It's been a good few weeks for games on rails. Nintendo's Star Fox remake wisely kept the tightly scripted, action-packed levels from Star Fox 64 largely the same, and they're still fun to fly through nearly 20 years later. Denshattack!, a new game from Undercoders, similarly features levels packed with carefully orchestrated sequences to great effect. Except instead of flying through space as an unnervingly realistic anthropomorphic fox, you're flying - and flipping, and spinning, and grinding - through Japan while driving a blindingly fast train.

Calling Denshattack! a train game radically undersells what you actually do. Across a bright …

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At its peak, around 12 million people subscribed to World of Warcraft so that they could explore the realm of Azeroth together. The audience for PointlessQuest is quite a bit smaller. On launch day, the game hit a peak of 15 concurrent players… and no, that sentence isn't missing a word. Then again, basically everything about PointlessQuest is intentionally tiny. It's a game that was developed as a side project by designer Gareth Williams, and it's available on just about the least likely platform to house an MMO: the Playdate. Yet it has garnered a small group of hardcore players who are working together to burn through the early game exper …

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Roleplaying games are often defined by excess. Storylines that span dozens of hours, side quests so big they could be their own game, massive worlds that require complex maps to explore, and casts so big you start forgetting character names. That's part of what makes these games feel like epic adventures, but it can also make them intimidating, particularly if you have limited spare time. Dosa Divas, on the other hand, manages to capture much of that same feeling in a package that spans less than 10 hours. And it does it with a bold sense of style and a story that seamlessly flits between big themes and personal drama. There's just one big d …

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What's the Password? has a simple concept: To solve each of the game's more than 100 puzzles, you have to type in the right four-digit password on a number pad. That might sound like a limited constraint. But the simplicity gives solo developer Dan DiIorio, better known as TrampolineTales, lots of room to play with clever ideas. Over the course of a few hours, the game never stopped surprising me.

Puzzle clues come in several different formats. Some are written text; the very first puzzle is a sentence that tells you what numbers to punch in. But you'll also have to decipher four-digit codes from things like the blinking digits of a clock, …

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From its opening minutes, Moves of the Diamond Hand is upfront about what it offers: You're going to have a lot of strange conversations, and you're going to roll a lot of dice. Get on board with this proposition, and the reward is one of the most creative roleplaying games I've seen in years, even if its many mysteries won't be resolved until 2027.

Moves of the Diamond Hand is an Early Access videogame available on PC, macOS, and steamOS (including the Steam Deck, where I played it) from musician and game designer Cosmo D. The game looks and feels like a 2000s-era first-person RPG or immersive sim: environments are grimy, stark, and blocky …

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Echo Isle is heavily inspired by The Legend of Zelda, and it's not afraid to show it: The retro graphics bear a striking resemblance to Link's Awakening, the main character wears a blue tunic and wields a sword, and he navigates dungeons to collect items and keys to fight bosses and gather magical MacGuffins. But where Echo Isle shines is how it takes the best parts of a Zelda adventure and shrinks them down to their essence - I finished the game in a little more than an hour.

The game starts with the main character falling from the sky onto Echo Isle, an island protected by a magical lighthouse that has mysteriously gone dark. While you d …

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There are a lot of games that remind me of summer - hot days in the backseat with a copy of Dragon Warrior III, cooling off in the basement while grinding Gran Turismo races - but there aren't a lot of games that are actually about summer. That's part of what makes Kabuto Park so charming. It's a game that manages to not only capture the fleeting moments of a childhood summer, but also cram a Pokémon-style adventure into a game that lasts only a few hours.

Kabuto Park actually launched last year on PC, but it's available now on both Xbox and the Switch, the latter being probably the ideal platform for it. It takes place over the course of a …

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Slots & Daggers, a low-key, fantasy-themed slot machine roguelike, was one of my favorite games last year. That may sound like a complicated description, but the game mixes ideas from deckbuilding roguelikes with slot machines to create an engrossing loop, and there's steady meta-progression that helps you push further with just about every run. Perhaps the best part is that Slots & Daggers is short: Solo developer Friedemann describes the game as a mini roguelike, and I completed it, including all 12 achievements, in just under six hours. This month, Slots & Daggers came out on the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X / S, and …

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Finding a cafe that fits you can be a revelatory experience. For me at least, there are few places outside of my house that I can truly feel comfortable in. I'm lucky enough to have two options in walking distance: a coffee shop that's bright, airy, and full of art, and another that doubles as a plant shop so that I'm surrounded by greenery while I write. They're third places that have become central to my life. But in the virtual realm I have an option as well - and while it's not a place for getting work done, it's just as relaxing.

The Coffee Talk series kicked off in 2020, with a direct sequel three years later, and the title really say …

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