‘If you want to torture somebody, first show them your tools’ is one of the better horror game design lessons taught by Amnesia: The Dark Descent. I thought of Amnesia’s cistern chapter while playing through a later area in Lunar Software’s excellent first-person spookathon Routine, announced 13 long years ago, though only in active development for around five. The area centres on a curious underground tree, with water dripping from a hydroponic ceiling and sealed doors on all sides. You can imagine Amnesia’s Shadow manifesting here, clogging the roots with acid rot as it homes in on your comically loud footfalls.

I also thought of Alien – of moisture splashing on Brett’s upturned face while he searches for Jonesy in the guts of the Nostromo. Routine is so indebted to that film and the hallmarks of that era that it inevitably risks feeling hollow. The game’s desolate moonbase setting is a late 1970s to 1980s vision of the future, made up of curving Macintosh plastic and cathode-ray crackle. It has the jaw-dropping lustre and formaldehyde reek of a very expensive museum, every room and corridor perfectly composed, however trashed and darkened, every in-world computer display a marvel of speculative 1-bit OS design.

Your only equipment in Routine is a boxy and bevelled multiple-purpose CAT scanner with a camcorder display and accessories you have to manually peer at and pop from the casing, as though ejecting cassettes. It’s the kind of thing I’d have gone crackers over as a kid who dreamed of getting a tricorder for Xmas… Who am I fooling? I’d go crackers over it today. You’ll find a module for your CAT in a mall showroom, and there’s a nagging sense that that’s where Routine ultimately belongs, but the game powers through the sheeny nostalgia.

In some ways, it’s a more exciting piece of horror than Alien: Isolation, which launched a couple of years after Routine’s announcement. Mostly, that’s because it doesn’t have an Alien, one of the most overexposed monsters in gaming. It has other dangers that need to be encountered and deciphered, with uncommon care. You’ve likely seen the robots in trailers: there’s a nasty trick to their operation, a simple variable that cultivates a relatively novel kind of suspense, and they’re not the only thing you have to worry about. Routine also has an impressive knack for foreshadowing, which makes it a shame that the developers have spoiled certain aspects of enemy behaviour in pre-release coverage. Beware of more potential spoilers from here.

So yes, let’s return to that opening Amnesia quote. Show us your tools, Routine! The room with the tree is the centre of a small maze of scanning facilities, server rooms, receptions and terminals. I was calm when I stole into the place – I’d just survived a baptism of fire in chapter 3, around four of seven hours in, a climax I mistook for the end of the game, and Routine had rewarded me with a bizarre floral transition and the chance to grapple with new mysteries.

I thought the pressure was off, and it was, for a handful of minutes. I set out from the hub, having procured the means to unseal one set of doors, and immediately came across computer docs that began layering up hints of a resident threat. Which might sound like a clunky piece of set dressing, a la “Hack off their limbs” in Dead Space, but Routine drags out the payoff to marvellous effect. Having given me just enough material to scrape together some rudimentary engagement tactics, it left me to shuffle through more doors and creep through vents, grasping at the threads of puzzles and returning often to a central computer near the area savepoint. Quite naturally, I saw evidence of my half-understood enemy everywhere.

Above all, I heard it in the walls. Routine boasts a vast menagerie of ambient machine noises – dire reverberations that tickle with the suggestion of guttural lungs and lips, dirging their resentment from deep within the world as you blunder about pushing buttons and rousing dormant systems. It’s just the aircon, you tell yourself, listening to the bulkheads moan. It’s just some turbine that some asshole specifically designed to sound like a dying elephant.

Elsewhere, there are magnetic tape storage units that chatter to themselves unpredictably, like hibernating droids in Star Wars, and speakers playing noisy synth that are absolutely maddening because they stop you hearing anything else nearby. Now, combine those persistent, corrosive acoustic elements with the screech and slam of a motorised door. Every door in Routine opens far faster than necessary and always sounds a little like something bursting through that door in a flurry of teeth. I actually found myself shushing them. For god’s sake, doors! You are going to wake it up. Wherever and whatever it is.

You horror junkies are reading all this and thinking “aww, look at Baby getting to grips with some bread-and-butter sci-fi fixtures and elementary dramatic build-up”. Well, the other twist is that I’m fairly sure Routine uses familiarity with such things against you. It’s not just that your surroundings sound like they’re coming to life, to say nothing of abysmally long hallways with the regulation Object In Shadow at the far end, or pure slabs of negative space that cry out to have a grenade lobbed into them, if any were to be found.

As I trawled the rooms around the underground tree, I also slowly put together a list of hiding spots, changing plays of sightlines, and certain props of the yellow-paint variety. I grasped at future sequences of actions and how challenging it would be to complete them, given what I understood about my still-unseen aggressor. Again, might sound like knowing too much in advance, but therein lies the wickedness. Having allowed you to understand the overall nature of the trap, to settle in as armchair designer, Routine lets you burden your mind with permutations. Like Amnesia’s victims, you wield the scalpel against yourself, stockpiling scenarios while waiting for the game to finally take the knife from your hands.

Lunar Software manage to raise the tension while sort of hiding nothing, in a way I haven’t quite experienced in any other horror game. One random document more or less spells out the eventual, sadistically belated scripted emergence, but it managed to scare the pants off me anyway.

I do find it masterful. But I fear I’m overegging the Kane-pudding. I played Routine in parallel to Santa Ragione’s Horses (review up very shortly), a rather more… complicated horror production, though a curiously similar one in terms of its shared interest in older media technologies, and I do think I’ve come to see Lunar Software’s project as a reprieve. So here’s an unceremonious list of things that might turn you off.

Firstly, and just in case it wasn’t obvious, do not play Routine if you hate hiding from things you can’t kill, or trying to solve puzzles while hiding from those things. The CAT scanner can be repurposed as a weapon, but not a lethal one, and you’ll run out of battery power quickly if you try to Vasquez the opposition. There are lots of replacement batteries around, but they’re just rare enough that you might keep a note of their locations.

Don’t play Routine if you can’t bear manual savepoints that are not only relatively far apart – or feel that way, given your character’s lumbering spacesuit movement – but have to be activated by synching up your CAT over wireless. Do not play Routine if you hate backtracking from one part of a puzzle to another, either, and definitely do not play Routine if you can’t abide the thunderous tramping of an avatar’s feet – the sound design’s one failing.

Do not play Routine if you need modcons such as maps or minimaps, or an always-available codex carrying every hint or document you’ve looked at. Such bits and pieces are mostly found on computers within the world. Shout-out for how your look controls synch to the in-game terminal cursor when you approach – it’s just fiddly enough to raise your hackles when you’re in a hurry, which you usually are. Don’t play Routine if you like good gunfeel. Your CAT is a flexible device, but also a winningly ungainly one: you’ll need to reset the display after passing through a strong magnetic field, if you want to shoot straight, and there’s no tactical hotkeying between firemodes when push comes to AIEEEE.

You can’t change modes while crouched under tables either, but that’s less of an issue, because you’re seldom safer than when crouched under a table. If Routine’s enemy design has an obvious belief-scuppering flaw, it’s a strange disinclination to bend over.

Do play Routine if you enjoy actually good jump scares – scares that arise convincingly and organically from the behaviour of entities who are never more dreadful than when utterly silent and still. And do play Routine if you like epistolary sci-fi backstory. There are a lot of missing people to get to know through collected correspondence, and if the writing is perhaps too spare, leaving the key personalities half-lit, don’t forget that you won’t be perusing those docs at leisure in a codex. I’m too craven to test it out in the company of anything horrendous, but I’m not sure the pause button actually pauses anything.

The story is more Solaris, 2001: Space Odyssey and Annihilation than Dead Space or Alien, though the weaponising of tools recalls Visceral’s various mining implements. It’s all rather fey and sketchy, with passing asides on being and consciousness: “it’s like time forgot to take me with it”. The biggest mystery is your own identity, but there are also subplots of the wacky science cult variety, and reminders of the human brain’s susceptibility to odd patterns and signals. There’s also plenty of mystique bubbling through the decor, including ads for products that might have been named for Stephen King stories, and arcade parlors with singsong cabinet games that riff upon the wider terrors.

Routine is just a well-made sci-fi horror game. I wish I had a more elaborate closing note, but I’ve used up all my adjectives yammering about turbine noises and VHS-C. 2012 was a million years ago, but this elegantly cumbersome chillfest seems none the worse for the interruptions and extended spells in suspended animation. Congratulations, Lunar Software. You pulled off the moonshot. Now, let’s get the hell out of here before that thing down the hall notices me typing.

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If you’re around my age, you remember back when gaming wasn’t indie or triple-A; it was just games. Things changed a lot for console players when Xbox Live Arcade appeared, and suddenly a whole host of new games started to creep into mainstream gaming. The early games in that program were a little janky, kind of cute, often cheaper, and just fun to play. It’s not often that you get that exact same feeling in 2026, and yet Bounty Brawl: Most Wanted manages that.

That’s both a good and bad thing, in my opinion. It’s good in that it’s a game that’s immensely easy to pick up and play, you’ll understand it straight away, and you can muck around with your mates. You have to go to different planets to hunt down bosses, and each level gives different modifiers, with them getting more intense as your run goes on, but you get stronger by getting upgrades. A lot of these are kind of run-of-the-mill, like move and attack speed, but each character has different unique buffs too.

The characters do all feel meaningfully different too, although they don’t tend to be complex. The main thing is that you can dodge, you can lasso (I’ll get to that), you have a basic attack, and you have a special attack. You can also dance, which is always good. Basic attacks range from things like charging up a big melee swing to shooting at something, and special attacks can have unique properties, like making claws swirl around you, or being chargeable if you have a special resource. Each character also has different weapons you can unlock, but they really don’t change much.

The lasso is pegged as being one of the big features, and while you do use it a lot, it also feels a little bit too limited. You use it to interact with the various stage hazards, like pulling up lightning rods or trying to stop trains to act as cover for you, and you can use it to deal damage to enemies if you can stun them, but that’s sort of it. There is movement with it, but it’s only in specific places, so it’s just a bit underwhelming.

I’m not really trying to complain about Bounty Brawl, because it is a fun time with friends, although it does also feel bad solo. It’s one of those games which feels like a time capsule to 20 years ago, and that brings me a bit of internal joy, but I also don’t know that that’s enough for how good games are now. There’s fun to be had here, and I think it’s likely a massive amount of fun with younger gamers in split screen, where I do think this game would shine, but otherwise, it’s fun, but not for long. If you don’t mind that, then grab it and enjoy the sheer nonsense of it all, find your favourite character, and summon some worms to help aid you in battle.

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Playing Tour De France 2026 feels a bit odd if you’re a cyclist. Now, I’m a triathlete, which means some riders turn their nose up at the fact I like to do a spot of swimming, drench my bike in lake water and then go for a run after hopping back off, but I am a real cyclist, with a silly bike – that’s a Ribble Ultra SL-R if you’re interested – a drawer full of lycra, and a bunch of unnecessary ‘aero’ items to make me go as fast as possible. That’s right, even the hallowed ‘aero’ socks.

Playing Tour De France 2026 feels weird to me because it feels like cycling, but without any of the physical effort. If you’re used to the gamified exercise of Rouvy, Zwift or Training Peaks, what you’re getting involved in here is a training session without moving your legs, without the watts output or heart rate peaks, and without the downpour of sweat onto your laminate flooring. Part of me really likes it, and the other part? It thinks I should be on my Wattbike.

Tour de France 2026 translates the cycling experience into a gaming one with a controller setup that’s part racing game, and part Souls-like stamina fest. You hold a trigger to move your legs, and the other to brake, while you can hammer X to break away and to pump your legs harder than your opponent, attempting to crush them physically and psychologically as you leave them watching your blinking radar light in the distance. OK, so there is some physical exertion, but it’s about as much you get from a thumb war.

That’s for your standard events, with TT – that’s time trial – races requiring a little more input and commitment. Here you also have to juggle getting into an aerodynamic TT position, as well as managing your effort through the session. The TT position is faster, but you can’t corner very well with your hands on the TT bars, so you have to know when to get in and out of this form. If you’re a cyclist who’s ever ridden tri-bars, it all makes perfect sense.

There’s then effort to consider. You have a yellow bar indicating how hard you’re pushing, a blue one to indicate overall energy levels, as well as a red energy bar which you can use for extreme efforts. You have to manage these three gauges through races and time trials if you want to succeed, knowing when to back off, or when you’ve got enough in the tank to go harder.

Throughout my time with Tour de France 2026, the thing I was most impressed with was just how accurate to the cycling experience it feels. Whether it’s those pushes through hill climbs or to break away from your opponents, latching onto the peloton, or the sound of your breathing as you work hard on the bike, this feels like cycling to me. There’s little in the way of audio beyond the sound of your wheels, your laboured breathing, and the cheering of fans as you whizz by – this effect pleasingly captured by positional audio – making it feel pretty zen at times.

You will be ripped out of that state by the announcer. He leaps in with information and bios for some of the riders, but it’s stilted and often hard to know what he’s talking about. He’s generally wittering away about the leaders, but if you’re a long way away from them, it can all feel a decidedly low rent and detached.

That’s amplified by the visuals. Some elements of the game look fair – that’s mainly the bicycles and the riders, and the weather effects which bring a whole new aspect to the racing – but outside of the cities and towns, the majority of the landscapes you’ll be riding through look incredibly basic. Yes, you’re spending more of your time focusing on your stamina bars and the other riders on the course, but there’s numerous reminders that this is not a good-looking game, from clear anti-aliasing shimmer, to egregious pop-in, and spectators that skate into the road as you approach them, which feels disappointing when the cycling part feels as true to the sport as it does.

At least you’ve got a decent selection of modes to hop in and out of, including regular races, multiplayer, Pro Team, and Pro Leader with the latter letting you take a created rider through a season of UCI-approved racing. Races are long and gruelling, just like in real life, but you can save midway through a stage if you need to take a break. If only you could do that in real life.

There are further annoyances beyond the visuals, from the overwhelming strength of Pogačar, who’ll decimate anybody through the final stages, to the fact that riders don’t age when playing through multiple seasons, meaning that there’s no ebb and flow to year-on-year action, other than your own team’s improvements. It all feels a little too static, and set in place, when you really want it to capture the reality of development and experience, tempered by ageing, injury and illness. If you’re the type of person who’s buying Tour de France 2026, you’re not likely to care quite as much, but there’s the real sensation that cycling fans very nearly have a great game on their hands, and it’s just not quite there.

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One of the first “moving pictures” ever created is a moving picture of a horse. In the late 1870s, the photographer Eadweard Muybridge produced a series of “chronophotographs” of horses and riders, including the famous 12-frame sequence Sallie Gardner at a Gallop. I know about Muybridge’s work thanks to Jordan Peele’s film Nope, which considers the historical erasure of Sallie Gardner’s Black jockey, whose identity is disputed. Another thing that easily gets overlooked when considering these images is their contribution to the practice of horse-breeding.

Muybridge – who, incidentally, murdered his wife’s lover, which doesn’t seem wholly irrelevant here – captured the images after many years of tinkering with shutters, triggers and emulsions, but they were commissioned by the industrialist Leland Stanford, founder of the university of the same name. Stanford kept racehorses, and wanted a more precise understanding of their movements, with the obvious wider motive of being able to raise more champions; nowadays, gait analysis by means of video capture is commonplace among breeders. Muybridge’s breakthrough in terms of photographic reproduction is thus an important development in control of equine reproduction. To stretch that point a little, you could argue that the moving picture has always been a way of disciplining sex – and one animal may seem much like another, once reduced to a quantity of frames.

Those lineages combine in Santa Ragione’s ugly and disquieting artwork Horses, which explores how bodies are constrained, operated and degraded by media technologies that range from early silent movies all the way to the grotesque and choppy sorcery of videogames. Released today, the game has been rejected by Steam, the world’s largest PC gaming storefront, on the grounds of being an obscenity, based on an earlier, work-in-progress version that isn’t publicly available for review. This is both a potential financial disaster for Santa Ragione, and a torturous performance of the gameworld’s own inhibitions.

Save for some title screen footage of a pink and green meadow, Horses unfolds in shades of rickety grey. Starting the game, you catch glimpses of a film projector. It gasps to life, and from there on, everything you see implicitly emerges from that projector. You hear its soporific whirr throughout, lifted fleetingly by music that includes tracks redolent of modern horror movies, and mock-jaunty asides that recall the live piano accompaniment for older silent films. The world is otherwise soundless, which is welcome, because if Horses were fully audible it would consist mostly of screaming.

Horses entangles these cinematic devices with the workings of what could almost be a first-person Stardew Valley. It takes place on a 3D farm estate about the size of the average FPS multiplayer map, with a house, a paddock, a vegetable garden, a rolling cornfield, and an overpopulated graveyard. You are a harrowed young man of around 20, sent to the Farm by your parents to make something of yourself over two weeks of honest labour.

There are the rudiments of a conventional farming sim here – an inventory bar, tool icons and the suggestion that plants actually grow between visits – but the presentation keeps yanking you back into the realm of cinema. Dialogue is delivered by title cards. Actions such as watering the potatoes are illustrated by scratchy live footage. Sometimes you hallucinate, and the reassuringly false digital world films over with vistas of rippling, fleshy horses. There’s a kind of kinky antagonism here. Rather than being complementary in the triple-A sense of “cinematic visuals”, or working around limited resources for digital modelling and animation, it’s as though the older technologies of representation were repeatedly frustrating the younger.

The game’s “horses” are similarly at odds with themselves. They are naked and branded male and female human slaves in horse masks, their genitals, breasts, and arseholes blurred out so as to perform a double brutalisation – at once stripping them bare, and pixelating them in disgust.

The depiction of the “horses” recalls the actual treatment of slaves throughout what we are pleased to call civilization, but there are also ironic references to how certain videogame conventions perform bodily subjection, in echo of Leland Stanford’s designs for the emerging technology of chronophotography. One day, you’re sent to round up two stray “horses”. This involves adding them to your hotbar inventory like items, via the button prompt “tame”. In the process, you’re shown a rotatable T-posed character model, a spectacle familiar from countless asset libraries. Get it? Tame-posed.

The only thing more unnerving than the “horses” is the Farmer. He is how Shrek might appear in David Lynch’s Eraserhead, an ogreish fatberg in creased and bulbous overalls, his eyes diabolically frail and white beneath his screwed-on hat, his teeth slightly bared as he looms over you in dialogue. He is an abomination – but he is also your host, the person who prepares your meals and pins a list of chores to the wall outside. These tasks range from feeding the farm’s “dog” to forcing a “horse” to pull a plough, all performed by clicking on things, with absolutely no “skill” element beyond deciding how much revulsion to express in dialogue with the Farmer. In the process of doing your dailies, you also learn a little more about the situation on the Farm, and naturally, you look for opportunities to misbehave.

Above all else, you are instructed not to let the “horses” have sex, because the Farmer is both horribly lustful and mortally afraid of sex, to the extent that his own desires have become indistinguishable from his terror, and must be handed over to others to perform. When intoxicated after dark, he has his “dog” rape and abuse the “horses” while he himself stands aside in costume and a chastity belt, fumbling at his thighs.

These nocturnal scenes are hard to distinguish from your own dreams, as you fall under the Farmer’s spell. It’s swiftly apparent that he sees you as an heir, to be moulded through graft and other ceremonies of dominance, especially the sharing of food. The three biscuits he bakes you for breakfast are stamped with symbols of the previous day’s obscenities. Gulping all three down is a squeamish little schoolboy rite of acceptance, like humming the melody for a racist nursery rhyme. Shunning them has no penalty, as far as I can tell – you can get by without breakfast – but feels like a dangerous provocation.

The Farmer’s weaponisation of mealtimes notwithstanding, Horses is possibly more revolted by eating than sex, inasmuch as it seems unsure how to contain and punish the sensuality of eating. At dinner you’re treated to sickly accelerated visuals of smacking lips and teeth, with sound effects that never quite match what you’re eating.

For most of the game, your agency as player is required only inasmuch as this allows you to be disempowered. Refuse the Farmer – whether it be saying no to a second helping of meat, or declining to castrate a pinioned “horse” – and he’ll jovially insist, and the game won’t let you refuse again. Perhaps the aim is to test whether you’re willing to say no regardless, or perhaps Horses simply needs you to think you have free will, so that it can get off on the thrill of denying you.

The “choices” are about investigating your own impotence, in other words. Later on you acquire a gun, videogaming’s favourite “verb”, but no ammunition. The gun is eventually used by somebody else, and not as a gun. There’s also a “save the damsel” subplot, videogaming’s other classic verb, but this is thwarted and respun as a softcore daydream, with the Farmer rubbing his thighs from the other side of a screen as he watches you abscond with the “princess”.

The above scenario is a reminder of the projector clattering away behind you, the player of Horses. That projector and the Farmer are one and the same abuser. The machine discharges his pious, voyeuristic need to be estranged from his own sexuality, to experience it as a moving picture. The game’s many rapes, beatings and scenes of self-flagellation are appropriately machinic and abortive, the beginning and end of each animation failing to knit. It’s like watching somebody trying to remember how to jerk off, automatic and listless, even subjectless. The suffering isn’t really inflicted by a character, but unthinkingly enacted by the game’s own technology. However vile the pixel-bruised imagery of welts and amputations, the mayhem is always structural and in a bizarre way, disembodied, even dispassionate. It is merely the action of this world. It just… is.

I wonder if that reflects primary developer Andrea Lucco Borlera’s debts to Surrealist film, which – here and in general – risk being reduced to the commonplace idea of the surreal as simply “weird”. I’m no student of Surrealist cinema, but if I take anything from, say, The Seashell and the Clergyman, it’s that there are no people in those artworks. There are only images carried and convulsed by subconscious flows that are at once revealed and hidden by the camera. In practice, however, this framing doesn’t quite apply to Horses, which does have a plot and individual characters with histories mentioned in scattered letters and dialogue, and there is naturally the risk of too-easy exculpation in the suggestion that the violence is structural, not individual – a risk that needs to be investigated, because individuals as awful as this do exist, and Horses is broadly a story about refusing to become one.

It isn’t just the Farmer: at intervals the Farm has visitors, including a supplier and his garishly made-up adult daughter, all of whom appear comfortable with the carnage, inasmuch as they allow themselves to perceive the violence as violence and the “horses” as people. When the Farmer and his buddies discuss the euphemistic ‘deviancy’ they wish to punish, they refer primarily to religion, but ultimately to the crushing machinery of common-sense morality, what ‘everybody knows’. As the supplier’s daughter tells you, while literally riding on the shoulders of a naked slave: “the way they used to live… a lot of people find that unacceptable. I don’t care, personally. But usually, people exhibiting immoral behaviour also have dangerous ideas.”

The supplier’s daughter is a tricky figure because she is both the voice of the censor – her callous remarks an elaboration of Steam’s storewide prohibition on “content that is patently offensive or intended to shock or disgust viewers” – and also, the probable reason for Steam declining to platform the game. Inasmuch as can be told from Santa Ragione’s own account of events, an earlier, work-in-progress build of Horses featured a version of the character the platform holder’s content reviewers deemed to be plausibly underage, with Valve telling Santa Ragione “we will not distribute content that appears, in our judgment, to depict sexual conduct involving a minor”.

In choosing to make this fact public before release, and accuse Valve of censorship while defending their game against the charge of child sexual abuse material, Santa Ragione have struck a Faustian bargain. On the one hand, Horses now has a profile it likely wouldn’t have had, if the developers had released it on other storefronts without comment. On the other, the game we have today is haunted by an earlier, seemingly vanished version of itself that is now the subject of widespread speculation – in good and bad faith.

The complexity here is that Horses is about the sexuality of younger people, even if none of the characters are actually minors. The Farmer is the way he is because of how he was raised – there are doodles and a home video that obviously date back to his early teenage years – and now, he is trying to pass those brutal values onto you. The moral is about how puritanism may reproduce across generations, even when taken to the extent that congress becomes impossible, which necessitates certain other, shambolically crude and fantastical approaches to securing a legacy. That your character is a legal adult is a technicality: the game frames you as a mute child, peering up at the Farmer while eating, struggling to say no by means of emojis and shakes of your head. It’s easy to imagine the fable playing out exactly the same way if the protagonist were in their early to mid teens.

Still, I can only comment on the game I’ve played. “Dangerous ideas are a concern for everyone,” the supplier’s daughter tells you. “Because if the machine jams, everything falls apart.” That’s what bodily reproduction is in Horses – a jamming of the mechanism of audiovisual reproduction that performs this social order, that preserves the abysmal mutant sterility of this awful world. The camera fucks. The participants are props, scenery, special effects.

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It’s odd that more roguelites don’t toy with time as a core concept. Hades 2 did, and that was cool, but in that case Time was a literal being, not just the concept. When time is the enemy, what are you even meant to do? There’s no stopping time, not really, but that’s not going to stop Wilbur from Clockfall from trying. Thankfully, he does have access to a magical clock which can turn back time, but it can only take him back to just before his village gets massacred, and he can’t do anything about it.

That’s a less than ideal fate, but he can go out for three minutes at a time to try and find the pieces to repair the magical clock, along with getting stronger in order to survive the nightmare onslaught that all good runs end with. The longer you last, the more upgrade materials you get. However, taking too long to get trough a level ensures you can’t actually get to the boss, because even if you do sacrifice something to give your run more time, the boss door closes after a set amount of time has passed.

Normally in a roguelite with ever-changing layouts, that would be a borderline impossible proposition, but here, the only thing that changes is you. You become stronger between runs by powering up, you become strong in each run by grabbing different buffs, and you gain new knowledge about which chests you want to go for, which fights are worth actually fighting, and how to fight different enemies.

The rooms themselves don’t change, the enemies don’t change, the paths don’t change. You change, and you need to make the most of all of that to try and get the perfect run. It’s almost like the game wants you to speedrun it, and that gets easier the more of the meta upgrades you unlock, because you keep getting more and more powerful, while the rest of the world stays the same.

It’s just a really fascinating take on a roguelite, because it’s not how it’s normally done, but it does fit perfectly into the idea of a roguelite. I do think there’s a high chance that some people will find the lack of changing levels to be annoying, since you are even more literally doing the same thing again and again. Sure, you are doing that, but you’re trying to perfect your craft every single time, and get a little bit closer to grabbing an extra chest or buff before the boss room closes.

Clockfall is doing something I think I’ve only seen once before in a roguelite, and to a far higher level. Heretical was another game which has the same room layouts and boss placements, but a lot more randomisation outside of that. Here, you’re really just trying to learn everything and have a perfect run, all while being constantly tormented by your own horrifying failures.

I just realised I haven’t even talked about how it feels to play. It’s slick, incredibly slick, and the simplicity of the combat fits perfectly when it comes to what the game is doing. Clockfall is very cool already, and it’s only just getting started.

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A game where music is illegal and you do crimes. It’s the perfect tone-setting tagline for Unbeatable, a rhythm game about a bunch of young adults (and one child) rebelling against an oppressive regime by playing raucous garage rock.

There are two sides to Unbeatable (which the game insists should be written in all caps or no caps, but in the spirit of rebellion I will be defying this request). The A-side is the story of the aforementioned rebels as they form a four-piece band (also called Unbeatable) and take on anti-music cops, blending visual novel storytelling and assorted action sequences. The B-side is Arcade mode, where the only goal is to get better at playing through a collection of original songs.

Both modes are built around a basic rhythm mechanic. Your character stands in between two tracks, one above and one below, and notes fly in for you to hit in time with the beat. This is mixed up with notes that must be dodged instead of hit, notes that fly onto the other track when hit and must be hit a second time, notes that must be held, or notes that require you to mash the buttons like you’re hammering out a drum solo (the best kind). Since there are only two buttons to concern yourself with, it’s incredibly easy to pick up, but as the difficulty increases and the song charts get more complex, it can get hectic.

Because of the simplicity of all this, there are multiple options available to adjust which buttons correspond to up and down. If you’re using a controller, like I was, I strongly recommend switching to the shoulders/triggers for up and D-pad/face buttons for down. The default was left and right shoulders for down and up, which broke my brain when notes started switching between left and right sides of the screen. Controller and keyboard inputs can be changed independently of each other too.

Story mode plays with this in a number of interesting ways. Sometimes it’s a fight sequence, where the appearance of the notes changes, and each successful hit on the beat leads you to punching an opponent. Other sequences merely ask you to press a button on the beat like a QTE, with the most notable being a batting cage minigame that slowly drove me insane with its weird variable timings.

Story mode is where the heart of Unbeatable can be found. You play as Beat, a down-and-out slacker who wakes up in a field, and is roped into helping out a twelve-year-old girl named Quaver who wants to investigate what happened to her musician mother. This leads to a run-in with H.A.R.M., short for Harmonics and Resonance Management, an organisation whose job is to take down illegal musicians. The two then team up with the twins Treble and Clef, starting a band with the goal of taking the fight to H.A.R.M. through the Almighty Power of Rock. Incredibly cheesy, of course, but it’s the kind of cheese I’ll happily devour every single time.

That said, Unbeatable’s story doesn’t always put its best drum-pedalling foot forward. After a linear introductory episode, we’re immediately sent to prison for a series of repetitive, menial tasks. It’s strange sequence to frontload the game with, as it kills the pacing right out of the gate. Thankfully it doesn’t last, as the episode ends in a prison break sequence that reveals just how much the team at D-Cell (correctly) love Jet Set Radio before things properly kick into gear in the remaining episodes.

If you’ve enjoyed any kind of Scott Pilgrim media, you’ll know what the vibe is here. Musicians are powerful fighters and the villains are anime caricatures (complimentary). In these middle chapters, there’s a greater sense of freedom, allowing you to rock out with new songs, play The Floor is Lava in a traffic jam, defiantly throw up posters over H.A.R.M. propaganda and, yes, hit the batting cages. But you can also explore and find moments of quiet reflection, emphasising the joy of simply taking inspiration from the world around you and turning it into music.

This is all complemented by a unique DIY aesthetic, one which draws heavily from anime and zine culture in equal measure. The flat sprites on 3D backdrops give a paper-cutout look, while the animated sequences feel like they fell out of a cult anime from the 90s, right down to a shift into a 4:3 aspect ratio. It does go a bit wonky sometimes, as scene transitions and fight sequences often cause sprites to land in weird places. It’s not clear if this is something that will be fixed in the final release, but while it is a little jarring, it does little to harm the experience and even manages to work with the game’s scrappy, handmade charm.

While I expected Unbeatable’s brash punk tone, I didn’t expect how much the story also veers off into dreamlike surrealism. H.A.R.M. exist because something mysterious and terrible happened prior to the game’s events and Beat herself is also surrounded in mystery. No one seems to know anything about where she came from, and she keeps drifting off into strange dreams set in a void bathed in sunset.

Sadly, these two elements never truly felt like they paid off for me. The incident that sparked everything is never truly elaborated on, while the penultimate chapter provides revelations about Beat that end up contradicting what we learn in the final one. There are clearly some cool concepts at work here, but at best it feels like something important was left on the cutting room floor, and at worst it can feel like the worldbuilding was made up as the team went along.

However, there is a line in the final chapter – “music is feeling” – that sums up where the writing excels. It fumbles on the external worldbuilding but on the internal elements (characters, feelings, relationships), it sings at the top of its lungs. The core band are a bunch of weirdos who are constantly bantering with each other, and much of the game’s humour comes from Clef being an aggressive loudmouth, Beat being constantly sarcastic, Treble being awkward, and Quaver being “like five” (she is twelve). This is a group I want to hang out with more, as messy and contradictory they all are.

Messy and contradictory is the key takeaway here. At its core, Unbeatable is a story of a young woman trying to find her place in a world that rejects her. Beat is a mess of insecurities, which the game never shies away from exploring. This is especially true in the game’s final chapter, a deeply emotive and admirably earnest delve into the value of relationships and the power of human creativity. It all builds up to a triumphant final song that hammers the message home and brushes away all of the story’s weaker elements. This climax hits hard in ways I did not expect from the silly punk rock rhythm game. I challenge you not to shed a tear. I certainly failed.

However, after taking about ten hours to get through the story, the real meat of Unbeatable can be found in Arcade mode, which presents a huge list of songs, split into four categories: songs by Unbeatable (the band), additional non-diegetic music from Story mode, remixes of the previous two categories, and a secret fourth category that is best discovered for yourself. Anyone who’s played a Guitar Hero or similar rhythm game can guess how this is structured: select your song and your difficulty and then play through them with the goal of racking up the best scores possible.

It’s not just score-chasing though, as Arcade mode is built heavily around the Challenge Board, a wide selection of cryptic achievements that unlock online titles, new characters, and new songs. Some of these are obvious or will just naturally unlock as you play the story, while others are completely baffling. But that’s the draw here. These challenges are designed to keep you coming back, figuring out the clues and experimenting until something clicks. And since I keep loading the game up because I think I’ve figured out a clue later and want to try out my theory, it’s clearly working.

It also helps that the song selection is consistently excellent. It’s surprisingly varied, including grungy garage rock, ambient electronica, high intensity jungle, and Hideki Naganuma-inspired breakbeat, all of it catchy and addictive. The only critique I have of the tune selection is that the soundtrack officially releases at the end of December rather than right now. This is another reason I keep loading the game back up, because I have to hear more of these songs.

I also would have liked to see Arcade mode offer selectable, or at least a wider assortment of, backdrops. While the story features a range of settings, with action taking place in concert halls, warehouse hideouts, dreamscapes and more, every stage of Arcade mode sticks you in the same rural Japanese train station. This is especially jarring for the song Waiting, which in the story features a train chase and Quaver wailing out a guitar solo behind the action, while in Arcade mode it’s… just the train station. For a game so confident in its art direction and themes of self-expression, the lack of different background options feels like an oversight. It’s a relatively small thing, but it did bother me enough to wonder why it wasn’t there.

Much like the titular band, Unbeatable is a game that doesn’t always hit the right notes but exudes so much heart and enthusiasm that it’s hard not to fall in love. It’s a sincere celebration of the creative spirit that overcomes its own rough edges by getting everything right where it counts. This is a song you’ll want to stick on repeat.

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To say Mina the Hollower has been a highly anticipated title is an understatement. Yacht Club Games built their reputation with Shovel Knight, with players embracing the retro style and gameplay elements. Mina the Hollower is more of that classic 8-bit style, with gameplay to boot, and while it has some great execution as a retro Zelda-style adventure, it also comes with some questionable decisions.

The basis of Mina the Hollower’s story is that she has been recalled to Ossex to restore the light of the Spark Towers which power the city, and which have allowed it to flourish. They have been the target of Thorne who seeks to destroy the towers forever, so Mina’s mission is to venture across the island and restore those towers while dealing with dangerous foes. To be honest, the overall story is pretty predictable from near the beginning, though there are a couple of moments at the end where the impact of Mina’s exploits hit in a way you wouldn’t expect. It’s not the only driving force from the main story, Mina will come across different characters who have their own problems or issues, with all of these being optional to complete though some are worth doing for the rewards. There are some fun and absurd side quests like the Duke looking for the Duchess, which becomes a pretty dark tale. Then there is the guy moonbathing and a leaf being murdered.

Mina the Hollower’s gameplay consists of exploring the isle and unlocking pathways, fighting enemies, and solving environmental puzzles. Mina is armed with one weapon, and you get the option to pick between a whip, a hammer, and blades at the start. You can unlock the other weapons later but you are stuck with your starting weapon. I chose the chain whip to allow some range with decent damage. Mina can also find sidearms in the world, including throwing axes, boomerang knives, and a poison gas pump, as well as trinkets to provide additional bonuses and abilities. All of these can be upgraded, and you’ll certainly want to increase the ammo count for sidearms, as it’s easy to run out.

To be honest, the combat is pretty straightforward. You will be hitting enemies and dodging them using Mina’s burrowing to dig underground and move out of the way, but it can feel that Yacht Club Games has overengineered some encounters. One section leading up to a boss fight includes a chase sequence while avoiding lighting strikes and dealing with wind that can push you back into pits. You can lose quite a bit of health before even triggering the boss fight. It’s instances like this where the game is designed to essentially punish as much as possible, and it can lead to frustration. Mina can only attack in a straight line for the direction she is facing, but som enemies can attack from any angle – flying enemies in particular can be an absolute pain to deal with.

It’s a shame because, when the combat lines up, it can be very good, rewarding you, during a boss fight as an example, for switching from an offensive whip approach to a defensive one with a shield. It is worth experimenting against bosses because some weapons are better suited for situations, but you can’t switch weapons on the fly, and have to return to the Underlabs checkpoints. Except that the game will automatically equip a weapon that you find, which can be quite inconvenient!

Healing can be its own issue too. Even if you have health vials, their use and the amount that they can heal you by is limited by the amount of damage you’re dealing to enemies. It’s also not instant, as Mina has to play out the animation and wait for the little sparks to be absorbed. If she is hit during this then she won’t heal and you’ve wasted a vial.

Exploring Ossex and the island is a mix of fun and getting stuck. There is a lot of detail put into the world with hidden areas and secrets to find off of the beaten path. Smashing through walls and diving into holes in the ground can lead you to unexpected boss fights, and treasures like new trinkets. Areas are not all open to you with paths locked until you make progress in other areas, so you are encouraged to walk around and see what you can find.

However, while you can unlock a general map of the island, there is no detailed view as you might expect from a Zelda or Metroidvania. This can make it difficult to find the path forward and it’s easy to miss what you need to take you forwards. While I can understand the design decision, pushing back against the way some games simply lead you around by waypoints, but it goes too far and ends up just being annoying as you walk back and forth in the same areas.

As you explore you will collect bones, which are the games currency – a morbid choice, but everyone wants bones for some reason. Initially, they are tough to collect and it is annoying when you lose them in combat if you do not reclaim sparks. It also doesn’t help that there is a pickpocket who will steal from you, and if you are not quick enough you lose a significant amount. As you upgrade Mina’s attack, defence, and weapons building that bone balance does become easier, but the initial learning curve to get there is steep.

The top-down platforming can be very good but then there are other times where it does not quite connect. Mina’s burrowing is a core way of getting around and finding secrets, and it is also necessary in fights to get around enemy attacks and pop up behind them, but there are times when the jumps don’t land as intended. If you do want to change things up, Yacht Club Games has included an extensive amount of modifiers and assists you can use, but turning many of them on means that beating feats and getting their associated achievements will be locked out. You can make the game easier so you don’t lose bones, or you can go the opposite way and make things harder.

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Crushed In Time really ought to be called something like The Elasticated Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, or maybe Holmes & Watson Break Their Game (and Then Fix It Again). Here’s a point & click adventure that takes many of the typical conventions of the genre and slingshots them right out the window, a game where you get to explore every moment of its development and creation. Or at least, that’s how the story goes…

It’s launch day at Draw Me A Pixel’s glitzy high-rise HQ, but their game is getting review bombed into oblivion as an NPC has gone completely missing. As the team frantically try to figure out what’s going on, the digital denizens of their creation end up on their own adventure through time, all of which starts with a knock on the door from the postman.

The letter handed to Watson by the postman, however, defies gravity. And so we immediately get into how Crushed In Time differs from the likes of Escape from Monkey Island or more modern adventure games in the Telltale style. Instead of telling your heroes to go somewhere and interact with something, whether that’s by pointing and clicking, selecting verbs and actions, or having direct movement control with a gamepad, you’re manipulating the world around Holmes, Watson and everybody else.

The whole world is elastic, and all of the interactions require you to click and hold to grab onto an object and then pull and release in a variety of directions and different manipulations. It can be a simple directional stinger to pop a door open – pull left and release to spring it open to the right – or repeatedly pinging an item across the floor, grabbing and rotating and object to wind it up, timed releases, and simply slapping characters to get them to move somewhere else. It’s genuinely impressive how Draw Me A Pixel has come up with this handful of interactions and then applied them in so many different settings. Heck, even the menus and hint system need you to drag and release the buttons!

Retrieving that letter from the ceiling requires a hefty dose of classic point & click lateral puzzle solving. This initial problem has you manipulating the dumb waiter hatch, clock, telephone, messing with Sherlock’s newspaper and so much more to reach the point at which the two men are able to actually read it. And then it’s from this mystery woman called Emma?

Heading out to the country to find Emma starts them on a wild adventure where some bugged letter physics are the least of their problems. Crushed In Time has them bouncing back and forth between different periods of the game’s creation, back through to early alphas filled with placeholder assets and broken things, and even, on occasion, busting through into the real world and other electronics. It’s a bit tangential how a faux Game & Watch in the cafeteria is related to this game’s development, but these moments do make for some fun interludes.

Holmes and Watson are a bickering couple throughout – not least as Watson and Emma become thoroughly enamoured with one another – and a lot of that revolves around how utterly oblivious they are to your presence. Holmes just explains things away, or blames Watson for them, while Watson has more of a feeling that strange things are going on, but can’t possibly work out how to explain them or get Holmes to acknowledge it.

It’s nice and humorous all the way thorough, but also with some real heartfelt moments as their adventure comes to several climactic moments. There’s a bunch of times where it feels that the game is drawing to an end, only for a cutscene to drag you off to another new setting and gameplay paradigm, and another version of the crisis that they are enduring.

Each chapter brings fresh ideas, and I’d say that only one of them really outstayed its welcome for me – sadly this was the penultimate chapter, which just made me more eager to see the ending for the wrong reasons. Draw Me A Pixel has also just about managed to walk the tightrope of point & click puzzle frustration, as well. The elastic interactions mean that there is a lot more timing-based puzzling through Crushed In Time, so you might need a character to be in one spot and then you interact with another object quickly enough to trigger the next action before they wander off. That does lead to more trial and error than I would have expected and repetitious cycles of actions, and with dialogue repeating as well. That can be a bit annoying, but the hints system is pretty good at nudging you in the right direction if and when you need it.

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I am in the dusty basement of Manchester cathedral. On the streets above me, there are police searching for anyone who would challenge the state. Someone like me. I am supposed to be working on a weapon to use against these fascists. It isn’t a gun or a bomb, it is a machine that eats books.

At least, that’s what I should be doing; instead, I’m searching for the final letter between the members of a love triangle of 1950s academics. I’ve tracked down all their trashy novels and papers on temporal dynamics, but I want to find the last bit of saucy gossip. Smashing the state can wait a moment.

There is a lot I won’t tell you about TR-49, Inkle’s latest puzzle game. I don’t want to ruin any of the epiphanies that lie in wait for you. But it is a treat for anyone looking to get all up in the personal lives of some long-dead fictional authors.

I know there are many of you curtain twitchers out there.

When you first awaken in that dirty basement, you are told by a voice over the radio that within the machine in front of you is a book. You must find a way to extract it from the machine’s archives before the police close in. However, when you turn the machine on, and its orange monochroma screens fizzes into life, you discover that its brain has become garbled. Whatever directory existed to guide users between the different entries in its databanks is corrupted. It falls to you to remap the archive and identify all the logged sources.

The sources within the machine are disparate. There are research papers with titles like Astral Perplexities, science-fiction novels retelling Arthurian legends with bug-eyed aliens, academic journals writing scathing takedowns of other academic journals, and personal letters sent between authors. It’s like trying to make sense of the papers littering a doctoral student’s cluttered bedroom floor.

You navigate between files in the archive by entering four-digit codes into the machine, selecting letters and numbers on a rotary dial. If the code you enter matches the address of a file then the machine’s monochroma screen zooms out and skates across the archive to your document, moving like a library microfiche machine. I’ve been playing on both my desktop and Steam Deck, and entering codes into this fictional machine has a delightful physicality to it. As you roll your thumb to select the letters and numbers the thumbstick clicks beneath your hands like you’re spinning a safe tumbler. It evokes the mechanical nature of those early 1950s computers, back when transistors were measured in inches not nanometres.

When you first land on a file in the machine’s archive, its title and contents are a mystery, encrypted and illegible. There is, however, always a note from the archivist who uploaded the document. These short blurbs offer clues to its identity. They might say, for instance, that it’s a book that was reviewed in the tenth edition of a particular literary journal. Find the journal in the archive and the archivist’s note appended to that file might tell you that edition contains a particularly scathing review of ‘Miracles of Water’ (not a real book in the game). You can now return to the first entry and pair its four-digit code with ‘Micacles of Water’ in your in-game notebook. Once successfully paired, the title and the extract will reorganise themselves into legible text and you will have returned a little order to the machine’s scrambled internals. Identify all of the machine’s sources and you might just piece together the mystery behind the device’s purpose.

A note on spoilers. The screenshots in this review and the paragraph below reveal some answers to early game puzzles. But there is nothing here from beyond the first 30 minutes in the game.

As you reassemble the archives, you will learn the rules of the machine. Recognising, for instance, that each log identifier follows the structure of the game’s title: two letters, two numbers. These stand for the initials of the author or publication and the year of its publication. Enter RS-83, for example, and you will be taken to a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 book, Treasure Island. From that identifier format, and the clues you spot in the archivists’ notes, you can begin to make leaps of logic. An early discovery is the publishing schedule of a literary journal. Once you know its publisher code and how often a new edition was published, you can jump forward to find new editions, uncovering a trove of titles, author names, and biographical clues useful for identifying further sources.

While Inkle provides an in-game notebook that automatically records titles, log codes, and creates brief biographies of the authors you discover, I also found myself scrawling across the tea-spattered pages of my own workbook. “She remarried?”, “Died 1971 but daughter pubbed open letter. Must find it”, “GA-00 = God Almighty year zero???”. As you piece together the archive, you catch glimpses of a literary scene filled with friendships and rivalries, admirers and haters, geniuses and idiots. There are references to their arguments in the archivists’ notes or direct call outs in the extracts you decrypt. I didn’t just want to know the function of the machine or discover the elusive text demanded by the radio operator, I wanted to know everything I could about their lives.

While there are a multitude of authors in the archive, your constant companions are the archivists: Cecil Caulderly, Beatrice Dooler, and their daughter, Aliz. Their notes hint at what’s in the files, helping solve the TR-49’s puzzles, but they also reveal the strain the work puts on Cecil and Beatrice’s relationship, the heavy responsibility Aliz feels in following her parents’ footsteps, and tease at mysteries within their own family life. Despite being a game filled with dead texts, the archive you’re restoring is alive with the people that created the library and wrote the sources that fill its digital shelves.

With the entire archive open to be searched from the start of TR-49 there is a sense you have complete control of your investigations. You could just start entering four digit archive codes and there is a chance you may stumble across an entry deep in the machine’s memory. You decide what clues to follow, and so your path through TR-49’s archive may be quite different to mine.

That freedom is a double-edged sword, however. As you can investigate any corner of the archive at any time, throwing out author designations and publication years with abandon, you can stumble into entries sooner than Inkle may have intended. I found the first pieces of a puzzle and leaped to the correct conclusion before I had the full context of the parts I was slotting together. Solving the puzzle ended the game, triggering a dialogue between characters which discussed significant details of the story that hadn’t been touched on at that point in my playthrough.

I’m being vague, as I don’t want to spoil any of the mysteries of such a short game, but I had so fallen into the world Inkle had created that to find myself unceremoniously stumbling out of the other side was disappointing. After hitting the credits you are given the opportunity to return to an earlier point and try a different approach, which I did, but then hit another ending I wasn’t looking for. There are still mysteries to uncover and sources to identify in my game, but after hitting two endings, it’s difficult to regain that same headspace where I was lost in its world.

I say I’m done with TR-49, but I never did find that final letter. Maybe, I will give the game one more go. After all, is the game really complete if I don’t find out what she said to the spurned academic after he wrote that journal article that was derided in the Literary Review?

This review was based on a review build of the game provided by developers Inkle.

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My experience with the third Nioh reminded me of many other games — the open world of Elden Ring, the samurai/ninja gameplay of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and the dopamine-generating loot drops of Diablo.

I make these comparisons not to disparage Nioh 3, but rather to praise its adroitness. This is a great game that pilfers elements from many disparate titles with the stealthy fluidity of a shinobi, blending them into an attractive whole that resembles a shiny samurai cuirass.

I should now admit that I find samurai, who were basically the cops of their day, overrated. I particularly roll my eyes at the “honourable warrior” myth that romanticises the Warring States, AKA Sengoku era, a period of civil war in Japan. That said, Nioh 3, which is full of Sengoku stereotypes, is good enough to overlook the cliches.

The plot of Nioh 3 may be incomprehensible if you’re unfamiliar with Japanese history — I have a degree in East Asian Studies, and I found it a blur at times. You play as Tokugawa Takechiyo, the grandchild of famed shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu. You’re supposed to be next in line for the throne until your emo brother, Tokugawa Kunimatsu, seizes control and summons a giant red eyed-yokai (which bears an odd resemblance to the boss Bongo Bongo from Zelda: Ocarina of Time) to engulf Edo Castle.

The next thing you know, you’re jumping around in time from 1622 to 1572 trying to save the day, and your quest leads to multiple eras. Expect to run into dozens of mythologised Japanese personas who come and go in the blink of an eye. How many versions of Tokugawa ninja Hattori Hanzo has this series featured, anyway?

I haven’t played the previous Nioh games (though now I want to), but Ed, RPS in peace, mentioned a similarly sloppy story in his review of Nioh 2. The Tale of the Heike, this franchise is not. Gameplay has always been the priority for Koei Tecmo, and happily, they’ve done a fine job here, starting with the Ninja playstyle, which complements the Samurai stances that defined Nioh 1 & 2. While Assassin’s Creed Shadows split things up by featuring one Samurai character and one Ninja character, here your version of Tokugawa Takechiyo learns both styles and switches between the two with a single button press, which you’re encouraged to do so as a means to parry major enemy attacks.

Playing as a Ninja is a fast experience where you can pepper a boss with ranged projectiles, including kunai, shuriken, and all manner of Ninjutsu magics, breaking to dash in for some hit-and-run backstabs with talons or tonfa. In contrast, the Samurai leans closer to typical soulslike patterns of attacking and parrying with the occasional dodge. You’ll wield slower, heavier, and more reliable strikes, all while rhymthically tapping buttons at the right intervals to keep from running out of Ki.

Whichever style you choose, the combat feels refined, though there is much more to keep track of than other soulslikes. There’s all that tapping to maintain your Ki, and you also need to be wary of so-called “Yokai Realm” pools of corruption that occasionally appear from enemies and suck up said Ki, and then you can invest in skill trees to get additional attacks that require combos a la a fighting game, and let’s not forget the dozens of weapons on display, each of which must be learnt with care. Nioh veterans will know all of this already, but you can tell that the folks who made Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden are behind this series.

Perhaps the Ninja playstyle, which allows beginners to toss tonnes of bombs with relative ease, was included for newbies. I certainly found Ninja easier at first, though I soon began to switch to Samurai whenever I needed to tank a boss or deal maximum damage.

Nioh 3 does a fine job, in other words, at encouraging players to utilise both styles as they become more adept. If you practice, you can pull off some truly ridiulous attack patterns by switching between Samurai/Ninja in rapid succession, and I doubt that even the hardened Nioh 1 & 2 Redditors grumbling about the inclusion of Ninja are going to stay grumpy when they discover this potential. Though they might justifably bristle at the fact that gear and weapons are now divided into Samurai and Ninja types, and one cannot use the other, which means that you’ve got to be a Ninja if you want to use old favourites like the Splitstaff.

Nioh 3 also differs from its mission-based, linear predecessors in its now open world. As someone who finds the size of Elden Ring intimidating, I became worried once I cleared the tutorial segment, crested a hill, and the logo appeared over a vast valley that dared me to lose myself in its seemingly excessive intricacies. I was even more nervous when I opened my menu and was once again reminded of Assassin’s Creed, this time by a map that seemed destined to be plastered with a nonstop array of markers.

I’m relieved to report my first impressions were false. Not as big as Elden Ring’s (but still pretty big), Nioh 3’s open world uses gentle features to keep from overwhelming you. Each sector of the map comes with a Recommended Level, a decision that seems pulled from ARPGs and MMOs. (Don’t worry — you can ignore these recommendations if you’re skilled (or brave) enough to attempt a tougher area.) You also aren’t hit with hundreds of map markers and checklists from the getgo. Rather, as you move through an area and raise its Exploration Level, there’s a gradual rollout of icons on your map.

There’s much to do in Nioh 3’s open world, which is busy but not as busy as most. Enjoy huge vistas, hang with roly poly cats, rub the bellies of otters, good stuff.

Even when a region’s Exploration Level is full, Nioh 3 still avoids most of the fat common in open worlds. Sidequests, called Myths, are spaced out, the Enemy Bases that you can clear (which once again feel extremely similar to Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which had the exact same mechanic) aren’t too grueling, and the bog-standard “collect X number of doodad” tasks are entertaining, because they revolve around chasing chonky cats called Scampusses and shooting fantastical flying otters known as Chijiko out of the sky. (If you’re reacting in horror, know that their bestiary entry mentions they like acting as target practice for humans. They’ll also always give you a cuddle after you zap ’em to the ground.)

Interspersed through the open world are fragments of the structure of the previous Niohs. Certain quests are instanced missions that can be replayed in co-op, which I didn’t get to test for this review, but I imagine may please anyone who played through Elden Ring with a buddy. Chief among these are deep dives into a hell-like landscape called the Crucible, created by that big Bongo Bongo-esque yokai in the sky. The Crucible missions offer something similar to the traditional soulslike levels that I typically prefer, though their confusing fire red landscape had me running in circles more often than not and dying in lava pits.

Bosses can be absolutely vicious, but if you can’t tackle ’em in co-op, you can at least summon the soul of a dead NPC or fellow player to assist you. (They’re called Acolytes here.) When you emerge victorious, expect to get a bucketload of loot for your trouble.

Speaking of death, on the difficulty scale, Nioh 3 is less punishing than its contemporaries except when it comes to certain bosses, one of which frustrated me so much that I slammed my controller into the piece of MDF that masquerades as my desk and left a hole in it, something I haven’t done since the NES days. But tales of the Bloodedge Demon plaguing demo players aside, none of these bosses are insurmountable, largely thanks to the freedom that switching between Ninja and Samurai offers.

There’s also a heckuva lot of gear, skills, and customisation to help you deal with the opponents in your path. Nioh’s loot and leveling system has always taken influence from ARPGs, and you will see slot machine-style drops of weapons and equipment colour-coded for rarity, with purple representing that sweet legendary gear. Diablo and Path of Exile fans will be right at home, and all everyone else needs to know is that even though there’s a blacksmith designed to help you improve loot, you really don’t need to fuss around with it in your first playthrough. Pick a few weapons to specialise in, equip the highest level gear you get, choose skills you like, rinse and repeat. You can transmog your look and run around in a not-leaving-much-to-the-imagination fundoshi if you so prefer, and respeccing stats is 100% free. I haven’t even touched on the Onmyo magic system, which returns from Nioh 2 and lets you collect the souls of yokai like Pocket Monsters to supplement your attacks.

Clearly, there’s enough stuff under the hood to entertain for a very long time. (The first era of the game took me 45 hours to clear.) The only quirks you might face are optimisation issues, which sadly cropped up for me more than once. I know that my RTX 3060 is getting on in years, but Nioh 3 chugged like molasses at times, even when I tweaked FPS and turned down a bunch of graphical flairs. Team Ninja has never succeeded at optimising their games for PC, even when they brought a bunch of decade-old Ninja Gaiden titles to Steam long ago, so there’s no surprise here.

Wonky performance aside, Nioh 3 is excellent. It’s not as elegant and practiced as FromSoftware’s efforts, and I daresay that the creativity present in recent Chinese soulslikes like Black Myth: Wukong isn’t matched here either. But it still warrants a Bestest Best, because what this game does do is deftly borrow from modern titles in a variety of genres, mingling their flavours into one delicate Miso soup. There’s a word in Okinawan – chanpurū – which means to mix together. That’s what Nioh 3 is – a chanpurū of influences that manages to entertain in a wonderful fashion. Even if you’re biased against samurai like I am, it’s still worth your while to fire this one up, tackle the Crucible, and cuddle a Chijiko or three.

This review is based on a review build of the game provided by the developer.

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