Before you accept a mission inDeep Rock Galactic, the game tells you how long it will take. This has nothing to do with the vague estimated-campaign-length figure on a store page. On the mission select terminal there is a row of little icons, one to three, for length, and another row for complexity, and they mean what they say. A one-dot mission is a quarter of an hour. A three-dot is closer to half. You can look at the wall, look at the clock, and make an informed decision about whether you have time for this before the washing machine finishes.

I have been trying for years to explain why that small piece of interface design makes me trust Ghost Ship Games more than any studio operating a seasonal calendar, and the honest answer is that everything else about the game follows from it.

The four verbs

Ghost Ship, a Copenhagen studio, putDeep Rock Galactic into early access in February 2018 and shipped 1.0 in May 2020. The premise is that you are one of four space dwarves employed by an aggressively cheerful mining corporation to go into procedurally generated caves on an alien planet, extract something, and get out before the bugs finish eating you.

The design decision that makes it work is that each of the four classes owns a way of moving through the world, rather than owning a role in a combat triangle. The Driller carries a pair of drills that eat tunnels through solid rock, and he is the reason a vertical shaft becomes a ramp. The Engineer plants platforms out of a gun and strings ziplines, and he is the reason an unreachable mineral vein is now a floor. The Gunner fires ziplines across chasms and drops a bubble shield that pauses the world for six seconds. The Scout has a grappling hook and a flare gun, and he is the reason anyone can see anything at all.

Every cave is fully destructible. Put those two facts next to each other and the whole thing clicks: the map is a problem, and each of you holds a different tool for deforming the problem. When a mission goes well it is because four people independently reshaped the same rock into something navigable without ever discussing it. When it goes badly it is because the Driller has tunnelled somewhere private, the Scout is two hundred metres up a wall, and the Gunner and the Engineer are having a nice quiet time being eaten.

The real ancestor of this is not the co-op shooter lineage at all. It isBoulder Dash — Peter Liepa and Chris Gray’s 1984 C64 game, one of the first things I ever loaded off tape that made me think of terrain as a material rather than a backdrop.Boulder Dash understood that digging is a verb with consequences, that the tunnel you cut is a tunnel that exists afterwards, and that the tension in a mining game comes from the geometry you yourself created.Lemmings took the same idea onto the Amiga seven years later and made it about other people’s stupidity.Deep Rock Galactic is the version where the terrain you ruined is a shared social space, and the stupidity is yours.

Why the loop holds

The mission structure is where the craft is. A Mining Expedition asks for a quota of Morkite; Point Extraction wants Aquarq crystals hauled to a central pad; Salvage has you defending stationary uplinks on a timer; Escort Duty walks a drilling machine called Doretta through the cave and dares you to keep her alive. They are all, structurally, the same shape — go in, do a task under pressure, call the drop pod, run for it — and yet they do not blur, because the task changes what the cavemeans.

In a Mining Expedition the cave is a larder and you wander it greedily. In Salvage the cave is a defensive perimeter you have five minutes to understand. In Escort Duty the cave is a corridor being carved in front of you by something that does not care about your opinion. Same rocks, same bugs, same four dwarves. Completely different reading of the space. That is the trick that lets a game with a handful of mission types stay legible across hundreds of hours, and it is a far more efficient use of design effort than shipping thirty modes.

Then there is the extraction. The drop pod lands, a timer starts, and now every mineral in your pack is a bet against your ability to sprint. This is the single best-tuned moment in the game and it is essentially free: it costs Ghost Ship nothing to add a countdown, and it converts the last ninety seconds of every mission into a small farce. Somebody always dies. Somebody always has to be carried. The dwarf who mined the most is invariably the one who is furthest away when the door opens.

Nitra is the other quiet masterpiece. It is the mineral that buys resupply pods, at eighty per pod, and it is scattered like everything else. Which means your ammunition economy is amining problem. Run dry and the answer is to go find some rock. No shop, no loadout screen mid-mission, no crate. The resource that keeps you shooting is the resource you are already there to dig, and the two systems fuse instead of sitting next to each other.

The part everyone else should copy

Deep Rock Galactic runs seasons. Season 01 arrived in late 2021 and they have kept coming. Here is what a season is: free, for everyone, with a progression track you can work through by playing normally. Here is what happens when it ends: the cosmetics and gear from that season roll into the general loot pool, permanently available to anyone who shows up afterwards.

Read that again, because the industry standard is the exact inverse. Nothing expires. Nothing is held hostage behind a date you missed. There is no paid tier of the pass. The studio sells optional cosmetic packs, and that is the whole monetisation. A player who buys the game in 2026 can obtain everything a 2021 player has, by playing.

This is a coherent theory of what a co-op game is for, and charity has nothing to do with it. Ghost Ship appears to have concluded that the product is the fifteen minutes in the cave, and that anything which makes those fifteen minutes feel like an obligation is damaging the product. The Deep Dives, the weekly three-stage runs on a shared seed, are the one concession to a calendar, and even those are a treat rather than a tax: a special hard thing that expires, sitting on top of a permanent library that does not.

The social furniture matters here too, and it is easy to be sniffy about. The salutes. The “Rock and Stone!” shout mapped to a button. The Abyss Bar on the space rig where you can drink beers that apply modifiers and dance badly at a jukebox. Every one of those is a small mechanism for turning four strangers into a crew before the mission starts, and they work on a population of anonymous players in a way that no amount of voice-chat etiquette guidance ever has. It is the most consistently pleasant public lobby in the genre, and that is a design achievement; the demographics did not manage it on their own.

Where it fights itself

The gear progression is slow in a way the rest of the game is not. Overclocks — the build-defining weapon modifiers — come from Deep Dives and machine events and a forge with a randomised cost, and the randomisation means the specific overclock you want may simply decline to appear for weeks. A game this generous with its content is oddly stingy about its builds.

And Hazard 5 is where the design’s honesty runs out slightly. The lower hazards are a physics comedy; Hazard 5 is a game about knowing the spawn logic, and the gap between them is a small cliff wearing the costume of a ramp. The custom difficulty settings added later paper over this, and they are the right answer, but they arrived years after the players who bounced off had already gone.

The verdict is thatDeep Rock Galactic is the best-structured co-op game of its generation, and the structure is the argument. It is on PC, PlayStation and Xbox, has been on Game Pass, and asks for a fifteen-minute commitment and nothing else. Play it with three people you like. Play it with three strangers; that works too, which is the point.

If you want to see the same studio’s ideas run through a different mill,Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor takes this world and pours it into the auto-shooter shape I wrote about inthe Vampire Survivors review, and it is a much better licensed spin-off than it had any need to be. For the other end of co-op — the one that punishes dawdling instead of scheduling around your evening —Risk of Rain 2 is the counter-argument.

Spoilers below

A game with no plot has little to spoil, though it has a shape worth knowing about.

The season storylines — the Rival Corporation’s robots, the caretaker sequence, the various things Mission Control declines to explain — are told almost entirely through voice lines, terminal barks and the occasional new enemy that turns up without introduction. This is Ghost Ship’s most underrated decision. The narrative is ambient, skippable, and never once stops a mission to deliver itself. You learn that a rival company has been mining the same rock because you found their machinery in your cave, got shot by it, and had to deal with that instead of watching it.

Compare that to what a live-service game usually does with story, which is to interrupt your fifteen minutes with a cutscene about a war you did not enlist in. Ghost Ship’s version respects the same rule as the mission timer: your evening is yours, the cave is the game, and anything the studio wants to tell you has to fit around the digging.

And then there is Karl. Nobody will tell you who Karl was. The dwarves toast him, blame him, invoke him. The joke has run for years and the studio has never explained it, which is exactly the right call — Karl is a folk practice, and folk practice dies the moment somebody writes the lore page.

There is a version of this review that is four words long and reads “it costs four quid”. Poncle’sVampire Survivors has been on Steam since December 2021, went 1.0 in October 2022, and has spent the years since being the cheapest thing on anyone’s account that they have still somehow put a hundred hours into. It won the BAFTA for Best Game in 2023, which remains the funniest sentence in recent awards history — a browser game built in Phaser by one bloke in Italy, sat in the same category as budgets with a comma in them.

The joke has been told. What has not been examined nearly enough is the actual engineering. BecauseVampire Survivors is one of the cleanest pieces of subtractive design I have seen since the sixteen-bit years, and the thing it subtracted is the thing every other game in its lineage assumed was load-bearing.

The removal

You move. That is the input. The left stick, or WASD, and nothing else. Your weapons fire on their own timers, in their own patterns, forever, whether you are paying attention or not. Monsters come in from the edges in tides. Every kill drops an experience gem; every few gems is a level; every level throws up a small menu of weapons and passive items and asks you to pick one. Thirty minutes on the clock, and at thirty minutes Death arrives and takes the run off you regardless of what you have built.

Strip a twin-stick shooter of the aiming and you would expect to be left with nothing. Instead you are left withpositioning, and it turns out positioning was carrying the whole genre the entire time. The direct ancestor here is well documented — Galante has been open that he took the shape fromMagic Survival, a Korean mobile game from 2021 — but the deeper root is the arcade lineage that runs throughRobotron: 2084, where the second stick was really just a way of expressing which pile of enemies you had decided to be nearest to.Vampire Survivors noticed that the interesting decision in that genre was always the standing — the shooting was bookkeeping — and had the nerve to delete everything else.

What this does to the moment-to-moment is peculiar and specific. You stop reading the screen as targets and start reading it as terrain. A whip that fires horizontally means you want enemies on your flanks; a King Bible orbiting your body means you want to be inside the crowd rather than backing away from it; a Garlic aura means the correct play is to walkinto the thing that is killing you. Your build silently rewrites what “safe” means, and half the skill of a run is noticing that the geometry of safety changed two levels ago and you are still moving like the old build.

The economy underneath

The level-up menu is where the design does its real work, and it is worth being precise about why it lands, because “you get a choice of upgrades” describes a hundred games that feel like nothing.

You have six weapon slots and six passive slots. Weapons cap at level eight. A capped weapon plus the correct passive item unlocks anevolution, which arrives only from a chest dropped by a boss after the ten-minute mark. That is three separate resources — slots, levels, time — all converging on a single delivery window, and the effect is a run that has a genuine dramatic structure rather than a difficulty slope. Minutes zero to ten are you deciding what the run is about. Ten to twenty are the evolutions cashing in and the screen turning to soup. Twenty to thirty are you finding out whether the soup is thick enough to survive what is coming.

The screen-turning-to-soup is the part people describe as the game playing itself, and it is where the criticism usually stops. I would argue the opposite: the soup is thereward, and it is a reward the design has to earn by making the first ten minutes genuinely precarious. EarlyVampire Survivors, before your first evolution, is a horrible tense scrabble in which one bat can end you and the gems are always eight steps too far away. The power fantasy at minute twenty-two is only legible because you remember being nearly killed by a bat at minute two. Take away the fragile opening and the whole thing collapses into a screensaver, which is precisely what happens in the dozens of imitators that let you start strong.

Galante’s professional background before this — years designing for the gambling industry — is a matter of public record and he has talked about it openly, and you can see the fingerprints without needing to be rude about it. The gem-collection radius, the near-miss, the drip of small rewards between the big ones: this is somebody who knows exactly which frequency the reward loop wants to run at. The difference is that a slot machine’s schedule exists to extract, and this one exists to keep a decision interesting. Same tooling, aimed somewhere better.

Where it fights itself

The meta-progression is the weak joint. Gold from runs buys permanent PowerUps — more might, more speed, more luck, more revives — and it does the standard roguelite thing of making early runs artificially bad so that later runs can feel earned. It works, in the sense that it kept me coming back. It also means that a substantial chunk of your first several hours is spent losing to a wall that exists because a spreadsheet says you have not paid yet.Hades, which I have written abouthere, got away with this by attaching a story beat to every failed run;Vampire Survivors attaches a number.

The Arcana system, added at 1.0, is the more interesting late addition and the more uneven one. Arcana cards are run-wide rule changes — one makes your first weapon fire on a timer independent of cooldown, another converts recovery into damage — and the good ones are genuinely build-defining in the wayBalatro’s jokers are, a comparison I have leaned on before inthat review. The problem is that a few of them are so much better than the rest that the “choice” of two Arcana at the start of a run is frequently no choice at all. When your deck contains a card that trivialises the ceiling, the ceiling stops being a place you visit.

And the content has sprawled. Poncle has kept adding — Legacy of the Moonspell in late 2022, Tides of the Foscari in 2023, anAmong Us crossover, aContra one, and eventually the official Konami-licensedOde to Castlevania in 2024, which retroactively legitimised an aesthetic the game had been cheerfully gesturing at since the itch.io days. Each pack is generous and cheap. Collectively they have turned a game whose original virtue was that you could understand all of it into one with a collection screen you scroll. The free Adventures mode was an honest attempt to re-impose a shape on that pile, and it half works.

What it is actually for

Here is the read.Vampire Survivors is a game about the pleasure of a system you built becoming legible to you all at once. The reason it survives its own tedium — and there is tedium; minutes twenty-two to thirty of a strong run are frequently just holding a direction — is that the legibility arrives as asensation rather than as information. You do not read a stat sheet and conclude the build worked. You watch the screen fill with your own consequences.

That is a real, specific thing that games can do and other media cannot, and it is why the hundred clones that copied the auto-attack and the XP gems mostly feel hollow. They copied the loop. The loop was never the point. The point was the ten-minute window of genuine fear that makes the twentieth minute mean something, and fear is expensive to design and free to leave out.

Play it on whatever you have — it is on PC, Xbox and Game Pass, Switch, PlayStation, and free on mobile with ads, and it runs on hardware that would struggle to open a browser tab. Buy the base game, ignore the DLC until the base game bores you, and give it the first hour on the understanding that the first hour is meant to be a bit miserable.

If it hooks you, go toRisk of Rain 2 next, which does something structurally related with a clock that gets angrier the longer you dawdle, and which asks for rather more of your hands.

Spoilers below

The unlock tree is the real second game, and it is where the design shows most personality.

Moongolow is the trick everyone remembers: a stage that runs a fixed fourteen minutes and then ends in a cataclysm, dropping you somewhere considerably less pleasant, and it is the only moment inVampire Survivors that has anything you could call a set piece. It works because the game has spent hours teaching you that stages are inert arenas, and then one of them turns out to have a plot.

Green Acres and The Bone Zone are jokes — endless, arbitrary, essentially test rooms left in with the lights on — and their presence tells you something honest about the project’s origins. This was a browser toy that never fully stopped being one, and Poncle has declined to sand off the parts that give it away. The secret characters unlocked by typing nonsense into the main menu are the same instinct: a game that remembers cheat codes were once a folk practice rather than a store page.

The Randomazzo, the Yellow Sign, the escalating chain of relics that each unlock the ability to find the next thing — this is the structure that keeps people at four hundred hours, and it is essentially an ARG bolted to a screensaver. Whether that is genius or a cheerful mess depends entirely on how you feel about a game that hides its best ideas behind its worst ones. I lean towards genius, on the grounds that nothing else that came out in 2022 was this confident about what it could afford to leave out.

Roguelikes have always had a story problem, and it is a structural one. The genre runs on repetition — you die, you start again, the numbers reshuffle — and narrative runs on progression. Put the two in the same box and the story becomes something the player skips. Every roguelike before 2020 solved this by having almost no story, or by putting it in item descriptions and letting the community assemble it on a wiki.

Hades solved it by making the repetition the subject.

Supergiant Games put it into early access on the Epic Games Store in December 2018, moved it to Steam a year later, and shipped 1.0 on 17 September 2020 for PC and Switch, with PlayStation and Xbox versions following in August 2021. It won a BAFTA for Best Game and, in 2021, the Hugo Award in a one-off Best Video Game category — the first game to get one, voted on by a science-fiction readership that does not hand those out for combat feel. Five years and a sequel later, the thing it worked out about narrative repetition is still the most important design idea of its generation, and it is still barely copied, because copying it is enormously expensive.

Death is a commute

Zagreus is the son of Hades. He is trying to leave the Underworld. When he dies, he goes into the River Styx and surfaces in a pool in the House of Hades, which is his father’s office, and his father looks up from his paperwork and says something about it.

That is the entire trick, and everything else follows from it. Once dying returns you to aplace where people live, the run structure stops being a loop and becomes a commute. You leave home, you fail, you come home, and everyone at home has an opinion about your failure. Achilles is by the door. Nyx is in the hall. Cerberus wants attention. Dusa is dusting the chandelier and worrying. Hypnos — who is asleep at the reception desk and reads out your cause of death like a receptionist reading a delivery note — is the joke that makes the whole thing work, because he turns each death into an event the fiction acknowledges.

CompareRogue Legacy (Cellar Door Games, 2013), the closest ancestor, which made death diegetic first: your heir inherits the estate and the traits, and the castle persists. That is the right idea, executed as a frame.Hades runs the idea through the writing, and the writing is the part nobody wants to pay for.

The dialogue queue is the actual engine

Here is the machinery, and it is worth understanding because it is the whole answer.

Creative director Greg Kasavin wrote north of twenty thousand lines of dialogue forHades, all of it voiced, most of it by a small cast with Logan Cunningham carrying an implausible share of it. Plenty of RPGs have more words than that, so the volume is only half of it. The innovation is the priority system underneath.

Every character has a large pool of possible lines, each tagged with conditions: what boons you carried, who you last spoke to, which boss killed you, how many runs you have made, what you gave whom, what you have already been told. When you walk up to Achilles, the game queues the most contextually specific line that has not yet fired, and burns it. Say the wrong thing at the wrong time and the game notices; die to your father twice in a row and he has a fresh remark about it.

The player-facing consequence is thatHades almost never repeats itself for the first forty or fifty runs, and by the time it starts to, you are deep enough that the story has moved. The illusion is that the House is reacting to you. The reality is a very large deck being dealt in an intelligent order, and it holds because Supergiant did the unglamorous work of writing enough cards.

That is why nobody has copied it. The mechanic is cheap. The content pipeline feeding it is not.

The run itself

None of this would matter if the combat were poor, and it is excellent for a reason that has nothing to do with the writing: the boon system creates a build, and the build is a conversation with chance.

Six weapons, each with aspects that alter them substantially. Boons from the Olympians — Zeus chains lightning, Poseidon knocks back, Aphrodite weakens, Ares does damage over time, Artemis crits, Dionysus poisons — and boons that combine into Duo effects when the right two gods have already blessed you. The Mirror of Night spends darkness on permanent upgrades. Keepsakes weight the pool towards a god you want. Chthonic keys, nectar, ambrosia, the Fated List of Minor Prophecies: every currency you bring home buys something.

The design pressure this creates is genuinely good. You cannot plan a build. You can only lean — take Artemis’s keepsake, hope she shows up, adapt when she doesn’t. It is the same tension I wrote about inBalatro: The Poker Roguelike That Ate a Year: the run gives you a hand and the skill is recognising what hand you have been given rather than the one you wanted.Hades is more forgiving thanDead Cells about this, because the meta-progression means a bad run still pays, and that forgiveness is deliberate — the design wants you to get home so the House can talk to you.

The accessibility work belongs in the same argument. God Mode grants 20% damage resistance and adds 2% every time you die, so a player who keeps failing keeps getting stronger until the story unlocks. Supergiant understood that the story was the reward and refused to gate it behind execution. The Pact of Punishment runs the other way for players who want the difficulty back, in increments they choose.

What it owes

The Amiga I got in 1987 had a port ofRogue on it — Epyx published one in 1986 — and the thing aboutRogue is that it had no story at all and did not need one, because the dungeon generated the anecdote. You told the story afterwards, in a corridor at school. That is the genre’s founding compromise: the game supplies systems and the player supplies meaning.

Every roguelike since has honoured that compromise.Spelunky (2008),The Binding of Isaac (2011),FTL (2012) — all of them make you the author. What Supergiant did was ask whether a roguelike could supply the meaning itself without losing the generative anecdote, and the answer turned out to be yes, at a cost most studios cannot bear. Supergiant had also solved half of it already: the reactive narrator inBastion (2011) was the same technology in an earlier and cruder form, a system watching what you did and commenting on it.Hades is that prototype, nine years of iteration later, pointed at the exact structural problem it was built to solve.

The verdict

Hades is the rare game where the literary ambition and the mechanical design are the same object. Take the writing out and you have a very good isometric action roguelike with a strong art direction from Jen Zee and one of Darren Korb’s best scores. Take the combat out and you have a soap opera about a dysfunctional family of gods. Together they produce something neither half could: a story that getsbetter the more you fail at the game, which no other medium can do at all.

Its limits are honest ones. The Underworld’s four biomes are fixed in order — Tartarus, Asphodel, Elysium, the Temple of Styx — so the variation lives in the boons and the room layouts, and after enough runs the geography is a hallway you walk fast. The bosses are few, and Theseus and Asterius carry more than their share. The moment-to-moment combat lacks the mechanical strangeness of the best of its peers.

It is on everything — PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Switch — it runs on a toaster, and it is a complete game that never asked for a season pass.Hades II followed the same early-access route and only widens the argument: Supergiant found a design position nobody else can afford, and they are still the only ones standing on it.

What to play next:Dead Cells: The Roguevania Blueprint for the harsher, more mechanically dense version of the same loop, andRisk of Rain 2: The Difficulty Curve as a Clock for a roguelike that solves pacing with time pressure instead of dialogue.

Spoilers below

The ending is the part people argue about, and the argument is a good one.

Zagreus escapes, reaches the surface, finds Persephone, and then dissolves — because he cannot survive outside the Underworld, and the game makes you do this repeatedly. Ten times, in fact, before the story concludes. Supergiant took the one thing a roguelike player wants (the winning run) and made it a chore you must grind, which sounds like a design failure and is instead the sharpest joke in the game: reaching Persephone is the beginning of the story, and the reunion has to be earned through the same repetition everything else was.

The epilogue lands the thesis. Persephone comes home, the family is assembled, and the whole thing closes on a family reconciling — Hades and Zagreus finally speaking plainly, Nyx’s role revealed, Demeter thawing. It is a domestic ending to a myth about escape, and the reason it works is that you have spent sixty hours in that hallway hearing these people slowly change their minds about each other, one death at a time.

Hypnos, who has been reading out your causes of death for the entire game with no idea what is going on, gets the last laugh. Correctly.

The first hour ofControl is a woman walking into an office. There is a janitor with a Finnish accent, a reception desk, a directory board, and a pyramid of concrete overhead that goes up further than the building’s exterior allows. Remedy Entertainment released it on 27 August 2019 — PC via the Epic Games Store for its first year, plus PS4 and Xbox One — under director Mikael Kasurinen with Sam Lake writing alongside Anna Megill and Brooke Maggs, and published by 505 Games. Six years on it is the studio’s most complete piece of world-building, and the reason is architectural rather than narrative.

The Oldest House is the best level in any game of its decade, and it is a level about bureaucracy.

The building is the design document

Brutalism is a real aesthetic argument: the structure is the ornament, the concrete is left showing, the building declares its own systems. Remedy took that literally. The Federal Bureau of Control occupies a mid-century concrete government block, all board-marked walls, terrazzo floors, wood panelling, green-shaded lamps and an internal mail system, and then the building starts behaving like an Object of Power. Corridors reconfigure. A stairwell delivers you somewhere geometry says it should not. The Ashtray Maze rearranges itself faster than you can walk it.

This is a very specific horror, and it is the reason the game sticks. Haunted mansions are exhausted; a hauntedadministrative facility is not. The dread inControl comes from paperwork — a redacted case file describing a rubber duck that killed six people, a research memo written in the flat voice of a civil servant who has stopped being surprised. The building’s uncanniness is legible only because everything around it is so aggressively ordinary. You believe the impossible pyramid because the noticeboard next to it has a poster about workplace ergonomics.

The lineage is legible and Remedy has never hidden it: the SCP Foundation’s clinical containment prose, Mark Z. Danielewski’sHouse of Leaves for the building that is larger inside, Jeff VanderMeer’sAnnihilation for the New Weird tone,Twin Peaks for the FMV inserts and the Finnish rock band. What Remedy added is the thing prose cannot do: youwalk it. A house that is bigger on the inside is a conceit on the page and a spatial fact in an engine.

Why the combat holds

The Service Weapon is the second-best idea in the game. It is a single pistol that reconfigures into five forms — Grip, Shatter, Spin, Pierce, Charge — with no ammunition, only a recharge, so the weapon is a tool you select rather than a resource you manage. Beside it sits Launch: telekinesis, on a cooldown, which tears a chunk of the building loose and throws it at somebody.

The reason this feels good is Northlight, Remedy’s engine, and specifically the destruction. The Oldest House is built out of debris waiting to happen. Every desk, chair, filing cabinet, monitor, partition wall and potted plant is a projectile, and a serious fight in the Bureau’s open-plan offices ends with the room reduced to particulate. The combat loop therefore runs: shoot to build energy, Launch to spend it, watch the office disassemble. Levitate, added later in the ability tree, lifts the whole thing into three dimensions and turns the atria into arenas with a Z-axis.

The real ancestor here sits outside Remedy’s own catalogue. It isPsi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy (Midway, 2004), which built a whole third-person shooter around telekinesis and physics objects and which nobody bought, alongsideHalf-Life 2’s gravity gun (2004), which taught a generation that a physics object in your hands is more interesting than a bullet. Both games arrived when physics middleware was new enough to be the selling point, and both understood the same thing: the pleasure of throwing a filing cabinet is that the cabinet was furniture a second ago.Control is the first game to give that idea a budget, an art director and a building worth destroying.

Where it fights itself: the enemy variety is thin. The Hiss are men in hard hats and body armour, floating, chanting, and by hour twelve you have seen the roster. The encounters escalate through numbers and health pools, which is the least interesting axis available to a game with this much physics under it.

The ability tree compounds it. Jesse’s powers arrive on a schedule tied to Objects of Power, and each is excellent on arrival, yet the game rarely builds an encounter that demands two of them together. Seize — turning an enemy to your side — is the clearest waste: a mechanic with real tactical depth, deployed against enemies who die too quickly for the investment to matter. Remedy built a sandbox and then mostly asked you to clear rooms in it.

The map is a genuine failure

I take the map seriously becauseControl takes navigation seriously and then sabotages it.

The Oldest House is a Metroidvania — gated sectors, clearance levels, ability locks, backtracking — and it ships with a map that does not rotate, does not sensibly express vertical relationships, and is close to unreadable in the multi-level sectors it most needs to explain. In a game whose entire subject is a building that will not hold still, being lost is thematically perfect and practically miserable. CompareMetroid Dread, where the map is the interface the whole game is played through.

The launch checkpointing was worse and Remedy fixed it. Control Points were sparse, and a boss death could send you on a long walk back through cleared rooms; the studio patched in additional checkpoints — including around the Anchor fight and the mould sequence — after the complaints landed. Base-console performance was rough at launch too, and theUltimate Edition in August 2020 brought ray tracing to PS5 and Xbox Series consoles, though existing owners on older consoles found the upgrade path handled badly enough to become its own small scandal.

The verdict

Control is a game whose ideas outrun its systems, and it is worth playing for the ideas. The Oldest House is a genuine achievement of environmental design — the rare fictional space you could navigate in your head years later — and the Bureau’s tone, that mixture of cosmic horror and departmental procedure, is Remedy’s most original register. The physics give the combat a texture nothing else quite matches, even when the enemies opposing you are dull.

What it does not have is a second act with the confidence of its first. The Hiss are a weak antagonist for a building this strange, and the mid-game settles into a rhythm of side missions that ask you to clear a room with the same three enemy types you cleared the last room with. The Ashtray Maze is the correction — a scripted, musical, twelve-minute sequence where the level design and the soundtrack take over completely — and its presence in the last quarter is a reminder of how much more the building had left in it.

The Foundation (March 2020) and AWE (August 2020) expansions are worth taking. The second folds Alan Wake into the Bureau’s case files and turns Remedy’s back catalogue into a shared universe, which they then cashed in properly withAlan Wake 2: Remedy’s Swing at the Fence. Remedy bought the fullControl rights back from 505 Games in 2023 and a sequel is in development, which is the correct outcome for a studio that finally built a world worth owning.

Play theUltimate Edition on PC or a current console. It is cheap, it is everywhere, and there is nothing else like the Oldest House.

What to play next:Alan Wake 2 for what Remedy did once it stopped apologising for being strange, andSignalis: The Survival Horror That Reads Like a Poem for bureaucratic dread on a fraction of the budget and twice the compression.

Spoilers below

The Ashtray Maze is the game’s high point and it is instructive to say why, because the sequence works by taking things away. For twelve minutesControl removes navigation entirely — the maze folds and unfolds itself, you cannot get lost because there is no choice to make — puts Poets of the Fall’s Old Gods of Asgard over the top of it, and hands you a corridor of fights to walk through while the building performs for you. Everything the game has been fumbling (pacing, legibility, the sense that the Oldest House is doing this deliberately) snaps into focus the moment the player’s agency is narrowed.

Which raises the awkward question:Control’s best sequence is the one where it behaves least likeControl.

Jesse’s internal monologue — the second voice she has been talking to since childhood, revealed as Polaris, a benign Object of Power riding along — is the structural gag that pays off the FMV inserts and Dr Darling’s increasingly unhinged research films. Trench’s suicide, delivered as the game’s opening beat and understood only later as a man refusing to become a vector for the Hiss, is the sharpest piece of writing Sam Lake has done. And Dylan, the brother, is the Bureau’s real indictment: an agency that studies children as containment risks and calls the paperwork ethics.

The ending withholds resolution deliberately — Jesse is Director, the Hiss are contained rather than defeated, the building keeps its secrets. That was a sequel hook in 2019 and it looks like patience in 2025.

Titanfall 2 came out on 28 October 2016.Battlefield 1 had arrived on 21 October.Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare landed on 4 November. Respawn’s game was released by EA into a fourteen-day gap between EA’s own military shooter and the biggest annual shooter on earth, and it was flattened. Patrick Söderlund, then running EA Studios, said publicly the following year that the timing had hurt the game and that they had misjudged it. That is the whole tragedy in one paragraph, and it is the reason the game is now shorthand for a certain kind of industry injustice.

Nine years on, the injustice framing has calcified into a meme, which does the game a disservice.Titanfall 2’s campaign survives on its own merits: it does something structurally unusual that almost nobody has copied since, and the reason nobody has copied it is that it is expensive, wasteful, and hard. The bad luck is a footnote to a design worth studying.

One mechanic per level, then bin it

The standard shooter campaign teaches you a verb in hour one and spends the next seven hours escalating it. More enemies, bigger rooms, a boss.Titanfall 2 does the opposite: each level introduces a mechanic, extracts a single good idea from it, and throws it away before you get bored.

You get a level where the terrain itself is the assembly line: a factory that builds rooms in front of you as you move through them, so the level is being constructed at the speed you traverse it. You get a level built around a time-shift device that flips you between two eras of the same facility with a button press, where the enemies, the geometry and the light all change and your momentum does not. You get a gauntlet — a speed-run training course with a leaderboard, sitting inside a campaign, teaching you your own movement by timing it.

Respawn has been open about how this came about: the team built playable prototypes first, small self-contained toys, and then designed levels around the ones that felt good. The time-shift level, “Effect and Cause”, came out of that process under designer Mohammad Alavi. The result is a campaign that reads like a compilation album, and it is short — five or six hours — precisely because a mechanic gets one level and then leaves.

This is a real design position, and it costs money. Every one of those toys is bespoke engineering for a single level, thrown away afterwards. It is why the game has no filler and also why nobody in a boardroom wants to greenlight it. A campaign built this way cannot amortise its costs across a sequel. CompareDoom Eternal: The Shooter as Puzzle, where id built one economy and spent eighteen hours proving it. Both are disciplined. Only one is repeatable.

Why the movement is the actual argument

The mechanics-per-level structure gets the headlines. The thing underneath it is better.

Pilot movement inTitanfall 2 is a wall-run, a double jump, and a slide that preserves speed, and the crucial property is that none of them are on a cooldown or a meter. Chaining them is a matter of the level agreeing to be chained. So every space in the game is authored twice — once for a player walking through it and once for a player who never touches the floor — and the design’s whole character comes from that second reading.

What this produces is a feeling almost nothing else in the genre offers: the levels are legibleas movement. You look at a room and you see a route rather than a set of cover positions. When the time-shift level asks you to jump between eras mid-wall-run, the reason it works is that both eras were built to be run through, so the switch never breaks the line you are drawing through the space.

The Titan half is the counterweight, and it is smarter than it looks. BT-7274 is slow, heavy, and armed with loadouts you swap by taking them off dead Titans, and the deliberate friction after twenty minutes of pilot movement is what makes both halves read. A game that was all wall-running would flatten into noise inside an hour. The campaign alternates the two registers relentlessly — light and fast, then heavy and considered — and the rhythm is the reason six hours never sags.

There is a design lesson here that the industry mostly ignored: the pleasure of mobility depends on periodically taking it away.

The one that got away

Titanfall 2’s time-shift level shipped two weeks beforeDishonored 2 (11 November 2016), which contains “A Crack in the Slab”, a level built on the same idea — a device that flips you between two time periods of the same building. Two studios, parallel development, no possibility of copying, both landing the trick in a fortnight of each other. It is one of the strangest coincidences in level-design history, and the fact that both are widely considered their game’s best level suggests the idea was simply sitting there waiting for hardware that could hold two versions of a space in memory at once.

The genuine ancestor of “one bespoke mechanic per chapter” is older:Half-Life (Valve, 1998), which introduced a set piece, resolved it, and moved on, and whose sequel built a physics toy and then spent a chapter on the gravity gun before dropping it. Respawn’s team came out of Infinity Ward, which came out of 2015 Inc., which madeMedal of Honor: Allied Assault — a lineage that has been building scripted, single-use spectacle since 2002.Titanfall 2 is what that tradition looks like when the spectacle is handed to the player as a system rather than played at them as a cutscene.

What went wrong, and what happened after

The release window is the famous part. The less famous part is the aftermath. Respawn’s multiplayer — free maps for everyone, no season pass carving up the population — was the most player-friendly network model any big publisher shipped that year, and it was undermined for years by sustained attacks on the servers that left matchmaking unreliable or unusable for long stretches. A community project, Northstar, eventually stood up unofficial servers so people could play. EA rolled out fixes in 2024 that restored official matchmaking. That an eight- year-old shooter needed rescuing twice, once by its players and once by its publisher, is a fair summary of how the game has been treated.

EA acquired Respawn in 2017. The studio then madeApex Legends, set in the same universe, released it in February 2019 with no announcement, and it became one of the biggest games in the world. Every wall-run and double jump inTitanfall 2 is money that eventually arrived, just wearing a different hat.

The verdict

The campaign is six hours long and has no fat on it whatsoever, and that is a genuinely rare sentence to be able to write about a AAA shooter. The mechanics are disposable by design, the movement is the best in the genre, the pacing between pilot and Titan is exact, and the whole thing is over before it can disappoint you. Its reputation as the great lost shooter is deserved on the merits and has nothing to do with the release date.

The reservations are real. The story is thin — competent, warm, thin — and the emotional weight it goes for in the last hour is doing a lot of work on very little setup. The Titan boss fights against the Apex Predators are the least interesting encounters in the game, arriving on a schedule and reading as a different, more ordinary shooter’s idea of structure. And six hours is six hours; the campaign gives you a movement system that only becomes properly expressive around hour four.

It is on PC, PlayStation and Xbox, it is old enough to be permanently cheap, and it runs on everything. The campaign alone justifies it.

What to play next:Doom Eternal: The Shooter as Puzzle for the opposite structural bet — one system, endlessly deepened — andMetroid Dread: The Series Remembers What It Is for another design that treats mobility as the thing being authored rather than the way you get to the authoring.

Spoilers below

“Effect and Cause” is the level everyone names, and it deserves it, but the better piece of design is “Into the Abyss” — the factory that assembles the level in front of you. It is the game’s thesis made physical: the space is being authored at the speed you move, and you are outrunning your own level designer.

BT’s ending works despite the setup being thin, and the reason is mechanical rather than narrative. You have spent six hours climbing into and out of BT, being caught by BT, being thrown by BT across gaps you could not cross alone. The throw is a verb you have executed dozens of times. When the last one comes, the game asks you to perform an action you have internalised, one final time, with a different meaning attached — the feeling arrives through your hands, having been rehearsed for six hours under another name. That is what games can do that film cannot, and Respawn got there through a mechanic they had been quietly teaching since level two.

The Ark and the Fold Weapon plot is disposable. Nobody remembers it. Everybody remembers the throw.

I playedDoom in 1993 on a beige tower that a friend’s older brother had talked his parents into, and what I remember is the width of it — you strafed, you circled, you emptied a shotgun into a room and the room emptied back. The game asked for nerve and spatial sense. It did not ask for a plan.

Doom Eternal asks for a plan. id Software released it on 20 March 2020 for PC, PS4, Xbox One and Stadia, with a Switch port arriving that December, and it remains the most divisive big-budget action design of its generation for one reason: game director Hugo Martin and his team took a shooter and built a puzzle game inside it. Five years on, the people who bounced off it have not come back, and the people who clicked with it have never really stopped playing. Both camps are responding to the same mechanic. They just disagree about whether a first-person shooter is allowed to have a correct answer.

The triangle

Here is the design, stated as plainly as it deserves.

Ammunition is scarce, and the reserves are small enough that you will empty a weapon during any serious fight. Your refill is the chainsaw, which regenerates one fuel pip on a timer, and one pip is enough to open a small demon and spray ammo across the floor.

Health is scarce, and the pickups are thin. Your refill is the Glory Kill — stagger a demon, punch it apart, take the health it drops.

Armour is scarce. Your refill is the Flame Belch, which sets a demon burning so that everything you subsequently land on it sheds armour shards.

Three needs, three verbs, each verb requiring you to be inside the fight rather than backing out of it. That is the whole engine, and it is whyEternal moves the way it does. The 2016 reboot introduced the Glory Kill and called the philosophy push-forward combat.Eternal takes the same idea and closes every exit. You cannot turtle, because turtling starves you. You cannot hoard, because the reserves are too small to hoard into. The only route to resources runs through the demon standing in front of you, and the game has arranged for a demon to always be standing in front of you.

Why the arena is a lock

The second layer is where the argument really lives: weapon-specific weaknesses.

The Mancubus has arm cannons that come off to a precise shot. The Revenant has shoulder launchers. The Arachnotron has a turret on its back that can be sheared away, which stops it suffering you at range. The Cacodemon will swallow a grenade fed into its open mouth and go straight into a stagger. The Carcass throws up a barrier that the Super Shotgun tears down. The Pain Elemental floats where only certain tools reach.

Every demon, then, is a lock with a named key, and an arena is a queue of locks opening at you simultaneously. The mental loop that results is genuinely strange for a shooter: the dominant activity issorting. Which threat resolves fastest, which weapon is loaded, do I have the fuel to open a fodder demon for ammo before the Mancubus commits, can I dash twice to reposition before the Revenant’s second volley lands. The pace is frantic and the thinking is turn-based. Hugo Martin has described the fantasy as being an apex predator running a chess board at 200 miles an hour, and that is an accurate description of what the pad is doing.

The result is a combat system where two competent players can look completely different. One is playingDoom Eternal. The other is playingDoom (2016) inDoom Eternal’s costume, running out of ammo every fifteen seconds, and hating every minute.

Why people hate it

The complaint is coherent, and dismissing it is lazy.Eternal removes freedom from a series whose entire cultural memory is freedom. If you want to solve a room with the rocket launcher because the rocket launcher is fun, the game will punish you for it, and the punishment arrives as an empty magazine with a Mancubus attached. The design has an opinion about how you should play and it enforces that opinion through the economy rather than through a difficulty slider. Some players experience that as being taught. Others experience it as being managed.

The Marauder is where the argument gets loudest, and it is the fairest test case. He blocks everything outside a specific range band, and he opens for exactly the window in which his eyes flash green — a window you cannot rush, cannot bait early, and cannot skip. He is a rhythm-game boss dropped into a shooter. Fight him correctly and he is the best encounter id has ever built; fight him the way you have fought everything else since 1993 and he is a wall that laughs at you. He is a purer version of whatSekiro does to people, and he provokes the same split: some players hear the game telling them the tempo, and some hear it telling them off.

The platforming is a weaker defence. The monkey bars and the jump pads exist to give the arenas breathing room, and they largely do, but they also drag a game whose best quality is momentum into stretches where the momentum is a chore. Nothing in the traversal is as interesting as the worst fight.

What it is actually descended from

The easy read is thatEternal descends fromDoom II (1994), and it does in the sense that combined-arms encounter design — an archvile behind a crowd, a revenant on a ledge — is where id first learned to make a room think. The deeper ancestor is elsewhere.

Eternal’s real lineage runs through the resource-economy roguelike. The question the game asks you every four seconds — what do I spend, what do I have left, what do I need to be holding twenty seconds from now — is the questionRisk of Rain 2 asks with its clock, which I wrote about inRisk of Rain 2: The Difficulty Curve as a Clock. It is also the question every good arena-shooter map asked in 1999, when the armour and the quad respawned on timers and the entire skill of Quake was knowing where the resources would be before they existed. id’s insight in 2020 was to move that timer off the map and onto the demons. Once the ammo is inside the enemy, spatial control and resource control become the same act, and the shooter collapses into a single verb.

For the boss-rush reading of a similar idea — encounters as locks, each with a tool — the mech that best rhymes with it is inArmored Core VI: The Boss Rush Hiding in a Mech Game.

The verdict

Doom Eternal is the most rigorously designed action game of its era, and the rigour is the reason it will never be universally liked. It is a game with a thesis, and it spends eighteen hours proving the thesis at you. When the loop locks in — chainsaw, Glory Kill, Belch, Super Shotgun into a Cacodemon’s mouth, meat hook to the next problem — nothing else in the genre produces that specific feeling of a hard system dissolving into instinct. When it does not lock in, you are standing in a car park with no bullets, and the game feels like homework someone set you.

The post-launch record backs the thesis.The Ancient Gods, Part One (October 2020) andPart Two (March 2021) tightened the screws rather than loosening them, adding encounters aimed at players who had already internalised the economy. Update 6 added Horde Mode in 2021 — pure arenas, no story, no monkey bars — which is id quietly agreeing about what the game is for. The Denuvo Anti-Cheat component added in May 2020 was pulled within days after players objected, a small episode that says more about the PC community than the game.

Play it on anything that will run it at a high frame rate; the design assumes your inputs are instant and it becomes a different, worse game when they are not. If the economy irritates you in the first two hours, it will irritate you in the last two. That is a real answer, and it is not a failure of the game.

What to play next:Risk of Rain 2 for the same resource pressure expressed as time, andSekiro: The Rhythm Game With a Sword for the other 2019–20 combat system that insists there is a correct answer and refuses to accept anything else.

Spoilers below

The campaign’s structure is the weakest thing about it, and the lore is whereEternal most conspicuously loses its nerve. The 2016 reboot understood that the Slayer worked because he was a blank — a man who threw a monitor across a room rather than listen to exposition.Eternal answers questions nobody had: the Maykrs, Urdak, Argent D’Nur, the Slayer’s origin as Doom Guy pulled out of a Night Sentinel order, the whole Father-and-Khan-Maykr theology. The joke of 2016 was that the story was an obstacle the protagonist wanted removed. Making the protagonist the centre of a cosmology retires the joke.

The Ancient Gods, Part Two closes it out with a duel against the Dark Lord, a one-on-one that strips away the arena entirely and asks you to parry — the final statement of the Marauder’s argument, aimed directly at the players who spent two years insisting the Marauder was badly designed. It is a fight only somebody who had accepted the game’s terms could enjoy, and it is the most honest endingEternal could have had.

On 25 January 2023, Xbox ran a Developer_Direct, announcedHi-Fi Rush, and put it on sale the same hour. No marketing run-up, no preview embargo, no two-year drip of trailers. Tango Gameworks — the studio Shinji Mikami founded in 2010, best known at that point forThe Evil Within andGhostwire: Tokyo — had made a cel-shaded rhythm-action comedy under director John Johanas and simply let it go. It is the cleanest shadow-drop of the decade, and it worked precisely because the game does something you cannot really convey in a trailer. You have to hold the pad.

Two and a half years on, the release-day novelty has burned off and the design is still standing up, which is the only test that matters. What is left is the most interesting argument anyone has made about rhythm in an action game sinceRez.

Everything is on the beat, including the furniture

The core fact:Hi-Fi Rush runs at 120 beats per minute, and it runseverything at 120 beats per minute. Chai’s attacks resolve on the beat. Enemy telegraphs land on the beat. Platforms rise and fall on the beat. Fans turn, hoardings flash, girders swing, and a robot cat called 808 wags its tail — all on the beat. The world is the click track, rendered.

This is the bit that people underrate. Most rhythm games put the music in one channel and ask you to match it with your thumbs.Hi-Fi Rush dissolves the channel. Every readable object in the frame is a metronome, so you are never listening for the beat as a separate task — you are reading the room, and the room happens to be in 4/4. Losing the beat here feels like losing the plot of a conversation: you fall out of sync with a place, and the place tells you so from every corner of the frame at once.

The fiction earns it, too. Chai is a wannabe rock star who volunteers for Vandelay Technologies’ Project Armstrong to get a prosthetic arm, and his music player falls into the machinery, fuses to his chest, and makes him a defect: the one person in the building who can hear the rhythm the building is moving to. That is the diegetic justification for a HUD that would otherwise be a bar at the bottom of the screen — the beat becomes a fact about Chai before it becomes an interface element.

The generosity is the mechanic

Here is where the design gets genuinely clever, and where it departs from thirty years of rhythm-game orthodoxy.

You cannot fail for being off-beat.

Press attack at the wrong moment and Chai still swings — the game quantises the input to the next beat and lands it. Nothing punishes you. Nothing shatters, no combo counter resets to zero out of spite, no “MISS” strobes across the middle of the fight. What you lose isupside: on-beat hits do more damage, extend combos further, and pay out better ratings at the end of the encounter. The beat is a multiplier on top of a competent character-action game rather than a gate in front of it.

Compare that toCrypt of the NecroDancer (Brace Yourself Games, 2015), which is the closest structural ancestor and which takes exactly the opposite line: step off the beat and your gold multiplier collapses, and in the harder modes your turn simply does not happen. That is a purist’s design and I like it, but it sorts players into those with rhythm and those without within ninety seconds. Tango’s version sorts nobody. It lets a player with no sense of time at all finish the game while still making the beat feel like the most interesting thing in it, because the feedback for finding it is so lavish — the hit pauses, the partner assist chimes in on the downbeat, the whole encounter suddenly reads as choreography instead of as work.

That generosity extends outward. There is a beat-visualiser you can leave on permanently. There is an accessibility option that auto-aligns your inputs outright. The rhythm parry — which arrives partway through, taught by Korsica after she stops trying to kill you — is a timing window like any parry, and the game gives you a metronome to hit it with.Sekiro asks you to internalise the tempo of a duel with no click track at all; I wrote about why that works inSekiro: The Rhythm Game With a Sword, and the interesting thing is thatHi-Fi Rush arrives at a comparable feeling of locked-in flow by handing you the very information FromSoftware withholds. Both work. They just disagree about whether the tempo should be a secret.

What it owes, and to whom

The visual lineage is legible from the first corridor: the cel shading and the comic-panel sound effects come out ofJet Set Radio (Smilebit, 2000) andViewtiful Joe (Clover, 2003), and the combat vocabulary — light and heavy strings, launchers, a rating screen that grades you at the end of every scrap — is Capcom’sDevil May Cry school, filtered through people who clearly enjoy it without wanting to be brutalised by it.

The real ancestor of thefeeling, though, is older and further sideways. In 1987 I had an Amiga, and the thing that machine did better than anything else in the room was sync visuals to a tracker module — a demo where the bassline drove the geometry, where the music caused the scene.Hi-Fi Rush is that trick, thirty-five years on, with a budget and a character-action game hung off it. Tetsuya Mizuguchi’sRez (2001) is the other obvious forebear, and the connective tissue between all of them is the same insight: the pleasure lies in beinginside a system where causation runs through the rhythm, so that hitting the beat feels like agreement rather than obedience.

Where it fights itself

Three real problems, in ascending order of how much they cost.

The comedy is loud and it is relentless, and it is aimed squarely at a young audience. Chai is written as an idiot with a good heart, and the jokes come at you in a stream. It landed for me more often than it missed. Anyone allergic to the cadence will find eight or nine hours of it a long time.

The rating pressure sits slightly askew from the generosity elsewhere. The game tells you the beat does not matter, then grades your entire encounter on how well you kept it. That tension is productive for most of the run and merely nagging in the back half, when the bosses start demanding rhythm-parry sequences that tighten the window the design has spent hours telling you is loose.

And the platforming is the padding. The traversal between fights is a rhythm game in the least interesting sense — hit the jump on the beat, land on the moving thing — and it exists to space the combat out. Tango knows the combat is the product; the level design keeps interrupting it to prove the world is on the beat, which the world had already proved.

The post-launch work argues the studio knew where the value was. The freeArcade Challenge! update later in 2023 addedPower Up! Tower Up!, a run-based mode with randomised modifiers, andBPM Rush!!, which ratchets the tempo upward as you go. Both do the same thing: strip out the platforming and give you the fights.

The verdict

Hi-Fi Rush is the rare game whose central conceit is load-bearing. The metronome is the skeleton, and the fighting, the level readability and the tone all hang off it correctly. It is the best argument I know that rhythm mechanics do not require punishment to produce flow, and that a design can hand a player every piece of information and still leave them something to master.

Its afterlife is the ugly part. Microsoft closed Tango Gameworks in May 2024, months after the studio shipped a well-reviewed original game and an award-season favourite. Krafton subsequently acquired the studio and theHi-Fi Rush IP in a deal announced that August. The game came to PS5 in March 2024. It is on PC and Xbox, it runs on anything, and it will still be doing this trick in ten years, because 120 BPM does not go out of date.

What to play next:Sekiro: The Rhythm Game With a Sword for the same flow state with the click track removed, andNine Sols: The Sekiro Parry in a Taopunk Frame for a 2D parry loop that also believes tempo is the whole conversation. If you want the purist counter-argument to Tango’s kindness,Crypt of the NecroDancer is right there, waiting to fail you.

Spoilers below

The structural joke of the back half is that Vandelay’s executives are each a department made flesh — Rekka in HR, Zanzo in R&D, Korsica running security, Mimosa in QA, Roquefort selling — and each boss fight is a satire of what that department does to a person. The QA fight is the best of them, because the encountertests you the way QA tests a build, and the game is self-aware enough to make the joke land mechanically rather than only in dialogue.

Korsica’s defection is the pivot that fixes the combat. Up to that point Chai is a fairly conventional combo machine with an assist button. The rhythm parry arrives, and every subsequent encounter is a two-way conversation with a tempo rather than a one-way beating. It is the correct place to put it — late enough that you have internalised 120 BPM, early enough that you get to enjoy it.

And the Project Armstrong reveal — that Kale’s rollout is a plan to remove the defective from the workforce entirely — is a broader corporate satire than the first hour prepares you for. The game keeps its silly voice while making its point, which is harder than it looks.

Metroid Dread was announced in 2005 for the Nintendo DS, went quiet, was rumoured for a decade and a half, and then turned up in October 2021 on Switch as if the intervening sixteen years had been a scheduling error. Produced by Yoshio Sakamoto and developed by MercurySteam with Nintendo EPD, it is Metroid 5 — the direct sequel toFusion, which came out on the Game Boy Advance in 2002. Nineteen years between instalments of a numbered series is a long time to think about what you are.

The remarkable thing is thatDread clearly used the time. This is a game with a very specific and slightly severe opinion about what a 2D Metroid is for, and the opinion isn’t the one most of the genre’s descendants arrived at. The rest of the metroidvania field spent twenty years adding — skill trees, roguelike runs, dialogue, builds.Dread subtracts. It plays like somebody re-readSuper Metroid, wrote down the three things that made it work, and threw the rest overboard.

Movement is the whole subject

PlayDread for ten minutes and the first thing that registers is how fast Samus is. She slides. She free-aims in any direction while walking. She has Flash Shift — a short teleporting dash, chainable — from early in the run. The Speed Booster is still here, the Shinespark still fires her diagonally through the architecture, and the Spider Magnet reads walls as surfaces rather than obstacles.

None of that is decoration. InSuper Metroid (SNES, 1994) the pleasure was the moment your capability changed the map: a Grapple Beam turned a ceiling into a road, and a wall you’d walked past four hours ago became a door.Dread pushes that idea to its limit. Nearly every upgrade in the game is amovement upgrade — a new verb for crossing ground — and the ones that are weapons mostly function as keys. So the entire progression is one continuous statement: you have become better atgoing, and here’s a place that punishes anyone who can’t go well.

MercurySteam’s own history explains the second pillar. TheirSamus Returns (3DS, 2017) introduced the melee counter, andDread refines it into the game’s other axis. Enemies telegraph, you press the button on the beat, Samus knocks them into a free-aim slow-motion window, and you convert the parry into a kill. It’s a rhythm layer inside a movement game — the same instinct that runsSekiro, scaled down and applied to a corridor of frog-things.

The counter does something structural, though. It makesstanding your ground viable in a series whose combat has historically been a tax on exploration. Old Metroid enemies were furniture: you shot them, or you walked past them, and either way they were an interruption. Countering makes each one a tiny beat you can choose to play. That is the single largest change to Metroid’s minute-to-minute sinceSuper, and almost nobody talks about it because it’s not what the game was marketed on.

The E.M.M.I. zones, and why they work

They marketed it on the robots, and the robots are more interesting than their reputation.

E.M.M.I. are near-invulnerable machines that patrol sealed sections of ZDR. Enter their zone and the music drops, the map tints, and one of them starts hunting. Your beams do nothing. Caught, you get a single frame-perfect counter attempt with an extremely narrow window — succeed rarely, and die usually. The escape is the zone’s exit, and the exit is a door you have to reach while a machine that outruns you closes in.

Read as stealth, this is thin. There’s no meaningful hiding, the Phantom Cloak is limited, and the AI is more of a pursuit than a puzzle. Read aslevel design, it’s superb, and the reason is the same reason the counter works: it’s a tempo device.

An E.M.M.I. zone converts a map you know into a map you mustexecute. You’ve probably crossed that room before. You know where the exit is. What you don’t have is time to think, and so the zone tests the movement vocabulary the game just gave you — slide under, Flash Shift through, magnet up the wall — at speed, under pressure, with a fail state. It’s the Speed Booster puzzle with legs. And when you finally acquire the Omega Cannon and turn on the thing that’s been chasing you for forty minutes, the release is enormous precisely because the game spent forty minutes making you run.

The complaint that the zones break the pacing has it backwards.They are the pacing.Dread has no dialogue, few cutscenes, and no dramatic engine of any kind; the E.M.M.I. zones are the only device the game has for creating pressure and then removing it, and the reason the run feels like it has a shape is that the shape is made out of hunts and their endings.

The real ancestor is theMetroid II Metroid encounters — a hunt through a corridor with a countdown attached — given modern animation and an actual off switch.

Where it fights itself

Dread’s severity has costs, and the honest ones are worth naming.

The world is a machine rather than a place. ZDR is efficient, legible, beautifully signposted and slightly airless.Super Metroid’s Zebes had rooms that existed to be looked at, dead ends that were just dead ends, and a general willingness to waste your time in the interests of atmosphere. ZDR has almost no waste. Every corridor is a test, every room does a job, and the map is so well-designed that you’re rarely lost — which is a strange thing to complain about until you remember that being lost on Zebes was the entire experience. The signposting is so good it occasionally does your exploring for you.

Bosses run hot. The fights are excellent — sharp, readable, fast — and they arrive at a difficulty the rest of the game doesn’t prepare you for. Kraid is a wall. Escue and the Chozo Soldiers ask for a counter precision the corridors never demand. There’s a genuine gap between “very good at moving” and “very good at bosses”, andDread doesn’t build a bridge across it.

And the Aeion abilities — the resource-driven kit, Phantom Cloak and the rest — are the least-used thing in the game, for the same reason the prosthetics are the least-used thing inSekiro: the core loop is too complete to need them.

The verdict

Dread is the best-playing 2D game Nintendo has published in years and one of the most conservative, and those two facts are the same fact. It says a 2D Metroid is a movement game with a map on top, and then it executes that thesis with a precision the genre’s sprawling, generous descendants can’t match. It’s also the fastest-selling entry the series has ever had, which is a slightly funny outcome for a game whose main innovation is deciding what to leave out.

I’d hand it to anyone who thinks they like metroidvanias, because it will tell them whether what they actually like is the map or the running. Switch is the only place to play it, and it does not need a better machine.

I came to this from the wrong side. My 2D exploration-platformer of the eighties wasTurrican on the Amiga — Factor 5’s answer to this shape, all sprawl and firepower and no economy at all.Dread is the discipline that game never had, and playing them a lifetime apart makes the argument for restraint better than any review can.

For the descendants:Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown takesDread’s movement-first thesis and adds the systemic depthDread refuses, and it’s the better game for a lot of players.Animal Well goes the other way entirely and puts the whole progression in your head.

Spoilers below

Raven Beak is the argument’s conclusion, and he’s brutal. The final fight is a counter test — a long, escalating, four-phase demand that you read a Chozo warrior’s animation set with the precision the E.M.M.I. demanded and the corridors never did. It is the hardest thing in the game by a distance, and it lands because it is the only fight that asks for both halves of the toolkit at once: the movement to survive the arena, the counter to make progress in it.

The story around it is the partDread actually cares about, and it’s more pointed than the series usually manages. Samus’s Metroid DNA — theFusion inheritance, the thing that has been a plot device for two decades — becomes the resolution. She wins by being the monster the series has spent five games having her exterminate. That’s an ending with a real idea in it: the X parasites, the Chozo, the Federation and Samus herself are all the same story about a weapon that outlived the people who built it.

And then the game ends, cleanly, after roughly nine hours, with no post-game grind, no season, and nothing left to farm. Nineteen years of waiting for a thing that respects your evening. It closes the sentenceFusion started, and it closes it hard.

Most remakes are arguments. The remake ofResident Evil 4 takes its original’s central rule and overturns it.Final Fantasy VII Remake takes its original’s ending and makes a philosophical scene out of disagreeing with it. Motive’sDead Space, released in January 2023 on PS5, Xbox Series consoles and PC, does something rarer and much harder to talk about: it agrees. Fifteen years after EA Redwood Shores shipped the original in 2008, this is the same game, with the same layout, the same weapons, the same beats, executed by people who thought the 2008 design was already right and set out to build the version the hardware of the time wouldn’t allow.

That’s a strange product to review, because the temptation is to score it on novelty and it has almost none. The interesting reading is elsewhere.What does a remake look like when the designers’ only ambition is to remove the compromises? And how much of a horror game turns out to have been compromise?

Dismemberment was always the system

Dead Space’s reputation rests on one line of dialogue and one design rule, and the rule is the reason the game outlasted everything around it. Necromorphs don’t die from body damage. Empty a pistol into a torso and the thing keeps walking. You kill them by taking the limbs off, which means the plasma cutter’s rotating blade — horizontal, vertical, snap it round with a button — is an aiming problem rather than a damage problem. Every shot is a decision aboutwhich piece of a moving body you want to remove.

That does something no health bar can. It makes the enemy’s body legible. You look at a Slasher and you see arms, and arms are the problem, and the game has trained you to solve problems by cutting rather than by shooting. Panic inDead Space is the specific panic of firing four rounds into a chest because your hands forgot the rule.

The remake’s central technical addition serves exactly that rule and nothing else. Necromorphs are now built in layers — skin, muscle, bone — and shots strip them progressively, so a limb visibly degrades before it comes off. In a game about damage numbers this would be gore for its own sake. In a game where the enemy’s silhouette is your information, it’s afeedback improvement: you can now see how close a limb is to separating, and adjust mid-encounter. The 2008 game had a binary — attached or gone — because that’s what a 2008 console could stream. The remake has a gradient, and the gradient is the extra sentence the original wanted to say.

That’s the pattern for the whole project. Find the thing the design was reaching for, and give it the hardware it needed.

The ship as one continuous object

The USG Ishimura in 2008 was twelve chapters connected by loading screens dressed as tram rides. In 2023 it’s one place. You can walk from the bridge to the mining deck without a cut, the tram is a real vehicle in a real network, and — this is the part that matters — the ship is nowfully interconnected, so the level design can double back on itself the way a real derelict would.

Motive uses that in two ways. The obvious one is atmosphere: the Ishimura reads as a working vessel with a plan, which makes the corpses read as an event that happened to a place rather than a set of horror rooms in a row. The subtler one is the security clearance system, which replaces the original’s locked doors. Doors that refuse you at clearance one open at clearance two, so the ship gates you byrank rather than by scripted key, and the map fills in gradually as a single expanding space. It’s the metroidvania grammar applied to a survival horror ship, and it’s the single biggest structural improvement over the original.

Side missions follow from it. Isaac now has a handful of optional errands — chasing the Ishimura’s dead crew through their own logs — that send you back through territory you cleared hours ago. That trip is where the game earns the seamless ship, because returning to a “safe” corridor and finding it repopulated is a feeling the 2008 version’s architecture simply could not produce.

The Intensity Director sits on top, adjusting spawns, lighting and sound to what you’re doing. It’s less of a headline than the marketing wanted, and its real function is modest and correct: it stops the backtracking from being empty, and it keeps the ship from settling into a rhythm you can predict. The same idea, differently expressed, underwritesStill Wakes the Deep, where the horror is likewise a structure you have to keep re-crossing.

Isaac speaks, and the room changes

The one genuine deviation: Isaac Clarke has a voice, provided by Gunner Wright, who played him inDead Space 2 and3. In 2008 he was a mute — a helmet with hands, in the Gordon Freeman tradition.

This is the change most likely to annoy purists and it’s defensible on the game’s own terms. The 2008 Isaac was silent while every other character in the fiction spokeat him, issued orders, and treated him as an engineer to be dispatched. Giving him a voice converts him from an instrument into a person who is being used, which is the story the original was already telling and could only tell in the third person. The remake’s Isaac pushes back, occasionally, and every time he does the power dynamic of the Ishimura’s chain of command becomes visible.

The cost is real. Silence was doing work — the helmet is one of the great horror designs precisely because it never told you what was behind it. Trading that for characterisation is a legitimate trade with a legitimate loss, and it’s the only place in the remake where I’d say the original still wins.

Where it fights itself

The remake inherits the original’s third act, and the original’s third act is the weakest part of a very good game. Zero-G is now full flight, imported fromDead Space 2, and it’s an enormous improvement over the 2008 point-and-jump version — the asteroid-shooting sequence, which was reviled for fifteen years, is finally playable. It’s also the point where the game becomes a shooter with a level select, and the Necromorph rule that made the first six hours brilliant gets buried under set pieces.

Kinesis and Stasis are still underused. Kinesis lets you pick up a severed limb and throw it as a spear, and it’s the most inventive economy in the game: your ammunition is the enemy. Stasis slows anything to a crawl and turns a panic into a puzzle. Both are fully realised and both are optional, because the plasma cutter is so good that most players will finish the game having barely touched either. When a toolkit’s best tools are elective, the loop underneath is either magnificent or too dominant, and here it’s both.

And the upgrade tree keeps the original’s node system, which was fiddly then and is fiddly now — a grid of sockets that mostly amounts to spending currency on numbers. The remake adds an upgrade path for weapon behaviour rather than pure stats, which helps a little. It’s the one place Motive should have argued and didn’t.

The verdict

Dead Space (2023) is the most useful remake anyone has made, precisely because it’s the least interesting to argue about. It’s a demonstration that a well-designed game from 2008 needed nothing except the machine it deserved — that dismemberment, the Ishimura, and the plasma cutter’s rotating blade were finished work, and the loading screens were the flaw. Every change serves the original’s intent. Nothing is here to make a point.

The first six hours are as good as survival horror gets. The last three are a competent action game with a lot of set dressing, which is exactly what the last three hours of the 2008 version were, and I’d rather have the honest reproduction than a fabricated improvement. Play it on PS5 or PC; the ship is worth the frame rate.

If you want the opposite philosophy — a remake that disagrees with its source in public — readResident Evil 4 (2023). If you want the argument that survival horror’s soul lives in restraint rather than technology,Signalis makes it with a fraction of the budget.

Spoilers below

The remake’s smartest addition is the smallest one. In 2008, Nicole was a ghost you didn’t clock until the game told you, and the reveal at the end — that she’d been dead the whole time, that Isaac had been talking to a Marker-induced hallucination — landed as a twist because the fiction had withheld its cards.

Motive rebuilds it as something you can catch. The new-game-plus alternate ending, and the seeding of Isaac’s instability through the run, turn the reveal into a piece of evidence rather than a rug-pull. Isaac’s dialogue lets him respond to Nicole, and the responses go wrong in ways an attentive player registers long before the confirmation arrives. That’s the strongest justification for the voice: a silent Isaac cannot be seen losing his mind in real time, because losing your mind is a thing that happens in speech.

The Hive Mind is still a boss fight in a genre that shouldn’t have boss fights. It was true in 2008. It’s true now. Some things a restoration honestly cannot fix, and pretending otherwise would have made this a different, worse project.

The originalResident Evil 4 would not let you walk and shoot at the same time. Raise the gun and Leon planted his feet like a man in wet cement; the laser sight came up, the world narrowed, and the Ganados kept coming. That restriction was not a technical limit — the GameCube could have moved him — it was the design. Shinji Mikami’s 2005 game was built on a single, brutal trade:you may aim or you may leave, and you must choose now. Every encounter in that game is a clock made of that choice.

Capcom’s remake, released in March 2023 across PS4, PS5, Xbox Series consoles and PC, lets you move while aiming.

That’s the review, really. Everything else follows from it. Directed by Yasuhiro Anpo and Kazunori Kadoi under producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi, and built in RE Engine after the studio’s runs atResident Evil 2 and3, the 2023RE4 is a genuinely superb action game that has a running disagreement with the thing it’s remaking. It knows what the original’s tension was made of. It takes it apart anyway, and then spends forty hours building a different tension in its place. Whether that trade lands is the only interesting question here, and it’s a closer call than the near-universal praise suggested.

What the stop-and-shoot rule was actually for

Give the 2005 design its due before touching it. Planting your feet did three jobs at once.

It madepositioning a decision made in advance. You had to pick your ground before the shooting started, because once you committed, you were furniture. That’s why the village opening works: the whole encounter is you reading a farmyard and choosing where to stand thirty seconds before you need to have chosen.

It madethe crowd frightening without needing the crowd to be fast. Ganados shamble. They shamble at a speed that is trivially outrun and lethal to a man standing still, and the entire threat curve ofRE4 is calibrated on that gap.

And it madethe shot expensive. Ammunition was scarce, so aiming cost you time; time cost you space; space was the only defence. Three resources, one input, all traded against each other. It’s one of the tightest economies action games have ever run.

Take the plant-and-shoot away and you have to replace all three, and Capcom knew it. The remake’s answer is the knife, and the answer is smart.

The knife as the new economy

In the original the knife was a tool: break crates, chip an enemy, cut yourself free. In the remake it’s the load-bearing defensive system, and it’s the best thing in the game. You can parry with it — including, remarkably, a chainsaw — you can stab a downed Ganado to stop them getting back up, you can slit a throat from behind, and you can cut yourself out of a grab.

And it wears out. Knife durability is the pivot the whole design turns on. Every parry, every finisher, every escape spends the blade, and the merchant charges to repair it. So the game reinstates the original’s core bargain in a new currency:defence is not free, and the resource it costs is one you have to buy back. You’re no longer trading time for space. You’re trading blade for safety, and a blade broken at the wrong moment leaves you doing the thing you spent the last hour avoiding, which is fighting a crowd with a handgun and no way out of a grab.

Around that, the tuning is meticulous. Leon moves while aiming, so the enemies got faster and more numerous, and they flank properly now. Parades of Ganados throw hatchets and sickles at range. The crowd pressure is genuinely higher than 2005’s because the game knows you can back out of it. The village fight is still the village fight — read the ground, pick your building, watch the ladders — and it’s harder, because standing still is now achoice rather than a consequence, and the game punishes the ones who make it lazily.

The dynamic difficulty system returns underneath, adjusting spawns and drops to how you’re doing, which is whyRE4 has always been the most forgiving hard game on the shelf and why almost nobody notices.

Ashley, and the argument Capcom won outright

The one change nobody sensibly disputes: Ashley Graham has no health bar. She has a downed state you can revive her from, no ammunition to manage, and a two-verb command set — follow or wait. In 2005 she had health, could be killed, and was the reason a generation of players remember an escort mission with a full-body shudder.

The remake’s version works because it identifies what the escort wasfor. Ashley’s job is to be a constraint on your movement and your attention — a thing that makes you look over your shoulder and route around a room differently. Her job was never to be a fail state you couldn’t control. Removing the health bar keeps the constraint and deletes the arbitrariness, and it is a masterclass in understanding your own game well enough to know which parts were load-bearing. Compare it with whatFinal Fantasy VII Remake does when it reaches the same fork: that game changes the thing to make a point about memory. This one changes the thing because the thing was bad.

The QTEs go too, mostly, and good riddance — the cutscene button prompts that killed you for blinking were 2005’s worst habit, and the remake keeps only the parry, which is a real mechanic rather than a reflex tax.

Where it fights itself

The remake is longer, denser, more generous and, in a very specific way, less frightening.

The originalRE4 had arhythm of pressure and relief that came from the movement rule. Between fights you were safe, because walking away was always available and always sufficient; inside fights you were trapped, absolutely, by your own trigger finger. The remake smears that. You can always move, always reposition, always slice your way out if the blade holds. That produces an unbroken, competent, slightly even hum of tension where the original had spikes and troughs. It’s a betteraction game and a slightly flatter horror one.

Then there’s the sheer amount of stuff. Side treasures to combine, spinels to trade, a shooting gallery, requests pinned to walls, weapon cases with attaché-case grids. The merchant’s economy is deep and enjoyable and it is also, hour by hour, the thing that keeps pulling your eye out of the world and into a spreadsheet. The original was a corridor with a shop in it. This is a shop with a corridor attached.

And a few of the strange edges got sanded. The remake reworks Salazar’s laser corridor into a stealth sequence, drops the U-3 fight, and generally trades 2005’s cheerful arbitrariness for coherence. Coherence is worth having. So was the arbitrariness, occasionally. The best moments in the original were the ones where a Spanish village stopped making sense.

The verdict

Capcom made the finest version of this game and, in doing so, made a case that Mikami’s constraint was a compromise rather than a thesis. I think that’s about sixty per cent right. The remake is better designed, better paced across its middle third, better at crowds, and vastly better at Ashley. The original is still the more frightening object, because being unable to move while a chainsaw approaches is a specific and irreplaceable feeling, and no amount of parry-timing gets you back there.

Take both. They’re arguing, and the argument is the interesting part. Available on PS5, Xbox Series and PC, withSeparate Ways — Ada’s parallel campaign, added in September 2023 — worth the money for the grappling hook alone, and the free Mercenaries mode from April 2023 sitting there as the purest distillation of the new combat system.

If you want to see a remake that takes the opposite position and restores rather than argues, go toDead Space (2023). If you want to see modern developers building a survival horror that keeps the old constraints on purpose,Crow Country is the one.

Spoilers below

The Krauser knife fight is where the remake’s whole design philosophy stands up and takes a bow. In 2005 it was a QTE — a sequence of button prompts flashed over a cutscene, memorised rather than played, and one of the most-hated three minutes in the game precisely because it asked for reflex rather than skill. The remake rebuilds it as a real knife duel: parries, reads, a proper contest fought with the mechanic the game spent thirty hours teaching you.

That’s the case for the defence in a single encounter. The remake takes 2005’s laziest moment and turns it into a test of the systems it built, which is exactly what a remake ought to do and almost none of them manage.

The counter-case is Saddler. The final fight is fine, competent, well-staged and completely conventional, and the original’s version was also fine, and neither is the reason anyone remembersResident Evil 4. Both games peak in a farmyard in the first hour, with a bell ringing and a crowd walking away, and no amount of engine work changes that. The village is the game. Everything after it is a very long, very good encore.

There is a moment, somewhere in the first ten hours ofSekiro: Shadows Die Twice, when the noise resolves into music. Up to that point you have been doing what every FromSoftware game sinceDemon’s Souls trained you to do: circle, wait, punish, roll away, drink, repeat. Sekiro tolerates none of it. The dodge is bad on purpose. The healing is scarce on purpose. Backing off gives your opponent the one thing the whole design refuses to hand you, which is time to recover. And then the penny drops, the sword comes in, you press L1 on the exact frame it lands, and the game answers with a metal chime that is unmistakably a downbeat.

That chime is the thesis. Released by FromSoftware in March 2019 under Activision, directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki,Sekiro is filed on shelves next toDark Souls andBloodborne, and it is a different genus entirely. The Souls games are about resource management under threat. Sekiro is about tempo. Once you hear it that way, everything from the posture bar to the resurrection mechanic to the game’s famously unbudging refusal of a difficulty slider snaps into a single coherent argument.

The posture bar is the whole game

Every FromSoftware combat system before this one ran on a health bar and a stamina bar, and your job was to spend the second to drain the first. Sekiro keeps health — vitality — and quietly demotes it. The bar that matters isposture, and posture is a balance meter. Land a hit, chip it. Deflect a hit, chip it harder. Let it fill and your opponent’s guard breaks, exposing them to a deathblow: one animated, unambiguous, fight-ending strike.

The clever part is what posture does when nothing is happening. Itrecovers, and it recovers faster the healthier the character is. That single rule is the engine of the entire game. It means backing off to breathe hands your progress back. It means the correct way to kill a boss is to stay inside their reach and keep the pressure on, which is precisely the thing a decade of Souls play taught you never to do. Sekiro spends its first act unteaching you, and the unteaching hurts, because the muscle memory it is fighting is your own.

So the posture bar converts defence into offence. A deflect — a block timed to the frame the blade arrives — costs you nothing, and costs them posture. Which means the optimal defensive action and the optimal aggressive action are the same button, pressed at the same moment. That is a rhythm system, dressed in Sengoku steel, and it explains why the game feels so bad until it suddenly feels superb. You are not learning tactics. You are learning a chart.

Why the deflect window works

Plenty of games have parries. Most of them make the parry a gamble: high risk, high reward, punished hard on a miss. Sekiro does something more generous and much more demanding. Mistime a deflect and you still block — you eat posture damage rather than a wound. The failure state of a perfect input is a mediocre input. That’s a design decision with enormous downstream consequences, because it means the game can hand you a boss who attacks in eight-hit chains and expect you to hold the line through all eight. You will not die from the third one. You will die from your posture cracking on the seventh.

Sitting on top of that are the perilous attacks, flagged with a red kanji, and they are the game’s genius stroke. Each one demands adifferent answer, and the answers are not interchangeable. A thrust wants the Mikiri Counter — step into the spear, not away from it. A sweep wants a jump. A grab wants your legs. The red kanji flashes with barely enough warning to react, which means you cannot read the symbol and then decide; you have to have already learned the animation that precedes it and be committed before the warning arrives. The symbol is a confirmation, not an instruction.

That is exactly how a rhythm game’s approach notes work. The note tells you what to hit and when, and by the time you consciously register it, your hands are already moving. Sekiro isGuitar Hero where the chart is a man with a naginata and the fail state is being taken apart at your own hearth.

Look for the real ancestor and you land onPunch-Out!!, where every opponent was a fixed loop of tells to be memorised and answered, and where “getting good” meant learning a script rather than raising a stat. I’d file the C64 and Amiga fighting games of my teens in the same family —The Way of the Exploding Fist,IK+ — where the whole contest lived in a single well-timed input and the loser was the one who twitched early. Sekiro is that lineage given twenty-five years of animation budget. Its cousins are elsewhere on this desk:Nine Sols takes the deflect and rebuilds it in two dimensions, and does it well enough to be worth the comparison rather than embarrassed by it.

The resurrection mechanic, and what it actually costs

Sekiro lets you die and get back up. Press the button, Wolf rises where he fell, and the fight continues from the enemy’s current state. On paper it’s a mercy. In practice it’s the most interesting piece of tuning in the game, because standing back up mid-fight puts you exactly where you least want to be — inside a boss’s active attack chain, at low health, with your posture recovery crippled. The revival hands you a chance and a worse position at the same time.

It also feeds the Dragonrot system, the game’s tax on repetition. Die often and NPCs across Ashina fall ill, sidequests stall, and your Unseen Aid — the chance of keeping your money on death — drops. Dragonrot is curable, and it is not really a punishment so much as a slow, visible pressure. The world coughs when you fail. It is one of the few times a FromSoftware game has made death mean something narratively without making it mean less mechanically.

The upgrade economy runs on the same honesty. Vitality and posture rise from Prayer Beads, and beads come in fours, from minibosses. Attack power rises from Battle Memories, and memories come from bosses. Healing capacity rises from Gourd Seeds. There is no build to hide behind. InElden Ring a wall can be walked around, out-levelled, or answered with a summon and a bleed build. Sekiro’s wall is a person, and the only thing that gets you past them is that you have learned the song. That is either the purest thing FromSoftware has ever made or the most obstinate, and the honest answer is that it’s both.

Where it fights itself

The prosthetic tools are the weakest system in the game, and it’s instructivewhy. Firecrackers, the Flame Vent, the Loaded Axe, the Umbrella — they’re inventive, they’re beautifully animated, and most players find two they like and never touch the rest. The reason is structural: the deflect loop is so complete, so self-sufficient, that the tools have nowhere to sit except as situational counters to specific enemy types. The game builds a second toolkit and then designs a combat system that doesn’t need it. The Loaded Umbrella against the Guardian Ape’s terror scream is genuinely essential; most of the rest is decoration on a machine that runs fine without it.

Stealth has a similar problem. Sekiro gives you a grappling hook, a crouch, ledge-hanging and one-hit backstab deathblows, and it’s a fine way to strip a boss arena of its rank-and-file before the real fight begins. It is also almost entirely optional and almost entirely absent from the encounters that define the game. The stealth exists to get you to the rhythm section.

The difficulty argument that swallowed the internet in 2019 looks different from here. FromSoftware shipped no difficulty options and took a proper kicking for it, and in October 2020 patched in Reflection of Strength for boss rematches and the Gauntlets of Strength — more ways to practise the chart rather than ways to lower it. Whatever you think of the accessibility question, the studio’s position was at least coherent with the design. You cannot ease a rhythm game without changing the song, and the song is the game.

The verdict

Sekiro is the most focused thing FromSoftware has built, and focus cuts both ways. It offers one answer to one question and asks you to get very good at it, which produces a stretch of about six hours in the middle where nothing works and you suspect the game is broken, followed by a click, followed by some of the finest one-on-one combat ever animated. Isshin, Genichiro, the Guardian Ape — these fights land because you arrive at them as a different player from the one who started, and you can feel the difference in your hands.

It doesn’t do the thing the Souls games do, where a hundred people play the same boss a hundred ways. Everyone beats Sekiro identically, because there is one way. Whether that’s purity or narrowness depends entirely on how much you want a game to hold an opinion. This one holds a very strong one, and it’s right.

Play it on PC or PlayStation; it runs fine on both and the frame timing is the whole product, so give it stable hardware. If it takes and you want the same grammar in a different key,Nine Sols is the sharpest descendant going, andArmored Core VI is FromSoftware doing the same trick with a stagger bar and a rocket launcher.

Spoilers below

The design argument closes at Isshin, the Sword Saint. Three phases, no gimmick, no environmental trick, no summon — just the game asking whether you learned it. The first phase is Genichiro again, which is a joke at your expense and a genuinely kind one: the man who annihilated you in hour three is now the warm-up. Isshin’s second phase adds the spear and the thrusts, and every thrust is a Mikiri check. The third adds lightning, and the lightning is the only moment in the whole game where a piece of the toolkit outside the deflect loop becomes mandatory — the Lightning Reversal, learned from a fisherman, thirty hours earlier, in a place you probably haven’t thought about since.

That’s the argument landing. Sekiro’s final exam tests one skill, and the skill is listening. Everything else — the tools, the stealth, the Dragonrot, the Sculptor’s grief — is set dressing on a metronome. The Shura ending, where Wolf turns on his own oath, is thematically the right shadow to hang over a game about obedience to a rhythm. You do what you are told, on the beat, for forty hours. Then it asks whether you can stop.

The first thingElden Ring does, once it lets go of your hand in Limgrave, is show you a castle. Stormveil sits up on its rock in the north-west, visible from most of the starting region, lit and enormous and obviously important. There is no marker on it. There is no quest in your log telling you to go there. There is a castle, and there is you, and the game has correctly calculated that this is sufficient.

FromSoftware and Bandai Namco shipped it on 25 February 2022 across five platforms, it sold in numbers that embarrassed the entire genre, and two years on the interesting question isn’t whether it’s good. It’s whythis open world holds when so many don’t, given that it contains most of the same parts as the ones that don’t.

Navigation by sightline

Here is the design decision everything else hangs off. The map fills in when you find a stele and read it, and the map it gives you is adrawing — terrain, rivers, roads, the shape of things — with nothing on it that tells you what to do. Your objective marker is a shaft of golden light that leans in a direction from every Site of Grace, and you are free to ignore it forever, which most people do for the first twenty hours.

What replaces the checklist is your own eyes. You crest a hill on Torrent and there’s a cathedral in a swamp, or a ruined manor, or a shaft of light coming out of a well, and you go and look. The information that drives navigation lives in the world geometry rather than the UI layer, which means that the act of playing and the act of deciding what to play are the same act. The Ubisoft tower solved a real problem — how do I tell the player what’s out there — and it solved it by moving the world into a menu. FromSoftware solved it by building a skyline.

The mechanical consequence is that curiosity has an actual cost. Riding to that cathedral takes ninety seconds you could have spent elsewhere, you might die on arrival, and nothing promised you a reward. So the reward, when it comes, isyours in a way that a completed checklist item never is. That’s the loop. It’s very old and almost nobody runs it, because it requires the confidence to let players miss things — andElden Ring lets you miss an enormous amount. Entire questlines, entire underground regions the size of a normal game’s map. Ranni’s line alone is missable by walking past a door.

Why the fear survives the freedom

The obvious risk in going open-world with a Souls game was that difficulty stops meaning anything when the player can walk away from any fight. FromSoftware’s answer is a rune economy that makes walking away expensive in the right way.

Die with runes on you, they drop where you fell. Die again on the way back, they’re gone. In a corridor game that’s a tense trip down a familiar hall. In an open world it’s a ride across hostile terrain, and the map is full of things that hit like a truck and are placed exactly where you’d want to gallop. The genius bit is Torrent’s double-jump and the spirit springs: you’re fast enough to escape almost anything, so death is nearly always a decision you made. The game gives you the exit and then watches you decline it.

Then there’s the Spirit Calling Bell. Summonable ashes are the difficulty slider FromSoftware refused to put in the options menu, and giving them to you inside the fiction — a bell, an item, a thing you upgrade with Grave Glovewort — is a better answer than a difficulty select, because it costs FP and it changes how the fight reads. Bring the Mimic Tear and a boss becomes a two-front problem it wasn’t designed for. That’s a legitimate solve. Nobody has to tick a box marked EASY, and the fight’s identity survives.

Where it fights itself

The padding is real and I’m not going to be polite about it. The Lands Between contains roughly a hundred and fifty catacombs, caves and mines, and a substantial share of them end in an Erdtree Avatar or an Ulcerated Tree Spirit you have already fought, in a room shaped like the last room, for a reward you’ll shard down for materials. The dragons are worse: after the third Flying Dragon you can read the entire encounter in two seconds.

This matters because the whole navigational thesis depends on the horizon keeping its promises. Every recycled Erdtree Avatar is a small withdrawal from the trust that makes you ride towards the next unexplained shape. By the Consecrated Snowfield, plenty of players have stopped detouring — which is the design defeating itself, and it happened because the map was sized by ambition instead of content.

The back third is also where the legacy dungeons start doing FromSoftware’s older, meaner thing — narrow, vertical, interlocking — and it’s a reminder that Miyazaki’s team still build the best enclosed spaces in the business. Stormveil Castle is a masterpiece of a level and it arrives in hour eight. Nothing in the open world beats it, and I think the studio knows.

The ancestor

The lineage everyone reaches for isBreath of the Wild, and the shared instinct is obvious: put a thing on a hill, let the player want it. The real ancestor runs further back, to the home-computer sandboxes that had no budget for markers and no room for a quest log. I’d point atHunter, Activision’s Amiga game from 1991 — a free-roaming island, vehicles you could just get into, objectives given asdescriptions rather than dots, and the expectation that you’d work out where things were by looking at them. It was crude and it was enormous and it navigated exactly the wayElden Ring does, thirty years earlier, because it had no other option.

Sightline navigation is what you build when youcan’t build a marker system. FromSoftware went back to it deliberately, with a budget, which is a much harder decision than it sounds.

For the studio at its most compressed, seeSekiro, which does the opposite of everything here — one moveset, one rhythm, no build-crafting, no escape — and is arguably the betterdesigned game. For the studio’s other 2023 answer to the same question of what a Souls game is once you take the sword away, there’sArmored Core VI. And if you want the open-world argument made in miniature by a much smaller team,Tunic hides its entire map in a manual and dares you to read it.

The verdict, argued

Elden Ring is the best argument in years that an open world can be aplace rather than a delivery route, and it makes that argument with a hundred and fifty dungeons of evidence against it. Both things are true. The first thirty hours are the finest exploration design of the decade; the last twenty are a very good Souls game wearing an oversized coat.

What it earned, it earned by holding a line every other studio abandoned: it refuses to tell you where to go. That refusal is what makes the castle on the horizon mean anything, and it’s why people who bounced offDark Souls three times finished this one. Beingtold was always the barrier.

It’s on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Series X|S and PC, and it runs best on PC with a frame cap you set yourself. Start as a Vagabond, ignore the golden light for as long as you can stand it, and go look at the castle.

Play next:Sekiro if you want FromSoftware with every fat trimmed off.

Spoilers below

The moment the design fully tips its hand is Leyndell.

You spend forty hours riding towards a golden tree that is visible from everywhere in the Lands Between — the single largest sightline in the game, the thing that has been telling you where north is since Limgrave. Then you reach the capital underneath it, fight your way to the base, and discover the tree is sealed behind thorns that no weapon touches. The navigational landmark that organised the entire map turns out to be a locked door.

What follows is the game’s best structural joke and its most divisive stretch. You godown — the Siofra and Deeproot depths, an entire second map hanging under the first — and then Leyndell burns, and you come back up to a version of the capital filled with ash where the geometry you learned is now a trap. The open world resolves into the closed one. Farum Azula is pure late-period FromSoftware corridor design, floating in the sky, and Torrent is useless there, which is the point. The horse gave you freedom for forty hours and then the game takes it back for the ending, because the ending is about arriving rather than choosing.

Malenia is the other tell. Waterfowl Dance is a three-part flurry that covers the arena and kills most builds outright, and there is a widespread view that it’s unfair. It isn’t quite — it’s dodgeable, the timings are published, thousands of people do it hitless — but it’s designed against the grain of everything the open world taught you. Open-worldElden Ring rewards preparation, level-scaling and bringing a bigger hammer. Malenia doesn’t care about your hammer. She’s aSekiro boss wearing a Souls skin, sitting in an optional tower at the end of a missable region, and she’s there to remind you which studio you’re dealing with.

The endings, meanwhile, are the weakest thing in it. Four cutscenes and a Frenzied Flame variant, gated on questlines most players never touch, delivered as text. After two hundred hours of a world that spoke entirely in geometry, the finale speaks in paragraphs. The game that trusted your eyes for the whole ride ends by reading to you.

There is a moment about two hours into The Lost Crown where you get the dash, and the game stops being a competent Metroidvania and becomes something you have to be physically removed from. It’s the air-dash, the Shadow of the Simurgh, and it does what every dash does — crosses a gap, cancels a state, opens the old rooms — except that Ubisoft Montpellier tuned the acceleration curve on it with what I can only describe as malice. It snaps. Sargon leaves a smear of light and arrives somewhere with the momentum still in your thumbs.

I have been playing platformers since a C64 and a tape deck, which is to say I have been playing platformers for long enough to be extremely boring about how things feel. This one feels correct.

What it is and what happened to it

Ubisoft Montpellier released Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown on 15 January 2024, on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series, Xbox One, Switch and PC. It’s a 2D side-on Metroidvania. You play Sargon, the youngest of a warrior band called the Immortals, sent to Mount Qaf to retrieve the kidnapped Prince Ghassan and finding that Mount Qaf has some opinions about the passage of time.

Montpellier are the studio behind Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends, and you can feel that pedigree in every frame of the animation. They are also, historically, the studio Ubisoft lets make the strange one.

The release window was a bloodbath. The Lost Crown landed in the middle of January, four days before Palworld appeared from nowhere and ate the entire conversation for a month, and a fortnight before Tekken 8 and Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. A mid-priced 2D Metroidvania under a dormant brand, from a publisher whose business is open worlds with towers in them, went out into that and — predictably — struggled to be heard. Ubisoft did release a demo, and the demo is genuinely one of the better ones anyone has shipped; it just needed someone to look at it.

The game deserved better weather.

The parry is the whole conversation

Combat is built on a single flash. Enemies telegraph attacks with a yellow glow, and a yellow-glow attack can be parried on a tight window. Some attacks glow red, and a red attack cannot be parried at all — you dodge, or you eat it.

That’s it. That’s the grammar. And it works because the game commits to it absolutely: the yellow-red distinction is honoured by every enemy in the game including the final ones, the window doesn’t shift depending on the arena, and the parry animation gives you a distinct, tactile, slightly ridiculous counter-flourish that makes you want to do it again.

The obvious ancestor isSekiro, and the debt is unhidden. What Montpellier changed is instructive. Sekiro’s parry is a posture economy — you’re parrying to build towards a break, so the parry is a resource action, and missing one costs you accumulated work. The Lost Crown’s parry is a state action. Hitting it doesn’t build a meter towards a win condition; it opens a window. The pressure is lower and the rhythm is faster, which suits a 2D plane where you can see the whole fight at once and there’s no camera to fight.

That decision is why the game reads as breezy where Sekiro reads as an exam.Nine Sols took the same parry into 2D and kept the exam. Both are right. They just want different things from you.

Layered on top: Athra, a meter you fill by fighting well and spend on special attacks, and an amulet system where you slot buffs into a limited number of sockets. The amulets are the light-RPG layer and they’re fine — a couple of them change how you play, most of them adjust a number. The build depth here is shallow and I don’t think that’s a flaw; the game’s argument is that execution is the interesting axis, and it stakes everything on that.

The map system is the actual achievement

Here is the part I want people to steal.

Metroidvanias have a memory problem. You find a locked thing at hour two, you get its key at hour nine, and in between you are supposed to have remembered a particular ledge in a particular room out of two hundred. The genre’s answers are map markers you place manually, which are a symbol soup you stop reading, and wikis, which are a confession of failure.

The Lost Crown gives you Memory Shards. You stand at the thing you can’t do yet, press a button, and the game takes a screenshot and pins it to that spot on the map. Later, when you have the tool, you open the map and you’re looking at an actual picture of the actual obstacle, and you know instantly whether your new ability solves it.

It’s obvious. It’s so obvious that its absence from twenty years of the genre is an indictment. And it does something subtler than convenience: because logging a puzzle is now cheap and precise, the designers could afford to be much denser with locked content than they otherwise could. Mount Qaf is packed with things you can’t do yet, and the density never becomes anxiety, because the game gave you a filing cabinet.

CompareMetroid Dread, which solved the same problem by narrowing the map into a mostly-linear tube with guided doors. Nintendo removed the navigation burden by removing the navigation. Montpellier kept the sprawl and gave you a better tool. Theirs is the harder trick and the more generous one.

The accessibility options are cut from the same cloth. There’s a platform assistance option, adjustable enemy damage, a guided or exploration mode for the map. None of it is buried in a menu apologising for itself. You can dial the game to the shape of your evening, which for a design this tightly tuned is a remarkably confident thing to allow.

Where it fights itself

The story is the weak axis. The Immortals — Vahram leading, Anahita among them — are drawn broadly, the voice performances swing between committed and stranded, and the plot’s shape is visible from the second hour. Mount Qaf itself is a better character than anyone standing on it.

The art direction is the other place opinion divides. The environments are gorgeous, the animation is superb, and the character designs land somewhere near a mid-budget anime and will not be to everybody’s taste. This got a lot of attention at reveal and it is, having played it, the least interesting thing about the game.

The bigger structural complaint: the back third leans on combat arenas — lock the doors, spawn three waves — as a pacing tool, and after twenty hours of the best 2D platforming Ubisoft has ever produced, being asked to stand in a box and fight is a demotion. The platforming challenge rooms in the late game are the answer the designers already knew was better. There should have been more of those and fewer boxes.

The verdict

The Lost Crown is the best-feeling 2D action game a major publisher has shipped in a decade, and its map system is a genuine contribution to a genre thirty-eight years old. It moves, it’s generous, it respects both your reflexes and your schedule, and it is completely uninterested in wasting your time — which from a company that built its reputation on 200-hour checklists is close to an apology.

Buy it on whatever you own. It runs well everywhere, including Switch, which given the density of what’s on screen is its own small piece of craft.

The tragedy is a scheduling decision. Somebody at Ubisoft looked at a calendar in January 2024 and decided this was the moment, and then Palworld happened, and the best thing the company put out in years went past most people at a distance.

If it hooks you, go and playMetroid Dread for the other end of the design argument, and thenNine Sols when you want the parry to hurt.

Spoilers below

The time-loop material in the back half is where the design and the fiction finally shake hands. Mount Qaf’s temporal instability stops being set dressing the moment you get the abilities that let you manipulate it directly — the shadow clone you place and recall, the frozen platforms — and the game starts building rooms that are essentially a musical bar you have to play in the correct order.

That’s when it becomes clear what the Simurgh powers are really for. They aren’t traversal upgrades with a story hat on. Each one is a new verb in a puzzle grammar, and the late-game rooms conjugate all of them at once: place the clone, dash to it, recall, use the recall’s momentum to reach the thing the dash alone couldn’t. Those rooms are the peak of the whole game and there are maybe a dozen of them.

Vahram’s turn is telegraphed roughly the instant he opens his mouth, and the betrayal lands anyway, for a purely mechanical reason: you fought alongside him in the opening, so the game taught you his moveset as an ally before it made you answer it as an enemy. Nobody says anything clever about it. The game just trusts that your hands remember. That’s the whole design philosophy in one boss fight.

Most games measure difficulty against you. You get better, so they get harder; you fail, so they ease off. Risk of Rain 2 measures difficulty against the clock on the wall, and the clock does not care whether you are ready.

There is a readout in the top-right corner. It tells you how long you have been alive and it tells you, in a word, how much trouble you are in. It starts at Easy. Given long enough it stops using words that mean anything and starts shouting at you. Nothing you do slows it down. You can stand perfectly still in an empty corner of the first map and the number keeps climbing, the enemies keep getting more numerous and more expensive to kill, and the run you were carefully building gets taken away from you by arithmetic.

That single decision — difficulty as a function of elapsed time rather than progress — is what makes this game work, and it’s why it has outlasted a good many slicker things released since.

What it actually is

Hopoo Games released Risk of Rain 2 into Early Access in March 2019 and hit 1.0 in August 2020, on PC and every current console. It is the 3D sequel to Risk of Rain (2013), a 2D side-scroller with the same architecture and a much meaner silhouette. Gearbox published both and later bought the property outright.

The loop is simple enough to explain in a lift. You drop onto a stage as one of a roster of survivors — Commando, Huntress, Engineer, MUL-T and a dozen others, each unlocked by a specific challenge. You kill things, which drops gold. You spend gold on chests, which drop items. Items are permanent for the run and they stack: two of a thing is roughly twice the thing, six of a thing is a problem for whatever is standing in front of you. Somewhere on the map is a teleporter. You activate it, survive the boss and the charge window, and move to the next stage. After five stages you loop back to the beginning with everything harder and everything you own still in your pocket.

Items are the whole texture. A white common item that gives a small chance of chaining lightning is a shrug at one stack and a screen-clearing weather system at twelve. The red-tier legendaries change the rules rather than the numbers — one of them, famously, lets you cheat death once per stage, and the run in which you find it becomes a different run. Lunar items are the interesting ones: they come with an explicit cost, a real downside written on the tin, and picking one up is the game asking whether you understand your own build well enough to pay.

The clock is the design

Here is the thing everything else hangs from. Gold scales with time. Chest prices scale with time. Enemy health and damage scale with time. So the more chests you open, the stronger you are — and the longer you spent opening them, the stronger everything else is.

That’s not a difficulty setting. It’s an economy with an interest rate.

Every decision in a run is the same decision wearing a different hat. There’s a chest on a ledge across the map. Getting there costs ninety seconds. Ninety seconds is worth a certain amount of enemy scaling, and the item in the chest is worth an unknown amount of power, and you have to price that trade with incomplete information while a horde is assembling behind you. Do it right and you leave the stage marginally ahead. Do it four times in a row on a stage where the chests roll badly and you leave the stage behind the curve, and being behind the curve compounds, because a weaker character kills more slowly, and killing more slowly takes more time, and time is the thing that is hurting you.

The genius is that the punishment for greed is never immediate. Spelunky’s ghost arrives at two minutes thirty and tells you off in person. Risk of Rain 2 lets you overstay, gives you the loot, sends you happily to the next stage, and then kills you eleven minutes later with a bill you signed without reading. You almost never die of the mistake you just made. You die of the mistake you made two stages ago, and by the time you understand that, you’ve internalised the pacing in a way no tutorial could have taught you.

Compare the timed doors inDead Cells, which do something adjacent and much more legible: run fast, get a reward, and the reward is gone the instant the timer expires. That’s a clean, honest bargain you can evaluate in a second. Risk of Rain 2’s bargain is smeared across an hour and you’re never quite sure you got it right. The uncertainty is the product.

Why the power fantasy lands

Roguelikes have a structural problem with escalation. If the player gets strong enough to trivialise the content, the game stops being interesting; so most designs cap the player, or scale the enemies to match, or reset the whole apparatus every run. Hopoo went the other way and let the ceiling off entirely.

By the third loop a well-built survivor is a war crime. The screen is a smear of proc effects, ricochets, mortars, satellite lasers and burning ground, and you are killing bosses in the time it takes them to finish their spawn animation. This is the same joy thatVampire Survivors later refined into a pure distillate — the pleasure of watching your own build outgrow your ability to follow what it’s doing.

The difference is that Risk of Rain 2 charges for it. Vampire Survivors ends at thirty minutes and hands you the victory lap. Risk of Rain 2’s clock keeps ticking past the point where your build is godlike, and the scaling curve is exponential where your item stacking is roughly linear. So the god phase is a phase. It has a shelf life. You are always, at every moment of the run, watching two lines on an invisible graph and trying to guess where they cross — and the right play is often to leave a stage with money in your pocket and chests unopened, which feels physically wrong and is correct.

Very few games make walking away from free loot into a skill.

Where it fights itself

The 3D translation cost something real. The 2013 original was a side-scroller, and a side-scroller tells you where everything is. In three dimensions, with a camera behind your shoulder and enemies spawning off-screen in every direction, the fair-fight legibility goes. Late in a run you will be killed by something you never saw, from a direction you had no reason to check, and the game’s answer to that is a minimap you don’t have and a sound mix that is already saturated. The tension between “readable combat” and “the screen should be chaos” never quite resolves.

The other cost is the ramp-in. The first ten minutes of a run are, by design, the least interesting ten minutes. Difficulty is low, items are few, and you are essentially doing paperwork to build a character. Once you’ve had four hundred runs, those minutes are a chore you tolerate. The scaling clock justifies it — you cannot skip the early game without also skipping the item economy — and I still think it’s the strongest argument for the design and the most obvious tax on your evening.

Multiplayer is where the seams show most. Up to four players share a stage, item drops don’t scale cleanly, and the difficulty coefficient rises with player count in a way that makes an uncoordinated four-stack a farm and a coordinated one a rout. It’s a joy to play with friends and it is not a balanced experience, and Hopoo were fairly upfront that it was never going to be.

The ancestor

Everyone reaches for Isaac or Spelunky here, and the resemblance is surface. The real ancestor of Risk of Rain 2 is the arcade timer — the coin-op design where the machine’s job is to end your session on a schedule, whatever your skill, and skill only buys you a longer schedule. Every one of those cabinets had a hidden rank system pushing back against a player who got too good.

The trick Hopoo pulled is exposing that clock, putting it in the corner of the screen, and making it the thing you play against rather than the thing that plays against you.Hades solved repetition by making the loop mean something narratively. Risk of Rain 2 solved it by making the loop mean something economically. Both are answers to the same question: why should I press start again? Hopoo’s answer is that last time you left two chests behind and you’ve spent the intervening hour wondering whether you should have.

The verdict

Risk of Rain 2 is the most honest tension engine in the genre. It gives you one number, tells you the number is your enemy, hands you every tool you need to manage it, and then quietly makes managing it the entire game. The combat is loose, the camera is a liability, the early minutes drag, the multiplayer is lopsided — and none of that matters much, because the thing it does is something almost nothing else does, and it does it for as long as you keep asking.

Play it on PC, where the mod scene has been carrying it for years and where the frame rate survives what the third loop does to the entity count. The console versions are complete and competent; they just wilt at the top end, which is where the game is.

Then, if the loop takes, go and see whatVampire Survivors does when you remove the ceiling and the aiming. It’s the same drug with the difficulty clock swapped for a shorter fuse.

Spoilers below

The reason the loop mechanic works — going back to Stage 1 with a difficulty coefficient that has never reset — is that it makes the map geography a memory test rather than a discovery. You already know where the chests are on Titanic Plains. You know where the shrine spawns cluster. So the second loop asks you to run a route you know at a speed you can’t quite sustain, and the pleasure flips from exploration to execution without changing a single asset.

The obliteration ending is the part I keep thinking about. You can end a run voluntarily, at the obelisk, by choosing to erase yourself. It’s the only exit that isn’t death and it costs you the run’s rewards. A game built entirely on the tension between greed and the clock offers you, as its cleanest ending, the option to stop wanting things. That’s a better joke than it has any right to be, and it took me a long time to notice it was a joke about me.

There’s a moment, some way into Alan Wake 2, when the game stops being a game and becomes a music video — a full-blown, choreographed, live-action rock number with the studio’s own creative director hoofing about in it, staged inside a survival horror published by the company that makes Fortnite.

Nobody made Remedy do that. That’s the whole review, really. Alan Wake 2 is a studio taking the biggest swing available to it, with somebody else’s money, on a sequel to a game from 2010 that most publishers would have quietly filed under “fondly remembered”.

It shipped on 27 October 2023 for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, published by Epic Games Publishing, digital-only, no disc. Directed by Sam Lake and Kyle Rowley. It is Remedy’s first actual survival horror after twenty-odd years of making third-person shooters that were secretly about something else, and it is the least compromised thing they have ever put out.

Two games in a trench coat

You play two people.

Saga Anderson is an FBI agent who arrives in Bright Falls to investigate a series of ritual killings, and her half is the procedural: rain-soaked Pacific Northwest towns, a caravan park, a flooded resort called Watery, a lot of walking through woods with a torch. Her signature system is theMind Place, a mental room she can step into at any moment to pin evidence to a case board, connect threads, and profile suspects by sitting in an imaginary chair opposite them.

Alan Wake has been in the Dark Place for thirteen years, writing a story to get out, and his half is a nightmare version of New York where the geometry lies. His system is theWriter’s Room, where he swaps out plot elements — pick a different angle for a scene, and the physical space rearranges to match the new draft. He also carries an angel lamp that can lift light out of one place and drop it into another, changing the whole state of a level between two versions of itself.

You can switch between them almost freely after the opening hours. Two protagonists, two structures, two visual languages, one story that only closes if you’ve been in both.

The reason this works, when it works, is that the two halves arearguing. Saga’s method is evidence: things happened, they can be established, a board can hold them. Alan’s method is authorship: things happen because someone wrote them, and the board is where you decide what’s true. Putting a detective and a novelist in the same plot and giving each of them a corkboard is a genuinely good joke, and the game is smart enough to know it’s a joke and serious enough to build both systems properly anyway.

The Mind Place problem

Except one of those boards doesn’t actually work, and it’s worth being specific about why, because it’s the clearest case in the game of the design fighting itself.

Saga’s case board cannot be wrong. You collect a piece of evidence, you go into the Mind Place, you drag it to the slot that lights up, and a thread appears. The game will not let you connect the wrong things. There’s no failure state, no dead end, no bad theory. It is aritual of deduction rather than deduction — the pleasure of tidying, dressed as the pleasure of thinking.

Compare it withReturn of the Obra Dinn, where being wrong is the entire texture of the experience and the game only confirms you in batches of three so you can’t brute-force it. Obra Dinn treats you as a reasoning adult who might fail. The Mind Place treats you as a reader who needs the plot restated in a nice room.

And yet — I don’t hate it, and here’s the honest complication. Alan Wake 2’s story is deliberately hard to hold, and the case board is where Sagasays out loud what she’s just worked out. It’s a comprehension aid with a lovely UI. As a puzzle system it’s theatre. As a narrative instrument, it’s the reason a plot this strange stays legible for twenty hours, and I’d rather have the legibility than a fake puzzle I’d have looked up anyway.

The Writer’s Room is the better system for the reverse reason: swapping a plot beat visiblychanges the level. The idea has consequences you can walk through. It’s the same trick Alan’s angel lamp pulls with light, and the same trickControl pulled with the Oldest House rearranging itself behind you. Remedy have been building the “the building is the plot” mechanic for years, and here it finally has a novelist in it, which is what it always wanted.

The horror, and the shooting

Survival horror, properly. Small inventory, real ammunition scarcity, save rooms with a locker, enemies that require a light-then-shoot two-step that makes every encounter cost something.

The light mechanic from the first game returns and is finally load-bearing. Enemies wear a shadow shield; you burn it off with the torch, and the torch has batteries. So a fight has a resource sequence — light, then bullets, then run — and the horror comes from the arithmetic breaking down halfway through. That’s a good system, borrowed knowingly from the genre, and the sound design sells it: the Taken don’t shamble so much asmutter, and the muttering arrives before they do.

The shooting itself is the weakest thing here, and Remedy know it. The guns are deliberately heavy and imprecise, dodging is a lurch, and after eight hours the encounters stop escalating — you fight the same handful of shapes in the same handful of ways, with more of them. Remedy have made some of the best third-person combat ever built. They have chosen, correctly, to make the combat in their horror game feel bad. The problem is that they didn’t cut enough of it, and a system you’ve deliberately made unpleasant should be rationed like the ammunition is.

The other soft spot is the middle. Alan’s Dark Place chapters are the most inventive material in the game and also the most repetitive traversal — the light-swapping is a puzzle you solve about nine times, and by the sixth it’s a chore with a beautiful skybox on it.

Why the swing lands anyway

Because of the confidence. Alan Wake 2 is full of things that should not survive a pitch meeting.

It has live-action FMV cut into it constantly — Ilkka Villi’s face, Matthew Porretta’s voice, a whole in-fiction talk show, an in-fiction TV anthology. FMV has been a punchline since the CD-ROM boom in the mid-90s, when every studio with a camcorder shoved grainy actors into a DOS game and called it cinema. Remedy have spent twenty years quietly refusing to let the idea die, from Max Payne’s photo-comic panels onward, and Alan Wake 2 is where it stops being a stylistic tic and becomes the actual grammar. The live-action isn’t cheaper than the engine. It’sanother layer of the fiction, deployed because a story about an author trapped in his own draft should keep showing you the seams.

The nearest recent relative isImmortality, which also understood that footage of a real face carries a charge no rendered model can fake. Immortality is the more rigorous experiment. Alan Wake 2 is the one that got a AAA budget and used it to stage a musical.

And the Remedy Connected Universe finally justifies itself. Alex Casey — Sam Lake’s face, James McCaffrey’s voice, a hard-bitten cop from a series of novels inside a game whose protagonist wrote them, played by the man who made Max Payne — is the kind of joke that only works if you’ve been paying attention for two decades. Control’s Federal Bureau of Control is here too, and it lands as a payoff rather than a homework assignment.

The verdict

Alan Wake 2 is the most interesting big-budget game of the year and it is not the mostenjoyable one, and I think Remedy would take that trade every time.

The combat drags, the middle sags, the case board is a magic trick pretending to be a mind. Against that: a studio that got handed serious money and spent it on a wordless twenty-hour argument about authorship, with a rock opera in the middle and a live-action talk show host doing the exposition. It is strange in a way games at this budget essentially stopped being around 2012, and the strangeness is not decoration — it’s structural, it’s the point, and it is worth more than another well-tuned shooting gallery.

Play it in the dark, in chunks, and let Saga’s board do the remembering for you.

What to play next:Control for the same studio building the same idea with concrete instead of ink, andImmortality for the purest version of the live-action gamble.

Spoilers below

The structural gag is that Alan is writing Saga’s story and Saga is investigating Alan’s, and both of them are right. Remedy commit to the loop hard enough that the game’s own chapters start behaving like drafts — the Initiation and Return labels aren’t flavour, they’re the manuscript’s table of contents, and the whole thing folds into a spiral where the ending is a beginning that’s been through a rewrite.

The chapter that makes the case for the whole project is We Sing. You walk into the Old Gods of Asgard material expecting a set-piece and get “Herald of Darkness”: a full musical number, live-action, that recaps thirteen years of a fictional writer’s biography in verse while you’re still holding a torch. It is the most expensive thing in the game and it has zero mechanical purpose, and it’s also the only sequence I’ve seen this year that made me put the controller down and grin at a wall. That’s the swing. A studio with a publisher breathing on it does not make We Sing.

The Dark Place’s rewriting of New York is where the Writer’s Room finally goes from clever to frightening — the moment the plot element you swap starts changing things you didn’t intend, and the tool you’ve been using to escape becomes the thing keeping you in. Alan’s arc lands because the mechanicis the theme: an author whose only power is authorship, in a place that grants it too literally.

The ending is a hinge into whatever comes next, and it’s the one place the ambition cashes a cheque it hasn’t earned yet. Remedy have built a universe and now owe it a resolution, and Alan Wake 2 closes on the confidence that they’ll get to make it. On this evidence, they’ve earned the benefit of the doubt.

Ten years is a long time to leave a series in a cupboard.Armored Core: Verdict Day came out in 2013, and then FromSoftware went and became the most influential studio in action games on somebody else’s dime, and the mechs sat in the dark while everyone learned to say “Souls-like” with a straight face.Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon arrived on 25 August this year, published by Bandai Namco, directed by Masaru Yamamura — lead game designer onSekiro — after Hidetaka Miyazaki started it and handed it over.

Read that credit list again, because it’s the review. This is a mech game directed by the man who designedSekiro, and it plays exactly like you’d fear and hope.

The stagger bar is a posture bar

Every enemy inAC6 has an ACS gauge — Attitude Control System — that fills as you land impact damage. Fill it and the target staggers: it stops, it can’t act, and every hit you land while it’s down does bonus damage under the Direct Hit system. Your own ACS works the same way, so a boss can do it to you.

That isSekiro’s posture bar with a coat of engine grease on it. Same shape, same argument: health is the score, and the real fight is over a second meter that measures whether you’re being allowed to act. Both games invert the natural instinct — chip away safely, retreat, repeat — because retreating lets the gauge drain. Pressure is the mechanic. Patience is the trap.

The difference is what you press.Sekiro gave you one sword and asked for timing.AC6 gives you four weapon hardpoints — a gun in each hand, a launcher on each shoulder — and asks for abuild that can fill an ACS bar faster than it empties. Impact and damage are separate stats on separate weapons. The pulse gun that shreds shields is bad against armour. The bazooka that staggers in two hits reloads slowly enough to lose you the window it just opened. So the assembly screen stops being a fashion choice and becomes the answer sheet for the fight you’re about to lose.

I want to be exact about why this feels good, because “customisation” is a lazy description of it. The assembly screen constrains you three ways at once: total weight against your legs’ load, energy draw against your generator’s output, and the boosters that turn all of it into movement. Change the arms and your legs are overloaded. Fix the legs and the generator won’t feed the shoulders. Every build is a small optimisation problem with a personality on the other side of it, and the game grades your answer in about ninety seconds of live fire.

Missions, not a world

AC6 is mission-based, and afterElden Ring that reads as a retreat. It isn’t. Mission structure is what makes the assembly screen mean anything: you get a briefing, you get a rough idea of what’s in there, and then you build for it. An open world would dissolve that instantly, because a build for everything is a build for nothing. The garage needs a door with a known thing behind it.

This is theSekiro lesson applied at a different scale. That game’s tightest design decision was refusing to let you respec your way around a wall, so the wall had to be climbed.AC6 lets you respec completely and for free between attempts — parts cost money, and the game refunds parts at full price, so experimentation is genuinely free — and then puts a wall in front of you anyway. The wall is the same. The tool for getting past it is a spreadsheet instead of a reflex, at first.

Chapter one’s is called Balteus, and it has already become the internet’s argument. It’s a hovering flying fortress with a shield, a missile barrage that fills the sky, and a second phase that sets the arena on fire. It arrives roughly three hours in and it stops a very large number of players dead, in the exact way the Genichiro fight did and the Asylum Demon didn’t. FromSoftware have used this shape for fifteen years: an early fight whose job is toteach, by refusing to let a bad answer through, long before the hardest fights arrive. Balteus’s lesson is that your loadout is a hypothesis, and that the pulse weapons the game gave you an hour ago are not decoration. People who bounce off it are usually people still trying to win with the starting build, which is the point — the game is telling you to go back to the garage and it is telling you loudly.

Where it fights itself

Two seams, and neither is fatal.

The first is that the boss rush eats the missions. When the duels are this good, the connective tissue — clear this outpost, escort this thing, hold this line — reads as a corridor between the good parts. The level design is smart and mostly brief, and it is still hard to care about a supply depot when there’s a duel waiting.

The second is the repair kit economy. You carry a fixed number of repair kits into a mission; that’s your entire healing budget, and it doesn’t refill at checkpoints in the way you’ll want it to. The intention is attrition. The effect, in practice, is that a mission you’re limping through is usually better abandoned early and started again clean, which is the design quietly paying you to give up. It’s a small thing. It sits in your teeth.

Then there’s the structure.AC6 wants three passes: NG+ and NG++ unlock new missions, new fights and different endings, and the story is genuinely unrecoverable from a single run. I take a forty-hour ask seriously as a thing demanded of a reader’s life, and I’ll defend this one — the repeats are short, the new content is real, and the mission list you’re re-running takes twenty minutes a sitting. But the game should say so on the tin, and it doesn’t.

The ancestors

The obvious one isArmored Core itself, 1997, on the PlayStation. I came to that one the way most Europeans did — through a magazine that couldn’t decide whether it was a sim or an action game — and it was genuinely both, in the sense that it was mostly a menu. You spent an hour in the garage, ninety seconds in the field, and the ninety seconds told you your hour was wrong.AC6 preserves that ratio with the lag taken out.

The deeper ancestor is the mech sim:MechWarrior 2 in 1995, the heat management and the loadout tonnage and the sense of driving a building.AC6 keeps the tonnage and deletes the weight of the walk. Its mechs move like a fighting-game character with a jetpack, which is precisely the fusion — sim maths, arcade hands.

And theSekiro debt, again, whichI’ve written about at length: this is FromSoftware’s second game about a meter that isn’t health, and they’re now unambiguously better at that than they are at hit points.

The verdict

Fires of Rubicon is FromSoftware admitting what they’ve actually been good at since 2019: the duel. It has dressed the duel in a garage, and the garage is a brilliant piece of design, because it converts “get better at this fight” into “understand this fight well enough to describe it in parts”. The mission wrapper is the weakest layer. The bosses are among the best they’ve made, which given the company is a serious sentence.

If you bounced offElden Ring because the open world diluted the fights, this is the concentrate. If you lovedthe open world FromSoftware earned, this will feel small until Balteus, and then it won’t. It’s on PC, PlayStation and Xbox; the PC version is where the assembly screen is comfortable, and the assembly screen is where you’ll live.

Go back to the garage. That’s the game.

Spoilers below

The three endings are the argument the missions can’t make. Fires of Raven, Liberator of Rubicon and — behind two full playthroughs — Alea Iacta Est all turn on what you do about Coral and about Ayre, and the structure means you can’t be told what the choice costs until you’ve already made it once. That’s an old-fashioned use of NG+, and it works, because 621 is a merc who doesn’t get context until someone pays for it. The player and the character learn the world in the same order.

The Sea Spider is the fight that reveals the real design. It has no gimmick weakness and no phase you can skip. It is a pure demand that you understand the ACS system, played at a tempo where the stagger window is worth roughly one good decision. Beating it means you have finally stopped thinking of your build as a preference.

And Walter’s arc is the closest FromSoftware have come to writing a boss who is sad rather than mysterious. The final chapter’s willingness to make a man’s principles into a health bar is unsubtle and it lands, mostly because the game has spent a whole campaign teaching you that everyone on Rubicon is renting their convictions from somebody with money.

Dead Cells left early access on 7 August 2018, which makes this month its fifth birthday and a reasonable moment to ask a question the launch reviews couldn’t: does the thing hold? Plenty of 2018’s roguelites are now a footnote and a Steam sale. Motion Twin’s is still receiving expansions —Return to Castlevania landed in March this year — and is still the game every new hybrid gets measured against. The word they coined for it, “RogueVania”, has outlived the marketing that produced it, which almost never happens.

The reason is a weld. Two genres that should reject each other were joined, and the joint holds under load.

The two things that shouldn’t fit

A roguelike is about a run: procedural, disposable, and meaningful only because death erases it. A Metroidvania is about a map: handmade, persistent, and meaningful because you memorise it and come back with the double jump. One genre throws the level away. The other asks you to live in it. Welding them naively gives you a procedural map nobody can memorise, which is the worst of both — the tedium of backtracking with none of the mastery.

Motion Twin — the Bordeaux worker co-operative that made this, before spinning off Evil Empire to carry the post-launch work — solved it by separating what is random from what is fixed. Thebiomes are fixed: the Prisoners’ Quarters, the Promenade of the Condemned, the Ramparts, the Ossuary. Each has a fixed character, fixed enemies, fixed exits. Theinteriors are procedural. So the map you memorise is the graph of biomes and how they connect, and the corridor you’re walking through right now is disposable. You learn the country and improvise the street. That’s the whole trick, and everyone who copiedDead Cells copied that before they copied the sword.

The Metroidvania half is then delivered through runes. The Vine Rune, the Teleportation Rune, the Ram Rune, the Spider Rune and the Homunculus Rune are permanent traversal unlocks, earned once from specific fights, and each one permanently opens branches of the biome graph that were previously closed. This is exactly a Metroidvania gate — a door you couldn’t open, then can — laid over a structure that resets every death. You lose your gear. You keep your keys. It is a startlingly clean idea and it took the genre most of a decade to arrive at it.

The flask is a design argument

Here’s the part I think people undervalue.Dead Cells gives you a health flask with a small number of charges per run. It is the only healing you can rely on. Everything else in the economy — the cells you bank, the gold you spend, the gear you pick up — is abundant. Health is not.

That single scarcity does an enormous amount of work. It makes every trade legible: taking a hit costs a fraction of a finite resource, so “I’ll just tank this” is a decision with a visible price rather than a shrug. It converts the combat from a damage race into a bookkeeping problem you solve with your thumbs. And it makes thepace of the game non-negotiable in a way a health bar alone never manages.

Timed doors are the other half of that argument. Scattered through the biomes are doors that open only if you reach them under a time limit, and behind them is good gear. Nothing forces you through one. The game simply prices dawdling and lets you decide. That’s a far more elegant instrument than a chase sequence or a countdown, because it produces the behaviour by making it attractive instead of compulsory. You start speedrunning the early biomes for a reward, and by the time you notice, you’ve internalised a movement grammar — roll, hit, roll — that the later biomes require.

By the time you’re on 5 Boss Stem Cells, the difficulty tier that gates the true ending, Malaise makes the argument explicit: it accumulates over time, buffs the enemies, and is pushed back by killing things. Aggression stops being a style. It becomes the only sustainable metabolism.

Where the loop fights itself

The build system is the seam. Weapons scale with one of three stat colours — Brutality, Tactics, Survival — and you raise a colour by choosing scrolls at the end of each level. Commit early and hard, and the numbers explode. Spread across colours and you end a run with a broad, weak character who dies to the first elite that respects itself.

This is a legible, teachable system, and it’s also a tax on the thing the game otherwise does best.Dead Cells is at its finest when you’re improvising with whatever the floor gave you. The scaling maths quietly instructs you to stop improvising and start filtering: a purple weapon in a red run is litter, however interesting it is. The game hands you a toybox and then explains that three quarters of the toys are wrong today. Custom Mode, added in 2020, is Motion Twin’s own admission of the problem — it lets you delete items from the pool so the drops match the build you wanted anyway.

The other seam is the Collector. Cells are the meta-currency; you bank them at checkpoints and spend them on permanent unlocks, and losing a run before a checkpoint loses the cells you were carrying. The intent is tension. The effect, often, is that a good run’s most stressful moment is a bank transfer.Hades answered this better two years later by making death a narrative beat and the currency almost unlosable, which I’ve arguedat length elsewhere.Risk of Rain 2 answered it byputting a clock on the whole thing and letting greed do the rest. Both are downstream of this game’s willingness to put a real cost on the meta-layer.

The ancestors

The obvious lineage isRogue Legacy (2013) for the meta-progression andCastlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997) for the map, andDead Cells nods so hard at the latter that it eventually licensed it. Fine, and true, and not the interesting answer.

The real ancestor of howDead Cellsfeels is the 16-bit European action-platformer, and specifically the Factor 5 lineage. I had a C64 from the mid-eighties and an Amiga from ‘87, and the thingTurrican understood in 1990 — the thing most of its imitators didn’t — was that a movement system is a rhythm instrument. You playedTurrican’s levels the way you’d play a phrase, with the run and the roll and the fire button as a chord.Dead Cells has that exactly: the roll’s invincibility frames, the way a weapon’s animation commits you for a fixed number of frames, the sound design snapping on the connect. It’s an instrument game wearing a roguelite’s clothes.

That’s also why the procedural interiors don’t hurt. When the pleasure is in executing a phrase, the room can be arbitrary. The run is the composition. The map is the key signature.

The verdict

Five years and five content drops on —Rise of the Giant,The Bad Seed,Fatal Falls,The Queen and the Sea,Return to Castlevania — it has the rare distinction of having been correct on day one and better every year since. The weld holds. The flask still hurts. The movement is still the best in the genre, and I include everything that has arrived since in that.

Its flaw is honest and structural: a colour-coded build economy that fights the improvisation it otherwise sells, patched over with an options menu. Live with it. Custom Mode exists for a reason and using it is not cheating, whatever the forums say.

It’s on everything — PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, mobile — and the Switch version remains the one I’d point at, because this is a game built in eight-minute phrases and eight-minute phrases belong on a handheld. Start on 0 Boss Stem Cells. Take the timed doors. Pick a colour and stay married to it.

If the movement is what grabs you,Metroid Dread is the handmade version of the same instrument — no procedural anything, every corridor authored, and a demonstration of what the fixed map buys when you commit to it fully.

Spoilers below

The Hand of the King is the fight the whole design points at, and it’s a deliberate anticlimax in the best way: after a dozen-odd biomes of improvisation, the final boss is a pure test of the grammar. No gimmick, no phase where your build stops working, just the roll timing you’ve been practising since the Prisoners’ Quarters, asked for at speed. Motion Twin resisted the urge to make the last fight a puzzle. It’s an exam.

The true ending needs 5BC, and that gate is the smartest editorial decision in the game. Everything the story has to say about the island concerns a plague that keeps reanimating what it kills, and 5BC is the tier where Malaise forces you to kill continuously to stay alive. You have to run the disease’s own metabolism before the game will explain the disease. A mechanic and a story agreeing with each other is a rarer event in this genre than the trophy list suggests, and Motion Twin got there by hiding the payoff behind the difficulty that proves the point.