The woods in Reanimal are full of surprises. You will encounter human cadavers that slither like snakes, gigantic talking pigs, and, at one point, a forlorn, supersized whale who seems resigned to an agonizingly slow death. These variously monstrous beings inhabit a realm that, though it looks like our own, seems to defy spatial logic: the forest leads to an oceanic expanse, which segues into a decrepit, towering city. It’s like Aesop’s Fables meets the nightmare visions of both Lars von Trier and J.G. Ballard.

Playing as a boy and girl (either solo or via local / online co-op), Reanimal evolves the premise Tarsier Studios explored with its first two Little Nightmares games: the timeless terror of children being pursued by larger, looming monsters. But the camera in this action-platformer is more fluid and dynamic. It feels less like you are peering inside a doll’s house and more like you are seamlessly directing these characters through a miniature film set. Another notable departure: For all its unsettling darkness, Little Nightmares always carried a little storybook charm. That quality is largely absent here. Reanimal is darker, nastier — and stronger for it.

The game begins on water, with you following dimly lit buoys; you reach a beach and open washed-up suitcases to find a key. From there, you venture into what seems like a hydroelectric facility. Inside, there are light puzzles to solve as you move forward, though nothing so taxing as to impede your progress for very long. The pair you’re controlling (referred to simply as “Boy” and “Girl”) can jump and grab objects; later, they wield a crowbar, useful for prying open doors or whacking smaller enemies. If you have played either a Little Nightmares game or a title by Playdead (the Danish studio’s landmark first game Limbo or 2016 classic Inside), then the action will feel instantly familiar.

The revelatory moments arrive via finely crafted details: These child protagonists carefully and reassuringly usher one another into each newly discovered room. I love how upon each restart after dying (perhaps in the jaws of a monstrous foe or by tumbling down a sheer drop), the duo are shown hugging one another — the only comfort they have in this terrible world. 

Yet these children are made of steely stuff. For every panicked sequence fleeing a gigantic sheep down a blood-red corridor, there is a moment when it is these youngsters who are doing the chasing. Reanimal, like forebears dating all the way back to 1991’s Another World, delights in showing you enemy figures loping ominously off-screen through some crack or hole in the wall. You must follow, plucking up the courage to trail these beasts into inky shadows. 

Reanimal takes some time revealing where its strikingly macabre, exquisitely haunted images are leading. The key moment occurs with the arrival of a soldier wearing a Brodie helmet popular in World War I; a few scenes later, you discover coastal artillery. Tarsier toyed with wartime motifs in its Little Nightmares games, notably the pile of shoes that recalled the heaps of belongings found by Allied soldiers at Nazi extermination camps in West Germany. Reanimal’s allegory is more explicit: At one particularly gruesome moment, you must evade the shots of a sniper stationed high in a building. Fail to find cover quickly enough and the young boy or girl’s body is ripped apart by a speeding bullet.

Tarsier’s latest operates in a different tonal zone to the jingoistic, popcorn warfare of the Call of Duty series and the amped-up-to-11 absurdity of Battlefield. Its solemnity evokes the trench sequences from the first Death Stranding game and finely calibrated dread of 2024’s underrated survival-horror title Conscript and action-adventure Hell Is Us.

That said, for all Reanimal’s achievements, it falls just a little short of greatness. The game doesn’t possess the same crystalline, airtight polish of Playdead’s work. Some transitions between scenes are a little abrupt, and on a few occasions, I had to reload because of a glitching character. Such is the literal darkness of the game, coupled with the choices of perspective, that distinguishing between the fore and background is a struggle; cue the odd accidental fall.

None of this greatly impacts what is a frequently bold and brilliant game. Since 2017, Tarsier has made children’s nightmares for grown-ups; despite its young protagonists, Reanimal is a nightmare wholly born from the anxieties of adults. It seems to speak to both the horrors of the 20th century and our barbarous present in which large-scale on-the-ground conflicts between sovereign nations have regretfully reemerged.  

I’m still running the story’s deeper meaning through my head. But regardless of the conclusions I eventually draw, there is no denying the sheer verve and power of the images that Tarsier summons on screen. Bodies — human or otherwise — disappear into bodies; children are doomed to wield the weapons of grown-ups (if they are not torn asunder by them first). The game also harbors a fascination with the spectacle of popular entertainment, delivering showstopping moments in both a cinema and theater.

Reanimal does not flinch; this action-platformer delivers a parade of atrocities you cannot take your eyes off of.

_{Reanimal launches February 13th on the PS5, Xbox, PC, and Nintendo Switch 2.}

It has been 13 long years since Aaron Foster last spoke to The Verge. Back then, Foster’s tiny, three-person studio Lunar Software was touting sci-fi horror game Routine with a striking vision: Foster hoped to suck players into the desolate eeriness of its moon base setting, which was equal parts immersive and grounded. Foster ended that interview by swerving a release date question. With 13 years of hindsight, it reads like an all-timer understatement. “Making a good game is more important than a hard-set deadline,” he said. “So we will keep it loose for now.” 

Now, nearly a decade and a half on, Routine has been released on Steam and Xbox. Better yet — miraculously, even — the game appears to bear little trace of its turbulent and protracted development. This is visually ravishing hard sci-fi with some of the most committed diegetic design I’ve ever seen in a video game. There is no heads-up display and no health gauge, nor is there any omniscient text directing you where to go. Instead, you must pay close attention to everything. Such is the concentration the game demands, likely causing you to literally lean into the screen; it can feel as if you are actually there, inhabiting the physical space of this magnificently believable lunar base.

Foster has made the game for a very specific type of video game aficionado, himself included. “I just appreciate it when I’m playing a game that I forget that I’m actually playing a game,” he says in a new interview with The Verge. “Often UI brings you out of the experience.”

Foster, who serves as art and design lead on the game, says that he and his partner, assistant lead artist and designer Jemma Hughes, go to great lengths to foster this kind of experience in games not expressly designed for them. The pair played online multiplayer survival game Conan Exiles with a self-imposed modifier: Neither person is allowed to look at the map. “We could only navigate the world through memory,” says Foster, “and that changes how you interact with the spaces.”

Your Cosmonaut Assistance Tool — or CAT —  is the best example of how hard Lunar Software has pushed this diegetic approach in Routine. CAT is an ungainly multifunctional electronic device with a chunky, 1980s-inspired look. You can hold it like a firearm, aiming the reticule through a small, low-res screen, pinging off bolts of electricity at the imposing robots that stalk the station. You can also hold CAT up, revealing buttons on its side and a bar showing how much battery life remains. Press one button and, if you’re standing next to a terminal with a projector, the in-game menu (tracking objectives and other useful information) appears. There is no way to access this menu by conventionally pressing Start or Esc; the menu must be accessed through the game world.

CAT, and the overall sinister atmosphere, is visible in the very first 2012 trailer. Not long before, Foster had quit his job as a 3D environment artist at Eurocom, a large UK-based studio that specialized in licensed games. He was feeling burned out and creatively unfulfilled, working on personal projects in the evening. This grueling double life caused him to overdose on caffeine. He wasn’t able to focus on any of his work, and he suffered from nosebleeds. 

At first, Foster saw Routine as a Dear Esther–esque walking simulator. “I thought I could make something visually distinct, if not with the great writing of Dan Pinchbeck,” he says. Soon after, programmer Pete Dissler came on board, which meant more involved systems could be implemented. In 2011, Foster, Dissler, and Hughes formed Lunar Software, moving into an apartment together in Preston, an industrial town in the north of England. They became like a tightly knit three-piece band. Foster and Hughes still live in the same flat; they became a couple in the early stages of production.

For a time, Routine’s production went smoothly. The team built environments and mechanics, while Mick Gordon, composer and audio designer on titles like Prey and Doom, joined the trio, designing its intricately machinic soundscape (listen closely for the ambient whirs and clicks of the door’s internal mechanisms). Yet slowly, the game began to lose focus. “We tried to solve problems with design by just throwing more things at it, more environments to navigate, more this, more that. None of it added anything to the experience,” says Foster. “It felt like a very shallow experience that we weren’t creatively in a good spot to fix.”

A release date trailer arrived in 2016; the team missed that deadline. Health issues struck various team members; what savings they had ran out. Foster and Hughes were reliant on Hughes’ parents for financial support. “We didn’t pay ourselves a wage,” says Hughes. “We were running on fumes.” Some of the team took on contract work; others did odd jobs. In effect, development shut down.

Then, in 2020, flickers of life. Lunar had pitched a prototype for a different game about a bounty-hunting frog, which they’d been working on as a means to keep their spirits up, to Raw Fury. The publisher was more interested in revisiting Lunar’s shelved project. “They’re like, ‘Aren’t you the folks that are working on Routine? What’s your feelings on returning to that project?’” recalls Foster. “‘Very, very fucking positive,’” he told them. 

Many developers spend years toiling on their passion projects: Acclaimed autobiographical life simulator Consume Me took 10 years to make; lauded Metroidvanias Ultros and Animal Well, and gorgeous soccer adventure Despelote, all took approximately seven years. There are many tales of blockbuster development hell: Duke Nukem Forever and the ongoing Beyond Good and Evil 2. But Routine is unique. Early into this second iteration of the project, Foster and his colleagues had a realization. “We were essentially doing a remake of our own game,” he says. “But without the game having ever been released. It was very strange.”

Chief among Lunar’s initial tasks on the second run was creating practically every asset from scratch as they shifted production from the relatively humdrum Unreal Engine 3 to its successor. The team borrowed a texturing technique from Star Citizen (another game languishing in its own development hell), and the lighting looks so ravishing because it has been baked into the levels, diffusing naturally through every ominously long corridor. 

During Routine’s most stressful moments, lumbering foes, likely having spotted your helmet poking out from behind a counter, click into thundering gear. There are doors that you can close to halt them momentarily, except — oh no! — you may fumble closing one because you must aim your cursor at the terminal screen itself rather than locking on to it automatically. It’s an interface style that was cribbed from Doom 3, and is representative of Routine as a whole: It riffs on the familiar yet manages to feel fresh. 

Given all of that work, how did the team maintain motivation on the project for all that time? “We just couldn’t live in a world where Routine didn’t release,” says Hughes. Foster, 26 when the project started and now 40, cites devotion as the primary reason behind how they kept going. “If we didn’t love Routine as much as we do, it wouldn’t have gotten us through the hard times.”

Even suffused in otherworldly fog, Silent Hill F’s picturesque period setting gleams with authenticity. Traditional hardwood buildings line narrow alleyways, while babbling brooks and small footpaths crisscross soaking paddy fields. The ephemera of 1960s everyday life is everywhere: glossy magazines, vintage toasters, exquisite flower arrangements. Yet beyond this moody sense of place, the details that feel most authentic in Silent Hill F are of a kind that video games rarely excel at. It’s the anxiety on the faces of its teen characters as they trade barbed taunts, the outpourings of emotion scribbled onto notes passed around at school.

We see this finely drawn, and frequently painful, world through the eyes of high school student Hinako Shimizu. She is a “tough girl,” according to her friends. Quickly enough, the series’ iconic mist descends and Hinako is forced to make use of her athletic streak, vaulting over obstacles to flee the malignant haze. She picks up pipes and bludgeons skittering, long-legged monsters; she finds arcane keys to unlock ominously decorated doors. We are yet again exploring a town twisted into grotesquely personal shapes by the intense emotions of our protagonist. The classic ingredients of Silent Hill return, yet there is newfound freshness and vitality here.

Partly, this is down to ravishing visuals: verging on photorealism yet painterly in their eerie prettiness. Light diffuses naturally down every cold and brooding street, bouncing off Hinako’s prim-and-proper bob and buttoned-up uniform. A carpet of red spider lilies frequently unfurls across the fictional mountain village of Ebisugaoka, transforming the setting into a kind of eco-horror hallucination. In an otherwise artfully desaturated palette, the plants are a vivid, violent interruption.

Moreover, Silent Hill F feels revitalized thanks to a story penned by renowned Japanese manga author Ryukishi07. Hinako is at a pivotal moment in her life, still at school yet on the cusp of an arranged marriage by her abusive, alcoholic father. She is tormented by social anxieties: the gossiping of friends and absence of her older sister. This plot is revealed patiently through cutscenes and scattered letters. It’s typical video game storytelling, but Silent Hill F offers a beguiling marriage of game space and narrative. The town of Ebisugaoka opens up alongside the mysteries; the streets seem to double back on themselves like this tricksy story.

You discover further tantalizing tidbits: details about arsenic pollution, toxic gas leaks, and the building of a massive dam. Are these central to the monstrous manifestations Hinako must endure or merely red herrings? I’m still not sure, even having rolled credits around hour 10.

Think of Silent Hill F as survival horror meets the honkaku mystery fiction of Japan, one whose story continues to be illuminated with each subsequent playthrough (all told through five possible endings). While wandering through creepy woods during my first session, I came across a giant, sacred tree. But I couldn’t interact with it. The tree remained an enigma until I started the game anew, quickly discovering a new puzzle which seemed to center it. More details and cutscenes arrive in subsequent playthroughs (and there is even a feature that distinguishes new cutscenes from old so you can hit the skip button).

The depth and nuance of the mystery is striking, but so is the lack of genuine scares. Silent Hill F is sinister, tense, melancholic, and, in a handful of scenes, wince-inducingly nasty. But scary? Not very. There’s nothing here that matches the terrifying abyssal descent into the bedrock below town in Silent Hill 2, that staircase that seemed to tunnel directly into James’ troubled subconscious. The closest Silent Hill F comes is Hinako’s family home. Doors and rooms multiply; corridors lengthen. The space — endlessly repeating until you complete all its puzzles — bristles with nightmarish logic.

The lack of frights stems mostly from a tilt toward action. Hinako lands critical hits, executes slo-mo dodges, and even wields a pole weapon with a curved blade called a naginata. She is no action hero at first, straining to lift weapons and sometimes flailing at thin air. But the teenager is committed. “Do not get in my way,” she says at one point, growing ever more assertive.

During bouts, Hinako consumes whatever remedies she can lay her hands on — kudzu tea, red pills, chocolate — and at shrines, which double as save spots, she can make sacrifices to the gods, thus upgrading her health, stamina, and even sanity. This journey, then, is a test of faith for the youngster who has one foot in tradition and another in modernity (a point reflected in the terrific score, which blends traditional Japanese folk music with ’60s psychedelia).

“The road twists and turns,” says Hinako in a moment of quiet reflection toward the end of the game. “It’s like I’m walking through my head.” The line is a clunky outlier in a script that typically has the smarts not to spell out its Freudian subtext. Still, the remark begs a question: what lurks in the darkest, most private recesses of Hinako’s mind? Through expressive level design, a deftly told story, and thrashing combat, we find a young woman locked into battle with societal expectations.

Silent Hill F beautifully communicates her emotional arc, from vying desperately for survival to unleashing violent fury. Hinako doesn’t so much blossom as erupt. She becomes a mighty force of nature in her own right.

_{Silent Hill F launches on September 25th on the PS5, Xbox, and PC.}

The opening hours of Hell Is Us are brilliantly confusing. The game tasks you with getting up to speed on a complicated civil war between the Palomists and Sabinians. A deluge of proper nouns is unleashed: Lymbic weaponry, Guardian Detectors, and more. But the clearest way the game communicates that you should feel utterly dumbfounded is through the cryptic stone panels scattered amid its ravaged, Eastern Europe-coded setting; you’re unable to actually read the text engraved in these tablets. At every turn in the first levels — a dank forest and then a fetid bog — meaning and, just as importantly, understanding, eludes. 

In this manner of willful bewilderment, Hell Is Us evokes Hidetaka Miyazaki’s constellation of soulsborne hits. Like those games, notably Elden Ring, here beckons a world of esoteric symbols, puzzles, and inscrutably complex history. Combat also apes the cadence of quintessential Miyazaki titles: stamina drains with each thunderous strike, recuperating only in moments of panicked or planned retreat. 

Yet that’s where the FromSoftware comparisons end. Hell Is Us is also a detective game: you are given a pleasingly chunky retrofuturistic datapad in which you store a small encyclopedia’s worth of information, and there are spider diagrams filled with leads to follow. To solve the game’s more devilish conundrums, you may wish to have a pen and paper on hand! 

Befitting both its own name and game title, the fictional country of Hadea has fallen into war-torn carnage — in essence, becoming hell itself. The first hour shows the grisly aftermath of a firing squad and lynched bodies swinging from a tree. Nearby, a soldier plays a maudlin tune on a violin. Bizarre white creatures stalk marshes and blustery plains; gigantic orbs barbed with spikes — so-called Time Loops — pulsate. These anomalous fissures in time and space are the result of the so-called “Calamity,” and it is up to protagonist Rémi, a gorpcore investigator-cum-action-hero, to send them back to oblivion. 

At first, the game seems like a hodgepodge of visual styles: bleak landscapes, mannequin-like creatures, technical wear fashion, gigantic swords to rival Cloud Strife’s in Final Fantasy VII. Slowly, it begins to coalesce, taking on a sublime, haunted quality suffused with dream logic. The strangeness is compounded by the sheer density of obscure puzzles. What maddening realm is home to so many arcane riddles?!

There is a lot to process in Hell Is Us. This extends to its enemies who, if especially powerful, summon support beings via a weird, metaphysical umbilical cord. One is a white, humanoid creature; the other is a brightly colored, geometric foe. There’s a further wrinkle, as each color corresponds to an emotion: blue for grief, green for terror, and so on. The metaphor is a little hackneyed yet potent. These enemies are physical manifestations of war’s emotional wreckage. They wander the landscape, imbuing it with a surreal, psychic quality. But the symbolism is a little limited: how do you put an end to intergenerational grief? According to Hell Is Us, by cleaving it in two using hand axes infused with rage.

There is a breadth of ambition and imagination here but uneven execution. Take our hero, who looks great in his flapping, rain-resistant poncho, yet speaks like a gruffer, more cynical version of countless male game protagonists from the late 2000s. Gazing upon a cathedral-sized mound of human bones, Rémi (played by Elias Toufexis, aka Adam Jensen from the Deus Ex series) muses aloud: the Sabinians may be the victims here but the region is also littered with Palomist graves. It is an odd, jarring line, to make this kind of equivalence when confronted with such monumental loss.  

After the wonderfully discombobulating opening hours, Hell Is Us loses some momentum. Hadea remains a beguiling setting throughout; the desire to pull at its various laced mysteries never wanes. But the same can’t be said of the other narrative layers, either Rémi’s own personal voyage to discover the fate of his parents and the place he fled as a young child, or precisely what the Calamity is. The former is intended to propel the player’s exploration yet it does not grip. Without the requisite narrative intrigue, the plot boils down unlocking a series of doors decorated with ornate glyphs. At one point, a character inadvertently sums up the prosaic plot: “So you found a door with a strange mechanism. What happened next?”

Meanwhile, combat — which is an activity you need to do a lot of in order to decipher the weird event that caused the appearance of the unnerving pallid creatures — becomes rote. My attention started to dwindle around hour 15 of a possible 30. 

This is a shame because Hell Is Us does so much that is admirable and interesting. The actual dungeons that plummet below the game’s semi-open zones are a spatial symphony of claustrophobic passageways and soaring, light-filled atriums and altars. There are no waypoints or quest markers; you must carefully read journals for navigational clues (and sometimes use a compass). Another smart design choice: you can only talk to characters about information you have already uncovered. In this era of often anodyne and frictionless big-budget video games, where anything that might potentially limit a game’s audience is carefully considered and often avoided, it is refreshing to play something that is so intentionally prickly. 

As I trudge forward in this muddy, miserable land, my mind keeps circling back to language and understanding: the codes, symbols, tongues, and customs of Hadea. It’s clear that I am only grasping a tiny fraction of this millennia-old conflict. But there is another, more universal language that the game seems to use, which it relays through bracing imagery: the misery of war. 

Regardless of time and place, violent conflict breaks people in much the same way, making them scared, angry, vengeful, and, naturally, violent. Despite its myriad of shortcomings and sheer informational density, Hell Is Us speaks with clarity: of war, it is impossible to close Pandora’s box once its evils have escaped.

_{Hell Is Us launches on September 4th on the PS5, Xbox, and PC.}

Momentum is what Wheel World does best. It is the feeling of reaching a downhill section of road, a pristine Sega-blue sea stretching out in the far distance, and letting gravity, the weight of your bicycle, and slope do all the work. Release the right trigger, the button used to pedal, and simply careen down the gently curving asphalt. It’s as if you’re flying — the wind in your hair and shirt fluttering on your back, coasting to wherever the road takes you. 

Wheel World is an undeniably feel-good video game. But this wasn’t always the case. It started life with the title “Ghost Bike,” casting you as a deceased cyclist making their way to bicycle Valhalla. One name change later (and probably a lot of behind-the-scenes wrangling), it arrives as a game about the unmitigated joy of riding a bicycle through a Mediterranean island. 

The roads here are lined with cypress trees, the beaches are white and sandy, and you’ll come across many chic cyclists lounging in cafes. The atmosphere is so vividly rendered that I can practically taste the vacation Coca-Cola as I play. Summer itself seems strewn across the screen. 

You play as Kat, a rider chosen by a cycling spirit named Skully to enact an ancient ritual. This is achieved by accruing parts of a so-called legendary bicycle: frame, wheels, chain, and more, which have fallen into the hands of rival cycling gangs. So you race these teams (which have superbly off-beat names like the “Nude Dudes” and “Shimmy Squad”), moving across a mix of dirt and road tracks. You encounter other cycling spirits residing in gigantic sculpted bike bells along the way. Ringing your bell at one of them causes the stonework to crack, thus revealing said spirit. You chat and gain an extra few bars on your boost gauge, before a portion of the map is revealed with tiny little icons indicating where you should pootle to next. 

That’s right: Wheel World, from California-based studio Messhof, maker of the excellent Nidhogg sword-dueling games, is structured like an open-world behemoth from Ubisoft. But expectations should be kept in check. There isn’t a blockbuster’s worth of content here. Rather, across the roughly seven hours of playtime, you’ll take part in races, duke it out with lone cyclists, and meet cute little dudes with boxes on their heads who point you in the direction of new gear. Oh, and there are strange hovering drones which dole out rewards for classic checklist completion stuff (like finding hidden jumps and lost members of cycling crews).

You could argue the game is a little slight in its array of things to do. But that’s not quite right. Rather, Wheel World requires you to rethink traditional definitions of content — to move beyond markers on a map. Content, for example, is every highway and path whose varying terrains cause your bicycle to handle differently. It is the shaky, unstable feeling that is channeled from screen to hand to brain via the controller when you veer onto the little slip of gravel next to the road. Content is also watching Kat as she strains to surmount a hill with a gradient that would cause a heart attack in most. Our hero remains stoic: I marvel at her thighs of steel!

Wheel World is filled with many more beautifully animated details. You’re able to hop off your bicycle and push it around on foot. Maneuvering in a tight space, Kat does a kind of swivel trick with her handlebars, essentially spinning the bike frame around in one effortless motion. Another deftly rendered moment: when Kat dismounts, lifting her right leg over the bike, resting it next to her left, and then freewheeling to a gentle stop while standing upright. If you’re a cyclist, this move will likely already be familiar to you: it means every journey ends with nonchalant cool (or so you likely imagine). I’ve never seen it reproduced in a video game before. 

All this serves to make ambling around the island an exquisitely elegant thing. It’s a shame, then, that the racing is a little more chaotic, a little less refined. Showdowns on wide open roads are, for the most part, a joy. Those that take place in tight city streets can be finicky, Kat bouncing awkwardly off AI cyclists, world geometry, and oncoming traffic. The difficulty also feels a touch wonky: races are too easy for much of the game before an unexpected spike arrives in the last hour or so (exacerbated by a chugging frame rate on the PlayStation 5). 

Still, these moments of frustration only made me pine all the more for the relative serenity of the open (world) road. Upon rolling credits, I dived back in to check off remaining objectives while soaking up the picture-postcard vibe again. This, I think, is the true mark of a game like Wheel World: the extent to which the core mechanics might cajole you back. 

Galavanting during my post-credits session, I thought about another notable racing title with light open-world design: Mario Kart World. The latest in Nintendo’s flagship kart racer is a cascading stream of serotonin hits induced by cotton-candy skies, soaring backflips, and delightful wahoos. It is a pure pleasure machine. Wheel World, on the other hand, doles out joy with a little less machine-like efficiency. It is more languid, massaging your eyeballs, ears, and brain with great blocks of warm, cel-shaded color, nostalgia-tinted electropop, and, of course, beautifully tactile cycling.

What mileage there is in simply ebbing and flowing across the gorgeous sun-kissed land, carried along by both cool breeze and smooth tarmac. Freewheeling, it is practically impossible not to break out in a smile. With every descent, those smiles only widen.

_{Wheel World launches July 23rd on PC, PS5, and Xbox.}

Rolling across rugged alien wilds, your circular base in The Alters offers a twinkling haven from the whipping winds and nauseating radiation. At least, that’s how it feels for the first few hours. Gradually, as the in-game days stack up, my view of the vessel changes: protagonist Jan Dolski seems to be stuck on what is essentially a very expensive, very large hamster wheel, eking out an existence within modular rooms that look a lot like shipping containers. For the corporation funding this venture, Ally Corp (pah!), Jan and his crewmates are just like the resources they’re seeking to extract: commodities. 

The hamster wheel stylings of your ship evoke the visual storytelling of filmmaker Bong Joon-ho: the speeding train in Snowpiercer, or the repetitive clone deaths of Mickey 17, each distilling class and the flow of capital into raw images. This should tell you something about how ambitious and frequently weird this sci-fi game is. In part, The Alters is a base-building survival experience of the kind that developer 11 Bit Studios received plaudits for with the Frostpunk series.

But there’s a wrinkle: in The Alters, you’re directing Jan about the ship, getting him to interact with menus rather than seeing everything from the omniscient top-down perspective. Beyond your base walls, the game snaps into a third-person action-exploration mode as you comb the ravishing extraterrestrial planet for resources, and maybe even the key to life itself. 

Twenty minutes in, the game evokes another modern great, Hideo Kojima, when you build the most important — and weirdest — room in the whole game: the Womb. Using a shimmering, highly volatile substance called Rapidium, Jan, the sole surviving member of the original crew, is able to replicate himself thanks to a scientific breakthrough involving the multiple universes theory. It sounds heady but is straightforward enough in practice: Jan punches the “alter” that he wants to create into a quantum computer and out pops an all-new, yet strangely familiar, assembly of flesh and bones. There is Jan Botanist, Jan Miner, Jan Doctor, and more. Each represents a fork in the space-time continuum of the original Jan’s life. Conveniently, each is also suited to a particular task on the massive rotating mining vessel. 

The game quickly settles into the min-maxing groove typical of survival games. Such are the demands of the economy on default difficulty, it feels as if you need to optimize every single second of the game’s 24-hour day-and-night cycle. Jan Botanist gets to work making veggies in the garden, then rustles up nourishing meals in the kitchen. Jan Refiner processes the raw materials; Jan Scientist researches new technologies in his lab. The day’s labor consumes your attention with its pleasing machinic rhythm. Outside, 11 Bit flexes its art chops with considerable verve. Gnarled, tree-like rock formations curl across the arid terrain; matter swirls within shimmering physics-defying anomalies; a vast cosmic sea churns menacingly.

Everything is running smoothly until — oh no! — it’s not. The crew are peeved, overworked, and understandably terrified. So you build a gym, social room, and, in true corpo-hell style, a contemplation room. Get the exercise endorphins flowing, kick back and watch a movie (which are live-action shorts by comedy sketch duo Chris & Jack), or play a few rounds of beer pong. Your crew’s anxiety fades; their designs on rebellion dissipate. 

Fittingly, for a game that can be read as an exploration of dissociative identity disorder, The Alters has its own split personality: the actual work of maintaining your base and the interactions that emerge between your crew. The former can become rote; the latter provide moments of spontaneous drama. One touching early-game scene involves the death of a sheep, the initial test subject for the Womb. Your crew are gutted; they decide to hold a wake honoring the doe-eyed Molly. She was a friend, after all. Despite the psychedelic strangeness of their creation, this oddball assortment of Jans are still human, possessing an innate desire for ritual. 

Elsewhere, the script doesn’t quite sparkle. Original Jan asks his alters the same set of control questions each time they emerge from the Womb, moving through clockwork beats of dismay and outrage as the new arrivals grapple with the baffling nature of their existence. Indeed, as the hours accrue, the conversations naturally take on a kind of eerie, echoey feel, such is the way that Jan is, in essence, talking to himself. The result is a kind of maddeningly claustrophobic nightmare — and perhaps not wholly in the way 11 Bit necessarily intended. 

There are exciting, sometimes downright devious decisions to make, like choosing between the unscrupulous company you work for or an unhinged scientist to solve a deadly health issue (goodness knows how long I ummed and ahhed on that one). Beyond such big, plot-altering choices, you’ll spend most of your time agonizing over actions befitting your role as the ship’s de facto boss. Are you getting in extra gym equipment solely because it will brighten Refiner Jan’s day or because it will make him fitter, happier, and more productive?

11 Bit has long explored questions of labor, notably in its Frostpunk games, but the zoomed-in, up-close-and-personal perspective of The Alters successfully reframes them — and in timely fashion. Recent years have shown starkly how most real-world corporations (including those that make and publish video games) feel about their workers: i.e., as an inherently disposable resource, especially when firing them presents an opportunity to swell profits.

In outer space, this disposability becomes existential. Original Jan, and all the other Jans, feel the supercharged, life-and-death stakes of their precarious predicament. Not all of them will make it, spending their final moments toiling under the yoke of corporate labor. They are reduced and then, in turn, extinguished — their bodies considered little more than grist for the cosmic mill.

_{The Alters launches June 13th on the PS5, Xbox, and PC.}

Squidge, splodge, splat: Skin Deep doesn’t sound like most immersive sims. It doesn’t sound like most video games. Close your eyes and what it aurally resembles is a slapstick cartoon with a healthy dollop of toilet humor. These sounds, though, bookend chains of effects that are pure video game magic. Take the splodge, produced when you tamp down on the soap dispenser next to a sink, that in turn creates a cloud of flammable petroleum. Toss a lighter close to it and then you get a KABOOM.

In Skin Deep, you play as Nina Passedena, a secret operative for an intergalactic insurance company. Your job? To save cube-headed cats from a group of marauding space pirates called the Numb Bunch. Each mission plays out in taut, smartly designed spaceships, each just three or four rooms filled with a plethora of objects to play with, like banana skins (perfect for making guards fall flat on their asses) and black pepper (vital for making them sneeze). You sneak through vents (a lot of them) and skulk in the shadows. Should you take out a guard, you can dispose of their popped-off heads (because of a bizarre disembodying technology dubbed “Skull Saver”) by ejecting it from an airlock into the vast, lonely expanse of space.

If you’ve played a Blendo game, like Thirty Flights of Loving or Quadrilateral Cowboy,, then the tone of this spy caper will feel immediately familiar. It’s silly, eccentric, and brimming with knowing gags. The studio’s lead, Brendon Chung, has spent over 15 years honing a singular style that draws on classic Quake as much as art-house cinema. During Skin Deep’s introduction, Chung delivers a virtuoso synthesis of this vision: a blur of jump cuts between first-person action sequences through a faintly rickety vessel. There are exploded pipes and smashed glass, but wait! — you need to pick the glass out of your bare feet lest you bleed out.

Having to pick glass out of your feet might make it sound like Skin Deep is interested in realism. It’s not. What Chung and a small cohort of developers at Blendo hone in on are the possibilities afforded by a play space that is aiming for, even more than big-budget immersive sims like the Dishonored, a frankly preposterous level of physical and systemic coherence. They’re doing so using a video game engine, Id Tech 4 — famously used for Doom 3 — which is now more than 20 years old. The pleasure comes in testing the pliability of the design, the extent to which the game is able to account for harebrained schemes and foolhardy mistakes.

At one point, I lured a bunch of goons to a bathroom. I’d already duplicated a bar of soap (using the duplicator gun, naturally), which I then plopped on the floor. Upon entering the restroom, these hapless foes, dressed in lurid purple suits, slipped and slid all over until I eventually jumped on one of their backs, directing them in wibbling, wobbling fashion to smash into their nearby comrades and the surrounding faucets. By the end, the bathroom was a mess of spewing waters, fallen bodies, and mission-critical items like colored keycards. 

There are other ways physicality manifests in Skin Deep. Guns, which arrive a handful of hours in, are modeled in exquisite detail; pop the clip to see how many bullets you have; cock the weapon after firing each round. Each animation is rendered with a satisfying, fidgety snap. 

Yet sometimes, even against the most heavily armed enemies, you may not even need to use your firearm. On a fast-food spaceship, having evacuated my feline friends, a group of higher-level foes docked in a bid to try and take me out (such arrivals are always accompanied by a brilliant breakbeat version of sea shanty, “Wellerman”). I was struggling to evade them and ended up hiding in a vent that, unbeknownst to me, was connected to a huge walk-in freezer. There was a big button in the vent, and so when my adversaries walked in, I instinctively hit it. They froze, their heads popping off, leaving me a clear path to the escape pod. I hadn’t planned for this moment, merely stumbling into it. Blendo had engineered it. 

Skin Deep has a habit of churning out serendipitous moments like this. For all the careful sneaking it encourages — and this is some of the finest free-form stealth since Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain — the game soars when your actions go awry. If spotted, the Numb Bunch are liable to unload bullets into you even if you’re standing in front of a window that looks out into the cosmos. Lo, the bullets shatter the window, throwing the entire contents of the room, including you and the idiot who fired the weapon, into zero gravity. 

You can do the same, albeit in a more controlled manner, gliding gracefully around the outside of a ship in serene slow-mo before lining up a shot at a window, thus sucking your enemies into deep space. The options afforded by Chung’s sandbox design are supremely generous.

The fun is not quite inexhaustible. These ships, for all their distinguishing features (one is a post office; another is a mining vessel), and delightfully oceanic names (like the “Narwhal”), begin to blur as the hours stack up. Enemies, too, are a little uniform visually and not especially smart, following simple patrol paths, which you can easily skirt around. You will likely master these levels; it’s more a question of how much. The results board, which arrives at the end of each excursion, details your time and other key stats, suggesting the game has been partly designed with speedrunning in mind. 

Because of the Id Tech 4 aesthetics and its evocation of foundational immersive sims like Thief, it’s possible to read Skin Deep as a throwback. But that sells the game short. The verve, personality, and breakneck pace of this stealth action feels supremely modern, like a manic hyper-pop reimagining of the classics — now with added sneeze mechanic.

_{Skin Deep launches on April 30th on PC.}

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. You awake in a dimly lit bunker with little recollection of yourself or your surroundings. A few moments later, having learned the basics of survival (throwing a punch; crafting a bandage), you emerge blinking into the light. But wait: something is different. You see not a frontier expanse a la Fallout or the painterly wilderness of Breath of the Wild but the windswept uplands of England: ancient dry stone walls snake about rolling hills, enclosing the vivid greens of clipped grass, ferns, and gnarled oak trees. 

The next few hours are both brilliantly disorienting and mercilessly punishing. Immediately, Atomfall, whose maker, Rebellion, is behind the cult Sniper Elite series, lets you wander in any direction. Within minutes, you encounter hard-nosed foes speaking in broad British accents who would love nothing more than to turn your skull into cornflakes with a cricket bat. You snoop about ruined farm buildings to scavenge resources before discovering a note from a long-deceased person, containing a set of coordinates that you must mark manually on your map. Lo, the adventure begins proper, with only the lightest-touch guidance.

Through its mix of freeform stealth and semi-open-world survival, Atomfall most closely evokes the Dying Light and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchises. But the game quickly asserts its own personality. Partly, this is because of the world: the year is 1962, five years on from the real-world Windscale atomic reactor fire (the worst nuclear disaster the UK ever experienced). In Atomfall’s alt-history fiction, that event turned out to be even more strange and severe, causing a composite of a region called Cumbria to enter quarantine, essentially becoming its own sci-fi Zone. Fittingly, you do lots of traipsing about evocatively named regions like Skethermoor and Slatten Dale. You wind through paths carved out of flinty slate and pallid limestone, skulking through sun-dappled groves of native deciduous trees and hiding behind crooked walls lined with bright pinky-purple foxgloves. 

Stealth survival makes up only half of Atomfall; the other half is solving the mystery of this picturesque nuclear nightmare and how the hell you escape it. You have investigations rather than quests. These are open-ended, able to be started (and, very often, resolved) in multiple ways. Don’t take an immediate liking to an NPC or can’t be bothered to go through the rigmarole of doing them a favor to get something in return? You can always just kill them, as I did with the poor vicar who I was certain would be carrying a certain key. (He wasn’t!)

If you’re able to exercise enough self-restraint not to bash your investigative leads on their heads, then Atomfall does a wonderful job of making you feel like a detective as you slowly unpick this craggy, contested land, hunting down evidence in a way that naturally chimes with exploration. Just beware of the gigantic, fire-spewing robots.

The overall experience, which can last anywhere between 10 and 20 hours, is undeniably absorbing, if a little uneven. Survivalist crafting is streamlined; stealth is serviceable rather than spectacular. The atmosphere is mostly rich and dread-filled. In one chilling emergent moment that could be straight out of a Ben Wheatley movie, a group of forest-dwelling pagans loom out of the woodland mist. I feel a spike of real-world cortisol because rabbles of their size usually mean swift, gruesome death. But in densely populated areas, the mood can be undone by the repetition of a limited pool of enemy barks delivered by an even smaller group of voice actors. 

In searching for answers, the game inevitably pushes you below ground into dank government facilities populated by killer rats, human squatters, and strange bioluminescent figures who seem to have an odd relationship with the local fungi. These conspiracies are compelling enough, taking place in a grand labyrinth whose gigantic, interconnected form is gradually unveiled as you power it back up with atomic batteries. But it pales a little in comparison to the people-made horrors that are occurring aboveground — the power grabs and creeping sense of insanity. 

For all the toodle-pip quaintness of the writing and visuals, Atomfall is deeply serious about its depiction of an England gone fascistic rogue. An armed force known as Protocol imposes what is essentially lockdown-like martial law. The soldiers, almost without exception, are malicious young men keen to assert their violent will on the unarmed populace while simultaneously preaching a message of civility. In Wyndham village, buildings are festooned with British flags, as if a royal coronation is happening on the same day as a World War II memorial. Out in Casterfell Woods, a pagan group eyes you suspiciously. “What… are you?” they ask while brandishing lethal weaponry, unable to fit you into some kind of imaginary, perfectly definable box. Everyone here seems to value conformity — even the weirdos in the woods. 

One of the game’s masterstrokes is how you interact with such ostensibly hostile factions. If you’re unarmed, they will spot you from afar without immediately engaging in combat. Approach and an icon turns yellow, indicating the situation could turn violent. But back off, giving these people a wide enough berth, and the icon will slowly turn white, indicating, at least for now, a mutual desire to avoid hostilities. These moments, especially in the early portion of the game, when you’re less well armed, are brilliantly tense and paranoid. They evoke something of the distrustful, fearing atmosphere that simmers just below actual Britain currently. The social contract is threadbare; in sardonic style, Atomfall hints at the cruelty that might be unleashed when it finally breaks.

That’s the crux of Atomfall: it doesn’t get everything right, but by George, it does get England right. This is a rich, crisis-laden tapestry of the famously green and pleasant land. There is abundant, familiar beauty here: gurgling brooks; stone packhorse bridges; cozy pubs serving real cask ale. The familiarity enhances the horror while also being a change from the usual postapocalyptic video game worlds. As you sprint through this rugged countryside, desperately looking behind at the pack of murderous foes in pursuit, all while leaping over turnstiles, the sense of doom is palpable.

_{Atomfall launches on March 27th on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox.}

When S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl was released in November, it was clearly not yet the game its developers, GSC Game World, wanted it to be. Sure, this imagining of the Zone was fabulously moody, a desolate and bleak expanse of bog, scrubland, abandoned warehouses, and pallid vistas. For all the ways it was transportive and evocative, it did not yet feel truly alive. The Zone was, dare I say, a little too quiet, lacking the kind of brilliant emergent moments (like three-way skirmishes between stalkers, more stalkers, and roving packs of mutant dogs) that have previously defined the franchise. I ended my review wondering whether the game would, and indeed could, become the very best “shining” version of itself. 

Three months on, with two major and five smaller patches under its belt, I’m thrilled to report that the game is close to becoming exactly that. To cut a long story short, the enemy AI in combat situations is vastly improved, A-Life 2.0 (the more expansive AI system that gives the game its thrillingly unpredictable sense of life) is practically purring, and I’m now encountering far fewer of the immersion-breaking bugs (like floating and disembodied heads). S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 was admittedly no Cyberpunk 2077 disaster at launch. That said, the work done by its Kyiv and Prague-based developers, who have labored throughout the Russia-Ukraine war, is nothing short of remarkable.

Last night, while traipsing through the overgrowth to complete a mission in the Malachite region, I was spotted by stalkers from a rival faction. I retreated back into the vehicle station that I’d just passed through, taking cover behind a steel gate. I poked my rifle around the metal panel, leaning to my left as bullets whizzed past my head, catching a glimpse of the masked stalkers attempting to flank me. They threw grenades, pinning me back. I downed one of them, and the other went to heal him. As he crouched down to administer a med kit, I headshotted him, a fearsome crack whipping through the air. Of course, I unceremoniously looted both bodies moments later.

Improved enemy AI clearly has a massive impact on gameplay. It also changes how the Zone feels. Where, previously, the architecture felt ghostly — blown-out, post-Soviet wreckage that was slowly being reclaimed by nature — now, it is the perfect site for cat-and-mouse shootouts. Fear not, the Zone is still haunting, but the adrenaline-pumping, hardcore firefights that were such a standout feature of prerelease trailers are now very much a reality in the game. It adds up to a 64-kilometer-squared open-world playspace that feels even more dangerous; you’re locked into a battle with the landscape itself and the much smarter humans that stalk it.  

In the latest patch released last Thursday, there are a whopping 1,700 improvements, ranging from small balancing tweaks like radiation levels to what seem like pretty substantial changes, including “level design, and terrain improvements for multiple locations and regions.” Your flashlight now casts shadows on objects, and stealth has been improved (although, truth be told, it’s still pretty wonky). Maybe my favorite detail is that NPCs don’t just heal their fallen allies; they now loot the corpses of downed enemies. Turns out, these NPCs have just as little shame as me. Another small detail that subtly enhances the game’s already wonderful atmosphere: thanks, I think, to the improved A-Life 2.0, NPC stalkers now more regularly gather at campfires, even those in the wilderness outside of major hub areas. 

I don’t want to tacitly endorse developers releasing games in borderline unfinished states. The examples, unfortunately, have been piling up in recent years. But you can’t deny the achievements of GSC Game World. In early December, creative director Mariia Grygorovych reflected on the game’s rocky launch. “It’s not perfect, we need to fix everything,” she said. “But it’s a game! It’s a game with soul, with feelings there, with love there!”

Grygorovych is right, and now it’s easier than ever to appreciate all that love and soul. For sure, it’s an odd and uncompromising love, the kind that’s content to let the player cower in a shed while a blood-red radiation storm whirs above them; the kind that also takes pride in first-person animations of protagonist Skif wolfing down delicious cured sausage. These types of moments feed into a wider tapestry of action that does not go easy on the player — indeed, it goes out of its way to make life miserable for them. 

This type of friction has always been the major selling point of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchise. It’s what makes the series appeal to such a specific type of video game fetishist. Now, that friction manifests in many more of the ways the developers intended. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2. is no tribute act to past glories: three months on from launch, it finally feels as if it was worth the wait.