Open-world games have gotten very good at giving players somewhere to go, but getting them to actually care about those places is a different challenge. A huge map can provide hundreds of locations and still feel strangely empty once the initial novelty wears off. Rockstar Games has spent years pushing…

After the good news about Destiny 2 officially coming back with vaulted content returning to the game, a new chapter unfolds for Bungie, ending a long era that started in 1996. After Sony formally acquired the legendary studio, the company has gone through several issues, from the poor management of…

Something weird has been happening over the past few days. The social media platform X is obviously no stranger to spawning weird gaming trends that are partly or even wholly fueled by generative AI, like the proliferation of games about finding a needle in a haystack, but I’ve never been…

I’ve been playing Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave for two weeks now and the experience has started to take its toll. The world-building is entertaining and intriguing, representing a bold new direction for the sword-and-sorcery strategy RPG. But after thirty hours, the desire to know what’s going on and to discover…

Final Fantasy VII Revelation is the culmination of the Final Fantasy VII remake project. Square Enix, somehow, miraculously, in the face of ever-ballooning development cycles, will manage to release three triple-A games in seven years, each one bigger than the last. Revelation will be bigger than the two games that…

There seems to be some sentiment from players of Control Resonant that taking the action beyond the confines of the brutalist interior halls of the first game, Control (2019), is less than ideal. But understanding the relationship each game’s protagonist has with the building itself explains why this was the…