‘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 stunning foldable from across the import oceans.”

Pros

• Ultra-thin design with IP68 and IP69 ratings
• Exceptional screens with anti-reflective coating on both panels
• Class-leading battery life with fast wired and wireless charging
• Best-in-class rear camera system for a large foldable
• MagicOS 10 is polished, customizable, and genuinely useful for multitasking

Cons

• Performance is gimped in Balanced mode
• Performance mode brings thermal throttling under sustained load
• No zero-crease display
• Camera bump is large and makes the phone unweildy
• You will have to take the import route

Quick review

The Magic V6 is the most complete large foldable I have used in a while, and it’s no mean feat, especially in a sea of hard-hitting rivals. It’s a picture of holistic excellence, if I may put it that way. The IP68 and IP68 water resistance ratings are a first for the category. The battery will outlast your day regardless of how hard you use it. Moreover, the camera system is one of the best you will find on any book-style foldable right now.

Coming in as someone who had written off foldables entirely after frustrating flip phone experiences, the Magic V6 emerged as the phone that changed my mind on the form factor, and not through mere novelty, but by being a genuinely good phone that also happens to fold. It is not perfect, however.

The CPU performance is nerfed in the default balanced performance mode, which is a strange call for a phone with the most powerful Android chip on the market. The crease is still there, while other phones like the Oppo Find N6 have achieved a zero-crease panel. Finally, the camera bump is large enough to make the phone feel top-heavy. But to sum it all up, none of that changes the final experience. If you are considering a large foldable in 2026, this is the one you should consider.

Honor Magic V6 specs: Everything under the hood of this ultra-thin foldable

Dimensions	Folded: 156.7 x 74.5 x 8.74mm (white)/9.0mm (black, gold, red) Unfolded: 156.7 x 145.6 x 4.0mm (white)/4.1mm (black, gold, red)
Weight	219g (white)/224g (black, gold, red)
Display	Main: 7.95-inch foldable LTPO AMOLED, 1-120Hz 2352x2172px, 403 PPI 5,000nits peak Anti-reflective coating Cover: 6.52-inch LTPO AMOLED, 1-120Hz 2420x1080px, 406 PPI 6,000nits peak Anti-reflective coating
Processor	Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5
Memory/Storage	16GB/512GB
Rear Camera	Main: 50MP f/1.6, OIS Ultrawide: 50MP f/2.2 Telephoto: 64MP f/2.5, OIS, 3x optical zoom CIPA 6.5-stop Image Stabilization
Front Camera	Main screen: 20MP f/2.2 Cover screen: 20MP f/2.2
Battery	6,600mAh
Charging	80W wired 66W wireless Reverse wired and wireless charging support
Connectivity	Bluetooth v6.0 BLE, USB Type-C (3.2 Gen 1), Wi-Fi 7 (802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ax/be), NFC
OS	MagicOS 10 based on Android 16
Software support	7 major Android OS upgrades

Honor Magic V6 design and build: Engineering that earns its price

I have held a lot of phones over the years, but the Magic V6 is the only one I catch people staring at from across a room. Its incredibly thin form factor is part of it, but so is the gold hinge with its subtle triangular texture, and the way the whole thing folds into something that comfortably slips in my pocket without feeling too bulky.

At 4mm thin when unfolded, it is the thinnest big foldable on the market. Folded, it measures 8.75mm, which is roughly the same profile as an iPhone 17 Pro Max. That comparison never stops being striking in person.

The white model I reviewed uses aerospace special fiber on the back, a material that has the look and feel of frosted aluminum. It is the lightest of the four colorways at 219g, compared to 224g for the red, gold, and black versions. The white is the most minimal-looking of the four, but it’s quite slippery. The red version fixes that with eco-leather on the back that has a suede-like finish and offers a better grip.

The hinge is made from what Honor calls Super Steel, a high-tensile-strength aerospace-grade alloy with 2,800MPa tensile strength, rated for over 500,000 folds. It opens smoothly and snaps shut with a satisfying sound. In my testing, the hinge holds reliably between about 50 and 140 degrees. Push it beyond that range in either direction, and it snaps fully open or closed rather than holding position, which is worth knowing if you were planning to use it propped at a shallow or wide angle.

I had some history with foldables before this. The Moto Razr Plus I used briefly ended with the folding screen breaking without any obvious explanation. The Magic V6 hinge inspires considerably more confidence, though my unit does produce an occasional crunching sound when opening or closing. It has not affected usability in any way, but it is not the kind of noise you want to hear from a phone at this price.

The IP68 and IP69 ratings deserve more attention than they typically get. IP68 covers complete dust protection and submersion up to 1.5 meters for 30 minutes. IP69 adds resistance to high-pressure water jets. No large foldable has had both until now. The Galaxy Z Fold 7 comes with IP48 certification, which means it’s not fully dustproof. The Honor Magic Magic V6 is. That is a meaningful gap, and it changes how confidently I carry the phone day to day.

Two design frustrations are worth calling out, though. The camera bump is substantial. It makes the phone feel top-heavy, and the phone rocks on flat surfaces. But that is the unavoidable cost of a serious triple camera system in a phone this thin, and I have accepted it, but it is a daily reality rather than an occasional inconvenience.

The other is opening the phone. The magnets are strong enough that finding a grip between the two halves takes some getting used to. I am past that point now, but handing it to someone else is a reliable reminder of how long that learning curve actually is. Honor should etch a notch into the frame or find some other mechanical solution to make this a bit easier.

The bundled case is excellent. It has a built-in kickstand, matches the white and gold finish of the device, and feels like it belongs with the phone rather than sitting awkwardly on top of it. It also adds some much-needed grip, making the phone a lot easier to handle.

Score: 9/10

Honor Magic V6 display: The inner screen won me over

The Magic V6 has two excellent screens, but the 7.95-inch inner display is the one that changed how I use a phone day to day. I wrote about that shift at length when I first switched to the Magic V6, but the short version is that a screen this size makes reading, casual video watching, and multitasking feel so much better than on regular slab phones.

Both panels are LTPO 2.0 OLED with 10-bit color and 4,320Hz PWM dimming. Both also support HDR10, HDR10+, and Dolby Vision. The inner display runs at 2352 x 2172 pixels with a peak brightness of 5,000 nits, and the cover display at 2420 x 1080 with a peak of 6,000 nits. Both have anti-reflective coatings, which is new to this generation and makes a noticeable difference in direct sunlight. Neither screen is one you will be squinting at outdoors.

The refresh rate system is fully dynamic on both panels, dropping to 1Hz when the screen is idle and climbing up to 120Hz in use. There are three modes to choose from. Dynamic and High both go to 120Hz, with High adding a per-app toggle for finer control. Standard caps the screens at 60Hz but stays dynamic within that ceiling.

The screens themselves are hard to fault, but the crease is another matter. Out of the box, I barely noticed it. But after a few weeks of use, it became more visible, particularly in certain lighting conditions and at certain angles, and I could feel it under my fingertip too. Oppo’s Find N6 has achieved a true zero-crease panel, so that expectation now exists. It’s not a dealbreaker by any means, but it’s something worth pointing out if you’re expecting that from the Magic V6.

Stylus support on both displays rounds things out. Samsung dropped S Pen support entirely on the Galaxy Z Fold 7, but Honor went the other direction. I’m not a big stylus person myself, but if you are, it’s worth knowing the Magic V6 has you covered on both screens.

Score: 8/10

Honor Magic V6 camera: The best stills camera on a large foldable

The rear camera setup is a 50MP main at f/1.6 with OIS, a 64MP 3x periscope zoom camera at f/2.5 with OIS, and a 50MP ultrawide at f/2.2 with autofocus. Both the inner and cover displays have a 20MP selfie shooter at f/2.2. Honor has changed very little from the previous generation here. The Magic V5 had one of the best cameras on any folding phone, and the Magic V6 carries that forward with largely the same hardware.

Daylight shots from the main camera are excellent across the board. Colors are vivid, dynamic range is wide, and Portrait mode does a reliable job at both 2x and 3x. The full-resolution 50MP mode is available, but the default pixel-binned shots are sharper in most situations, so I rarely found a reason to switch.

The 3x telephoto is the standout of the three. It is the lens I reached for most in daily shooting, and it held up well across a range of subjects and lighting conditions.

6x is also more capable than you might expect, with enough detail to make the results usable for social media. Low-light performance is solid, though at 6x you’ll not get the same level of detail.

The ultrawide is the weakest of the three, but it’s not far behind. In good light it performs well, but in dimmer conditions it softens noticeably and at night it’s barely usable. It’s good enough for daytime shooting, but that’s where I’ll draw the line.

The selfie cameras are where the Magic V6 does not keep up. Shots are soft in a way that feels out of place on a phone this pricey. The workaround is to open the phone and shoot with the rear cameras using the cover screen as a viewfinder, which produces excellent results. It takes a bit more effort than a standard selfie, but the quality difference makes it worth it.

All three cameras record up to 4K at 60fps with HDR across all modes. Log recording is available in Pro mode on the main camera at 1x and 2x, which is great for anyone editing footage seriously.

Daylight footage is sharp and punchy, though contrast runs slightly higher than I would choose. Stabilization is strong for walking and stationary shots. Low-light video is also good on the main camera and the telephoto, but noticeably weaker on the ultrawide.

Score: 8/10

Honor Magic V6 performance: The fastest Android chip, applied selectively

The Magic V6 runs on the Snapdragon Elite Gen 5, the most powerful Android chipset available right now. In daily use, it is fast, fluid, and never strained. Apps open instantly, switching between them is seamless, and multitasking is a breeze.

For demanding workloads, though, the story is a little more complicated. The Magic V6 ships in Balanced mode by default, which prioritizes efficiency and thermals over raw output. You can switch to Performance mode if you want the chip to run at full tilt, and the difference in performance is quite evident in benchmarks.

In Balanced mode, the Magic V6 secured a single-core score of 755 and a multi-core score of 2,787, which was quite low for a device with Qualcomm’s flagship chip. The numbers jumped up to 3,531 and 9,524, respectively, in Performance mode, closer to what you would expect from the get-go. This kind of gap can be alarming without context. Although I did not notice it in everyday use, it is still there.

Switching to Performance mode does unlock those numbers, but it comes at a cost. The phone throttles quickly under sustained load, and the AnTuTu benchmark could not even complete in Performance mode, with the phone throwing an overheating warning before finishing. Balanced mode keeps things stable and the phone cool, but you are essentially leaving a significant chunk of the chip’s capability on the table.

Honor has included a vapor chamber cooling solution, but it only goes so far in a body this thin. For everyday tasks, it never matters, and Balanced mode handles daily use without breaking a sweat. For sustained intensive workloads like long gaming sessions, neither mode gives a clear answer, and that is a limitation you have to accept when you buy a phone this thin.

Score: 7/10

Honor Magic V6 battery life and charging: The strongest argument for this phone

Battery life is where the Magic V6 separates itself from every other large foldable on the market. The global model packs a 6,600mAh silicon-carbon cell, which is significant for a phone this thin, and it shows in real-world use.

I consistently got through a full day with charge to spare, even with the inner screen as my primary display and heavy use, including a lot of doomscrolling, video consumption, and multitasking throughout the day. Standby battery life is also pretty great, and I have not once gone to bed having worried about whether the phone would last until the next morning.

Charging is another highlight, with 80W wired and 66W wireless speeds on offer. Although Honor doesn’t include a compatible charger in the box, a third-party 80W charger took under an hour to get the phone from almost empty to full. The phone does prompt you to unfold it for the fastest possible charging speed, but I was not comfortable leaving the inner display exposed while plugged in, so I charged it folded throughout. It was still plenty fast either way.

MagicOS 10 has some sensible longevity options built in. You can cap charging at 70%, 80%, or 90% to preserve long-term battery health, and the phone has a Smart Charging mode that charges to 80% overnight and finishes to 100% just before your alarm.

It’s also worth noting that the Chinese variants of the Magic V6 pack even larger cells, at 6,850mAh and 7,150mAh depending on the storage configuration. The global model is already the class leader on battery endurance among large foldables. The Chinese version extends that lead further still.

Score: 9/10

Honor Magic V6 software: MagicOS 10 is surprisingly good

The Magic V6 ships with MagicOS 10 based on Android 16, and Honor promises seven major OS upgrades. That is the right commitment for a phone at this price, matching what Samsung and Google offer on their flagships.

MagicOS 10 features an iOS-style liquid glass aesthetic with translucency and soft blur throughout. Although inspired, the implementation is quite well done, and if it’s not your cup of tea, you can customize the translucency in settings. The software offers plenty of such customization options, including themes, fonts, always-on display styles, lock screen layouts, and folder sizes that scale up to a 2×3 grid with 3×5 icons inside.

The multitasking tools are what matter the most on a foldable, and Honor has done a great job on that front as well. Split-screen with adjustable ratios, floating windows, and Multi-flex, which runs three apps in a scrollable layout on the inner display, are all here and all work reliably. I use a two-app split regularly with messages alongside notes, or Google Books open next to Instagram. The implementation handles all of it without making me think twice.

The one frustration worth flagging is browser support for split-screen. Neither Chrome nor Firefox worked in split-screen view, which is a notable gap given how often a browser is exactly what you want alongside another app. On the plus side, frequently used split-screen app pairs show up in the dock for quick access, which is a genuinely useful touch.

Magic Portal is Honor’s system-wide contextual drag-and-drop tool. Long-press any content, and it surfaces a sidebar of relevant apps and actions, with AI adjusting suggestions based on what you have selected and what you have been doing. It works well enough, but it’s not something I use daily.

Honor’s AI suite is pretty extensive. Real-time subtitles, live call translation, deepfake detection during video calls, AI Memories for screenshot organization, and Image to Video 2.0, which generates short video clips from up to three reference images and a text prompt.

For Apple users, Honor Connect on iOS enables AirDrop-style file transfers and notification sync between the V6 and an iPhone. Honor Workstation on macOS can mirror the phone’s screen within macOS. I tested the file sharing, and it works without friction. These cross-platform tools exist in a space where most Android manufacturers have largely given up competing with Apple’s ecosystem lock-in, and Honor at least deserves some credit for making a genuine attempt.

Score: 8/10

Should you buy the Honor Magic V6?

The Magic V6 does not reinvent the large foldable. In my opinion, what it pulls off handsomely is that it takes everything the category has been building toward and executes it at the highest level currently possible. For example, it’s the first foldable with both IP68 and IP69 ingress protection, which is akin to solving the huge durability problem for fodables. You get a solid battery mileage that won’t leave you hanging before the day comes to an end.

More importantly, you get a camera system that does not ask you to accept foldable-tier compromises. And finally, the Magic V6 serves a rewarding OS that has finally caught up with the rest of the flagship Android skins. The performance situation is a bit unusual and worth pointing out, but it does not affect daily use in any way I could feel.

The crease is still present, and Oppo has now shown it does not have to be the case. The camera bump is an ongoing reality of this form factor that no amount of engineering has yet eliminated. None of that changes where I land, though. This phone changed my mind about large foldables entirely, and it did so not through novelty but through being a genuinely excellent device that happens to fold.

I have no qualms recommending it, though you might have to wait a little to get your hands on one. If you can’t wait, importing (with all its warranty, servicing, and transit risks) is the only viable option. The Magic V6 is currently available for pre-order in Malaysia, and based on a conversion from that pricing, you’ll have to shell out close to $1,900/€1,650/£1,400 to get your hands on one. Availability is expected to expand to more regions over the coming weeks, but regional pricing has not yet been revealed.

Why not try

If that’s too pricey or you would rather not wait for wider availability, here are two alternatives worth considering:

• Oppo Find N6: The only large foldable with a zero-crease display, and the one honest reason to consider looking elsewhere. The Find N6 has larger screens, similar battery life and charging speeds, and competitive cameras. Its Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 uses a 7-core architecture versus Honor’s full 8-core configuration, but performance in practice is similar given the Magic V6 is capped in Balanced mode anyway. If the crease is something that would genuinely bother you, the Find N6 is where to go.
• Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7: If budget is a constraint, Samsung’s flagship foldable is a viable option, though it’s now almost a year old. The device packs Qualcomm’s previous flagship chip, which is still a strong platform, and One UI 8.5 offers one of the best foldable software experiences out there. However, it is IP48, not IP68, and battery life trails the Magic V6 considerably.
• Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold: It’s the most rewarding phone in Google’s lineup, and not just because it’s a foldable Pixel. It’s sleek, well-built, and offers terrific cameras. The core appeal, however, is the software. This phone serves the most refined version of Android tailored for large screens. And let’s not forget, it’s also the test bed for all AI experiments and gets priority access to not just Android, but the broad Google software ecosystem, too.

How we tested the Honor Magic V6

I have been using the Magic V6 as my primary phone since receiving a review unit in late April. This is my first book-style foldable after years on slab phones, with the only prior foldable experience being a Galaxy Z Flip 3 and a Motorola Razr Plus 2023, both of which left poor impressions. That context shaped the review. I was not testing this against established expectations for the category. I was testing it as a phone.

Camera testing was done across multiple lighting conditions throughout the day, indoors and outdoors, over several weeks. Performance benchmarks were run in both Balanced and Performance modes to get a full picture of what the chip does under each setting. Battery testing was conducted through daily use across both displays over an extended period. The review unit is the 512GB model with 16GB RAM in the white colorway, running the latest stable build of MagicOS 10 at the time of publication.

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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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