As previews for Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave gushed across the internet this week, an indie game inspired by that storied franchise slipped onto Steam after a short, unexpected delay. Ledgerbound emulates the series’ old-school rock-paper-scissors combat and grid-based tactics, but it’s far, far hornier. That’s saying a lot, since Fire Emblem has prioritized romance and (occasionally outrageous) fan service for well over a decade!

Ledgerbound’s been on my radar since The 2025 Game Awards, when I bumped into its game director at a crowded afterparty that sprawled across the nearby JW Marriott. Russ Nickel served as a lead writer of Helldivers 2 before co-founding the indie studio OmniMegaSuperCorp . He spoke to me then about Ledgerbound’s development and how it shares Helldivers’ sense of black comedy:

“You play as a fantasy insurance adjuster, where you have to replay battles where heroes have died to prove that they died due to their own negligence,” said Nickel. “So you can deny claims to their grieving families.”

“It’s about replaying those battles and being like, ‘You should have done this, you should have done that.’ And then in between, you have office romance with your co-workers.”

4 Questions for Russ Nickel

Anybody on your team have any experience with the insurance claims — how did you do your primary research?

I’ve certainly had plenty of insurance claims of my own. I got hit by a drunk driver and it’s been crazy trying to wade through all of the insurance.

Was that or was that not part of the inspiration here, the kind of draconian insurance business?

Absolutely. We made Helldivers 2 before this. And so we’d wanted to take like the satire of the military industrial complex and be like, what else is there that we can satirize? How about the American life and health insurance system? In a fantasy way. […] We really wanted to lean into comedy. There's not enough comedy games in the world. One thing we're really trying to do is make it feel like a real sitcom. So we're comedically timing every single line in the game. Because we do full voice acting.

You said there’s workplace romance — are there options?

Yeah, so many options. Everyone is thirsting over our H.R. character, who is a very crass H.R. dragon. You have to fill out lots of H.R. paperwork if you want to date your co-workers.

Did the romance kind of build over time? You started with the insurance and then it became more of a workplace romantic comedy.

It actually came from an earlier interview. We were talking about, Baldur’s Gate as an inspiration with the dating your team and ‘they’re like, Oh, is that going to be a horny game?’ I’m like, ‘Oh, so horny.’ And people picked up those headlines and we’re like, ‘Well, everyone’s excited about a horny game.’

I’ve not had the time to finish Ledgerbound, but I can recommend it to Fire Emblem fans who can’t wait for the release of Fortune’s Weave next month. It’s also refreshing to play something so genuinely funny and bawdy — not unlike Date Everything! or Dispatch. Plus, the character designs and high concepts are impeccable. A draconian, gold-pinching company literally staffed by dragons? Heckin yeah.

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I also got something of a scoop from Felicia’s Day. I published a WBUR article about her upcoming Swords & Sweethearts card game and broke the news of the Erika Ishii’s cameo therein:

An upcoming movie based on popular web series The Guild has far exceeded the $1.5 million its Kickstarter asked for. With fewer than two weeks of crowdfunding left to go, The Guild creator Felicia Day and her team are showing more cards from Swords & Sweethearts, a competitive dating game they’re developing as part of the Kickstarter.

Erika Ishii, an actor known for shows like Dimension 20 and video games like Ghost of Yōtei, will cameo in the game. In a card labelled “The Gladiator Gargoyle,” a likeness of Ishii appears with horns and wings, tongue peeking out of a cheeky smirk.

Ishii is far from the only cameo. Swords & Sweethearts features all six original cast members of The Guild, along with performers like Alan Tudyk, “Weird Al” Yankovic, and Anjali Bhimani.

I played an online prototype with creator Day and designer Ryan Copple. While they stressed that the game was far from finished, the 40-minute preview still gave me plenty of insight into the high-variance whimsy it’s going for.

Your goal is to boost five different attributes and court suitors that randomly appear from a central deck. On each turn, you’ll equip loot, choose a suitor to pursue, and draw a random date card that confers a bonus or penalty. Then, you’ll roll a 20-sided die and add a relevant stat the suitor is interested in. If the result exceeds the number on the suitor card, you’ll claim it, scoring its points. First player to 20 points wins.

Day, Copple and I were unlucky in love, thanks to low die rolls and punishing cards. It didn’t matter how attractive we made our characters; we’d often pull disastrous dates that doomed us!

The game is designed to create uproarious turnabouts. You can also interrupt opposing players with loot cards, which are difficult to defend against. As a party game, it felt like balance and fairness weren’t top priorities — Day and Copple even acknowledged that our playtest was more cursed than any other they’d experienced!

Read more on WBUR.org.

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Pictonico! (yes the exclamation point is part of the title) is absurd and absurdly fast-paced. It’s WarioWare for your phone, speckled with photos sourced from whatever albums you give it access to. Loathe as I am to pass personal pictures over to a game, Nintendo swears they don’t save or share anything — and the resulting madness justifies the intrusion. I’m sorry it took me this long to catch up with it (the game released in late May, right as I was transitioning from full-time NPR work, and hence scuttled under my radar).

Played across dozens of microgames that will have you swipe and prod the screen in a frantic handful of seconds, Pictonico! identifies faces from your photos and slaps them all over its many characters. My baby, my wife, and (curiously, since she’s only in a few photos from a recent trip) my mom-in-law starred most often. Several strangers and work acquaintances also snuck in, as did actual celebrities: JFK from an archival newspaper; Nicolas Cage (as a pickle, AKA Pickle Nick) from a quirky New Hampshire store I visited; Donald Trump, as pictured in a satirical poster I snapped on the way to work in DC.

These familiar (or startingly random) faces enhance the game’s humor, but they’re no replacement for solid game design. Thankfully, Pictonico! is one of the better WarioWare-style games Nintendo co-developer Intelligent Systems has made, limited only by its modest scope. Just two volumes of the game have come out. Each costs between $6-$7 and together unlock 80 microgames. That’s not a bad deal for Nintendo, but it’s uncommonly steep for the mobile market — especially since the novelty can wear down after a few hours. The game also lacks the multiplayer modes that made the original WarioWare and WarioWare: Move It! such hits with my family.

I’d rather have a game charge up front than endlessly nickel-and-dime me, however. Pictonico! is simply perfect for anyone craving a dose of WarioWare silliness on the go.

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I’ve one more recommendation for you: my Instagram video debut, featuring five favorites from our Games of the Year list! I really hammed it up, egged on by NPR’s marvelous visuals team. We filmed in a corner of the office blessed with abundant natural light, near the Pop Culture Happy Hour and Weekend Edition teams. My poor colleagues had to endure me flubbing and retaking my lines over and over while they tried to work!

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I pitched a Dungeons & Dragons story as a single Here & Now interview. It exploded into an audio piece that I interviewed six people for, in addition to what I taped from the Gen Con Keynote and my Stonetop home game (not D&D, I’ll grant you, but it set the scene for tabletop roleplaying games in general!).

I had to kill many darlings — roughly 2% of what I recorded aired on the radio. However, I did manage to wrangle more quotations into a digital story that also published Friday:

Dungeons & Dragons is trying to court new and returning players this weekend at Gen Con, North America’s biggest tabletop gaming convention.

The brand revealed a deeper investment into classic products and new partnerships with Star Wars and video game titan World of Warcraft.

“World of Warcraft, at its heart, was inspired by Dungeons & Dragons. It has a lot of familiar motifs and types of characters, so we have a lot of shared DNA,” said Laura Hohman, product architect at game maker Wizards of the Coast. She oversees Universes Beyond, what Wizards’ calls the crossover effort that originated years ago with Magic: The Gathering, the company’s billion-dollar trading card game.

Despite the new branding, Dungeons & Dragons has pursued these kinds of crossovers for decades.

“D&D does have a history of doing this previously in other editions,” said Hohman. “We did a collaboration with Star Wars in the early 2000s, so it is new to this generation of the game.”

Dungeons & Dragons executive producer Greg Bilsland said the time is ripe for a return.

“Dungeons & Dragons has brought a lot of new people into the hobby, so this is the perfect time to give all of those Star Wars and D&D fans what they’ve been asking for,” Bilsland said.

Many such fans work at NPR’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.

“Some may call it a cash grab,” said NPR audio engineer Valentina [Vee] Rodríguez Sánchez. “That could totally be what it is, but it’s going to definitely work on me.

Fellow audio engineer and dungeon master Carleigh Strange was more skeptical.

“What are they going to offer me that my friends and I couldn’t make up ourselves?” she asked. “And how much money are they going to want from me?”

After all, anyone can design their own Dungeons & Dragons adventures, rules and settings for free. Wizards has allowed third-party publishers and fans to distribute content based on the game for decades.

Players got so used to the policy that a leaked plan to charge licensing fees sparked outrage in 2023. Wizards abandoned the change and now positions itself as the best source for official game content in a market crowded with alternatives.

“You know, one of the dirty secrets of D&D is you really don’t need a lot of books to make your own content,” said Bilsland. “One of the things that Dungeons & Dragons provides is integration with our digital tools like D&D Beyond, as well as books with beautiful art and official options that just make it much easier to get started.”

Some longtime players are unconvinced by that pitch.

“They have a basic misunderstanding of the nature of the game,” said Mike Czaplinski, a computer system support administrator at NPR who’s played D&D since 1979.

“Everything you need to play Magic: The Gathering you get from Wizards of the Coast — with D&D, the only one who really needs to buy stuff [in a play group] is the DM,” said Czaplinski.

Garry Butler, a NPR desktop support technician and D&D veteran since 1986, concurred.

“Unlike Magic: The Gathering, where you have to buy cards all the time, you just have to buy a book,” he said. Most players, Czaplinski and Butler contend, won’t invest in D&D products as often as Magic players do in collectible cards

Yet by introducing Universes Beyond into Dungeons & Dragons, Wizards clearly hopes to imitate the lucrative strategy that’s ballooned Magic: The Gathering revenues.

Read the rest of the article here.

I loved nerding out with my colleagues for this piece! We don’t represent all D&D players, of course, but the five of us reflect distinct generations of fans.

Mike considers himself a member of the “tail end of the 1st generation,” starting with the original 1970s release. Garry came aboard with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980s. I jumped in during the 3rd Edition revival of the 2000s, but also grew up with 1990s games based on 2nd Edition. And Carleigh and Vee got hooked on the current 5th Edition.

If I had more time, I’d produce a mini-podcast of the ebullient conversations I shared with these lovely people. But for now, I’ll leave you with a quotation from each of them that I couldn’t feature anywhere else!

Mike Czaplinski, speaking about the Icons initiative helmed by actor and D&D superfan, Joe Manganiello:

Joe Manganiello impresses the hell out of me because he is a big star in his own right. He’s modern Hollywood, you know, lower level royalty, but still royalty. And yet he’s not an empty suit. When someone speaks of the game in the ways I’ve heard him talk about it, he’s the real deal. If he is something other than a figurehead, which by all accounts he is, at least one person understands the mindset of the players.

Garry Butler chimed in:

He [Manganiello] was instrumental in getting Luke Gygax [for the Greyhawk collaboration]. By bringing Gary Gygax’s son back into the D&D family, they’re doing a great job of honoring the co-creators legacy.

Vee Rodríguez Sánchez had much more to say about Star Wars possibilities:

I’m already wondering, are they going the pure Star Wars route or are they including information that was added in the prequels? What fans are going to get mad? Is it more like comic book Star Wars lore? I am intrigued.

While Carleigh Strange had numerous mechanical questions, ranging from Ewoks to The Force, and noted that many other systems may be better suited to the setting than D&D:

If someone came up to me and they were like, “I really want to play a tabletop game, but I was wondering is there a way to make the setting not fantasy medieval times, can it be in space?” And I’d be like, “Oh my God, yeah, there’s a million systems for it. And then also we can probably come up with our own way to do it.”

Speaking of other TTRPG systems, they’re my current obsession — I’ve read thousands of pages of game books in the past two months!

I’m GMing the aforementioned Stonetop, which I featured in last week’s Games of the Year (so far) List. I LARPed at a small local convention. My RPG designer bro-in-law treated me to sessions of his upcoming The Last Caravan: Westward Bound and Austin Walker’s Realis. I ran an introductory one-shot of the upcoming Discworld RPG for my father-in-law and wife. Next week, I’ll embark on a Dagger in the Heart campaign.

I’ve never been more fired up for the hobby. Stay tuned for more!

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I also have to tip my hat to All Things Considered’s Vinny Acovino, who featured me and two other colleagues in a sound-rich segment tied to the Games of the Year list. It’s four minutes long and fabulously well-produced — listen here.

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• One hack to raise prestige and pay for caregiving roles: Get men into them — My D&D piece and ATC appearance weren’t the only times my voice billowed over the airwaves this week! I also spoke with clinical psychologist Darby Saxbe, asking her all the questions I couldn’t fit into Here & Now’s first story on her new book, Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How it Shapes Men’s Lives.

• As DHS condemns judges by name, Judge Esther Salas, who lost her son in an attack, is fighting back — a fiery guest on a sobering topic.

• Will the end of TPS mean a surge of deportations?

It’s my second-busiest time of the year: when we publish the first of two GOTY articles! Check out the interactive list here. Listen to me discuss it, and four games in particular, on Here & Now.

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Naturally, there are many games I couldn’t catch up with before having to finalize this list — I hope to do so by the customary December update. Stay tuned for more! Brief newsletter this week as I’m about to head to the airport for a whirlwind New Hampshire family trip.

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• Geek icon Felicia Day on how she’s trying to turn pioneering web series ‘The Guild’ into a film — Truly a delight; boggled my mind that I got to work with someone who so defined my college-era nerdery.

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While I spent formative years in the Netherlands, I couldn’t just fly over to Amsterdam for the Magic Con currently underway there. Thankfully, Wizards of the Coast invited me to preview what would be revealed at the convention, which included a timeline of 2027’s products and events:

I asked lead Magic designer Mark Rosewater why upcoming underwater plane, Nauctis, wouldn’t focus on Blue mana, as 2002’s Torment focused on Black. He answered in his typically laconic way: “Torment taught us why color imbalance is a bad idea.” I’m inclined to agree, even as Torment remains a nostalgic favorite of mine.

Senior creative director Jacqueline Jones also answered a question I posed about the upcoming Kamigawa Titanbreach:

Me: I’ve lost count of how many interplanar wars Magic has seen. Aside from the obvious Kaiju influence, how are you keeping things fresh for the new Kamigawa set?

Jones: This is an interplanar conflict, but what really excited us on the creative side was the chance to revisit two of Magic’s most beloved planes [Ikoria and Kamigawa] and explore sides of them we’ve never had the opportunity to before. While the stakes are multiversal, the story stays grounded, letting players experience the conflict through the eyes of the people fighting to defend their homes.

I’m optimistic for Titanbreach. Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths was my first Arena set and I drafted it into oblivion during the 2020 lockdown. Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty rightly deserves its reputation as one of the best draft sets ever, so I expect I’ll enjoy the resulting mash-up, tired as its kaiju framing might be.

But the preview for The Hobbit, releasing August 14th, really caught my attention. Magic communications director Blake Rasmussen confirmed to me that it’s “smaller” than a typical release: “with 198 cards in the main set, plus booster fun and scene cards.” That’s just three cards larger than March’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles main set. Much as I yearn for larger sets and the replayability they enhance, bonus sheets — reskinned reprints that appear in about a third of packs — do take the edge off. I also like the classic Tokienian art of these booster fun cards, as opposed to recent comic-book stylings.

We glimpsed five main draft archetypes. Where TMNT focused on enemy color pairs and Spider-Man focused on allied pairs, The Hobbit features a mix.

First up, White-Blue Draw 2 Humans.

Drawing a second card on your turn isn’t too tough and The Hobbit comes with a new mechanic to enable it: recruit. Set design lead Annie Sardelis acknowledged that it’s modelled on a recurring staple, connive.

Next, we’ve got Black-Red amass — though this time you’re building armies of Goblins, not Orcs.

We didn’t see much of this archetype but this signpost uncommon indicates it’ll also sacrifice creatures for value, further echoing Black-Red themes from The Lord of the Rings set.

Then we have Black-Green ferocious.

This archetype’s been done nearly to death, but I’m intrigued to see a Black-Green version rather than the typical Red-Green.

Now we come to my favorite archetype by far: Red-White storied Dwarves.

Sardelis confirmed that the enduring story condition works like the city’s blessing: once triggered, you’ll keep it regardless of whether you lose artifacts, legendaries, or sagas (which all happen to be historic permanents, by the way).

I love sagas, I love dwarves, I love these cards for their flavor — and I suspect I’ll love their gameplay as well.

Finally, we’ll round things out with Green-Blue landfall Elves.

Another tried-and-true archetype, I’m more fond of landfall than ferocious. As Sardelis asked the preview pool, “who doesn’t like playing lands?” She explained that she wanted to do something different with Elves than the scrying theme from The Lord of the Rings, and I’m glad for the change. Blue-Green scry didn’t really come together in LTR.

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The set’s otherwise chock-a-block with nifty references, intriguing lands, and adventures (another mechanical favorite of mine). Kicker makes a one-off return too:

And of course I couldn’t end this little preview without two of the novel’s biggest characters:

Mastromarino Productions

• Physical media are disappearing. Video games are next — Pink Gorilla Games co-owner Kelsey Lewin joined Here & Now to discuss the broader implications of PlayStation killing discs in 2028. Lewin’s also a podcast contributor, served as Video Game History Foundation co-director, and brought a deep personal and scholarly perspective.

• This is your brain on fatherhood: How childrearing, not just pregnancy, changes bodies and minds — I joined hosts Peter O’Dowd and Scott Tong in interviewing Darby Saxbe, a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Southern California. Her book was revelatory, and I’m happy we worked the perspective of three eras of dads into the piece (myself with a baby, Peter with a preteen and teen, Scott with kids in their twenties).

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I celebrated my birthday last week and spent Thursday through Sunday careening between work, childcare, and tabletop games (which included a LARP where I played a scheming royal bent on the crown and the affections of a noblewoman he believed he saw in a God-given vision!). I’ve neglected my newsletter until now, but offer up these morsels.

First up, the Xbox “reset.” Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier has pointed out that its worst consequence is the uncertainty it’s thrown Microsoft staff into. They’ve seen 1600 coworkers get the axe; another 1600 will go by the end of the year. I produced a Here & Now segment with Schreier — listen here. I also directed KUOW’s Monica Nickelsburg to an expert source for her superb All Things Considered piece on the layoffs.

In other gaming news, I caught up with Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, which sits uncomfortably between a traditional remaster and a thorough remake. I enjoyed chasing after sea shanties and stalking Caribbean settlements, but missed the Abstergo Entertainment framing device — without it, the pacing feels off and the quest for Isu Observatory feels forced. Jordan Ramée goes into much more depth on this point and more in their Gamespot review.

Black Flag’s characters still charmed me though. It’s great to see Stede Bonnet again, though my impressions of the historical figure have been much changed by Our Flag Means Death. And I swear that Ubisoft must have told Edward’s actor to channel Heath Ledger from A Knights Tale, but, you know, as a pirate. I love how unapologetically self-interested he is. Not to the point of malice, but he’ll never help someone if it doesn’t benefit him. It’s a fitting place to begin his hero’s journey — Assassin’s Creed protagonists have a preposterous tendency towards saintliness that Black Flag manages to avoid.

The tutorial is especially cute. Edward’s already mastered the usual Assassin maneuvers even though he’s only pretending to be one to appease the Templars he’s duping. Their plan to surveil the whole world doesn’t phase him, but he can’t abide their leader paying him less than he thinks he’s worth — kicking off his opposition and the rest of the plot. Also, he kills dozens of Assassins while maintaining his cover. They go down like chumps. So much for an elite order.

All in all, Black Flag Resynced belongs in the same category as AC Shadows — serviceable franchise fodder I don’t regret playing, but not something I’d go out on a limb to recommend.

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I’ve been hard on Nintendo. Star Fox, a serviceable remake, nonetheless let me down. Yoshi and the Mysterious Book delighted me but never quite opened into the freewheeling puzzle game I hoped for.

But Rhythm Heaven Groove, out this week, overcame my recent case of grumpy critic syndrome. I reviewed the game for WBUR.org:

Bounce fruit off your biceps by flexing to the beat. Shout in time to communicate with an alien. Catch pudding molds with your robot hands while blasting defective puddings with your laser eyes. Pop bubbles as they drop from a conveyor belt. Open and close the umbrella on your head to keep up with a synchronized routine.

Such minigames make up the majority of Rhythm Heaven Groove, the latest entry in a beloved series that went dormant in 2015. Each stage may only take a few minutes to pass, but will likely take many tries to perfect. Finish four such minigames to unlock a remix that blends them together, backed by some truly banging songs.

Despite branching off of the loopy WarioWare party game franchise, Groove demands absolute concentration and is best played handheld to avoid latency. Don’t attempt it while you’re sleepy or riding a noisy train, as I did, and for heaven’s sake, make sure you’ve got the volume up!

Groove may look silly, but its later levels get as uncompromising as J.K. Simmons’ jazz tyrant in Whiplash. At least you won’t risk getting a chair thrown at you – missing a beat is usually funny, as you’ll see the characters around you wince or give you a stink eye.

You don’t have to lock in alone. Groove also teems with co-op and competitive stages that’ll have you sprinting on balloons or serving tennis balls into the faces of monsters. Between its many modes, challenges and secrets, the game more than justifies the $40 price tag.

Yet Groove isn’t for everyone. If you want a wider catalog of recognizable songs, you’re better off with Beat Saber or even an old Guitar Hero. If you crave a novelistic story, try Goodbye Volcano High or Unbeatable. If you’re looking for a roleplaying/rhythm fusion, dive into People of Note, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, or the inimitable Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. If you’re more keen on combat, shimmy over to Crypt of the NecroDancer or its spinoffs, Rift of the NecroDancer and Cadence of Hyrule.

But for a rhythm gaming purist, you simply can’t do better. Groove is everything I hoped for the series’ return and more.

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I spent most of the week vacationing in North Carolina, but I’ve got one more Here & Now piece to mention. It’s even gaming adjacent!

I produced an interview with Joshua Greene, the Harvard professor who co-founded Tango Trivia, a game that pairs anonymous players from opposite political sides and challenges them with questions designed to get them to collaborate. Research indicates that this simple act encourages people with different ideologies to better empathize with each other. My colleague Jon Peck recommended the platform to me after experiencing it through a Black/Jewish dinner group, and host Indira Lakshmanan even played herself before interviewing Greene! Listen here.

I’ve enjoyed many a remake, but I’m losing my patience for them.

Take this week’s Star Fox release, which I reviewed for NPR. It’s polished to the gleaming Nintendo standard, with an orchestrated score worthy of John Williams. Its new cinematics admirably establish the quirks and rivalries of Fox’s team. And unflattering as the new character models might be, the detailed visuals and snappy controls elevate the creaky 1990s source material.

Yet the game never gave me a compelling answer to the question “why make this instead of something new?” It’s an obvious attempt to cash in on Fox’s appearance in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, of course, but Nintendo could have just as easily greenlit a new Star Fox game, even one with limited scope. Has the company truly run out of ideas for the vulpine hero? This is the fourth time it’s chosen to remake or revamp the original game’s story after all.

If this trial balloon sells well, I hold the distant hope that the lesson isn’t “make more remakes” but “make more Star Fox.” The best part of the new game, after all, is its delightful and largely new dogfight mode. Give me more of that — more Star Fox, without the constraints of decades-old design.

As we barrel towards an Ocarina of Time remake and countless more nostalgic brand extensions, I pray for the game developers trying to push the medium forward. Much as I too would play a Bloodborne remake, perhaps it’s better for the industry that From Software shot each pitch to make it down. I’d take an experiment like The Duskbloods over it any day.

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Here’s more from my NPR.org review of Star Fox:

The Star Fox campaign begins with a cinematic dramatization of the original game's opening text crawl… Each successive mission briefing gets reworked from its original clipped dialogue into fully animated mini-movies.

But the visuals are a mixed bag. Detailed as the planets and ships might be, fans objected to Fox’s unflattering appearance after the game’s trailer dropped. His original character designer, who wasn’t involved in the new game, admitted to preferring the Super Mario Galaxy Movie version of Fox to this remake’s. For my money, the lighting is more of a problem than the models. In nearly every scene, the cockpit illuminates Fox in a gross green glow.

This campaign doesn’t take long to complete — between an hour to two hours, depending on how often you die and reload. But to reach the game’s true ending, you’ll have to restart and hunt for secret paths, easily quadrupling the runtime. You can also play cooperatively on two systems if you’re in the same room, or you can split your Joy-Cons to have one player steer and the other use mouse controls to fire lasers (an example of Nintendo sacrificing ease for a new gimmick). I’d have loved this mode much more if you could have a second player aim with a joystick, as in Donkey Kong Bananza.

Battle Mode makes for a more entertaining multiplayer experience, but you can’t play it on the same system. I tried it through an online session Nintendo set up, diving and gunning my way through 4v4 matches that required us to capture points or collect energy from meteorites. If you’re hooked up to a webcam, you can use an augmented reality feature to puppet a character’s portrait in GameChat. The facetracking is pretty good: raise your eyebrows, and your character will raise their eyebrows back. Open your mouth to speak and they’ll do the same. If you’re playing as Slippy Toad and puff out your cheeks, you’ll see him inflate his chin.

But even with these charming flourishes, Star Fox remains awkward. It's got the production values of a modern blockbuster, but the sensibility of a 1990s arcade game. The campaign feels particularly antiquated, even with its expanded script and cutscenes. […]

If you've got buddies to battle or a tolerance for odd co-op, go for it. Otherwise, you're better off skipping this remake and saving up for an original game.

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• Rescue crews mobilize to Venezuela as earthquake casualties mount

• What the New York primaries might mean for the rest of the country

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• The enduring impact of Clive Davis, the music industry titan who died at 94

• UK prime minister resigns

I had something like a Marvel SNAP addiction. I hit the theaters for nearly every MCU movie through Thunderbolts*. I adored Spider-Man as a kid and practically memorized a collected volume of its earliest issues.

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But these days I feel little but exhaustion for the brand. Alas, it’s where my beloved Magic: The Gathering has gone and where it will likely dwell. I reviewed its latest set, Marvel Super Heroes, for WBUR.org and have excerpted the juiciest morsels here. I've added screenshots of my Arena draft decks as a bonus for you, dear reader:

Across its many products, Marvel Super Heroes boasts over 600 unique card designs — more than any other set to date. That doesn’t include hundreds of reprints and fancy collector versions of cards.

The crossover even got its own super team to build it. Mark Rosewater, Magic head designer, pitched Marvel on the collaboration and personally oversaw its development. Dave Humphries, a veteran celebrated for formats like Outlaws of Thunder Junction and March of the Machine, lead the more granular set design.

That golden pedigree roused me out of my Marvel fatigue. But the hours I drafted the set during an early access Magic Arena event left me more ambivalent than hyped.

Stick with any franchise long enough and you’ll feel like an old man yelling at a cloud. I’ve accepted that crossovers will dominate Magic: The Gathering, just as they now do for toys like Lego and games like Fortnite. But the transformation is accelerating. Where Magic players could once expect four to five major releases a year, 2026 features seven, and most are based on other properties.

Unlike the last Marvel tie-in, there isn’t a Through the Omenpaths version to escape to. Magic creator Wizards of the Coast couldn’t secure the digital rights to 2025’s Spider-Man set, resulting in two parallel products: physical Spider-Man cards and digital echoes based in Magic: The Gathering’s multiverse. Many players bemoaned this arrangement because they had to memorize separate names and art for mechanically identical cards as they swapped between in-person and Arena matches. But I loved the improbable spider mash-ups of Through the Omenpaths and hoped the dual arrangement would continue.

The mechanics are tightly bound to their comic book origins. For a game that’s often embraced moral complexity, I’m thrown by the Hero and Villain creature types that run across all five colors in Marvel Super Heroes. These themes rarely focus an entire deck but they’re far from incidental. A few cards reward you for leaning one way or another, with some characters, like Black Widow and White Widow, bearing both Hero and Villain types.

There’s another big “top down” design. Power-up upgrades your creatures with a one-time mana investment. If you pay for it the turn the creature entered, its cost is reduced by the creature’s mana cost. It’s an elegant update to Monstrosity that plays well at all stages of the game. Even modest power-up commons like Brave Brawler make for decent draft picks.

The set’s smaller synergies impress me most. Agent Maria Hill can dominate early if you have enough Teamwork cards to enable her. The intricate Connive and discard strategies return from Spider-Man. Fantastic Four heroes gel in subtle ways, though you’d be hard-pressed to include all four since they’re different colors. The set’s version of Blue-Red artifacts — a popular archetype last explored in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — deserves special mention: it’s chock-a-block with powerful commons and uncommons that Shuri, Wakandan Inventor can easily abuse.

This heady swirl of mechanics lends itself to drawn-out games. All my aggressive White-Black decks floundered while my slower, value-driven decks — typically focused in Blue or Green — won at least as many matches as they lost. I learned to prioritize removal more than efficient, cheap creatures, from counterspells like We Say Thee Nay! to expensive bounce spells like Atlantis Attacks.

When I lose myself in the details of the set, I can muster some enthusiasm. But when I step back and take the whole product in, I find myself dispirited by the direction it signals for Magic. It’s still fun, but the game’s diluting its unique worldbuilding and rapidly advancing its power creep. I can only hope future Marvel sets (we’ll get at least one more) retain this level of mechanical sophistication, because they sure won’t get me in the door any other way.

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I’ll go wherever Gareth Damian Martin leads. The creator of the Citizen Sleeper series just announced a sci-fi game inspired by fungal networks and post-industrial northern Britain. It sounds like a heady mix of Quantum Leap and The Mushroom at the End of the World.

“We call it a first-person fungalpunk RPG,” Martin told me in an interview conducted late last week. “I've never made a fungalpunk RPG before. I'm not sure anybody has.”

I’ve lightly edited the following transcript for clarity:

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What exactly is Signet City?

It’s a game about a strange kind of 1980s northern British city in an alternate universe where biological computers and fungal substances are the key industry of that city. Maybe you could think about it in the way that whale oil is the central industry of Dishonored or that in steampunk steam power becomes the all powerful force of society.

So in this case, this city is based on fungal technology, but it’s also comparable to 1980s deindustrialization, to a northern city like Newcastle or Liverpool or Glasgow. You play as a parasite, which does make the game a little different. You basically feed off the emotions and experiences of your hosts. And through kind of playing as a parasite, you get to experience the different parts of the city through different people’s lives and effect it through the lives of the people that you inhabit.

You can be a benevolent parasite is what you’re saying, which I guess begs the question of what a parasite even is?

Exactly. The classification of parasites is a debatable thing in biology, actually. There’s a big gradient between symbiosis and parasites. A lot of my previous work — especially In Other Waters, my first game — dealt with symbiosis to some extent. It’s in that wheelhouse of thinking about how humans and ecology interact with each other. But I think in a darker, stranger world, something a bit more like the weird fiction of Jeff Vandermeer or China Melville in that tone.

Your work has always explored these kind of boundaries, these fuzzy definitions. What are you bringing to this specific game that’s different than In Other Waters and Citizen Sleeper?

The thing that fascinates me in games is that the player is always different to the characters in the game. I think if you can find ways to make that part of the story of the game, part of the world and the structure of the game, then you tap into something that feels very real to the player. So In Other Waters is that was like the player being an eye inside the suit of the character that that’s the protagonist of the game. In Citizen Sleeper, you were different because you had a kind of questionable non-human body. Is that what it feels like to be a human? You don’t know because you’re artificial. And in this case, I’m casting the players as a kind of fungal intelligence.

I really want the game to explore this idea. If we compare them to a human mind, they’re dispersed, decentralized networks where time and space operate differently to how they operate in our minds. But they’re also creatures of chemical exchange. And I would say that we are internally like chemical creatures. Our brain chemistry is what makes us do various different things. We tend to use parasite, leech these words just like negative implications. But who’s to say that we really have any free will outside of the kind of brain chemistry? Are we just following those chemicals? So is a parasite intervening in our brain chemistry really a kind of manipulator, or could it be benevolent in some sense?

And I think there’s a really interesting space there, but that also there’s a kind of meta story I’m tapping into here, which is in RPGs, both in tabletop and in videogames, we also operate as a kind of parasite to the characters. We’re not really them and we’re also not really not them. Sometimes in a tabletop RPG, you might use your own name. Sometimes you might use the character’s name, sometimes you might really want something to happen because they want something to happen. Sometimes you really might want something really bad that’s super interesting that happened to your character. You might be cruelly poking them and trying to create some cool plot event. So I think there’s also that side of it for me.

I’m trying to put my head around not just the narrative, but the gameplay. Are you looking to immersive sims? How much agency will the player have to really manipulate this world?

One of the things that I observed when making RPGs that bothered me was the protagonist syndrome of like RPG characters. You know, you walk up into town and someone’s like, Hey, outsider. And then, you know, there’s like quests presented to you, and this is all a necessary part of the form, but it’s something that really limits the possibilities of the storytelling.

So what appealed to me about tapping into this parasite idea was that you’re dropping into the mind of a character, and that character is already in the world with their own tensions and their own concerns, and they’re already part of a story. In that sense, I’m not kind of interested in giving the player like total agency, because I think that’s not what makes for an interesting story. I’m interested instead in getting them in trouble, implicating them. I want the story to feel alive.

The way the game works is when you drop into the mind of a host, you don’t necessarily pick your hosts. They might be like a worker in the middle of like a labor struggle. Each day you have a limited number of actions. So each character comes with a chunk of the city, a little first-person hub, a little bit like an immersive sim level. And you’ll kind of slowly start to explore this character and learn the rhythms.

You’ll also learn what things in that part of the city affect your character’s mood. So it might be that it’s raining one day and that makes the character gloomy, or it might be that you can get the character into a political argument in the pub, and that makes them angry. And those are important because those are modifiers that apply to actions in the game. So if you then you want to kick down the door to get into this factory, then you might need to make your character angry in order to get a better chance of doing that. So you’re instigating things in the character to try and move the story forward.

Well, and it pushes players to think systemically, right? How much do you think about this distributed network thinking as a way to inspire different ways of thinking about our world?

Yeah, 100%. I think the eighties in northern UK and late seventies have these really interesting moments like the winter of discontent which was like a big labor struggle that also timed in with one of the coldest winters on record. I like that that was both an ecological and political and social event simultaneously, and that was the kind of thing that I wanted to start with.

Even the miners strike historically is thought of as a labor struggle, obviously. But now from a perhaps more ecologically minded perspective, it’s also a question of how do people relate to their environment. You had miners who were fighting for the heritage of these industries that connected them to the land they lived on. But equally, those industrial processes were both destroying the bodies of those miners and the land itself. So there’s this really knotty quality to that. It becomes really rich and interesting.

It’s not necessarily something that I have an answer to, but it’s a provocation for me as I’m working on the game. When I say to people “parasite,” people have all of these negative associations. The parasite indicates control and power, but it also indicates symbiosis and interconnectedness. So it kind of plays both ways. That’s kind of a core part, I guess, of the game’s wider themes. And what I’m hoping to dig into is this idea of enacting power on others, the ideas that grow like viruses between people.

Talk to me about the specific aesthetic choices you’re making because you’re mostly going for black and white. How are you trying to get players in a different headspace?

The visual side of the game takes a lot of inspiration from social photography of the 1980s in the U.K., where you have these grainy black and white photographs of really incredible architectural conflicts. Like tower blocks sitting in the middle of a wasteland of smashed up tenement blocks that got destroyed so they could be built. Massive container ships hanging over terraced houses that are 100 years old with slate roofs.

This was like a really rich starting point, but that was ten years ago when I first started kind of conceiving of this world. I think onto that, the kind of inspirations I looked at were things coming from distant places. There’s a really wonderful film called Tetsuo the Iron Man that’s this incredibly, richly grainy, 60 millimeter black and white film about a Japanese salaryman slowly becoming a kind of metal god. But the directors insist it’s like a it’s a film about it’s a superhero movie in his mind.

And I really like this idea of thinking about the connection between kind of superheroes and body horror in the sense that it implies that power is something that twists and transforms us as we inherit it or take it on. And the idea of a fungal superhero that was being many-bodied and those bodies were all being twisted or changed by this power that was running through them felt really connected.

I also wanted to do a game with my own 2D art to the first time because it’s not something I’ve ever done before. I drew webcomics when I was younger and I’ve always loved doing pen and ink drawings. It just was something that’s slowly developed over the ten ish years that I’ve been working on. It took me a little while to try and work out how I could do that in a game engine. But once I realized there were ways of doing it, that became the main focus, this rich and grainy world.

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Signet City doesn’t yet have a release date. You can follow its development on its Steam page. I, for one, am fascinated to see where it goes.

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While my baby acclimated well to his first week of daycare, the germs he brought back knocked us all flat. The whole family spent the weekend snuffling and sputtering, as I watched my inbox bloat with announcements from Summer Games Fest and myriad smaller events. Here’s what interests me most:

Persona 4 Revival and Persona 6!

The original Persona 4 hit me in the throes of a depressive episode — it enabled my spiraling isolation and, eventually, inspired me to form the bonds I needed to claw my way out. I curious about this remake, but I’m even more intrigued by the impending sequel. Persona 4 Revival is slated for February 18, 2027 — Persona 6 was teased but doesn’t have a release date.

Crossfire: Massive Korean multiplayer shooter game gets story-driven single-player spin-off

This was one of the few digital events I could jump on before my first week in the office. Chief Creative Officer Taylor Kurosaki spoke extensively about studio That’s No Moon’s commitment to narrative. Game Director Jacob Minkoff mostly talked about their new approach to the cover-based shooting genre. Say goodbye to “sticky cover.” Tap a button, and the game will dynamically adjust your characters crouch or crawl as you move, depending on height of the surrounding obstacles.

The game features two protagonists — even though only one, Layla, a revolutionary hothead, is playable. Her companion, Delroy Cross, is a stolid defender of the status quo. Even though they come from opposing military factions, they’ll have to shoot and sneak their through a hostile environment after an unspecified sci-fi threat throws them together. Crossfire doesn’t yet have a release date.

Exodus has SOOO many talking animals

I came to this realization before the general public — this was another preview event I managed to catch! This sci-fi epic, written by Drew Karpyshyn, the lead writer of the first two Mass Effect games, features a ton of “awoken” animals — including companion character Houston, a talking wolf. It really does look like Narnia in SPAAAACE. The main character’s last name literally is Aslan.

Also Matthew McConaughey is here too. Exodus releases “early 2027.”

Will Star Wars: Zero Company make me care about a galaxy far, far away again?

Keeping with space — Star Wars: Zero Company looks enough like XCOM to catch my interest and it’s coming out relatively soon: August 27, 2026. I’m thoroughly exhausted by Disney’s run with the property, but have some fondness for the era Zero Company depicts: the slide from the Galactic Republic to Empire (the same ground tread by Star Wars: Battlefront 2’s superb 501st Legion campaign).

Citizen Sleeper creator announces new game

Gareth Damian Martin’s at it again. Signet City looks far weirder than Citizen Sleeper 1 or 2, but I’m more than here for it. “Coming soon” to PC.

There’s more I’d wish to highlight, but my tummy hurts and my throat’s sore. I’ll be back later this week!

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The last week of May flattened me. I hosted my sister and bro-in-law, prepped the baby for daycare enrollment, and dived back into NPR work, one day after layoffs hit the company. I’m behind on the games I hoped to review — Mina the Hollower and 007: First Light. Feeling exhausted and overwhelmed, I’m writing up something cozy: my favorite new co-op card game of the year.

I only wish it had a snappier title. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers — Trick-Taking Game hardly rolls trippingly off the tongue. But this handsome little box, a new sequel to a Fellowship of the Ring Trick-Taking Game released last year, has made me groan in despair and gasp in delight.

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Like The Crew, the game uses simple trick-taking rules to tell a story. But while I admire The Crew, I’ve struggled to get it to my table. Its anonymous astronauts and clean gameplay might be brilliant, but they’re not so immediately accessible as The Lord of the Rings. Bedecked in luminous art reminiscent of stained-glass windows, these Trick-Taking Games follow the chapters of the books they’re based on, from “A Long-Expected Party” to “The Choices of Master Samwise.” Each chapter presents characters — each with their own win conditions — and tweaked rules to trace the contours of the original story.

It can get rather, well, tricky. My wife, her brother, and I struggled to overcome Helm’s Deep, which piled so many Orcs into our deck that we often coildn’t rid our hands of them. Some of the later Sam and Frodo chapters quite literally exhausted us. But the game handedly gets around the “quarterbacking” problem common to co-op games.

Since the rules forbid communication about your hands, you’ll learn to discern the needs of your fellow players by how they lead and follow. Some characters want to lose tricks — others want to win only a few, or win only certain numbered cards. Most chapters take around 15 minutes to play, so even if you fail, it’s easy enough to shuffle up and try again.

While last year’s surprisingly excellent The Hobbit: There and Back Again was essentially a dozen games in one, these Trick-Taking Games present a more continuous campaign. I’m not sure when I might revisit The Two Towers now that I’ve completed it, but it’s provided more than enough hours of entertainment to earn a hearty recommendation.

A talking encyclopedia invites me to catalog the many creatures tumbling through its pages. My crew of candy-colored Yoshis can freely enter and exit this magical domain — Baby Bowser and the hapless Kamek he’s saddled with are stuck inside. Over roughly ten chapters, I don’t so much pursue the dysfunctional pair as collide into their hijinks while conducting my own research. They incite the plot, but they’re not really antagonists. Yoshi and the Mysterious Book isn’t about heroes and villains, even in the sketchy outlines typical of a Mario game.

Discovery, instead, is your aim. This is a platformer where you succeed not by stomping goombas or clearing goalposts, but by experimenting with ecosystems. Each stage revolves around a critter that you’ll lick, carry, throw, stomp, jump upon, and otherwise mess with. Pop pink bubble-creatures to shoot yourself forward. Carry a hoola-hooping bird to bounce objects away from you. Ride seagull-things through updrafts to climb the skies. Each level feels like its own minigame.

As you uncover more properties and use them to explore a stage, you earn stars that unlock chapters and further illustrate the encyclopedia. You’ll also seek for flowers, which you can spend late in the game to gather randomized (and wholly unnecessary) UI upgrades. You’ll have to find the ultimate goal of each level yourself — Mr. E, the titular mysterious book, will drop hints at the press of the L button, but there aren’t any quest icons to point you to victory.

In this regard, Yoshi and the Mysterious Book follows Nintendo’s recent penchant for puzzly sandboxes like Tears of the Kingdom or Echoes of Wisdom. But the game never takes the guardrails off — it surprises and delights, but doesn’t quite transcend the sum of its parts.

The individual elements all shine, however. The game expands on the storybook, textured style laid by Yoshi’s Story and further defined in Woolly World and Crafted World with wonderful stop-motion-esque animation. It’s also got the usual array of mechanics. You can jump and pump your legs while making that weird Yoshi grunt to stay aloft. You can eat nearly anything and spawn an egg that bounces behind you. You can then throw these eggs — if you can tolerate the obnoxious targeting system.

Crucially, you can’t really “lose.” On the infrequent occasions that you go out of bounds or get crushed by local fauna, you’ll simply respawn nearby. I only encountered two challenges I could call boss fights: the lack of stakes drained all tension out of the first one, while the second at least required some trial and error to figure out.

Such ease fits the game’s kid-friendly audience, but it left me hungry. The Mysterious Book is field biology for the fun of it — inspiring in its scope and creativity, but unfulfilling when it comes to testing your accumulated knowledge. I loved identifying each new critter and learning just how they ticked. But after naming them (or accepting one of Mr. E’s terrible punny suggestions), they’d slide into my index and rarely reemerge.

Still, the game does range across an extraordinary breadth of mechanics and biomes. One moment your skating across the sea, then you’re burrowing through earth a la Pepper Grinder, then you’re trampolining off the internal organs of a giant monster. The overarching narrative even contains one or two cool ideas, minimal as it is.

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What I really want is something like Super Mario Maker or Garry’s Mod for Yoshi and the Mysterious Book. I pine to see what could emerge if the game’s designers handed over the keys to this menagerie. The circumspect levels we got feel like a prelude to this wildness — and they stop just short of true greatness.

Somehow I’ve swerved into reviewing games about music this year, from Unbeatable to People of Note to Mixtape. Wax Heads, also out this month, combines punk and pop beats with gameplay not far removed from Strange Antiquities, a 2025 favorite of mine. It’s cute, clever, and altogether lacking in subtlety.

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Each day of Wax Heads begins with you rolling up the shutters of Repeater Records and chatting with your coworkers, who sometimes oblige you to solve a jigsaw-style puzzle. You’ll then open the shop to recommend albums that perfectly match the tastes of your clientele, whose wants range obvious to confused. Succeed and you’ll earn a delighted response and points you can spend to unlock cosmetic store improvements or “Rare LPs” you can spin on the company record player (one of these is even from a real band!). Failure doesn’t block progress; the customer might leave unsatisfied or sad, but the plot will roll on. There’s even a mode that lets you retry recommendations until you ace them.

I’d have rioted if a game about a record shop didn’t have a varied soundtrack worthy of the premise. Composer Gina Loughlin rose to the challenge with unique songs from dozens of fictional bands, bouncing genres from rap to pop to chiptune to punk and more. Each day you’ll unlock a different song that usually pertains directly to the unfolding story — be it a sampling of a controversial album, the latest hit from a rising star, or a deep cut from an old band. You’ll also sift through social media takes and indie reviews, which, along with album blurbs and zines, flesh out figures in the music scene. You’ll need this information to keep up with your customers’ increasingly obscure wishes.

The game doesn’t get too tricky — there’s no overarching escape-room conspiracy to unravel here, like in Strange Antiquities or Strange Horticulture. Wax Heads stumped me only a handful of times over its five-hour runtime. I failed most at its bartending minigame, which was too cheeky and too British for me to parse. I dreaded the infrequent pre-shift puzzles, which the game even frames as chores no other staff can be bothered to do. They’re technically optional, but the game made it clear that my boss would be disappointed if I neglected them.

Normally, I wouldn’t care about pleasing a virtual employer, but Morgan — the rocker turned shop owner — carries the emotional core of the game. You’ll slowly uncover the interpersonal drama that doomed her 1980s band and contend with the landlord that seeks to sell Repeater Records to an old ex that’s pushing a generative music AI. You couldn’t write more obvious villains, but Wax Heads still raises timely questions. How can a store foster community more than blind consumption? How can humans give recommendations personal enough to compete with algorithms? How can you make art when capitalist forces and new technology threaten to replace you?

Don’t expect Wax Heads to provide surprising answers to these questions, for it’s as earnest as a Sunday sermon. The game’s at its best when it shows rather than tells you about collective action and the joy of creation. The final concert you help put together more than drives this point home, even if it’s immediately undercut by a sententious epilogue scene. But perhaps I’m too jaded. Wax Heads is defiant, joyous, and unapologetically political — everything that its self-described “cozy-punk” aesthetic promises and more.

Everything is Crab

I can’t think of a transition into this next game. It’s about crabs! Or rather, it’s about carcinization: the idea that natural selection converges on more of the scuttling crustaceans than statistically likely. You begin each run of this pixelated roguelike as a blue blob. As you eat food — scavenged from plants or animals you’ll kill — you’ll roll random evolutionary traits to increase your painfully slow base speed and buff your fighting prowess. Some evolutions push you up a crab meter, upping the rarity of your drops and the strength of your foes.

Like Vampire Survivors, tougher enemies arrive on a predictable timeline. Defeat bosses to get the most powerful upgrades, with the goal of eventually challenging a “Crabken” and claiming victory.

I loved watching my little ooze become unrecognizable as it gained more and more perks, but Everything is Crab doesn’t have enough variety to encourage the dozens of playthroughs necessary to unlock each difficulty rank. After four hours, I felt like I’d explored all the builds I wanted to (I was most overpowered with upgrades that charmed a small army to fight for me). That’s still a good deal for a game that costs less than $10, though, and I hope that updates or expansions give me more reasons to return.

I’m on vacation in California this week, introducing my new baby to old stomping grounds. Mixtape — a pithy slice-of-life adventure starring three delinquents in the 1990s Pacific Northwest — could not have hit me at a more nostalgic time. I quaffed the whole thing down in between trips to the beach and my childhood library. I wasn’t a rebellious high schooler, but I’ve hung out with plenty of kids like these: creative oddballs tumbling towards adulthood with fervor and trepidation.

In less experienced hands, Mixtape could have come off as smug or twee, but it masterfully balances naturalistic dialogue, meta self-commentary, and bravura flights of fancy. Developer Beethoven & Dinosaur’s previous game, The Artful Escape, also has plenty of killer music and visual whimsy, but Mixtape boasts an even more cinematic aesthetic — landing somewhere between John Hughes’ Ferris Bueller and Wes Anderson’s Rushmore.

Put simply, Mixtape is about trying to preserve life’s most precious moments even as they pass you by. Protagonist Stacey Rockford has the perfect playlist for the last day she’ll spend with friends Cassandra and Slater before she flies to New York to throw herself at a Hollywood music supervisor she hopes to work for. Rockford’s choreographed the day down to the minute. She confidently turns to camera to introduce each song as the trio skates from house to house, searches for booze, evades the cops, and reminisces on the “greatest hits” of their friendship. Even when her plan gets derailed, Rockford will find a tune to get her back on track.

Like Dispatch, Mixtape’s blessed with film-worthy animation and voice acting. But while Dispatch features a branching story, Mixtape’s distinguished by frequent minigames. Each captures the feeling of an experience more than its literal truth — from careening downhill in a shopping cart, to gliding through a meadow, to riding a dinosaur as a comet slams into the horizon. These varied gameplay textures put you into the characters’ high-top shoes and invite you to coauthor a narrative that’s otherwise quite linear.

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Mixtape wastes nothing. It packs more emotional scenes and character development into its four hours than many games ten times its length. Heartfelt, hilarious, and often profane, Mixtape has already cemented itself as one of 2026’s unskippable tracks.

Saros made me feel like a king, like a god. I crested its final boss in a euphoric crescendo of violence — zipping around its maddeningly dense attacks as I slammed it with bullets. I’d followed Arjun Devraj’s maniacal quest to its breaking point. I’d witnessed horrors, I’d overcome them, and I’d ultimately come to resemble them.

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Like Returnal, the previous game by developer Housemarque, Saros is as much a character study as it is a sci-fi thriller. Where Returnal protagonist Selene endures a hell of isolation and introspection, Saros dwells on Arjun’s relationships; on the deteriorating crew stranded alongside him, and on his shared history with Nitya Chandran, an ecologist who travelled to Carcosa years before his own arrival. Her voice — or what he imagines to be her voice — beckons him onward as he shoots, dashes, and jumps through the ruins of this alien world.

“Beautiful and cruel”

Housemarque built Saros to seem more familiar than Returnal. You’ve got an apparent hero and his distressed damsel, a doomed planetary expedition and the transparently evil corporation behind it. It’s Aliens by way of The King in Yellow, the 1895 story collection that inspired none other than H.P. Lovecraft and Blue Öyster Cult. There’s even an oblique reference to Ambrose Bierce, the author who first imagined “Carcosa,” a once-great city that’s now become synonymous with unknowable interstellar terrors.

The pitch “Returnal but on Carcosa” got me in, but the revamped mechanics kept me going. Saros doles out permanent upgrade material (here called Lucenite) more generously. It’s not as stingy with health pickups. It rewards you for dealing damage without taking any hits, but it’s not essential to do so. Best of all, you can tune the difficulty of each run. The game lets you select advantages and penalties, each with varying point values that you’ll balance on a scale. I’d usually equip the Increased Damage and Artifact-boosting mods, which I’d offset with a variety of debuffs. The game doesn’t have an easy mode, but this system accommodated my skills well.

The narrative doesn’t mesh with the roguelite structure as expansively as Hades, however. You’ll encounter numerous voice and text logs as you explore the ever-shifting biomes of Carcosa, but these will eventually grow thin. You’ll also check in with other survivors at your home base between runs, but I’d often exhaust these dialogues before hitting the next story beat. Once I faced the opposite problem — I surmounted a boss on the first try, triggering a jarring event before seeing all the scenes that would have better justified it.

I’ve got other quibbles as well. The game’s otherwise excellent visual design can get monotonous. While some biomes and adversaries really stand out, prepare to see a lot of yellow skies and Gigeresque techno-nightmares. Unlike Dark Souls or Elden Ring, you can only practice a boss fight by playing through an entire ten-to-thirty minute run. Thankfully, enemies telegraph their attacks so clearly that I learned boss patterns quickly, but early defeats still stung. I once backed out of a run from the pause menu, thinking it would save at least some of my upgrade material, only to find that it counted as a death and resulted in me losing over 30,000 Lucenite to an obscure “Volatility” effect.

“Not upon us, oh King, not upon us!”

While Returnal prepared me for the game’s frantic combat, Saros could still overtax me. Each gun has an alternate firing mode you use by lightly pressing the left trigger. Don’t push too hard, though — a “full press” gets you ready to use the powers you charge up by absorbing projectiles with a shield. This nuance quickly escaped me. Encounters required me to constantly dodge, dash, bash, blast, hop, zipline, block, and parry — I couldn’t juggle yet another mechanic, especially since it required such a deft touch.

Then there’s the bewildering array of weapon effects. As you gather Lucenite you’ll increase your Proficiency level, which boosts the weapons and powers you’ll find in random boxes. I eventually realized that sticking to a gun I knew well was better than automatically ditching it for the next higher-leveled pickup. I avoided shotguns (I preferred to keep my enemies at a distance!) and prioritized auto-hit weapons like the Tactical Rifle and homing powers like the Dispirator. Eventually I’d have to swap equipment or get outpaced by tougher foes — leaving me to hoard the “Acolyte’s Wagers” that could reroll items.

I’ll also note that Saros was much harder with a standard PS5 controller than the PS5 Edge controller I’ve grown accustomed to. This is a personal preference, of course, but there’s so much going on in Saros that I needed, well, an edge. The premium controller’s back-paddles allowed me to dodge and jump without taking my thumbs off the sticks and fingers off the trigger buttons. Lest I sound like a shill for a $200 dollar accessory, let me add that I’ve also modded a standard controller with back paddles for closer to $30, and it’s nearly as good.

“Have you found the Yellow Sign?”

At its best, Saros is intense but fair — rewarding mastery without demanding absolute precision. It all came together for me in that final boss fight, when I achieved a flow I’ve only otherwise experienced in FromSoft games. But as cathartic as its combat was, the story is what captivated me. Against all good sense, I devoted nearly every free hour to the game in a rush to beat it before a cross-country trip — rolling credits after midnight, almost five hours before I needed to be up to catch the plane.

There’s an inevitability to the plot that drove me on, even as I anticipated many of its twists. Heck, even the names of the two central characters — Arjun Devraj and Nitya Chandran — give a lot away. Look up their Sanskrit meanings if you want some clues. The game slowly unveils flashbacks and surreal glimpses of their past life together, complete with heartbreaking performances by Rahul Kohli and Shunori Ramanathan.

This domestic tragedy grounds the high-concept horror of Saros. The King in Yellow works fabulously well as a touchstone — it’s more evocative and less defined than the Lovecraftian mythos it was later appropriated into. Like Bloodborne, Saros deploys well-travelled conventions of weird fiction while forging an identity all its own.

Saros teased more narrative after the credits. I fear the game might explain its mysteries away, but suspect its developers, like me, admire The King in Yellow precisely because it’s so open-ended. Its menacing aesthetic has proven fertile ground for TTRPGs, an HBO miniseries, and, now, a glorious AAA video game. I look forward to spiraling ever deeper into its embrace.

AP Thomson, the indie auteur partially responsible for last year’s incomparable Consume Me, has a new game.

Titanium Court is hard to describe, though it’s built from familiar mechanics that have flooded mobile gaming. It’s a match-3 strategy game; half Bejeweled, half auto battler. But it’s also a narrative experiment; minimalist in its design and wily in its script. Out this week after winning the prestigious Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the Independent Game Festival, it’s the epitome of calculated restraint.

Titanium Court wastes no time. Within minutes of booting up the game, you’ll find yourself pressed into service as the titular court’s Faerie Queen. Your excitable courtiers then insist you command their castle as it slides through an ever-changing tide of terrain in an inexplicable, eternal war.

Arrayed in chunky pixels and a palate limited to five colors, you’ll swap these squares around in the first stage of every battle. Line up three or more matching tiles and they’ll disappear, awarding you with the corresponding resource. A progress bar depletes with each move you take, but you can add back to the bar if you match more than three icons with one stroke. Like all match-3 games, then, the real puzzle comes from swapping tiles to trigger many more than three matches at a time.

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I got good at keeping the bar from draining, as each combo cascade bought back precious time. But that’s just half the battle. Eventually the bar will deplete and you’ll face any opposing courts you haven’t matched away. Here, you’ll spend your accumulated money and material to purchase upgrades from shops, cast spells, and deploy units to combat enemies or gather more resources.

In my eagerness to rack up matches, I’d often leave myself stranded next to hostile forces. I gradually learned to use water and hills to block advancing adversaries. Survive, and you’ll continue to the next stage, each with its own quirks — culminating with bosses that range from dragons to leviathans to magic mirrors.

Each completed campaign, successful or not, returns you to your courtiers and to the game’s best feature; its sly writing. Characters may only be represented by a few static images, but their dialogue sparks with wit and surprise. You’ll explore the court, uncovering its secrets and encountering its bizarre denizens. Like Hades, the story you’ll gather between runs is as rewarding as the one you’ll glean during them.

Make no mistake, though: Titanium Court is more roguelike than roguelite. You don’t unlock persistent upgrades — instead you’ll earn a wider array of jobs, spells, and units. Two optional and competing mechanics, meanwhile, allow you to customize its difficulty.

Comfort fills up after each run. The higher your Comfort, the more advantages you can choose to take into a campaign — from resources to money to reduced enemy appearance rates. Strife does the opposite. The more challenges you overcome the higher your Strife will climb and the more penalties you can choose to incur. Succeed with high Comfort or Strife to achieve goals that advance the plot.

I’m amazed by how much Titanium Court squeezes out of a core design so basic that it’s almost cliche. Match-3 mechanics don’t just underpin your war efforts; they also illustrate your Queen’s shower thoughts and the determine the exchange rates set by M.A.R.K.E.T., a cult that trades in commodities. Bosses, meanwhile, challenge you to shape battlefields in strange ways — and some jobs recontextualize the entire game!

But Titanium Court’s writing is the real star. It’s so enchanting that it gradually overshadowed everything else. Once I discovered a way to skip campaigns entirely I couldn’t help but abuse it, all but exhausting my steward’s dialogue as I raced to question him night after night. Eventually I had to go back on the warpath to progress the plot, but I did so only begrudgingly. What started as a refreshing spin on an overtired formula began to feel like an obligation. That may be my fault for sprinting through the game’s story, but it’s also by design.

Titanium Court is ultimately about nothing less than the limits and the magic of games as an art form. It tantalizes with a burgeoning to-do list, even as it pushes you to question what you’re really getting out of the experience. Of course it won the IGF Grand Prize — its retro aesthetic and metatextual narrative may as well be catnip for critics and designers.

Don’t mistake that sophistication for snobbery, however. Titanium Court is as rambunctious and puckish as anything I’ve played — it just has a lot to say too.

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. Seven years later, 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.