is within the system menu. Why would the quest log be in the area where I adjust the BGM volume or screen resolution? It also doesn’t help that some interface tutorials mention using keyboard commands, yet I used a gamepad and had to peck and hunt to see which button performed the action the tutorial described. Items are not very well organized in battle menus and there are no sort options. I had to endlessly scroll through large numbers of filler items to find the ones I needed to use. The interface is not as bad as Shadow Madness’ messy menus, but it’s far from efficient.

Covenant of Solitude’s graphics are as basic as it gets. The tired engine used in many Magitec-developed KEMCO games does not look or run much better than games made using RPG Maker XP. I would have liked to see updated graphics in this re-release; a little HD sheen for 2025, at least. Character portraits feature an appealing, if generic, anime style. One stylistic choice I’m not fond of is that male versions of Dragon and Beast class monsters resemble animals, yet the female versions look like humans in “sexy animal” Halloween costumes. Fanservice is all well and good, but in Covenant of Solitude, it creates a nonsensically inconsistent look within the overall design context.

The music is decent, 16-bit MIDI-inspired JRPG fare. Every piece of music is nicely composed and fits its intended action or environment. I can’t say any tunes will get stuck in your head to the point where you hum them throughout the day, but you won’t turn them off and substitute your own music while playing. Sound effects get the job done, but some sound effects, like the teleportation one, are unpleasantly shrill and piercing.

I genuinely liked Covenant of Solitude, but have a hard time recommending it when other (arguably better) games like it exist that offer a better value for the money. That this 2025 re-release of Covenant of Solitude remains relatively unchanged from its 2013 iteration is disappointing. The potential for a good game is there, but it needs a remodel to compete in a supersaturated and highly competitive market. Regardless, Covenant of Solitude always has the wonderful Wicca; she absolutely makes the game.