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But what makes Wildermyth special is the untold number of plotlines, side quests, and character moments simmering underneath the hood. With an art style that resembles the watercolor composition of the mids webcomic golden age, we watch as they grow and change alongside the challenges ahead. In my first Wildermyth tale, my mage and my ranger fell in love and had a child.

Ten years later, the ranger was cursed by an eldritch god, making her more reserved and less buoyant, putting a strain on their relationship. The pair worked past it, though; later on, their eldest daughter joined my team for the final battle. Many of those selections appear above in his top 10 picks. Below are the rest of the games that stood out to Winkie this year:.

This was a shocker. Publisher Square Enix was still licking its wounds when it unveiled Guardians of the Galaxy , once again recruiting an ersatz cast of not-quite-Hollywood actors to fill the roles of Star-Lord, Rocket Raccoon, Groot, Gamora, and Drax. I expected the worst, and what I found was a genuinely moving single-player narrative that seemed desperate to atone for the sins of its forebearer.

The combat is mediocre, and I endured a ton of technical issues during my playthrough on PC, but Guardians contains an intimacy that is rare for the medium. The Guardians films thrive when the stakes are small, and Square Enix mirrors the magic brilliantly. As the world turns, more people are coming around to a noble truth; Metroid was always better in 2-D than 3-D.

But the masses have spoken: Give us Samus Aran in an oozing, purple corridor, where she can shrink down into a ball and snake through a wormy crevice. As always, Ms. Aran is marooned on a carnivorous planet and fending off translucent, brain-sucking parasites. The game is called Dread for a reason. Tim Schafer has been trying to make a sequel to Psychonauts for 15 years, and he finally pulled it off in Psychonauts has consistently managed to layer some fun, think-y questions about the nature of consciousness over its simple mechanics, and that bears plenty of fruit in the sequel.

Explore the psychic landscapes and face off against the physical manifestations of panic attacks and schizophrenia! If only it were that easy in real life. That was a raw deal. These 3-D shooter-cum-platformers have been great since the PS2 days, but they never quite crossed the Rubicon enough to be considered in the Hall of Fame conversation.

But all of those biases are shattered with Rift Apart , which is the single best-looking product available on new hardware. Insomniac leverages the PS5 to pump out a gorgeous, cyberpunk cityscape: The streets refract and reflect the piercing neon lights; loose cargo floats lazily in a deep, warm sea of stars; and big rubbery aliens — each of them with more personality than some main characters — mill about in the margins like the New Hope cantina scene.

I can only hope this spurs on a renaissance for every other earlys Playstation mascot. The great, venerable RPG shop suffered through a disaster in Anthem — a Destiny -ish ripoff that was unceremoniously killed off by EA earlier this year after attracting tepid review scores and a nonexistent player base.

Legendary Edition , then, is a mea culpa. The original Mass Effect trilogy is restored and preserved in a single package, allowing pilgrims to relive the Shepard arc from start to finish.

It feels like a homecoming. This is a vast sci-fi epic that — like the best space stories — thrives in its quietest, personal moments. Standing on the deck, suspended in the void, chopping it up about life, love, and death with one of your buddies. No game has ever captured that same serenity.

After years in the wilderness, with the series increasingly resembling a garden-variety shooter with a handful of jump scares , the studio discovered a newfound appreciation for its base instincts. Resident Evil Village , like the previous entry, is a straight-up survival horror game. Ethan Winters possesses limited ammo, limited healing abilities, and limited brain cells as he treks through a haunted Eastern European mausoleum.

Capcom exchanges its traditional zombies for a whole gamut of classic Victorian evils — vampires and werewolves abound — as it once again discovers that gameplay sublimity can be found on a much smaller scale.

People Can Fly, the studio behind Outriders , previously worked on the Gears of War franchise when it was owned by the megapublisher Epic Games. You can see those fingerprints all over its first new IP since regaining independence in Outriders is a third-person cover-based shooter, which will likely sit well with any veterans of E-Day out there.

But People Can Fly also borrows liberally from Destiny, Warframe, The Division, and practically every other prominent shooter that shot up the charts over the previous five years.

You will earn a gradient of powerful loot to augment your abilities and soak down bosses who possess a ludicrous amount of hit points.

That may sound fairly staid, but all these elements come together nicely. People Can Fly already has one of the best shooter pedigrees in the industry, and as it continues to accoutre its most ambitious game yet with expansions and updates, Outriders has a real chance to become a phenomenon. A marriage is on the brink somewhere in suburbia, and a heartbroken daughter cracks open a magical book that shrinks the battling couple down to Polly Pocket size for some bewitched relationship counseling.

The would-be divorced pair is tasked with navigating a series of esoteric, inventive, and often hilarious platforming puzzles as they slowly rediscover the original spark that brought them together. Like the other games from lead designer Josef Fares, It Takes Two is simultaneously symbiotic and asymmetrical. In one level, a player will be loading their partner into a cannon so they can bash their head against a target.

Later on, you may both be grasping the same oversize pencil, attempting to balance the graphite evenly through a cereal-box-style connect-the-dots puzzle.

There are two ways to play a Monster Hunter game. Other players tend to run into battle completely blind with a sword and a shield, throwing hands with a skyscraper-size dragon using guile and guts alone. Your frontiersman now has the ability to saddle up on the back of a tamed beast, considerably reducing the downtime between fights.

In that sense, Rise is a thrilling success. Urban-planning games are finicky. The answer, invariably, is very annoyed. Even though the rumored game was once in development at Rockstar, it has since fallen by the wayside in favor of the ever-popular "Grand Theft Auto" series. In late , fans got excited again when rumors pointed to the "Bully" sequel fans had been waiting for, but so far nothing has materialized from the hearsay.

However, a few former Rockstar devs have stepped out to discuss the original attempt to create a follow-up to "Bully" — and to explain why it never quite got off the ground. Today, it's the turn of reviewer Brett Posner-Ferdman. Persona 5 Strikers. The Phantom Thieves of Hearts are back, and better than ever! Going into , Like Comment Share. Fortnite Players Divided Over Newly Leaked Weapon for "Casuals" Fortnite Chapter 3 players are divided over a newly leaked weapon that some players claim is designed for "casuals.

That said, it looks like the next addition to the game, a pistol that deals out massive damage to builds, has leaked early, courtesy of HypeX, a prominent Fortnite dataminer and leaker who found evidence of the gun and accompanying information while digging through the files of a recent update. How did the Cyberpunk dumpster fire become one of 's most played games? In context: Cyberpunk 's launch was nothing short of disastrous, even by CD Projekt Red's own admission.

It was plagued by long delays, totally overhyped, and then virtually unplayable on last-gen consoles. The PC version was playable, but buggy and the current-gen ports were a complete no-show. Fans anxious for the game were vocally disappointed. See our Destiny 2 Beyond Light review. Built from the foundation of an iconic Skyrim mod, The Forgotten City is one of the best detective games in years.

Set inside a Roman metropolis and revolving around the Golden Rule, The Forgotten City is a memorable experience filled with stellar writing, great acting, and a beautiful landscape to explore. The people of the city live under the Golden Rule, which means that if anyone sins, everyone is punished. This premise leads to some understandable moral quandaries as well as a bevy of contradictions as to what constitutes a violation.

The Forgotten City also has a time loop mechanic that rewinds time if sins are committed. With some truly great narrative puzzles squeezed within the exquisite dialogue and multiple endings to uncover, The Forgotten City keeps you constantly guessing and makes you feel smart when you get on the right track and start to figure out what's going on. See our The Forgotten City review. Playground Games is, hands down, the most consistent studio within the Xbox family, and the UK-based developer has been doing it for a decade without getting the recognition it deserves.

Forza Horizon 5 just happens to be the best game it's ever made, taking drivers to a gorgeous and environmentally diverse Mexico filled with races to complete, challenges to try out, and hundreds of cars to earn. What makes Forza Horizon 5 so wonderful is that it fully embraces the the core pillar of every great open-world game: choice.

Do succeed, you can essentially play the game however you want, whether that's taking part in cross-country marathons or just jumping all the danger signs you can find. There's wrong way to play, unless it's doing something you don't find fun, in which case there are probably 15 things within a mile of your location that you will find fun.

See our Forza Horizon 5 review. Gears Tactics released on consoles alongside the launch of the Xbox Series X, so it's unsurprising that it runs best on the new hardware. The turn-based strategy spin-off runs in 4K at 60fps on Series X, which makes the action on screen crisper and clearer. Gears Tactics features fast-paced tactical gameplay.

While it's definitely a departure from the mainline franchise, Gears Tactics still boasts many of the same design features and systems fans have come to expect. The lengthy campaign is filled with well-designed maps, and the overarching progression system and deep character customization make the experience all the more enriching.

Gears Tactics translates extremely well to Xbox Series X, and it's an approachable and exciting experience for newcomers in the tactical genre. Xbox Game Pass subscribers can play Gears Tactics at no extra cost. See our Gears Tactics review. Hades finally released on Xbox in August, and the beloved roguelike is available to play for free for Game Pass subscribers.

Unlike many roguelikes, Hades uses its structure to its narrative advantage. This starts with the protagonist Zagreus, who happens to be the god of rebirth. Played from an isometric perspective, Hades' loop sees you running through procedurally generated rooms filled with increasingly challenging enemies. The fast-paced action gameplay is an absolute joy, and it has some serious legs thanks to a plethora of different builds, including wildly different weapon play styles and abilities.

Much of the storytelling is sandwiched between runs when you converse with other Greek gods and prepare for your next attempt to escape the underworld. Combining brilliant combat with top-notch writing, Hades is a must-play game even if you typically don't care for roguelikes.

See our Hades review. The best Halo game in over a decade, Halo Infinite finally sees Industries fully grasping what made the original games so special: a sense of discovery in the campaign and a simple-but-brilliant take on competitive multiplayer. Set almost entirely on one Halo ring rather than the many different planets we saw in Halo 5, the story also focuses entirely on Master Chief, giving us more insight into how the character has changed since he first battled the Covenant.

The biggest reason it works, however, is that the switch to an "open world" didn't go overboard, as the world size--paired with the new Grapple Shot--isn't daunting to explore, and campaign missions maintain a more linear and story-focused design. And what makes multiplayer the best it's been since Bungie's exit? It just feels good, emphasizing well-placed shots and learning the maps instead of extraneous systems that felt like they were chasing trends.

See our Halo Infinite review. Given the prowess of IO Interactive's first two entries in the World of Assaassination trilogy, it's not really a surprise that Hitman 3 is an exceedingly good conclusion to Agent 47's latest arc. That said, Hitman 3 expands on the foundation of its predecessors in some surprising ways. While there aren't many maps at this time, Hitman 3 makes tremendous use of each one, giving players even more freedom to approach objectives as they see fit.

New spins on the loop, including a delightful murder mystery level, make Hitman 3 feel fresh and inventive, too. In addition to tremendous level design and choice-driven gameplay, Hitman 3 does a better job of focusing on its story and the many lively NPCs that inhabit the sandbox-style levels.

This is Hitman at its finest, though you should definitely play the entirety of the World of Assassination trilogy. You can also import the levels from Hitman and Hitman 2 and play them in one place with enhancements. See our Hitman 3 review. One of the most creative platforming games over the last several years--and one that manages to do that while requiring cooperative play--It Takes Two improves on Hazelight's previous game, A Way Out, in virtually every way.

The whimsical gameplay is combined with a surprisingly dark story involving a couple divorcing, all while their daughter aims to keep them together through the power of imagination. The many gameplay mechanics could have felt overwhelming, but they're polished to a bright sheen that makes discovering the next one a joy.

And with a buddy pass system included, only one of the people playing needs to own the game. See our It Takes Two review. Available for the first time ever on Xbox systems, MLB The Show 21 is not a drastic change from the series' past games, even with the novelty of playing a Sony-developed game using an Xbox controller. However, it improves the formula in a few very important ways, including a revamped Road to the Show mode that allows you to play as a two-way player who excels at hitting and pitching--if you want.

It looks gorgeous on the Xbox Series X, especially with HDR enabled, and cross-play support means your friends who stayed behind on PlayStation can still toss hanging curveballs to you online. It's also available on Xbox Game Pass for free, so you don't need to buy it if you have a subscription. Already one of the best fighting games in recent memory, Mortal Kombat 11 is even more impressive on the powerful Xbox Series X hardware.

Featuring 4K resolution and new visual flourishes, the gruesome action on screen is rendered in a ridiculous amount of detail. The base game already had an ample amount of content, including multiple single-player modes and competitive multiplayer. The Ultimate edition tosses in the Aftermath story expansion and Kombat packs including 12 additional fighters.

Mortal Kombat 11 is one of those rare fighting games that balances solo and multiplayer content well, and it's also the type of fighter that's appealing to both casual players and die-hard fans alike. See our Mortal Kombat 11 review. No Man's Sky, much like Sea of Thieves, has improved mightily since launch. Over the course of four-plus years, developer Hello Games has released steady and substantial updates that have brought the space exploration game closer to its original, ambitious vision.

No Man's Sky now features far more tangible activities, including base-building and even racing vehicles across tracks in multiplayer. No Man's Sky's next-gen update allows the game to run in 4K at 60fps.