Discoveries

I’ve played so many survival and crafting games that I have the opening routine down to a science. Here’s how it usually goes: I wake up in a new environment and get straight to punching trees. Sometimes, I don’t even get to punch trees — I have to pick up sticks and rocks and make a makeshift axe, and then I can start chopping down trees to get logs. I am so tired of punching trees and gathering sticks. Overthrown, a wacky kingdom-building simulator designed to be enjoyed with friends, manages to shake up that stale formula.

The first thing I do in Overthrown is claim a crown marked with a beam of light, which seems like a poor system of government, but it lets me find my footing. Then, I have to start getting some wood to start building my settlement. Sure enough, I have to punch trees, but developer Brimstone made the basic movement and combat of this game smooth and quick. So I don’t just punch trees; I combo-strike them, spin dash into them, and beat the shit out of those mighty oaks. I don’t have to upgrade my axe to level 3 to attack a big tree; I just need to pummel it persistently.

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Earlier this year, a video of Deborah Ann Woll teaching Jon Bernthal how to play Dungeons & Dragons went ultra-viral, causing millions of people to go “Maybe I’d like this D&D thing after all.” It also caused hordes of tabletop gamers to wish that they could find a way to convince their friends and family to get RPGs without bouncing off hours-long character creations and arcane rules. Even if they do agree to play, scheduling — that great beast — gets in the way when all you want to do is play right now. Fortunately, independent game designer Clément Domergue has the answer.

Wanna play right now? is a free to download game that takes the basic ethos of tabletop role-playing and distills them into an approachable 22-page book. Taking the lead from Deborah Ann Woll’s immediate immersive prompt, the game has 10 one-page adventures with a structure that puts players into the action immediately. Set in different traditional fantasy scenarios like Woll’s original monologue about a Moonless Wood (which itself is included in the adventures), the book gives DMs a short paragraph that sets the scene, introduces a conflict, and asks the all-important question: What do you do?

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Restoration Games’ Crossbows & Catapults: Fortress War shows the scrappy little board game publisher at its very best — hunting down older, long-forgotten games and giving them a fresh coat of paint for modern audiences. Its latest effort is perfect for families with young children, and easily bridges the gap between hardcore fans of the tabletop hobby and the kids who love them. But the big box of plastic may prove a bit too pricey for some.

Published in 1983, the original Crossbows and Catapults was a big hit at retail, straddling the line between a novel toy and a dexterity-based board game. Players compete to land their caroms — chunky plastic disks — on their opponent’s treasure horde, or use those same caroms to knock over a central tower. The mechanisms for flinging those caroms are little plastic siege weapons, including a ballista and a catapult powered by rubber bands.

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Indiana Jones and the Great Circle kicks off a brand-new adventure with nostalgia. The start of the game, serving as a tutorial, is pretty much a one-to-one re-creation of the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark. You get to incarnate Indy, but only slightly — you’re constantly interrupted with cutscenes featuring dialogue and camera frames matched to the original film. It’s a showcase of how, 40 years later, CG technology can recreate movies to a painstaking degree of fidelity.

This sequence’s presence is passed off as a flashback dream for Indy. The rest of The Great Circle takes place a year after the events of the homaged movie. But even if the tribute is a commendable effort, it sets a precedent for the experience as a whole. The clear obsession to deliver a cinematic story around the character of Indiana Jones constantly clashes with this modern video game rendition of the films. Which is a shame, because there are plenty of interesting ideas when you actually have control.

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There’s a lofty reason for all the water in Monument Valley 3, next week’s long-awaited sequel to the beloved puzzle game series about climbing optical illusions.

And there’s a personal motivation.

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Do what you love, they say, and you’ll never work a day in your life. In the indie game Ikeelya, I’m doing that by balancing my day job as a patient, relentless assassin with my true love — crafting cozy living rooms. Ikeelya mixes the joy of browsing an Ikea catalog with the pressure of being a sniper. It’s almost like two games in one, connected by the thread of our hapless protagonist and a polite but nosy neighbor.

In Ikeelya, you step into the shoes of Barry, a grown-ass man who lives in an empty apartment worthy of r/malelivingspaces. I’m broke as a joke, so I have to take an assassination contract. These contracts are pretty quick to complete. I sit and wait for the target to emerge, take aim, and fire. Every time I miss, my shadowy boss yells at me and deducts some of my pay, so it’s in my best interest to make every job quick and clean.

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There’s darkness around the edges of Infinity Nikki’s idyllic townscapes and romantic dresses, a traumatic scarring that’s left the pastoral fantasyland of Wishfield — the starting region in Infinity Nikki’s larger world of Miraland — on edge. For every beautiful gown and pup with twee, cable-knit fur, Wishfield has a cruel, devastating reality: Violence in a neighboring region has left Wishfield harboring war refugees, and mysterious trinkets that prey on people’s hopes and dreams have citizens falling into incurable comas.

The war, ironically, is the backdrop of Infinity Nikki, a table setting for the desperate world. Instead, Infinity Nikki’s story centers on the coma incidents, which bring Nikki across Wishfield’s several different locations in search of answers. She’ll find glimmering fish shaped like luxury handbags, the ghosts of worn clothing, humans imprisoned by adorable fairies, and a stunningly complex plan to exploit the residents of Wishfield’s wishes.

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Thirty hours into my Fantasian Neo Dimension playthrough, I found myself in a surreal landscape, a twisted amalgamation dotted by ghostly white corruption known as Mechteria. My Dimengeon device, a contraption that allows me to “bank” monster encounters, was nearly overflowing, so I had to take out over 40 enemies in a single battle. I continued to advance, thinking that the threats had been eliminated, yet numerous encounters piled up within mere seconds.

Fantasian Neo Dimension certainly presents a challenge, even for the most ardent fans of turn-based role-playing games, such as myself. Developed by Mistwalker and released in two parts for Apple Arcade back in 2021, Fantasian is a collaboration between two giants of the industry: Final Fantasy series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi and renowned composer Nobuo Uematsu. Now, this new rerelease for Windows PC and consoles boasts 4K resolution support, along with battle themes from previous Final Fantasy titles, given that Square Enix is handling publishing duties.

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You don’t have enough Irish-language hip-hop in your life. That’s just a simple fact. But thankfully, Netflix has added the most interesting and unique music biopic of the year to help fill in that gap for you.

Kneecap follows the semi-mythical origins of the Irish-language rap group of the same name. The film starts out centering on two teenagers, Liam and Naoise, living in Belfast in the late 2010s. Naoise’s father, Arlo (Michael Fassbender), a former IRA member who went into hiding, taught the boys Irish at a young age, but while he did it to preserve some sense of national identity in the boys, they mostly use it to stick it to any authority they can find. Somewhere in the middle of all their teenage shenanigans they run into a music teacher named JJ, who finds out that Liam writes songs and suggests the three of them form a hip-hop group.

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As the opening scenes of Gints Zilbalodis’ gorgeous, wordless Latvian animated movie Flow started unfolding on the screen, I had a moment of déjà vu. The image of a little black cat with huge wide eyes, frantically navigating a verdant green forest during a shocking disaster — I’d seen it before. The panicked animals, the sense of a nightmare closing in on them all, the contrast between the cat’s cartoony style and its believable feline reactions to danger — they all seemed so familiar. Eventually, I realized why: I was recalling the opening scenes of China’s absorbing 2019 animated fantasy The Legend of Hei.

The Legend of Hei starts in a simple place, with Hei the black cat peacefully (and adorably) at rest in his forest home, communing with the little nature spirits that live there. Once things start going wrong, though, events escalate quickly — so quickly that it’s easy to get left behind if you don’t already know about the world he lives in.

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If you’re looking for restraint, you will not find it in Echo Point Nova. Within the first 30 minutes of the game, you’ll find yourself equipped with a hoverboard capable of climbing any vertical surface, a grappling hook that can latch onto clouds, and a triple jump. This game does not hold back the goods.

Echo Point Nova is an open-world FPS that offers nearly total freedom. Once you’ve got your basic loadout, you’re free to explore the enormous map of hundreds of floating islands and enemy bases. There is a story, delivered via in-world text popups, but you’ll likely miss much of it as you’re soaring over an ice mountain trying to dive-bomb a giant robot. It is an untethered power fantasy.

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One of the most inspiring things about humanity is that no matter where we end up, we can find a way to thrive. Take, for instance, the setting of Threshold, an indie game by a developer who previously worked on Deathloop and Dishonored. Threshold takes place on the peak of a high mountain, where you play as someone embarking on one of the most stressful maintenance gigs available. I watch the trains go by, and make sure that they run on time. The air is so thin, I often struggle and choke my way through a shift. My predecessor is buried nearby, and my co-worker is just relieved that someone is there to share the burden.

There’s a country-based difficulty system, or at least the Steam page advertises one. I chose Canada, and the game begins with an ominous display of my home country and flag. I load into my little worker’s room and spot a shirt that says “I love Ottawa.” As a proud Torontonian, I frown. This game is already insulting me. This is true psychological horror.

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What to watch with your family at Thanksgiving can turn into an endless debate, particularly with the seemingly infinite options that streaming services provide. So to save you time this holiday weekend, we’ve handpicked a thematically appropriate film that should bring the whole family together* no matter what: the Turkey Day-themed slasher Thanksgiving.

*“bringing the family together” can mean “getting nauseous via immaculately crafted gore”

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Arcane concluded its second and final season last Saturday. The adult animated action series produced by French studio Fortiche set in the universe of Riot Games’ League of Legends ended with a finale as spectacular as it was bittersweet, with the resolution of several major character arcs and the future of Piltover and Zaun’s continued coexistence affirmed.

Fans of Arcane needn’t be too upset by its absence, though, as showrunner and co-creator Christian Linke told Polygon that Riot and Fortiche are already at work on several unannounced projects based in the League of Legends universe. That’s fine in the long term, sure, but what about right now?

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I expected War Game: The Making of STALKER 2 Documentary — a video published by developer GSC Game World in October 2024, about a month before STALKER 2’s release — to feel like a 90-minute commercial that touted the game’s designs and features while bragging about hyped-up accomplishments. Instead, War Game is an emotional gut punch of a history lesson and a genuinely touching documentary.

The first STALKER game — a survival horror game created by Ukrainian studio GSC Game World — was released in 2007 to vaguely positive reviews, launching a series of prequels and not-quite-sequels that have gone on to sell more than 15 million copies. Eleven years later, in 2018, the official sequel was announced, expected in 2021. Then it was delayed to December 2022. Then, when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, that date became impossible to meet.

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Half-Life 2 celebrated its 20th anniversary last week, with Valve releasing a hefty update to the original game alongside a two-hour documentary featuring interviews and a peek at never-before-seen footage and concept art from the game’s development.

As a longtime fan of the series who considers Half-Life 2 one of my most formative experiences playing games, the anniversary has me feeling some type of way: a bittersweet nostalgia for a bygone era of PC gaming and the community of aspiring artists, designers, and modders that sprang up around it. Half-Life 2 was the first game I played that inspired me to know more not just about the people who created it, but about how games are even made in the first place. With that said, I must admit my love for the game has waned somewhat in the decades since its release.

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There’s no way around it — you cannot talk about indie fighting game Rivals of Aether 2 without mentioning how inseparably intertwined it is with Super Smash Bros. Melee for Nintendo GameCube.

The founder and director of Aether Studios, Dan Fornace, is a fan of Melee along with other developers who were involved in the sequel, including Jigglypuff main turned streamer and YouTuber Ludwig Ahgren. The publishing company Ahgren co-founded, Offbrand Games, partnered with Aether Studios after the very successful Kickstarter campaign for Rivals of Aether 2 concluded in 2023.

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Ray tracing and hyperrealistic physics are not requirements for a proper gut punch.

In Arco, an action-forward fantasy RPG released in August, a Western revenge saga unfolds across desert plateaus and lush forests, all rendered in intricate pixel art. That style intensifies the otherworldliness of the game’s not-quite-our-own Mesoamerica, a land of the past populated by monsters as well as a more grounded foe: the Red Company, a band of oil-seeking colonizers ready to slaughter anyone for a buck. Four Indigenous heroes, brought together by violent circumstance, wield knives, guns, and the arco — the bow — to hunt down those who’ve killed their people. But like in all great Westerns, even righteous retaliation weighs on a gunslinger’s soul.

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This review was published upon Neva’s release in October, but we’re updating it upon its three Game Awards nominations, including Best Indie Game.

I am not a woman with a sword, and I don’t live in a soft, watercolor world that’s quickly being overcome by dark, spindly shadows. But I feel like I do. Most days are a fight as I slash back at the abyss that threatens to overwhelm; I have a lot more in common, right now, with Neva’s striking human character Alba than I expected.

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Tetris is Tetris. It’s basically perfect, and it always has been. This is abundantly clear when you load up the first playable game in the new interactive documentary and retro game compilation Tetris Forever: the original Tetris, as it was on the Electronika 60 computer that was already old-fashioned when Alexey Pajitnov wrote the game in Russia in 1984. The text is all in Cyrillic alphabet, the blocks are made out of brackets (the Electronika 60 had no graphics function at all), the only color is green, and the game lacks several design refinements, like the score multiplier for clearing multiple lines at once. And yet, as crude as it is, the game is as instantly and ferociously playable as it is intuitive, and as profoundly satisfying as any version of it since. It is a work of the purest genius.

The chance to sample this epochal piece of software for yourself is the greatest privilege granted by Tetris Forever, which collects just a small handful of the dozens, maybe hundreds, of iterations of Pajitnov’s game from the past four decades. The most powerful revelation contained in the collection is the instant, firsthand realization that almost everything that makes Tetris great was present in those early lines of code. After that, Tetris Forever developer Digital Eclipse has both everywhere and nowhere to go.

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Reprobate, a word whose archaic meaning in the Calvinist tradition is “a person damned to hell,” is the perfect mindset to embody in a game where you play as an absolute bastard.

In Death of the Reprobate, I assume the role of a young tyrant named Malcolm the Shit. His father, Immortal John, is dying. Usually, that would be good news for a spoiled heir like him, but his plans to assume the throne hit a snag when his daddy tells him he must perform seven good deeds to earn his right to rule the land. Malcolm, however, is the equivalent of some sort of Renaissance-era fuckboy who likes to order the execution of his subjects. It’s up to me to usher him along on his path to redemption in a journey that combines potty humor with… Renaissance artwork.

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The Dragon Quest games have hewed to tradition over the past four decades. Series creator Yuji Horii, inspired by Ultima and Wizardry, aimed to bring role-playing games to the masses with simplicity and a smile. That same philosophy is applied to Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake, a new version of the 1988 original that retains the game’s classic, turn-based battles and random encounters but softens its old-school edges and gives it a prettier-than-ever coat of paint.

Square Enix’s latest game in the HD-2D family doesn’t fuss with the simplicity and approachability of Dragon Quest. It does, however, make it easier to play than ever, and gives longtime fans a few new things to do. Dragon Quest 3 has, after all, been repackaged and rereleased multiple times across console generations. This version ranks among the best.

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The original 5th edition Dungeon Master’s Guide (2014) came to market during a delicate period for its publisher, Wizards of the Coast. Dungeons & Dragons’ 4th edition had been struggling to grow its audience for years, leading many to wonder if the seminal tabletop role-playing game could retain its dwindling relevance in the marketplace. As it turns out, 5th edition was indeed a hit, and D&D is now bigger than ever before in its more than 50-year history. That’s thanks in part to a solid mechanical foundation, but also to a bustling actual play community that continually raises the bar for performance and storytelling.

Now Wizards is making yet another attempt at revitalizing the D&D brand with a revised, updated, and expanded 5th edition Dungeon Master’s Guide (2024). I’m happy to say that it feels like exactly what the game and its fandom needs in this moment. It would have been easy for developers merely to chase the community, codifying the way that the modern game is played and the culture that surrounds it. And yes, they’ve done that to a very large extent. But the book also moves the game forward in important ways, adding new and exciting tweaks to an already winning formula. DMG feels equal parts essential and inspiring, making it a tremendous way to kick off the next half-century of D&D.

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It’s the 1970s, and The Case of the Golden Idol is ancient history. What was the stuff of legends and myth — Lemurian history — in The Case of the Golden Idol is almost entirely unknowable, told in the shadows by the weirdest of conspiracy theorists and fringe historians. Anything that was known about the golden idol and its powers broke alongside it at the end of The Case of the Golden Idol. The Rise of the Golden Idol kicks off with a scientist face down, dead in the snow; the cycle begins anew. “The world has changed dramatically,” Color Gray Games wrote in its description of the sequel. “The sins of humanity have not.”

At the outset of Rise, there’s no immediate mention of the idol or the role it may play, but several people — mostly unhoused people and one prestigious scientist — have been found dead from various causes, all with glowing red eyes. Like in The Case of the Golden Idol, the first order of business in The Rise of the Golden Idol is to start piecing together clues built into the game’s scenes. While in The Case of the Golden Idol these scenes were static and made with pixel art, Color Gray Games’ team has advanced the art alongside the centuries: Scenes are still largely static, albeit with some looping animation on certain details, but now rendered in a grotesque art style that’s reminiscent of Arlene Klasky and Gábor Csupó’s Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, The Wild Thornberrys, or As Told by Ginger instead of classic video games.

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