Secrets of Strixhaven, Magic: The Gathering’s return to a university setting debuted in 2022, improves on the original set in all but one key way. It’s also gotten me quite philosophical about the trading card game’s fundamental design.

First: the good stuff — every college is playable in limited! I’m still partial to blue-green Quandrix and its abundant color-fixing, which makes it the college best positioned to splash five-color converge cards. I abused this mechanic in my first Arena Early Access draft in a particularly silly game against Luis Scott-Vargas, a pro player I’ve followed for years. The next day, as the Early Access period neared its end, he returned the favor, pummeling me with Together as One and Arcane Omens. The latter card has surprised me. I typically pass on costly discard spells, but when enabled early enough it can empty an opponent’s hand — a fate I’ve never recovered from.

More focused two-color decks can also shine. While red-white Lorehold struggled to pull off its graveyard themes in the first set, it’s now supported with numerous flashback and exile cards. Blue-red Prismari once again benefits from casting expensive spells. Its common mascot generates card advantage into the late game and its uncommon Spectacular Skywhale can win out of nowhere (an opponent once killed me with a 22-power Skywhale, thanks to Bulk Up). White-black Silverquill decks are even faster than before. Their speed reminds me of the heroic archetypes from Theros, but their repartee mechanic is more flexible as it also triggers when you target opposing creatures with removal.

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I’m less impressed with green-black Witherbloom, but it’s worked for me as an aggro deck. Two-drops like Bogwater Lumaret and Teacher’s Pest are crucial to this strategy, as you’ll need to consistently gain life to empower infusion cards like Pest Mascot and Poisoner’s Apprentice. Tricks like Efflorescence and Lumaret’s Favor have overperformed in my decks, but only on offense — they’re bad when you’re behind.

Like Lorwyn Eclipsed, Secrets of Strixhaven (amusingly abbreviated as SOS) is all about accumulating value. The set’s full of two-for-ones, as many creatures come “prepared” with instants or sorceries you can cast later. X-cost spells scale well into the late game, further aiding control and ramp decks. The resulting gameplay can feel polarized; either you’re losing to bloated Lecturing Scornmages and Scolding Administrators on turn five, or you’re drawing tons of cards and closing games out with Jadzi, Steward of Fate and an eleven-mana Oracle’s Gift.

Strixhaven’s Mystical Archive also returns, deepening the format. These 65 cards (not counting their Japanese variants!) feature classic instants and sorceries from Magic’s past and present, from Alpha’s Armageddon to Aetherdrift’s Stock Up. This time they’re nearly all draft playable — even Commander reprints like Akroma’s Will are decent in limited. Original Strixhaven cards like Culling Ritual, Expressive Iteration, and Fracture also make an appearance and I love how they look in the new full-art, transparent card frame.

SOS does not reprise my favorite thing about Strixhaven, however. Draft obsessives like me adored its Learn mechanic, problematic as it was for constructed play (not unlike Ikoria’s emergency-nerfed Companions). SOS omits Learn and includes only five new Lessons — paltry in comparison to Avatar: The Last Airbender’s 36 Lessons. Magic designers said that SOS didn’t have room to revisit Lessons and Learn together, an excuse I’ll begrudgingly accept. I took it upon myself to reunite the mechanics in a Strixhaven/Avatar cube that I playtested this week.

More broadly, SOS has got me thinking about two-color faction design. My musings began in a press preview. A fellow journalist asked what makes Strixhaven’s five colleges different from the two-color guilds that dominate Ravnica. The design team responded by saying that the Ravnican factions never get along (except when extraplanar forces invade the city — which has happened twice in recent years). Strixhaven colleges all share the same goal: the education of an increasingly diverse crop of young wizards, warlocks, bards, clerics, druids, and sorcerers.

The original Ravnica block formalized Magic’s ten two-color pairs. Later sets like Return to Ravnica set the standard for “Guild formats” — drafts that focus on particular color pairs while excluding others. This philosophy undergirds recent small sets like Spider-Man and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but it’s also evident in big premier sets like Lorwyn Eclipsed. Each of these sets drill down into five of the ten color pairs — you can pursue other combinations, but only at your own risk.

Curious about the viability of drafting outside the colleges, I finished my SOS Early Access experience with a blue-white deck. Shockingly, it achieved a 6-3 record — nearly a perfect finish. I chalk that up to the strength of my control cards and the game-ending mythics I lucked into: Emeritus of Ideation and Restoration Seminar. But I’d still advise splashing into a third color instead of drafting an unsupported color pair.

As someone who's always accepted the typical ten archetype arrangement, I'm now wondering if that's actually ideal. Throne of Eldraine famously embraced fifteen different decks between mono-colors and pairs, though all weren't equally viable. Lorwyn Eclipsed supports five pairs based on creature types, but all of them could dip into vivid or -1/-1 counters cards, which almost acted like their own archetypes. And of course converge hangs over SOS — a theme any college could attempt, even if Quandrix can most easily do so.

Broader questions aside, I’ve little doubt that SOS will stand out as much as Lorwyn Eclipsed did. In a year dominated by crossovers, it’s refreshing to revisit one of my favorite home-grown settings — one that also happens to be an advanced course in compelling faction design. I can't quite give it full marks, but I'm learning to love it.

People of Note, out this week from publisher Annapurna Interactive, is half music puns, half inventive JRPG. Its vibrant world, cast, combat, and soundtrack kept me humming along for over 20 hours. But despite its warmth and wit, the game’s story never quite transcended cliche.

Granted, I didn’t expect much subtlety or subversion. The game resembles an earnest Broadway musical, not unlike 2023’s Stray Gods. But while the latter focused on sleuthing and choose-your-own-adventure songs, People of Note’s showstopping numbers come between snappy turn-based battles and lengthy environmental puzzles. They’re wonderfully sung and animated, even as their lyrics are more trite than self-aware.

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The game begins with a simple dream. Our aspiring singer, Cadence, wants to win the American Idol-style competition her nation hosts every year. After wrangling a spot in the contest, she decides to stand out from the pop crowd by recruiting musicians from neighboring countries — each based on a different musical genre. While picking up band-mates in the lands of Rock, EDM, and Rap, she stumbles upon a conspiracy that threatens all of reality.

It’s a bit like Brütal Legend, without Tim Schafer’s keen writing and Jack Black’s laid-back humor. But instead of combining real-time strategy and action, People of Note sticks to a turn-based JRPG format. Most attacks and abilities require timed button presses a la Paper Mario, though you can’t parry or dodge enemies like you can in Clair Obscur. But the game’s musical combat ranges beyond these rhythmic QTEs.

The game challenges you to manage your mana (“beat points”) while composing symphonies of attacks, buffs, and combos. Each “stanza,” or turn, has a key signature, showing you how many actions you and your enemies will take each round. Stanzas can also feature one or several musical styles that empower matching party members. Characters can’t go again until everyone else has taken their turn, and some effects permanently buff or debuff measures on the stanza bar, forcing you to carefully sequence actions.

As your party takes damage they fill a special meter, eventually unlocking genre “mash-ups” that unleash devastating effects. Add in Materia-style “Songstones” that upgrade and alter abilities, and you’ve got a system that me had experimenting with builds and replaying bosses until I’d honed my performance like a well-tuned orchestra.

The combat isn’t just mechanically sound. It’s also accompanied by striking animation and a score that modulates as you move between areas and featured band-mates. This polish and charm pervades the rest of your quest. The world’s full of animal/instrument hybrids — you can even pet the “Accorgian” dogs! You run into “Weird Owls” which drop feathers if you answer their trivia questions correctly. Eventually, you can trade these to an “Ordinary Al,” who will reward you with prizes as he steadily becomes Weirder (get it?). Nearly every title or scrap of dialogue contains a music pun or cheeky reference.

Each region teems with lively disputes. The Metal, Punk and Grunge factions of Durandis, for example, struggle to unite against the Country music raiders encroaching on their land. A drug cartel opposes the most popular DJ of Lumina, while the prince of Pyre, the Rap kingdom, refuses the responsibilities of the crown. Back in Cadence’s native Chordia, a reigning member of the “Council of Fifths” schemes to keep the boy band he manages on the top of the charts, while secretly plotting his own 1980s-style pop takeover.

The overarching plot doesn’t hit as well as most of these side stories. By the penultimate region, the main quest detours into a mediocre, miniature Ace Attorney mystery. The finale feels a little clumsy — I kept expecting a twist or character revelation that never came. And, of course, the whole thing ends with a blow-out concert, predictably harping on the power of friendship and unity.

If People of Note was better-written — if its lyrics were sharper and its story more surprising and cohesive — it’d easily rank as one of my favorite indie RPGs. I’d have also preferred shorter puzzles that didn’t involve as much backtracking. Yet despite these dissonant notes, the game deserves a standing ovation for its gorgeous presentation and brilliant combat system. I’d eagerly line up for an encore if developer Iridium Studios ever gets around to it.

A buffet today — reviews and impressions of other big March games I haven’t yet written about.

Super Mario Bros.™ Wonder – Nintendo Switch™ 2 Edition + Meetup in Bellabel Park Upgrade Pack

Yes, that title might be the longest in video game history. This Switch 2 upgrade to SMB Wonder, one of my favorite games of 2023, adds a bevvy of new features, including…

• Plentiful multiplayer challenges,

• Seven new boss levels, scattered across the overworld,

• The new playable character Rosalina, and “Co-Star Luma,” which enables a Galaxy-style co-op mode,

• and the Super Flower Pot, a power which suits you up in leafy green, complete with flowery headwear. Use the power to conjure spinning flowers that hurtle upwards, damaging enemies and obstacles above you. You can also flutter your leaf-arms to jump further.

The expansion begins with an invitation to the titular Bellabel Park, a legendary garden disrupted by the nefarious Koopalings, who’ve made off with the seven bell-like flowers that give the Park its name. Captain Todd promptly leaves to track the ne’er-do-wells, setting up camps across the overworld. Find him and you’ll drop into a boss level, where a Koopaling will taunt you and transform into a monstrous giant with what’s left of Bowser’s stolen Wonder power.

These new levels match the original game’s most boisterous and novel stages. The fights also showcase the Flower Pot’s abilities, as the metamorphosed Koopalings usually loom above you, perfect targets for its upward-spinning attacks.

While these bosses can be challenged by up to four players, like all of the stages from the original game, multiplayer is mandatory for most of Bellabel Park. There’s three main modes:

• Local Versus — free-for-all or team challenges for two to four players. They’re a bit like Mario Party minigames, often retrofitted to dozens of existing Wonder levels. One minute you’ll be racing to pick up the most coins, the next you’ll be firing bubble cannons to knock opponents into electric walls.

• Local Co-op — these minigames get less intuitive. One requires you and your team to complete a stage after jumping a specific number of times. Another has you try to survive by bouncing on a cloud that’s weighed down by coins and enemies.

• Game Room Plaza — even more minigames you can only access by playing with online friends or with another nearby Switch 2. As far as I could tell, there aren’t public servers to play these games with strangers.

Bellabel Park also boasts a “training” mode — a series of single-player challenges that require you to beat levels under special conditions (such as a time limit). Succeed at these or finish multiplayer minigames to win water drops, which you can spend to grow blooms throughout the Park. Many of these flowers are purely decorative, but some give you new badges or emojis to equip.

My wife, a few friends, and I cruised through nearly all the multiplayer modes. These minigames mellow out the breakneck pace of Wonder’s co-op, since many of them occur in one screen. You won’t often leave slower players behind, as is easy to do in the base game.

While it’s got less to offer a solo player, Bellabel Park feels more substantial than most Switch 2 upgrade packs. Its multiplayer additions are even more of a party than Jamboree TV! At $20, it’s easy to recommend to owners of the base game.

Pokémon Pokopia

Pokopia surprised me. I expected Pokémon Stardew Valley, but it’s more akin to Minecraft, Animal Crossing, and Viva Pinata. My wife and I took turns building habitats, chatting with the Pokémon they attracted, and unravelling the game’s unexpectedly poignant background mystery.

Precision designed to trigger nostalgia for the original Pokémon games I grew up with, Pokopia slowly unspooled as I explored its desolated Kanto region. I’d excavate the ruins of familiar towns, read notes from its vanished residents, and compare observations with other Pokémon who also mourned the loss of their human companions.

I didn’t love all the busywork the game imposed on me. I especially hated the game’s awful inventory management (just let me access my storage boxes all at once — even the original Pokémon let you do something like that!). But Pokopia injects so much personality into its characters and biomes that it’s easy to forgive its nettlesome quirks. While my wife and I enjoyed the frantic Pokémon Legends: Z-A, Pokopia’s mellow charm has rightfully cemented its reputation as one of the best games in the franchise.

Screamer

Half anime-inspired visual novel, half racing sim, Screamer initially impressed me until I fell victim to its vicious learning curve. Decades of Mario Kart didn’t prepare me for Screamer’s technical drifting and gear-shifting. Its melodramatic plot and riotous characters kept me going, however, even as I spent hours replaying courses to master them.

Uncharacteristically, I haven’t messed with the game’s multiplayer modes — its long single-player campaign was the real draw. But even on the “Story focus” difficulty, I hit a wall in Chapter 25. I tried the “neural assist” settings to automatically brake and shift. After hearing those options slow you down too much, I remapped the controls to something more intuitive. But no matter how many tweaks and attempts I tried, I couldn’t seem to place better than eighth.

In my defense, some characters are just plain tricky or sluggish (here’s looking at you, Róisín). The campaign’s also strewn with enough difficulty spikes to derail even the most committed gearhead. Screamer may one day be patched to be accessible enough for me to conquer it, but in the meantime, I’m tempted to experience the rest of its bonkers soap opera on YouTube.

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I also sunk some hours into Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection, Homura Hime, and Slay the Spire 2’s early access. I’ll have more to say on these games later, but I’ll note now that StS2’s co-op has been a ridiculous romp. The more players you add, the less brutal the game gets until it resembles a much sillier, much less tactical Hellcard. I don’t even care that it’s wildly unbalanced for more than one player — it’s a delight to abuse the game’s combos in a big party. I hope that its multiplayer mechanics only deepen as the game’s development continues.

I rolled into Wyldheart as a drunk, outfitted with little more than rags and a broken bottle. Over the next twenty minutes, two of the game’s developers and I scrabbled with slime monsters, skeletons, and zombies, as we crept through grimy, trap-infested corridors. I scrounged some raggedy armor and a magic staff, which studio co-founder Dennis Brännvall helped me complete with a fire gem he’d found. In mere seconds, this makeshift flamethrower annihilated the dungeon’s final boss, an unexpectedly effective combo that made the devs ruefully admit that they needed to boost its HP!

Thus began my time with Wyldheart, an upcoming RPG that’s far earthier than the high fantasy heroics of Dungeons and Dragons. Brännvall told me the game’s more influenced by the Scandinavian tabletop tradition, particularly Free League Publishing games like Forbidden Lands and Vaesen. In Wyldheart, you start as little more than a peasant, with most of your power tied to random items instead of level-ups. While Brännvall said more fantasy races are in the works, you can currently choose between the Halfling-like Mosslings, the Ogre-esque Grimhorns, and the humanish Freefolk. Brännvall’s team hopes to avoid the classic “Elves and Dwarves,” opting for an aesthetic closer to Nordic folklore than Tolkienian fantasy.

The game alternates between real-time dungeons, each tuned to be roughly half-an-hour long, and an open overworld inspired by hexcrawl RPGs and the West Marches. Your caravan, and the characters you and up to three other friends pilot, totter around as tabletop standees as they explore this overworld environment. Each campaign’s intended to last around ten hours, featuring seamless drop-in and drop-out co-op.

I’m always in the market for this kind of collaborative game. I slurped up all of Wildermyth and Sunderfolk, alongside a rotating cast comprised of my wife, my bro-in-law, and a few close friends. Wyldheart’s real-time dungeoneering isn’t as immediately accessible as the turn-based tactics of these other games, however. I won’t be able to hold my baby while playing it, for example, and my wife might struggle to swerve a camera and fight at the same time. As much as Wyldheart draws on tabletop games, it does assume a modicum of third-person action familiarity.

But Wyldheart’s otherwise friendly to the new parent lifestyle. Completing a ten-hour campaign would be much more manageable than finishing our second co-op Baldur’s Gate 3 playthrough, a goal that’s stalled since our son’s arrival. I can’t comment on the quality of Wyldheart’s writing, however — what I’ve seen focused on mechanics. Should it manage some compelling adventures and NPCs, I’m hopeful this plucky indie could fill the Wildermyth-shaped hole in my life.

A dozen hours into Crimson Desert, and I’ve yet to explore a desert. I’ve gone to the Abyss, which you’d think would be underground — but no, it’s in the sky. Mostly, I’ve chased down livestock, hobnobbed with goblins, and gathered crew members in a camp that looks suspiciously like the one in Red Dead Redemption 2. Cobbled together from numerous influences, Crimson Desert, out tomorrow, is likely the strangest, most disjointed AAA game I’ve ever played.

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Perhaps something’s lost in translation, since the game comes from Pearl Abyss (maybe that’s why it’s called the Abyss?), the Korean developer behind the massively multiplayer Black Desert Online. Crimson Desert is similarly huge — in the scope of its fantasy world, the aridity of its plot, and the minutiae of the mechanics it supports.

The game starts simply enough. You play as Kliff, a sword-wielding wanderer who’s like Geralt of Rivia without the sass. Within minutes of launching the game, Kliff dies while fighting his sworn enemies, the Black Bears, who scatter his clan of vaguely-Viking, vaguely-Celtic Greymanes. He doesn’t stay dead for long — revived by some convenient and unexplained magic, Kliff awakes downstream from the waterfall he fell into, ready to reunite his clan and wreak vengeance on the Black Bears.

At least, that’s what I inferred about Kliff’s motivations, which remain unclear through the game’s opening chapter. What I’ll narrate next is barely a story — more a jangly sequence of quest directives that illustrate the game’s baffling narrative design.

After saving a local cartographer from bandits, Kliff trundles into town, only for guards to bar him from a castle because his clothes aren’t nice enough. He then sweeps into an inn and wins some money in an arm-wrestling contest, which he immediately gives to a beggar, who thanks him and disappears around a corner in a puff of particle effects. Kliff then descends into the sewers through the trapdoor the beggar was sitting on, answering the cries of captured noblewoman, who he promptly frees. She says something cryptic about Kliff “passing a test” before also disappearing.

Not long after that, Kliff’s whisked away to a sky-island, where the beggar, now revealed to be a great wizard, informs him that he’s been enlisted against a rising “chaos” that threatens the land. He’s given some spiffy magic abilities, which come in handy for the Breath of the Wild physics puzzles the game then throws at him. At no point does Kliff ask follow-up questions or marvel at world-saving task set before him. For much of the early game, he may as well be a silent protagonist, a cipher with little agency outside of what map icons demand.

More conventional storytelling and characterization crops up now and again. Kliff can muster some passable dialogue to speak over the missions that force him to dutifully follow someone on horseback — and what little personality he’s got surfaces in scenes where he discovers an old Greymane buddy. But as soon as the game unceremoniously dumped another playable character into my camp, I swapped to her, eager to be rid of him. Sadly, I couldn’t take her into the next few quests. I’d hit a text box that simply said “Kliff’s Story” and get dragged back to the primary protagonist.

Along the way Crimson Desert kept introducing mechanics and minigames. I learned to whack tent posts and sweep a chimney. I confused two of my magical abilities — one raises objects, the other twists and manipulates them. I frequently forgot how to activate my “Visione” — a dorky helmet that enabled me to reconstruct past scenes. Heck, the controller’s so overstuffed with commands that I’d even struggle to properly pick up objects.

This complexity underpins a vast, systems-driven game, but it’s fettered by other annoyances. Every time you encounter a new object, person, or place, a three-second-long “Learning in Progress” bar will fill, rewarding you with an entry in a sprawling pause-menu compendium. This isn’t much trouble when it’s ambiently happening as you explore, but it’s excruciating when you’re identifying a vendor’s wares. Bounty quests require you to physically pick up a flyer and scan it the same way. Meanwhile, if you’re anything like me, you’ll compulsively snatch everything in sight, from raw meat to grasshoppers to silverware, only to realize just how limited your inventory is — you’ll have to complete minor quests (errands, essentially) to slowly expand it.

Crimson Desert’s combat is also a lot less Elden Ring and a lot more Assassin’s Creed (though stealth isn’t nearly so viable). I rolled through early fights by spamming heavy attacks and kicks to break an opponent’s guard. The skill tree, which you’ll level up by spending special cubes earned through quests or discovered while exploring, eventually incorporated a huge variety of combos and counters, but I rarely needed to use them.

I’ll admit, however, that I’ve only delved into a fraction of what Crimson Desert offers. The game was too colossal to summit in the weeks I had to preview it. But the hours I spent painted a picture of a project that never found its focus. It’s an open world game where you can free-climb on nearly anything and ride your horse nearly anywhere — but exploration rarely feels like its own reward. It’s a medieval life-sim where you can busy yourself with ranching, mining, fishing and more — but these activities rarely entertain in themselves. It’s beautifully animated, but NPCs frequently overact like community theater performers, and character moments rarely feel earned.

My snidest self wants to jump to the easy metaphor: that this “desert” is just a wide sandbox where little life can grow. Yet, I really do respect the game’s ambition and its bustling, diverse world. Crimson Desert bursts with ideas — many are borrowed, but many are surprising and truly bizarre. Something majestic may yet lurk beneath the sands.

Arkham Horror: The Card Game, my favorite iteration of the Lovecraftian tabletop empire, took nearly a decade to tangle with Cthulhu directly. So rather than try to top that long-awaited spectacle in last year’s Drowned City expansion, the cooperative game is celebrating its 10th anniversary with a reboot. But this new chapter’s “glorious rebirth” feels more like a discordant echo: an uneven mix of investigator cards paired with an unexpectedly brutal campaign.

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The 2026 Core Set addresses a ballooning issue. The Arkham Horror card pool has gotten so deep that it’s nearly impossible to balance, frequent errata updates notwithstanding. Its dozens of product releases, many of which are out of print, daunt all but the most fanatical of collectors (I was lucky to jump into the game in 2018 — I ran so many concurrent campaigns that I acquired not one by three original Core Sets, and nearly every release since). With such a massive back catalog, Josiah “Duke” Harrist and Nicholas Kory, who inherited the game from creators Nate French and MJ Newman, decided to wipe the slate clean.

Something new, something old, something borrowed

The new Core Set inaugurates Arkham Horror’s “Chapter Two.” All cards printed before it form the “legacy” environment — players are free to use them, but future scenarios aren’t designed to accommodate them. The move’s intended to welcome newbies and encourage veterans to get creative with a much, much smaller card pool.

It’s not exactly all-new, however. The Core Set reprints a few staples for each of the five Investigator classes, like Ward of Protection for Mystics and Deduction for Seekers. Many other cards reference the classics, like Dorothy Simmons, a modest version of the famously overpowered Dr. Milan Christopher. Dorothy even makes the connection in her flavor text: “I’ve taken every class that Dr. Christopher offers!”

Seekers otherwise got the least revision. Nearly half of their cards — 6 of the 14— are reprints. That proportion is much lower for the other classes, which have about two or three reprints each. Meanwhile, most of the 19 Neutral cards are reprints as well.

The 2026 Core Set also reimagines characters from past products. Jim Culver’s far more playable in his new Ally form than he ever was an Investigator. The notorious David Renfield, once an Ally, now shows up as an NPC in the accompanying Brethren of Ash campaign. And then, of course, there’s the five headlining Investigators — all but one have appeared on Investigator cards before.

The Survivor, Isabelle Barnes (Izzie), is the new girl — the long-lost sister of Jenny Barnes, one of the game’s oldest Investigators. The Rogue Trish Scarborough has gone from spy to former spy, but retained her stats and emphasis on evasion. The Seeker Joe Diamond is still a private eye, but he’s traded his quirky Hunch deck for a straightforward card-drawing effect. The Guardian Daniela Reyes has arguably changed the least, with similar, if simpler, effects, stats, and deckbuilding options. Finally, the Mystic Dexter Drake also resembles to his earlier incarnation — but he’s harder to exploit without a wide variety of Assets to build around.

Playing with fire

Experienced as I might be, I wanted to review the Core Set’s campaign as a new player would, using the preconstructed decks included for each Investigator. My wife picked Joe. I picked Dexter. We had a rough time.

The campaign feels like an escalation of the original Core Set. Where 2016’s Night of the Zealot began with ghouls invading your house, Brethren of Ash opens with the iconic Miskatonic University on fire. The scenario then throws a lethal Elite enemy in your path after a few turns. It’s a cruel lesson — an introduction to how Arkham Horror often requires you to dance around problems, rather than confront them head on. Between our poor evasion skills and some incredibly unlucky token pulls, Dexter and Joe went down in flames.

Dissatisfied with Dexter, I swapped to Trish to join the traumatized Joe as we scoured Arkham for arsonists. Our fortunes, and my impression of the campaign, improved. This middle scenario reimagines the original Core Set’s Midnight Masks scenario, as you attempt to identify conspirators among the city’s luminaries. It’s more narratively rich, however, thanks to a Codex with paragraphs of story content, which you’ll consult after clearing card challenges. We outmaneuvered some baddies, including the same Elite, and fled after interrogating most of the suspects.

The final Brethren of Ash scenario drowned my renewed optimism. It takes place in a sewer, which the game acknowledges is a silly place for a fire cult to conduct its apocalyptic ritual. After fumbling around for clues, the game then dropped a truly impossible boss on us, along with our old Elite friend. Our only option was to have Joe open the sluice gates — a heroic sacrifice that killed everyone but Trish, who had narrowly escaped.

You’d think that epic conclusion would be narratively satisfying, but the resulting Resolution didn’t tie up any loose ends. Night of the Zealot at least gives you a companion Ally to bounce off of — it spins an intimate story into something with earth-shattering stakes. Brethren of Ash felt oddly impersonal. It began with a summons to find a nameless friend at Miskatonic University, and ended with generic cultists whirling around a wicker man. That anticlimax, combined with the steep learning curve, makes me hesitant to recommend this campaign to the uninitiated. Fresh players would be better served by taking one of the new investigators to an old campaign, like Night of the Zealot, or a side-mission, like the excellent Murder at the Excelsior Hotel.

Into the unknown

It’s not all disappointments, however. I admire the 2026 Core Set’s production values (though I have to note that the Rulebook and the Campaign Guide disagree about which tokens to use — it’s clear the Campaign Guide is correct). The box includes a nice token bag and, at long last, some dividers to sort the encounter cards, an inclusion I’ve not seen since the old “Return to” campaign expansions. Sadly, the dividers are too tall for the box, but they’ve got indentations that bend when the lid closes over them.

I’m also hopeful for the year’s other Arkham Horror releases, even as I worry that they’ll include many reprints I won’t need. By positioning Chapter Two as a sequel, the game’s designers can push recurring characters in new directions. The upcoming Investigator decks look exciting, if expensive, and I’m intrigued by this summer’s Children of Blood small campaign expansion.

But I’m not planning to commit to the slim Chapter Two card pool. I’ve already taken an Izzie deck into a Drowned City campaign, after sorting through all the Skills that she could best abuse. While I’ll accept some deckbuilding restrictions for novelty or to better roleplay as a character, I’ve grown fond of the arcane mess Arkham Horror has become. The legacy game might be an unwieldy, cyclopean nightmare, but it’s my unwieldy, cyclopean nightmare — and I’d rather go mad than give it up.

I’ve barely begun new indie RPG Esoteric Ebb, and I’ve eaten so many apples that I’ve fallen ill. I failed to convince a Kobold to hand over his snazzy crossbow, but did manage to charm a date out of an intriguing orc. I then almost got my finger bitten off by a giant seagull, ended up stuck riding a windmill, and hid in a barrel after fleeing from an audience with a Goblin matriarch.

Developer Christoffer Bodegård named both Planescape: Torment and Disco Elysium as inspirations for Esoteric Ebb — but it’s sillier than either game. Cheeky comedy, however, isn’t its strongest suit. That honor goes to its inventive setting, which remixes Dungeons and Dragons tropes and injects a hefty dose of modern-day politicking.

You play as a cleric of Urth, the patron god of Norvik — the last majority-human city in a world populated by fantasy creatures drawn from other realms. Tasked to investigate an explosion in a tea shop mere days before the city’s first democratic election, you wake up on a mortuary slab with a mild case of amnesia and your omnipresent helmet, which you can replace but never remove.

Planescape: Torment also began with a mysterious mortuary and amnesia, of course, but Esoteric Ebb quickly moves past this template as its protagonist begins to recollect his quest and his past. You play most of the game by wandering around and talking to citizens and suspects, all while six narrators — each tied to a classic DnD stat — bicker inside your head. This core conceit streamlines Disco Elysium’s cacophony of internal voices, and it’s where the game fleshes out its personality and competing philosophies.

Strength speaks authoritatively, worships power, and pushes you toward the Nationalist party that your fellow clerics ascribe to. Constitution rarely chimes in, but encourages you to go with your gut and aligns with the down-and-out Agrarian faction. Dexterity wants you to be acquisitive and admires the Freestriders, a (supposedly) liberal coalition that broke the tyranny of the Arcanists, mage-kings who ruled the world for centuries.

Intelligence, the most arrogant of the attributes, wants to re-establish that overthrown order, so long as you can be the Arcanist to lead Norvik. Wisdom tries to give a voice to the downtrodden and supports the socialistic Azgalists, a workers party popularized by Dwarven exiles. Finally, Charisma doesn’t care what ideology you choose — politics are just a means to its end of becoming famous and beloved.

Throughout the game, you’ll roll twenty-sided dice and add your attribute modifiers to navigate dialogue trees, overcome obstacles, and triumph in occasional battles. Attribute checks can be straightforward (use Intelligence to crack a puzzle or Charisma to craft a convincing argument, etc.), or more imaginative than their DnD counterparts (use Strength to appeal to someone’s sense of duty, or Constitution to withstand someone’s menacing aura, for example). You’ll also use these attributes to “Behold” NPCs. Such checks vary depending on the character — you could roll Dexterity to check out a merchant or Strength to size up a guard, for example. Roll well to glean someone’s class, alignment, and snippets of their backstory.

This flexible and simplified DnD system invites min-maxing. I chose to be proficient in Intelligence and Charisma but soon pumped points into Wisdom, thanks to level-ups, gear, and potent stat-boosting drinks. It took me a while to realize that I could also unlock feats after completing quests — you can equip up to four feats to modify stats or incur situational advantages. Esoteric Ebb also borrows from Disco Elysium here, as you’ll go through some introspective dialogue to pick between feat options provided at the end of a major questline.

These options aren’t created equal. Many feats give nominal advantages in combat, which I never chose since the game allowed me to reason my way out of most fights. Feats that improved equipment bonuses, on the other hand, could be bonkers in my build. I failed, however, to appreciate just how good a money-boosting feat would be — I later discovered a midnight potion seller that I was too poor to buy out.

While I’m on the subject of regrets, I’ll mention that I didn’t prioritize Dexterity until too late in the game. You can use it to pick-pocket nearly anyone! Failure rarely results in more than a slap on the wrist. Such behavior might not reflect well on the city government you represent, but it really eases your path through the game.

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Like Disco Elysium, Esoteric Ebb takes place over a few days — minutes tick down as you encounter new dialogue. Some actions take one or several in-game hours to finish. I worried about this time pressure, but as I approached the finale I found that I’d run out of obvious things to do. I instead stumbled around for hours, uncovering rooms and troves I’d missed with the aid of the Detect Secrets spell. Two minor quests stumped me, but I completed everything else I could find.

Though Esoteric Ebb captivated me for over 20 hours, it’s rarely as sophisticated as its chief influences. Your main sidekick, Snell, attempts to model the quiet confidence and dry wit of Disco Elysium’s Kim Kitsuragi but comes up short. Factious and layered as Norvik is, it’s no Sigil, the wonderfully-realized metropolis at the heart of Planescape: Torment. Nor does the writing meet the standard of either game. Its philosophical excursions range from insightful to insipid. The optional lore footnotes — which register as red text you can press a button to unfurl — contribute to the game’s rich worldbuilding and contain sly allusions, but they interrupt conversations so frequently that I started to skim them.

But compared to just about any other CRPG (besides Baldur’s Gate 3, naturally), Esoteric Ebb scores well. It teems with eccentric characters and novel challenges. Its central mystery connects to complex geopolitics outside Norvik, but stays grounded in the concerns of the neighborhoods you’ll explore. Its climax surprised me with its musings on religion, community, and nation-building. And its final dialogue screen deftly weaves the game’s narrative and mechanical themes together — and has been stamped onto my retinas since I saw it.

Above all, Esoteric Ebb feels like a joyous tabletop campaign. Its creator, Christoffer Bodegård, actually speaks to you after the credits drop, a Dungeon Master eagerly plotting your next adventure. I’ll gladly go wherever he wants to take me.

Where Esoteric Ebb reaches back to the golden era of CRPGs, Scott Pilgrim EX, also out this week, returns to the 90s beat-’em-up formula. It’s a welcome evolution of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game that feels more like a successor to the 2023 animated series Scott Pilgrim Takes Off rather than the comics or the film.

Mechanically, the game switches from a linear stage format to an interconnected world. You’ll choose between seven playable characters — which include the original power-couple, Scott and Ramona, four of Ramona’s “evil Exes” (don’t worry, they’re on your side now), and Robot-01, from Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. My wife and I rolled as the skateboarding movie star Lucas Lee and the demon-summoning Matthew Patel, and we crashed through Toronto, scurrying between quest icons and boss fights.

Along the way, we leveled up and collected cash to buy trinkets and health-restoring food items. Bosses often ruined us on the first attempt, but we found more success after experimenting with the Assist characters we gradually accumulated. These folks, drawn from the wider Scott Pilgrim cast, provide crucial buffs, heals, and attacks.

While my wife stayed loyal to Lucas, I started to swap between brawlers and realized that levels are tied to characters not players. That didn’t stop me from changing it up, but it did mean that I’d sometimes flounder as my wife’s level outpaced mine.

Cute pixel art and nostalgia for the Scott Pilgrim universe, however, aren’t enough to unseat Absolum as our favorite beat-em-up. But Scott Pilgrim EX does have the advantage of going up to four players, where Absolum only accommodates two. I’ll be adding it to my party game rotation, and expect my extended family to chew through it when I see them in a few weeks!

Magic: The Gathering — Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is expertly crafted and kind of a bummer. Like last fall’s Spider-Man crossover, it’s teensier than the average Magic set — which limits its breadth and chokes its replayability. In a bizarre development for a 33-year-old fantasy game, it too takes place in New York, meaning that the real-world city boasts more representation on Magic cards than homegrown settings like Strixhaven.

Much as I gnash my teeth at the proliferation of these smaller IP tie-ins, I have to admit that TMNT succeeds far more than Spider-Man did. Given the constraints its designers labored under, the set punches above its weight class. Over the course of an early-access Arena period, I explored its five main archetypes in draft and sealed events: White-Black Ninjas, Blue-Green Mutants, Black-Green Disappear, Red-White Alliance, and Blue-Red Artifacts. They’re all viable, and they all blend together thoughtfully.

Flexible mana-costs and key fixing cards enable this fluid gameplay. Where Spider-Man focused on allied color pairs, TMNT centers around more mechanically pliable enemy colors. Each pair features two hybrid commons — some, like Mechanized Ninja Cavalry and Slithering Cryptid, fit into three archetypes, boosting their draft desirability. On top of that, all ten of the set’s multicolor rares are hybrid, which allowed me to play the White-Green Mikey & Leo, Chaos & Order in a White-Black Ninjas deck, and the Blue-Green Mikey & Don, Party Planners in a Blue-Red Artifacts deck.

Splashing a third color isn’t too hard either, thanks to five new gain-lands, an Escape Tunnel reprint, and Omni-Cheese Pizza, an effective reprint of Golden Egg, the Eldraine all-star. Green, as always, has the best fixing. It’s got a common two-drop mana dork, the uncommon Mona Lisa, and a sneaky variant of Explosive Vegetation.

All that said, you’re still best off sticking to two colors most of the time, but the set’s rares and mythics are so powerful that you’ll sometimes stretch your mana-base to accommodate them. Thankfully, TMNT has a slightly higher removal ratio than usual, which compensates for the plentiful bombs. And while I expected the format to be aggressive, games can go long enough to justify the inclusion of expensive cards like Krang, Utrom Warlord and Armaggon, Future Shark (which beat every opponent I drew it against).

Enjoyable as I’ve found the format, it’ll soon outstay its welcome. TMNT will be in rotation longer than Lorwyn Eclipsed, even though it’s only two-thirds its size. Fondness for the source material won’t cut it for me either, as my familiarity only goes so deep as one YouTube video, the Mutant Mayhem movie, and the superb 2022 beat-’em-up, Shredder’s Revenge. At least I can pretend we’re on Kamigawa sometimes — the (non-Turtle) ninjas and avatars would feel at home in Neon Dynasty.

I do worry that Wizards might keep making small sets like TMNT and Spider-Man, as the company races to stuff as many releases into the year as possible. It’s the latest sign of shrinking draft variety in the FIRE design era, when Wizards ended the block structure and focused exclusively on single-set drafts. Bonus sheets included in sets like Strixhaven and Outlaws of Thunder Junction helped decks stay unpredictable, but I miss the wild days of Dragon’s Maze draft, which spread nearly 650 cards over three sets. That format’s much-maligned these days — and I recognize Wizards will never do something like it again — but small sets just can’t capture the unruly possibility space that makes limited Magic so memorable.

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If you’ve gotten this far you deserve a treat! Here’s an excellent UR artifacts deck, piloted to a 4-1 finish in the Pick-Two Draft event:

Here’s a UG mutations deck that also earned a 4-1 finish:

And while I forgot to take a picture of this WB 4-1 Ninja’s deck, I did snap this glorious moment. My opponent conceded after I baited them into blocking a Sally Pride, which I then reanimated with a sneaky Karai:

Turtle Team-Up Review

Finally, I have to talk about the Turtle Team-Up product, because it didn’t quite offer the co-op experience I wanted. On sale for roughly $40, the box comes with four 60-card decks with three rares apiece and two decks only usable in the co-op mode: a Boss Deck and an Event Deck.

Two to four players each choose a Turtle deck and play against the Boss/Event decks, played over three rounds. Both teams start at the same life total — 20 for the 2-player game, 30 for the 3-player game, and 40 for the 4-player game. You begin by drawing one Boss, which comes with a static effect. Then the Turtle players take their first turn, playing normally. The Boss goes next, flipping two event cards, which range from middling creatures that can’t block (typically 3/3’s) or devastating effects like “Destroy All Turtles.” Turns alternate until the Turtles lose or manage to defeat the first Boss. If the Turtles clear the first round, they draw two more Bosses, the Boss life total resets, and the Bosses get to keep any creatures they have in play. Defeat those two, and you’ll draw THREE Bosses and reset as before for the final round.

The problem — aside from the low-powered Turtle decks, which feel like Jumpstart decks stretched to 60-cards — is that the events can either be innocuous or back-breaking depending on the stage of the game. My wife and I were unlucky enough to flip Krang in the first round, which made the Boss draw THREE event cards a turn before we could get rolling! Facing an overwhelming board presence, we forfeited in stage two and tried again. This time, the event deck was much kinder, and we sailed through all three boss rounds without losing any life!

$40-$50 is simply too much to ask for Turtle Team-Up, though I’d recommend it if it’s ever on sale for $20ish. It’d actually work a lot better as a 2v2 format, as each deck has a few cards that can aid teammates. As such, I’m still intrigued by the co-op mode and have thought about rebalancing it by marking some events to shuffle in during the second or third boss round.

Resident Evil: Requiem tries to be all things for all people. It’s a survival horror game in the mold of RE7 and RE8; it’s also an action game ripped from the RE4 Remake. It’s a new story with a new protagonist; it’s also a nostalgic story with a recurring protagonist — one determined to recreate past highlights and reframe inciting events behind the whole series.

Perhaps it’s miraculous that the game works as well as it does, given how the franchise nearly imploded after its last attempt to tie everything together in the disastrous RE6. Despite an overwrought plot that eventually teeters into absurdity, Requiem is scary and satisfying. But it’s never as great as the games that went into its hybrid DNA.

Requiem begins with the fresh-faced Grace Ashcroft, dispatched by the FBI to a dilapidated hotel where a mysterious body was found. The assignment is especially traumatic for Grace, as it’s also where she witnessed her mother’s murder years ago. Why Grace’s boss chose her to investigate, let alone investigate by herself, without a partner, is never explained — a decision that I questioned even more once I realized Grace isn’t an FBI agent, she’s an analyst who’s much more comfortable behind a desk than a gun!

Sufficeth to say — things go poorly. Series veteran Leon Kennedy then arrives to the scene to pursue this predictably distressed damsel, looking more rugged and haunted than we’ve ever seen him.

These opening minutes illustrate the game’s core contrast. While Requiem defaults to a first-person perspective when you’re methodically exploring as Grace, it switches to third-person for Leon so you can blow away goons just like you did in RE4.

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Leon’s appearances also recontextualize Grace’s struggles. With a much bigger inventory and health pool, Leon can easily shotgun, chainsaw, and snipe foes that Grace overcame through pluck, stealth, and weapons synthesized from infected blood (yes, blood — while Leon crafts items with scrap metal and gunpowder, Grace often makes stuff by combining scraps with blood she’s syphoned from buckets, bathtubs, and corpses).

Initially, Leon’s action set-pieces offer brief, tension-relieving moments of catharsis in between Grace’s lengthy survival horror escapades. By the second half of the game, the ratio flips. Leon starts driving the plot, and while there’s still plenty of exploration, I missed the puzzles and sneaky, tactical combat of the Grace sections. I also tired of Leon’s constant one-liners. 80’s movie cliches started to colonize Leon’s vocabulary in RE4, when he levelled up from rookie cop to globe-trotting badass. By Requiem, Leon’s so Flanderized that his incessant punning elicited more groans than grins.

It doesn’t help that with the exception of a few great bosses and some superb call-backs to RE2, Leon’s main adventure muddles along in drab, ashen environments. No longer contained to ornate hallways and claustrophobic corners, these open areas and zombie hordes could also strain the Switch 2’s graphical powers.

Requiem picks up in its final chapter before ultimately dropping the ball. By the time I’d clocked in a dozen hours, the game had defanged much of its horror, explained away most of its mysteries, and indulged in some shockingly trite sentimentalities.

I’d feared as much, as the DLC for RE8 suffered from similar problems. Resident Evil has always ridden the line between intentionally schlocky writing and irredeemably bad writing, and it tilts further towards the former as Requiem rolls on. Excellent survival horror and decent action make up for the disappointing plot — but only just.

The more I reflect, the more Requiem feels like an inflection point for the series. Resident Evil has always mutated when it’s needed to — morphing from survival horror to action in 2005’s RE4, then back again in 2017’s RE7. By bouncing between both styles in one game, Requiem feels like a half-measure; a sign that the series needs a new synthesis to carry it into its fourth decade.

But don’t call it a swan song. Requiem’s still got enough life in it to keep the franchise shambling on for now.

[While the following review is spoiler-free, I tacked on a brief discussion of the game’s best ending in the audio version above!]

Where 2023’s Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo opens with a creepy conversation and a ghastly murder, Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse, out this week, begins with a sunny ocean dive. It gets much spookier from there, but the core of the game remains unabashedly optimistic, even sentimental.

In less skillful hands, this mélange of grisly horror, paranormal romance, in-depth historical fiction, and metatextual design would sink to the bottom of the sea. But series director and writer Takanari Ishiyama sets a pitch-perfect pace, as revelation after revelation roils the game’s deceptively placid surface.

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You play this visual novel by bouncing between four protagonists across a timeline you’ll steadily expand. Try every dialogue option and recollect flashbacks when prompted, and you’re most of the way there. If you’ve fully searched a chapter, it’ll fade into sepia-tone, prompting you to continue your hunt elsewhere. You’ll also unlock a vast archive of notes: from character backstories to the local lore of Ise Bay to the real history that underpins its legends.

Along the way you’ll solve puzzles and occasionally return to the (admittedly lackluster) diving minigame. If you’ve dutifully read the extensive notes, you shouldn’t have much trouble typing answers to its fill-in-the-blank prompts. Warning: progress in one chapter can hinge on specific outcomes reached in an earlier chapter. Some terrible fates are impossible to avoid the first time through.

When it goes dark, The Mermaid’s Curse commits as hard as Seven Mysteries of Honjo. Expect plenty of blood on your path to an ultimate happy ending — but know that persistence will always prevail. I cruised through the game’s story until the final ending puzzle stumped me for nearly three hours. Remembering how meta the first game was, patience and lateral thinking got me back on the right track.

That obscure challenge aside, The Mermaid’s Curse is tighter and smoother than its predecessor. While I was dazed by its torrent of lore and similarly-named historical figures, Ishiyama expertly weaves these details together by the end. If anything, the game’s a bit too exhaustive, as it adds paragraphs of extra information to peruse on top of its often expository dialogue. Granted, these notes can be revelatory and charming — and suffice as a way to shoehorn more details into what’s otherwise a focused plot. But by the time I got to the super-secret ending, I wished Ishiyama showed a little more than he told.

But what Ishiyama does show made me fall in love with the fictional island of Kameshima and the cast that swirled around it. The Seven Mysteries of Honjo had plenty of antiheroes and colorful foils — none were quite as goofy as Avi, as earnest as Sato, or as slyly playful as Yumeko. I don’t think protagonists need to be likable, but the characters of The Mermaid’s Curse are so charismatic that you’ll want to hang out with them. While its brighter tone initially threw me, it gets grim often enough to keep the sense of urgency and threat alive. I’ve come to prefer the The Mermaid’s Curse over the original Paranormasight and heartily recommend it to anyone looking for a spellbinding thriller.

My wife and I slide around a pinball court, bouncing off bumpers and diving for stray tennis balls. We swap between rackets at a “Racket Factory,” use their absurd powers, and then toss them away. We aim for a Wonder Flower and then fail to hit the seeds that have suddenly appeared atop green pipes in the middle of the match.

Developed by frequent Nintendo collaborator Camelot, Mario Tennis Fever takes plenty of whacky swings and lands most of them. I’ve been playing nearly nonstop (baby care aside) since its release this week, conscripting my wife whenever she’s free for a round of doubles.

I began with the game’s single-player Adventure mode, which opens with a bonkers conceit before slipping into doldrums. Questing after a golden fruit to cure an ailing Princess Daisy, Mario, Wario, Luigi, Waluigi, and Princess Peach get hit by a curse that transforms them into babies. Forced to grind to tennis stardom, you’ll go back to school — literally.

Adventure mode insists on teaching you every shot in the game one by one — Topsin, Slice, Flat, Lob, Drop, Star, and Fever. You’ll scurry between coaching sessions, training minigames, multiple-choice tests, practical tests, and — finally — actual matches. I sprinted through most of these challenges (except for one rally against a Toad, which took over 10 minutes!), and ignored most of the Academy’s side-content. It still took my nearly two hours to graduate from this exhaustive tutorial.

The game gets more inventive and entertaining after that, as it swerves from airships to ice caves to jungles. You’ll defeat each of your enemies by slapping projectiles with your rackets — levelling up and gathering more Fever rackets as you go. You can only unleash a Fever shot after filling up a special bar, granting you a bullet-time moment to aim. If your opponents don’t return the ball before it bounces, the Fever effect deploys — splattering the court with fireballs, whirlwinds, pokeys, and more.

Naturally, you’ll face off against a meddling Bowser as you seek to reverse your infantile curse. Apart from the novelty of seeing Wario and Waluigi in baby form, the plot’s hardly notable (though its RPG trappings did make me wistful for Camelot’s Golden Sun series). Amusingly, you never see that dastardly duo transform back into adults as Mario, Luigi, and Peach do. Perhaps they’re babies still!

My biggest critique of Adventure mode, apart from its laborious first chapter, is its lack of co-op. You’ve got a doubles partner for the vast majority of the campaign, so Camelot should have allowed for a second player to tag in for those matches.

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Thankfully, the game’s other formats all include multiplayer. There’s the usual Tournament mode, for both singles and doubles, where you’ll match one of 38 characters with 30 Fever Rackets (both of which you’ll unlock by achieving milestones). There’s Trial Towers, where up to two players run a gauntlet of special challenges — exhaust your three lives and you’ll have to start over from the beginning. Then there’s Free Play — the closest the game comes to a Super Smash custom ruleset. You choose between all the courts, characters, and rackets you’ve unlocked. You can even carry two different Fever Rackets per player and freely switch between them!

Mix It Up, however, is the mode that most resembles a loony arcade game, as each Special Match bends the rules further and further. Shoot tennis balls through rings! Pound them towards squares festooned with Piranha plants, who can gobble them up and spit them back out! Activate a Wonder Flower and scramble to shoot wonder seeds before your opponents collect them all!

I’ve been playing the Camelot Mario Tennis games since their debut in the early 2000s, and Fever’s definitely the most inventive of the bunch. The new slate of rackets stir just enough weirdness and strategy into a recipe that can otherwise grow stale. Fond as I am of the game, though, it’s nowhere near as deep as Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Mario Kart World or even Kirby Air Riders.

But few games are so immediately accessible. Even if you’ve never held a racket, you get the concept: hit the ball over the net. Add in some Mario zaniness and you’ve got something I’ll eagerly serve to friends and family for years to come.

Reanimal, the latest horror platformer from the originators of the Little Nightmares series, isn’t as successful. The game’s co-op so frustrated my wife that she forsook it after its opening chapters. Playing solo, I then spent an hour wandering around an abandoned cinema, unaware that the bolt cutters I needed to progress were across the street and over a fence. Later, the game conditioned me to button-mash my way through combat encounters before throwing me into a room where the solution was to ignore baddies and sneak around them. A counterintuitive design choice, to say the least.

These and other frustrations have made it hard to love Reanimal, much as I admire its unnerving atmosphere. Unlike the Little Nightmares games I’ve played, Reanimal features some sparse dialogue and a more coherent story. Rather than jump from one surreal set-piece to the next, the game slowly guides you through a terrifying world with body horror to rival Inside. But compared to that classic, Reanimal often feels opaque — less intellectual challenge and more a maddening hunt for items you must have missed. It’s not the satisfying adventure I’d hoped for, much less the smooth co-op experience I’d craved.

Sporting around ten body-warping mutations each, my cats have never looked more freakish or wielded more power.

I’ve lost count of how many kittens I’ve raised and how many campaigns I’ve waged. I’ve run through three story acts, each with its own routes and bosses. I’ve killed untold numbers of alley cats, robo cats, dino cats, man-cats, angels, demons, aliens, Nazis, living piles of poop and more.

I accomplished all of this through the game’s cumbersome Steam Deck controls. It might be “Verified” for the device, but its design favors keyboard and mouse over buttons and joysticks. Mewgenics hooked me so much, however, that I endured its fiddly cursor, its lack of obvious shortcuts, and its occasionally maddening UI. After 80 hours, I’ve barely slowed down.

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Mad Science

Indie dev and fellow Magic: The Gathering enthusiast Edmund McMillen cemented his reputation with Super Meat Boy, a punishing platformer, and The Binding of Isaac, an insanely deep roguelike I devoted over 600 hours to. His games blend scatological humor, biblical horror, and uncompromising difficulty with an art style that’s simultaneously gross and cute. He and frequent collaborator Tyler Glaiel teamed up to make Mewgenics, which has been in the works for well over a decade — so long that I forgot it was coming out this year!

You play as an expired cat lady, reanimated by Dr. Beanies, a self-proclaimed genius. For a purpose that's kept obscure for most of the game, he's tasked you to breed cats that you’ll dispatch in teams of four to venture through streets, caves, deserts, and beyond. One cat levels up after each battle, which comes interspersed between skill challenges, item pickups, and shops. If a cat falls to an enemy, they’ll bear a permanent stat-lowering injury but will revive after the fight should their body not sustain much additional damage. After the boss of each stage, you can return home or press on, eventually unlocking the final area of an act.

Whether you’ve fully succeeded or retreated before an act’s climax, your surviving cats will join their fellows in a house you’ll gradually upgrade after each run. There, they’ll mate (with each other and with the strays you’ll attract) to birth kittens that’ll inherit the stats and quirks of their parents.

This premise isn’t exactly unprecedented. Fire Emblem: Awakening made you matchmake a huge roster of soldiers who would then fight alongside their children. Rogue Legacy had your family of adventurers storm an ever-shifting castle, generation after generation. Massive Chalice boasted a procedural system that created bloodlines of heroes over centuries.

But none of those games were about cats — and none of them come close to being as unhinged.

All in the Family

Early into a Mewgenics campaign, my troop stumbled into a copier machine. Unsure how this encounter would go, I chose an option at random to see my cats become clones of my shapeshifting Druid, Bleck. Suddenly, my well-balanced party all had the same stats and abilities, reshaping not just the run, but the entire course of the game.

It turns out that four Druids with Wolf Form and pet birds could crush anything in Act 1, easy. I levelled them up around similar lines — drafting the “Feral” trait and upgrading it to boost strength and speed. When all four Blecks returned, they sired brawny kittens — some descendants were even lucky enough to also inherit the Feral trait!

Awesome as this was, my homogenizing population needed new blood. While random mutations are usually net positives, inbreeding risks “defects” that can be strictly bad (-2 to Intelligence, etc.) or come with a game-changing trade-off (like “Depression,” which lowers a cat’s stats and the stats of all units around it).

Thankfully, healthy strays would show up at my door every day. I’d throw them into my increasingly incestuous cuddle-puddle while sending unwanted cats to characters around town. Over time, I maximized this engine; trading mediocre kittens to Tink, old cats to Tracy, and injured cats to Baby Jack, to name a few. After hitting milestones with these NPCs, I’d unlock more dialogue, information, and items to buy.

My veteran cats couldn’t go campaigning again, but they got another chance at glory. Every so often, one of nine successive “house bosses” showed up at my door and I’d deploy cats to fend them off. One of my Blecks died to such a monster, but the rest succeeded and then truly retired. Cats who’ve faced a house boss can’t do anything but hang around and breed until they expire fromof old age or you move them on.

This metagame doesn’t stretch on forever, though. Each day my cats consumed food, a resource I earned on runs in addition to money. Once my pantry emptied, I’d head out to scavenge more with the best cats available.

Are we the baddies? (Some spoilers ahead!)

The progeny of the Blecks accrued mutations that continued the close combat trend. I all-but abandoned ranged classes like the Hunter, favoring flexible classes like the Monk or melee classes like the Cleric, the Fighter, or the Butcher. Looking back on this crucial fork in the road, I’m awed by how unique each Mewgenics playthrough will be. Your choices will resonate through generations, pushing your cats toward the playstyles you’ve had the most success with.

By the late game, I’d perfected my kitten factory to weed out all but the coolest mutations. I’d honed a “fight club” — a room with an idol I’d unlocked that rewarded the winners of the (potential mortal) duels that occur when your a room’s comfort stat gets too low. I’d racked up a body count and a perilously inbred population, since new strays mostly went to the fight club instead of the dating pool. I delighted in my well-oiled machine, even as it got less and less cuddly.

“Wholesome” could never describe this game, of course. NPCs range from abrasive to pitiable to loathsome, with Dr. Beanies emerging as a true megalomaniac who urges you to literally kill God (which admittedly, fits into a long-standing RPG trope).

The game even explores a nightmarish foil to Dr. Beanies’ genetic ambitions: a future where humans have become not heroic Übermenschen but useless blobs ruled by robots and a cyborg Hitler (it’s like a darker version of Wall-E!). By invoking real-world Nazism, even in such outrageous satire, McMillen and Glaiel are clearly aware that eugenics aren’t all fun and games. Much as Mewgenics might reward you for obsessing over genes, it goes out of its way to let you literally stomp fascists in the face.

While Nazism envisions genocidal, genetic uniformity, Mewgenics commits to mechanical neurodiversity. Disorders like Autism, OCD, or Williams Syndrome come with drawbacks but can be bonkers in the right build. In the hands of a speedrunner, ADHD is all gas, for example, as it bestows bonus stats at the cost of timer.

After five seconds without direction, an attention-deficient cat will make its own moves, which has backfired on me enough times that I’ve mostly pulled them out of my population — an awkward thing for me to say, as I’ve been prescribed medication for ADHD! Granted, if I was playing with a keyboard and mouse, not the clumsy Steam Deck controls, I think I could have kept up.

Therein lies the rub, right? Surely there’s something icky about the way the game’s incentives led me to purge disordered cats from my ranks. On the other hand, some people with such conditions have celebrated their inclusion. PC Gamer’s Tyler Wilde reported the McMillen’s fans have pitched the developer on how to model their own conditions: “They like the challenge of representing their minds and bodies with game logic, and the idea that they might in some small way be understood through the context of tactical cat battles.” If Mewgenics is making any statement about disability or genetics, it's trying to challenge the player to consider the value of difference while optimizing for mechanical utility.

The bottom line (spoiler free!)

Here’s what I do know: Mewgenics captured me this year like Hades 2 did last year. It may not be as pretty, and it may not have a sophisticated story, but its systems are incredibly smart. It’s a deck-builder where you slowly evolve the cards you want to play with. Like The Binding of Isaac, it’s breathtakingly bizarre and endlessly surprising — the product of indie visionaries who could never get away with this kind of crass absurdism in a corporate context.

And then there’s the sound design! It should come as no surprise that an employee of National Public Radio couldn’t get enough of the station that blares jazzy music and loony news updates as you micromanage your house and herd your cats. Each stage has its own theme, which culminates in actual songs, complete with lyrics, that you’ll hear in the boss round. Beat these bosses enough and their songs will get added to the rotation at home. Cats will sometimes even meow along!

Mewgenics releases February 10th, and I can’t wait to see what mutated weirdos my fellow players will create. If The Binding of Isaac’s trajectory is anything to go by, the game will only get more expansive with each passing year. I’m not a cat person, but Mewgenics has sunk its claws very deep into me indeed.

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Tips for new Mewgenicists

• Always read the enemy descriptions. Some of the later ones can one-shot a cat!

• You can quit out of a fight once per run to reset it without consequence! If you’ve had a disastrous fight, play it out as much as possible to get information, then close the game and restart.

• Remember to use Tactical View (Y on controller, Left CTRL on keyboard) to make it much easier to see the position of enemies and allies on the battlefield.

• The game has keyboard shortcuts it doesn’t really tell you about. I could only map a few of them to my Steam Deck controls, but keep in mind that 1=move, 2=weapon slot, Q=basic action, W=the action to the right of your basic action, and so on.

• If you don’t want to see your cats hump every night, you can switch to “safe” animations in the settings. I prefer “random,” as you’ll see kittens spawn from magic circles and get delivered by storks, in addition to the usual grind.

• Use the house construction view to easily clean up cat poop!

• Once you unlock the Idol of Evolution in Tracy’s store, prioritize it! It’ll cause your cats to mutate at home. You don’t have to buy her food containers or blank collars until you need to— they come up again on rotation.

• Stack furniture — cat-trees on top of couches on top of beds, etc.

• Consider temporarily moving a new crop of kittens outside or to another, less populated room while you scan their stats to see if they’re worth keeping or not! Rooms can get so crowded you can easily miss the little critters, and, rather bafflingly, you never unlock a way to view cats by category.

• Tink will eventually teach you how to track relationships, but if you notice two cats keep banging, be careful about breaking them up — they may be a breeding pair.

• It’s handy to have one coin ability per run because you can’t carry more than 99 coins back with you. That said, make sure you always keep at least ten coins per stage so you can afford Tracy’s Rare Candy every time it’s offered.

• Don’t be afraid of hard paths once you’ve got the hang of a stage!

• If a combo seems broken it probably is! Read ability descriptions carefully but take them at their word.

My eyes never stopped rolling at the original Code Vein’s risqué outfits and anime absurdities, but I relished co-oping its campaign with a dear friend.

We’d already toured the FromSoftware canon together after he introduced me to Dark Souls with a gift copy of its Prepare to Die Edition. Code Vein doesn’t rival the greatness of that series, but it had the advantage of coming out in 2019 — an era when decent soulslikes were harder to find, let alone decent soulslikes with co-op.

Debuting nearly seven years later, Code Vein 2 faces stiff competition from a recent slate of high-profile FromSoft imitators, from Black Myth: Wukong to Lies of P. Its anime aesthetic is no longer unique in the genre either, and it can’t even summon much nostalgia for the original game, since it features a new cast and setting.

Co-op could have helped Code Vein 2 stand out. Outside of the odd Nioh or Remnant title, few soulslike franchises have prioritized multiplayer as FromSoft has. But Bandai Namco made the baffling decision to abandon co-op, perhaps deigning it too labor-intensive or too hard to integrate into its new, open world design.

I’m left with a Code Vein 2 that’s awkwardly grafted Elden Ring into its DNA, without its multiplayer modes or its breathtaking commitment to player agency. CV2’s character creator stands as the only element to surpass this titan — with its kaleidoscope of eye colors, body shapes, hairstyles, hats, tattoos, scars, piercings, cloaks, corsets, and more.

The action gameplay isn’t so expansive. There’s no armor to speak of, and the game’s weapon variety — while broad — pales in comparison to Elden Ring. Its deepest customization system again comes from its Blood Codes. NPCs hand out these stat-twisting archetypes, which you can freely swap between and level up as you play.

I’ve still enjoyed my hours with the game, as I sneaked, slashed, and performed visceral — I mean, drain — attacks upon hapless foes. But without a friend to pull me through, I’m skeptical I’ll come close to finishing it. I’m already turning my attention to No Rest for the Wicked, a fusion of Diablo and Dark Souls that just added co-op (it’s also from the developer of the masterful Ori and the Will of the Wisps, one of my favorite metroidvanias). If Code Vein 2 follows suit, perhaps I’ll jump back in.

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Speaking of multiplayer games, we also caught up with HUNT(er/ed), kindly provided by Tabletop Bookshelf, a purveyor of indie TTRPGs. Aside from the booklet, all the game really requires is four d6s and a standard playing card deck. While a single player mode can guide you to self-narrate a duel between a monster and its nemesis, my wife and I played the two-player version, each taking oppositional roles.

Rounds begin with players rolling their two dice until someone gets doubles. That player then moves a token (which can be literally anything) closer to them, indicating that the fight has tilted in their favor. They’ll then draw from the deck until they hit a card with a suit matching their role (spades/clubs for the hunter, hearts/diamonds for the monster). Finally, they’ll read the corresponding prompt from the booklet, answering its question and advancing the story. These queries throw you through the ups and downs of mortal combat — though they also push players to explore mutual backstories and surprising conclusions.

The game supports any duo you can think of. Rather than start with a classic werewolf vs ranger faceoff, however, I took the role of a pet songbird who was plotting to kill the housecat he blamed for the deaths of his outdoor fellows.

After gouging out a feline eye with a sewing needle, my bird character got imprisoned in his cage by Feefee the cat. Having won the bout, my wife narrated the cat’s persistence and the bird’s stunted revenge. Such was just one possible outcome the game steered us to. Another of our sessions ended in farce. Others could end in deep tragedy or even reconciliation.

Like any TTRPG, HUNT(er/ed)’s mileage depends on how willing you are to play along, but its premise will likely wear thin after a few sessions. As an exploration of what it means to hunt and what it means to be hunted, the game invites deep metaphors and imaginative introspection. It may not be the most innovative example of the recent roleplaying renaissance, but it’s an approachable entry-point that can generate a cool story or two in games that last anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours.

A computer made of vacuum tubes and half-remembered dreams. The swirling ephemera of professors, editors, novelists, mystics, and radicals. A dire conflict, just off screen.

Beneath its unassuming interface, TR-49 — a new game by inkle, the developer of last year’s excellent Expelled! — hides mysteries aplenty. You play by rifling through the contents of a machine built from the technology used to break Nazi codes. This “Textual Reassociator” has, for a half-century, ingested books and articles that range from classic literature to baffling esoterica. The fate of your character, and her entire world, hinge on its enigmatic purpose.

TR-49 isn’t exactly an occult large language model, though. It’s more of a semiotic labyrinth — an interactive Umberto Eco story. You hop from entry to entry, each labelled with a four-digit code. You’ll learn to identity authors by their initials and discover new texts as you infer their publication dates. The system invites educated guesswork; sometimes it took me a few tries to deduce the right code, other times I’d stumble into something revelatory when I mistyped a letter.

TR-49’s exquisite sound design complements its morose score. Press a button to radio your counterpart in the outside world to glean the wider context behind your work. As you hit milestones, the conversation escalates as the stakes rise. Each time you access an entry, you’ll hear a garbled quotation from the book or article it’s pulling from. These clips only clear up once you’ve matched the code to its correct title, and even then they spill out crackly and fuzzed.

From the electrifying audio to the postmodern, self-reflexive writing, TR-49 totally entrapped me. I discovered all but the last of its major secrets, which I spent much of last night trying and failing to excavate. That’s the only quibble I can think of. I’ve been playing inkle games since 80 Days, which came out over a decade ago, and I’ve left all of them slightly unfulfilled. Something in their narrative and puzzle design crosses over into frustration whenever I near 100 percent completion.

For the majority of the seven hours it took to (almost) ace the game, however, I couldn’t have been happier. It’s been a sleepy month for releases, but don’t sleep on TR-49.

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A shorter newsletter this week, as I plug away on other games still on embargo. Listen to the accompanying audio (playhead at the top) for some more thoughts on Lorwyn Eclipsed, the end of Pokémon Legends: Z-A and the release of Station to Station, the sequel to Perfect Tides, an indie adventure game I reviewed in 2023.

Finally, I’ll tip to my hat to my colleagues at All Things Considered, who recently broadcast a fantastic interview with the lead writer of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.