Image: Blue Manchu Games
Before we get into the typically busy fall season, videogame publishers and storefronts tend to host huge sales on a shotgun spread of titles both big and small . These sales are often great opportunities to buy games you might’ve missed or may never have heard of for a pretty good price. For example, there’s a killer Resident Evil sale bundle available right now, and you can get the Hitman trilogy for dirt cheap too.
PlayStation is currently holding a sale and here’s what I think you should prioritize as you sift through those digital store shelves.
It Takes Two won Game of the Year back in 2021, shocking a bunch of people, myself included. In retrospect, it wasn’t that much of an impossibility. It Takes Two is, for what it’s worth, still the very best co-op game I’ve played. So many experiences are made better by just having another person or two around, but Hazelight Games went the extra mile to make a game catered to co-op and ingenuity. Across the span of the game, you play as a miniaturized couple on the cusp of divorce who have to learn to overcome their differences in order to make it back to their normal life and daughter. The wonderfully fantastical journey they go on transforms It Takes Two from just another 3D platformer into so much else.
At one point, It Takes Two jokingly becomes a 2D fighting game. At another junction, it becomes a third-person shooter. At yet another, it’s a decently compelling top-down ARPG like Diablo. You ride frogs throughout one level, and skate across an icy landscape in another. It Takes Two is constantly reinventing itself over the course of a playthrough, and crafts situations that test both players in unique ways the entire time. There is not a more diverse co-op offering out there, and you can have It Takes Two for just $14.
Hi-Fi Rush is my favorite rhythm game of the last few years. A character action game set to the pulsing beats of a rip-roaring soundtrack, Hi-Fi Rush is already one of the greats in my eyes, which made Xbox’s closure of the studio behind it a real blow earlier this year. Fortunately, Tango Gameworks has been resurrected, and Hi-Fi Rush seems like it’ll continue on after all.
That means that you all have no excuse not to pick it up, especially since it’s one of the Xbox exclusives that made the leap to other consoles. Believe me, you want to play a game where you get bonus damage by matching button presses and attacks to the metronome of the song literally playing in the main character’s heart, all while he dons a makeshift electric guitar made of metal scrap and screams about just wanting to be a rockstar. Hi-Fi Rush is so earnest and idealistic that you can’t help but love it, and its anti-capitalist story and visuals are just the cherry on top of that sundae. You can rock out to your heart’s content in Hi-Fi Rush for just $18.
Often, video games are a lot. They are too big, too loud, even too bright. They are certainly too long nowadays, and even a little too intense. When I need a game to shut my brain off and just blast some music (mostly Taylor Swift) I go to Powerwash Simulator, which is exactly what it sounds like, and evolve into the final form of my closeted clean freak persona. Go around town and spray down houses, municipal buildings, and parks for money. Just turn the world off and clean. Powerwash Simulator is the ultimate brain-pleaser and you too can get regular releases of dopamine by picking it up for $17.49.
With the upcoming Life is Strange title bringing back the first game’s protagonist, you may as well catch up on the life and all-too strange times of Max Caulfield. Taking place in a Pacific Northwestern town called Arcadia Bay, Life is Strange follows Max and her best friend Chloe as they make sense of being teenagers, their own thorny relationships, and Max’s newfound ability to rewind time. Quintessential teen shit, y’know?
Life is Strange was acclaimed at the time for its subject matter and fresh perspective, centering a queer teenage girl and her peers who dealt with depression, suicide, sexual assault, and abuse among other things. However, the series is probably most beloved for its soft, sometimes even twee, aesthetics and deliberately nostalgic vibes. Even just writing about it prompted me to queue folksy indie songs featured throughout the series. Something about it just makes me long for it to be 2015 again. It instills in me this intense desire to walk down the hallways of my old high school, be surrounded by some of those faces I haven’t seen in nearly a decade, and not have to worry about a thing beyond my grades and the girl I was crushing on. Life is Strange feels like simpler times, even if it isn’t and that is perhaps the series’ greatest feat. You can pick up both the remaster of the first game and its prequel, Before the Storm, in this collection for $20.
Ahead of the eventual release of Borderlands 4, me and my friends are diving into the entire 2K RPG series. After much deliberation, and a confusing roll of a 20-sided die, we landed on trying the fantasy-tinged spinoff Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. Set within a tabletop-RPG world, Wonderlands maintains the series’ trope of guns, more guns, and even more guns, while translating much of the writing and character abilities to fit a more magical world. As long as you’ve got a good crew with you, these games are often a breezy and joyous time. You can get the PS4 version of Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands for $12, and the PS5 version (along with the season pass) in the Chaotic Great edition for $18.
Prey has, by my estimation, the best opening to a game ever. It’s been over seven years since it first released, and I’m sure many people have seen it, but even now, I hesitate to give it away. It’s just something you need to see and feel for yourself, which is true of Prey itself. Words have often failed me when I try to describe Prey and why it’s one of the greatest games of our time, with some of the best worldbuilding, characterization, and meaningful progression systems. Talos I is still one of the best settings I’ve ever explored in a game, and one of the few worlds that made poking at its edges and corners a genuine reward. The shape-shifting and psi-blasting Typhon remain some of my favorite enemies, and no matter how far along in the game I got, or how powerful I grew, I loved that I never felt safe or secure. I still consider so many of my encounters against them as a high point in first-person shooters, stealth games, and the weird nexus of those genres that immersive sims like Prey find themselves in. I genuinely believe that a lot of people (myself included) didn’t get Prey at first, or refused to, but once you dig into it, it becomes apparent that it is one of the all-timers. You should pick up Prey while it’s only $6.
Void Bastards is a lovely little experiment of a game. In it, you get to play as a randomly generated convict sent into derelict ships possessed by all manner of aliens, robots, and subtly supernatural creatures. Sprites, as well as much of the environment, are rendered in a flat comic book style and cel-shading, but the game plays like a roguelike first-person shooter and immersive sim across a series of bite-sized levels. To further mix things up, your character is generated with randomized traits, including buffs and debuffs that can be game-changing, hilarious, or both. Some simply make you tinier, which does reduce your hitbox, but others can make you yell when you pick things up, alerting enemies, or alternatively, make you impossible to spot. It can be a bit unwieldy, but it’s always a blast and it was successful enough to merit a spiritual successor, Wild Bastards, which is releasing in a few weeks. Try out Void Bastards ahead of that release for $9.
If you own a PlayStation console, I think you just owe it to yourself to experience what sometimes feels like Sony’s last really great bonafide blockbusters: the Uncharted series. Unfortunately, the Nathan Drake Collection doesn’t include every game to star the eponymous rogue, but it does boast the trio that was released on the PS3. The first game is a little wonky, seeing as how it was Naughty Dog’s first foray into a full-blown third-person shooter (relax, I love the Jak games but those do not count) and a debut title for the PS3, but eventually the team got really good at these. In fact, they immediately got much better, as Uncharted 2 was widely heralded as the de facto game of the year upon release in 2009. It’s wild to consider how a linear third-person shooter that you can wrap in about 10-15 hours was considered the peak of gaming when it now eschews everything that the industry currently values.
Uncharted is just Indiana Jones if it were modernized and made into a game before Bethesda and MachineGames went ahead and actually did that. The series is constantly escalating the action and stakes with increasingly impressive setpieces, such as an escape from a derailed train hanging off the side of a mountain, a classic level on top of a moving train, and a gunfight in the ballroom of a capsizing cruise ship. Nathan is a hot smart mouth who gets all the girls, and even has a rotating series of trusty sidekicks/allies. His adventures take him all over the world in the pursuit of treasure, and every now and then he even uncovers places and people of legend. It’s a good time, and you can get the Nathan Drake Collection for just $10.
Tetris has always been able to make players feel something. Whether that’s despair at a loss, or overwhelming joy at a triumph, it has always been able to elicit a feeling. I stress this because Tetris Effect is often burdened with this perception that its combination of lush visuals, emotive music, and satisfying gameplay finally transformed Tetris into some higher form of art. I disagree: Tetris has always been this piercing, Tetris Effect just decided to make it plain as day.
What can be said about Tetris Effect and the rest of the series that hasn’t already been said somewhere else by someone with a bigger and better brain than me. It is the latest incarnation of the video game. Not the first one, but the one that outlined the form long before I was ever even a twinkle in my father’s eye. Before we discoursed ad nauseam about artfulness in games, Tetris was a living, breathing, reactive, and most importantly, challenging mosaic.
Tetris Effect Connected, which adopts the last bit of its title from a song featured in the game, brings further multiplayer capabilities to the title. Like all great art, Tetris Effect Connected is wonderful and edifying to share with others, be they strangers or your closest friends. We’re all connected after all. You can (and should) snag Tetris Effect Connected on PlayStation. The PS4 version, which lacks PSVR2 support, will run you $20, while the PS5 version that does costs $30.
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