Like always, here are the closing paragraphs for the reviews, fresh from my digital copy:
Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course (PC (tested), PS4, Switch, Xbox One)
That past half-decade, then, was evidently time well spent. Barring one or two lingering frustrations, where certain randomised elements combine to produce inescapable hazards, this feels like Cuphead distilled: an amalgamation of the best bits of the base game, with few of its shortcomings. Naturally, it's an exhilarating showcase of the Moldenhauers' breathtaking art and animation, which toys with perspective and scale to a degree beyond the original - it's almost worth the price of entry to simply watch someone else play but the many tiny refinements and quality-of-life improvements mean it's worth steeling yourself for a new challenge. That titular adjective, in other words, is not misplaced: with each boss delivering the *high-class bout' promised by the announcer, this helping of afters is anything but an afterthought.
9
Hardspace: Shipbreaker (PC)
Characters are prone to opening comms and monologuing while you struggle to focus, but your sense of irritation furthers the themes, inasmuch as it's in your employer's interest for you to see the topical plot elements as intrusive. The pressure to make the most of each shift even hinders your appreciation for the glories of working in space. When Weaver invites us to behold the railgate looming behind our worksite - a spectacle on par with Homeworld's mothership - we 're tempted to mute him. Who's got time for attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion when you're a billion credits in the red? Whatever your feelings on unionisation, Hardspace's unspoken challenge is to separate yourself from your employment and preserve your curiosity about that wider universe, which extends to gathering banned audio logs about the solar system's history, and, later, putting aside components for a ship of your own. It all adds up to a remarkable mixture of emotions, seldom encountered in a commercial videogame: kinetic thrill and the satisfaction of optimising your time, but also mounting claustrophobia, empathy for co-workers, and a sense that somewhere out among the stars there's a kinder society waiting to be riveted together.
9
The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story (PC, PS4, PS5 (tested), Switch)
But while the resulting cases bubble with murderous possibilities, the process of reaching that point falls flat. Matching facts to questions involves little deduction, with markings on each evidential tile revealing where it will or won't fit on the board. It's more like completing a jigsaw puzzle than drawing your own conclusions; worse, some slightly fuzzy phrasing means we struggle to see how some tiles fit where they do. Managing to be self-solving and baffling at the same time is quite a feat. More egregiously, the deduction phase slams the brakes on the story and removes us from the FMV world a little too long. When a late-game twist does lead to tighter interplay between the movie portions and the deduction task you get a glimpse of a more appealing adventure and it puts earlier unevenness in stark relief; a shame that thinking is relegated to the final stretch. The resulting journey is likely to speak louder to armchair detectives than more hands-on keyboard sleuths, and on those terms The Centennial Case is a success: it's handsomely shot, produced and scored, solidly acted, and boasts some late revelations that recontextualise the previous ten hours in notable ways (albeit during an epilogue so long even Kojima would get fidgety). And if the technical art of detecting is not as fully represented as it is in other games, the team's affection for mysteries and those who weave them is infectious enough to earn this a minor mention on the chronology of crime.
7
Evil Dead: The Game (PC, PS4, PS5 (tested), Xbox One, Xbox Series)
Melee is composed of the usual quick and strong attacks, plus a dodge and blood-splattering finishers that can be triggered when an enemy is sufficiently staggered. This all works well enough in one-on-one encounters, but, well, that's no way to pick off your victims. And so multiple nasties crowd the player, and (with luck) their friends rush in to save the day, and everyone mashes buttons until one side is dead. And rather than skill or tactical nuance, which way the outcome falls tends to come down to the relative power levels in play. Both sides have the chance to boost their stats within matches - which makes a certain amount of sense, since it locks off the demon's most destructive powers in the early game - but also via a skill-tree menu whose perks carry over from game to game. Empowerment has always been an important part of this series, much more than most horror films - just think of the "groovy" tooling-up montage in Evil Dead 2 – but when it's applied to both sides, you can end up with an entry-level Deadite that goes down in two hits or an identical one that seems to be made of brick. Neither option is satisfying, for either party, and it undermines the sense - so carefully established by the game's presentation and premise - that Evil Dead: The Game understands its source material. Then again, perhaps it's not the film part that it's struggling to adapt here, but rather the peculiar subgenre of games in which it has to exist. We'd suggest it might be time to lay the Dead By Daylight formula to rest, but you know how these things go in horror movies: it'd only rise again as soon as our backs were turned.
5
Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong (PC (tested), PS4. PS5. Xbox One, Xbox Series)
For all that it has the foundations of an absorbing player-authored story, Vampire: The Masquerade: Swansong too often feels like a predetermined narrative that's indifferent to your involvement. It lacks the scope to let you fail and commit to that failure, and the characters to make their choices affecting. Much like its previous game The Council, Big Bad Wolf has crafted an ambitious setup with many interlocking systems, only to stumble in the execution. Which, when you're a vampire, is hardly ideal.
4
Sniper Elite 5 (PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series (tested)
Admittedly, Sniper Elite 5 hasn't jettisoned all of the series' baggage. Enemy AI, while tenacious, can often get tripped up by their surroundings, funnelling themselves through bottlenecks. Multiple functions being bound to the same button often leads to moments of frustration, particularly when the difference between accidentally searching a body and picking up a weapon can be life or death. And while traversal options have been expanded, it remains annoyingly easy to climb the wrong surface in the heat of the moment, thanks to the auto-platforming mechanics. None of this, however, is sufficient to stall the momentum as the game progresses towards an ending explosive enough to make Michael Bay blush. Rebellion's not reinventing the wheel, then, but there's an admirable clarity of focus here from a studio clearly confident in its handiwork. And in the moments when we clear out encampments undetected, picking off targets with a silenced Welrod pistol, it feels like Fairburne has earned his nickname - even as a small part of us is waiting for the next moment a mistake belies it.
7
Silt (PS5 (tested), PC, Switch, Xbox Series)
Silt remains grimly unsettling, and there's a sprinkling of ingenuity in many of its puzzles, but it's not as powerful as it promises to be. Somehow, despite holding the ingredients in hand, it stops short of conjuring the abyssal terror of descending into an inky unknown. Nor is it quite as visceral or surprising as Limbo once was. As the jaws of some monstrosity clamp shut on us again, the chills give way to irritation. Not that we can blame the hungry creatures: just like them, we'd like a little more to chew on.
6
Card Shark (PC (tested), Switch)
Even so, the number of techniques to internalise and then pull off efficiently proves challenging - not least because some tricks are similar yet require a different string of inputs. You will, no doubt, fail a few unwittingly. At which point you might choose to back out before your ruse is uncovered. Or, if a mistake means the game is up, the repercussions could be more dire than simply returning to your caravan, cap in hand, asking for a loan from the collective pot into which you've been putting your winnings. Rapier duels demand you mimic an opponent's moves, but sometimes you'll simply be shot on sight. Death is not the end, however, or not immediately - you can pay to return to the land of the living, or attempt to play your way back from the afterlife. But try to cheat death and fail, and the consequences will be permanent. It's a smart way of increasing the tension in a game that feels high-stakes even before the opening bet reaches three figures. If Nerial doesn't perhaps interrogate the moral dimension of cheating as closely as it might, it amply demonstrates the dangers of not playing fair - partly by pitting you against characters who have underhand strategies of their own. The result is a game that regularly catches you off-guard, and yet, like a cheat on the verge of being found out, it knows not to outstay its welcome. Indeed, it's not until the end that it dawns on us that we've essentially been playing a game composed of (admittedly elaborate, handsomely presented) quick-time events. That, perhaps more than the two dozen or so you get to master over the course of seven hours, is Card Shark's most extraordinary trick of all.
8
Loot River (PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series (tested)
After all, you don't gain much from fighting. You accrue a smattering of XP (used to level up your strength, dexterity and the like), but levelling up is slow and unimpactful, and resets upon death. Anything more – a spot of loot, a few orbs' worth of currency towards persistent unlocks - comes down to the roll of some very unfavourable dice. It all feels like an attempt to disguise how shallow this river is, how easy it would be to scrape against its bottom. Nevertheless, you'll see the same ability-granting charms over and over again. There's similarly little differentiation between the jigsaw levels. It's hard to give a four-by-three block a sense of character, and because they have to be slotted together just so, there's no room for the quirks that lend procedural generation its magic. Rather than being ushered into a world summoned especially for your next run, this feels like inheriting someone else's Tetris grid. Every now and then, there's a flash of ingenuity. A boss with the power to manipulate blocks en masse, slamming half the room left and right as you duel; collectable modifiers that let you set some rules for how the next world will be pieced together. But generally, that daring collision of genres that fired the imagination? You 'll understand why no one has dared to try it before, and most likely never will again.
5
The Last Clockwinder (Quest 2 (tested), SteamVR)
From a room with catapults and lilypads, used to bounce fruit into a large receptacle, to the wonderful contraption you use to move between rooms (which involves plugging a cable into a reflective globe before pulling a lever to bring your destination to you), it's consistently playful. And we experience an odd swell of pride as we watch our automata at work, marvelling at these Heath Robinson arrangements for which we're entirely responsible. Sure, it's a feeling occasionally tinged with squirming embarrassment as we recognise our very human failings in the robots' movements, such as the odd ungainly stretch to retrieve an errant throw. But that only serves as a reminder of how valuable our input has been: without our efforts, all would be lost. Turns out we're not obsolete just yet.
8
Preview for the next issue:
