So far, so Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness — a persistent source of inspiration for everything from Apocalypse Now to Far Cry 2. And with good reason: Conrad had a masterful command of prose to paint scenes of captivating beauty and unsettling horror. The parallels are arguably strongest in Roadwarden, given it is essentially an interactive novel enhanced by some evocative pixel art, music, and sound effects.

Indeed, the quality of Roadwarden’s prose is its most immediately arresting feature. The world, at least at first blush, doesn’t stretch itself much beyond traditional fantasy tropes. Goblins, harpies, griffons, dragonlings, and many other quintessential mythical beasts roam the wilds. Disheveled villagers and austere druids espouse local knowledge and tenets of their faiths. The undead roam through the fogs, and bandits ply their nefarious trade in the woods. But these tropes are elevated by an elegant prose style that carries an eye for detail, characterization, and world-building without feeling verbose or overly labored.

It is only later, as you get to know the peninsula, that you realize things are a little more complex than initial impressions suggest. Many dialogue choices, portrayed as your memories of the past, allow you to define vastly different backgrounds for the city you came from —  a kind of retrospective RPG character sheet creation through recollection.

Elsewhere, through lack of means, or the desire to preserve the meager means you earn, you sleep on floors, wash in rivers, eat leftovers, and repair and launder clothes only when absolutely necessary. You take on risky work for low pay; wardening the roads is the perfect opportunity to courier messages and goods, as well as to explore, particularly when your paymasters haven’t provided enough resources for your expedition.

Your austere living arrangements and difficult contracts may bring you closer to the region’s denizens, revealing nuances of local politics, traditions, and geography. One distant village, for instance, is known to most locals but rarely talked about, so it requires an accumulation of local knowledge to ask the right questions, which reveal its existence and location.

If all of that sounds familiar, it may be due to more than just the parallels with Heart of Darkness. Often, Roadwarden feels like a particularly harsh, especially purist take on the The Witcher series of novels. In the books, as in the games and the TV series, Witcher Geralt has friends, lovers, and politicians that he can rely on, but beyond that he finds himself routinely abused, underpaid, injured, tired, dirty, and ultimately alone and ostracized from most communities. Look no further than the series’s ending in The Lady of the Lake, which I won’t spoil here, but which underscores the novels’ theme of the indiscriminate and unceremonious cruelty brought about by xenophobia.

These elements are present in CD Projekt Red’s and Netflix’s interpretations, but they are downplayed compared to in the books. By the end of The Witcher 3’s expansion Blood and Wine, it is possible to settle down to a quiet and relatively prosperous life in a temperate and fertile country. (This ending does echo some of the things Ciri says at the end of The Lady of the Lake, but it’s an uncharacteristically upbeat epilogue to a thoroughly cynical series.)

In contrast, Roadwarden never shies away from its consistently ambiguous choices and grim outcomes. On my playthrough, for instance, I saved a town from a deadly plague and made the Eastern trade routes safer to travel, but I still managed to end my days alone, unloved, and without the influence in the merchant’s guild that I had elected to be my life’s goal at the start of the game. In fact, some poor intriguing within the guild led to my untimely demise.

If Roadwarden manages to feel more like The Witcher than The Witcher games or television, then it’s the roadwarden’s mediocre skill set that most clearly sets the game apart in tone. Geralt may be a loner, but he is a genetically modified superhuman exceptionally skilled at slaying monsters. The roadwarden, by contrast, is nothing special. My fish traps frequently failed, my combat checks often rolled against me, my attempts to persuade got me beaten near to death, and even my alleged education didn’t help me to understand the Old Speech of a secluded tribe.

An amusing piece of optional dialogue with a local child tries to unpack the meaning of “roadwarden” but never manages anything like a precise analysis. Which is just as well, since the roadwarden is not especially good at any one thing — a glorified auditor who is often distinguished only by his horse, a rare sight in the peninsula.

And yet, for all its unflinching bleakness, there is an unlikely coziness to Roadwarden. As you explore the peninsula, the map takes the shape of a closed loop that you grow very familiar with over your 40 game days. Your job means that you traverse it over and over again, and so it becomes second nature to choose where to safely forage and fish, where to stay the night, and how far to push it before needing to find shelter before the deadly dusk. However, as you grow to know and understand the region, that loop also takes on new meanings. Landmarks gain significance, mysterious locations give up their secrets, shortcuts appear, and ultimately new routes grow like offshoots from that core loop.

It’s a pattern of gradual and incremental exploration that I think many of us are familiar with from our childhoods, from visiting and revisiting parks, family homes, recurring holiday destinations, or whatever else. When I was little, for instance, my grandparents had a dacha (a type of land allotment) outside the city. I used to spend my summers there, often cycling a loop that took me through the small village where the dacha was based, across a field towards a forest, over a major road into another village, past a lake, and back towards the dacha. I remember when that route seemed threatening — impassable without an adult or at least a friend to share the adventure.

As I grew up, the route seemed to shrink, to become comfortable and familiar. I started to go out into the forest, deeper into the neighboring village, or along the main road; the route grew and spawned offshoots. But at the end of each summer, before the autumn cold and rain, I returned to the city.

In this sense, Roadwarden also subtly taps into some of our primordial instincts and earliest memories. Its grim sense of place is anchored to a map and a gameplay mechanic that evokes a nostalgic sense of warmth — a subtle and strangely addicting counterbalance to its difficult choices.

Early this year the release of Horizon Forbidden West was marked by complaints that its protagonist, Aloy, was unbearably chatty, verbalizing ceaseless reminders about where to go, how to solve puzzles, and generally what was at stake. Now, at the end of the year, similar complaints have been leveled against God of War Ragnarok, as the deuteragonist Atreus voices thoughts about what to do next and how to do it.

One explanation for this design choice might be that video game blockbusters are increasingly unwilling to let the player break flow by spending too much time on a given element of the game. It might be better to annoy with over-explanation than to frustrate with something that takes too long to think about. Another explanation may be that, as the graphical fidelity of game worlds ramps up, our ability to parse those worlds goes down and we need workarounds not to get lost. In other words, the reason Atreus is chatty is the same reason Forbidden West’s and Ragnarok’s climbable surfaces are highlighted yellow or marked with conspicuous runes — the player needs to be able to navigate the visual noise.

Whatever the explanation, there is undeniably a tension here. Have the characters tell the player too much and it could be annoying; have them say too little, and it might be disorienting. In this context, Pentiment’s old-school design feels refreshing. The emphasis on simple yet evocative art and unvoiced text overcomes the problems faced by the year’s more mainstream releases.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given its Obsidian origins, Pentiment is cut from the same cloth as the likes of Disco Elysium or Planescape: Torment — a narrative-led RPG that is heavy on well-written prose and unusual world-building. It raises questions about history, philosophy, religion, class, tradition, personal fulfillment, and many other grand themes under the guise of a 16th century murder mystery set in and around a Bavarian abbey.

The art is rendered in the style of medieval illustrations and marginalia — colorful 2D characters against equally colorful 2D backgrounds. While there are some minor issues with navigation in certain areas, this design choice mostly solves any concerns about environments being too busy to be easily read.

Meanwhile, the emphasis on unvoiced text sidesteps the problems with overly chatty characters. Arguably the most original trick in Pentiment is the use of different font and font animations to evoke different personalities. The town printer, for instance, speaks in a font that looks like the workings of a printing press — letters are stacked together and then pressed into his speech bubbles. Some characters seem to think before speaking, so their dialogue is initially rendered in faint outline and then traced over as they speak. Others get anxious and their speech tumbles out riddled with typographical errors that are hastily corrected.

The font variations are an ingenious way to convey our paralanguage without resorting to intricate voiceover or animation, but it’s also a primer for the player’s imagination. It’s a reminder that certain things need to be read in a particular way and that the player needs to invest some effort into the act of reading, rather than passively absorb the information presented to them.

This information is frequently relayed through extensive internal monologues, which can often be expanded further by selecting an optional thought cloud. They analyze various aspects of Pentiment’s narrative — from what to do next and where to go, to how the player character feels about certain situations or people. In other words, it’s exactly the same tool as the one deployed in Horizon and God of War. Indeed, in many ways it is more extreme, since it can go on for several minutes and takes narrative center stage rather than remain contained to a throwaway remark.

One difference is no doubt the premise. It makes sense that a game about solving a murder mystery would feature the main character’s internal deliberations more than one about killing robot dinosaurs or about teaching your son how to murder a pantheon full of gods in the name of living peacefully in a wooden shed. But I think the key difference between these gameplay mechanisms is just the emphasis on unvoiced text.

The act of reading a sentence resembles the act of thinking that sentence. It’s not the same, of course, since the reader doesn’t think up the sentence that they read, but there are obvious similarities. A controversial but popular philosophical theory says that thinking occurs in a language — a kind of language of thought. Languages are typically understood to be compositional, which means that the meanings of complex expressions are at least in part functions of the meanings of the simpler expressions that make them up. If we think in a language and that language is compositional, it follows that we form more complex thoughts by thinking about the simpler elements that make them up.

Reading feels relevantly similar to this. As Pentiment puts a speech bubble in front of me, individual words gradually assemble into sentences and I come to understand their meanings. I might not be producing the thoughts Pentiment wants to convey, but I am reproducing them in a way that feels most faithful to that original production. The use of expressions like “I,” which in a game do double duty in referring directly to the protagonist but also to the player, help sell the illusion that I am the one doing the thinking. As Schopenhauer put it — figuratively, of course, but the metaphor helps to make the point — “reading is thinking with someone else’s head instead of one’s own.”

There is ultimately nothing new here; text-based games are as old as video games themselves. Nor is it something unusual: The likes of Roadwarden and Citizen Sleeper prove that text-heavy games are as popular in 2022 as they were in the heyday of Zork. The point is rather that sometimes text is irreplaceable. For all the technology that might be thrown at a game, the intrinsic properties of text and how we interact with it can’t be replicated.

Scorn is as repulsive as it is awe-inspiring. The clear influences from H. R. Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński make for some astounding architecture. Spine-like corridors stretch into misty horizons, rotting towers trail disturbingly humanoid appendages over yawning chasms, and dilapidated machinery hints at grand plans half-abandoned by unseen masters of whatever hellish world Scorn is set on.

The architecture invites increasingly repugnant interaction. First the violent grafting of a key to the protagonist’s arm, the controller vibrating and the screen shaking in response to pained attempts to disengage. Then the placement of hands inside a fleshy sleeve that acts as a door control. Later, the sliding of uncertain fingers into a glove-like lever. By the end of the game, the protagonist does not shy away from pulverizing vaguely fetal creatures to recharge a portable battery that wakes a pregnant humanoid — the circle of life reversed and turned into something unforgettably macabre.

It’s Cronenberg-like body horror that runs the full gamut from mildly menacing to borderline unwatchable, all the worse for the control Scorn places in your hands and the animations rendered with painstaking grotesquery. The choice to pair this aesthetic with frequent and increasingly difficult puzzles and slow, ammunition-starved gunplay makes for a singularly strange experience. It is as brilliant in the first half as it is frustrating in the second — a kind of gore-drenched Myst by way of Alien: Isolation.

And yet perhaps the frustrations of the second half are there by design. Scorn has no dialogue or written lore of any kind. Any narrative as minimalist as this leaves a lot of room for ambiguity and interpretation. Nonetheless, more than anything else, Scorn feels like a tale of a battle with oneself, rendered in blood and bloody sinew — a literal battle with one’s body playing metaphor for the struggle with one’s ambitions, limitations, and circumstances.

The protagonist, a creature that looks like papier-mâché flesh plastered over Giger’s rendition of a skeleton, wakes up to an unspecified quest. Initially it appears like the desire to escape, as the protagonist is clearly a slave in what seems like a planet-sized abattoir where bodies are digested, torn apart, and discarded with gruesome frequency to power unspeakable machinery.

One scene involves the protagonist’s emergence from one of hundreds of capsules that line a vast wall as far as the eye can see, and it is reminiscent enough of Neo’s birth in The Matrix to cement the idea that this is a factory. Later, as the protagonist makes his (an especially graphic late-game scene suggests the protagonist is male) way out of an enormous pit and along a train track, it seems he could be questing for something more. In the end, it may be nothing less than the quest for transcendence.

That quest is lined with obstacles beyond puzzles and combat sections. Early on, the protagonist is attacked by a centipede-like monster that proves to be a parasite. It clings fast to his back and punches eager hands through his malnourished body. Initially, the relationship may seem benign. The parasite grows stronger, but the host gains an additional pair of appendages, useful for a diegetic representation of the player’s inventory, if nothing else. As time goes by, however, the parasite periodically adjusts its grip and the host is literally torn apart with each adjustment. By the time he finds a device to remove the parasite, a contraption that wouldn’t be out of place in Prometheus’ cesarean section scene, his body is failing him entirely.

Besides missing chunks of his midriff, interaction with the parasite triggers a gradual growth all over the protagonist’s body. During the final stages of the symbiosis the growth consumes his hands, preventing him from switching between weapons or from interacting with machinery without temporarily cutting it away — a process that hurts the host more than the parasite. As a result, by the end, he is fit for little more than to be carried into Scorn’s final sanctum.

The sanctum hides a portal, its malformed edges bleeding into the world even as two rows of immobile creatures line the way towards it, partially dissolving as they seem to be gradually absorbed into it. Religious imagery suggests that this is a place of transcendence, rather than annihilation. Or perhaps annihilation is tantamount to transcendence in a world built for torture. In any case, the protagonist does not make it. The centipede parasite tracks him at the final hurdle and the two are locked in eternal immobility.

Besides the metaphor for the struggle with oneself, it is tempting to think of this as a commentary on mind-body dualism: the transcendence of the mind ultimately hampered by the failings of the body. But the interpretation seems unlikely. Even Scorn’s most out-of-body experience — the connection of the protagonist to some kind of hive mind — remains firmly threaded to the cerebrum.

It may be a particularly grotesque instance of the adage that the journey matters more than the destination. When the journey is as brutally torturous as this, can such trite sentiment hold true, if it ever did at all? Conversely, can we value a narrative for what it gives us in the moment rather than for its final payoff? By withholding any real closure from the ending, Scorn puts attention back on the five-to-six hours that precede it.

Or perhaps it’s a commentary on player agency. The gradual degradation of the protagonist’s body mirrors a gradual removal of control from the player. Where BioShock famously asked the player to perform certain actions and then invited them to consider that they had no choice given the constraints of linear game design, Scorn invites the player to interrogate what performing an action means. What happens when the feeling of flow generated by the inductive expectation that a certain player input will generate a certain behavior in their avatar is broken?

It is, after all, worth considering what “scorn” might mean here. Contempt for the protagonist, to be sure, or for the lives of many like him. But also disdain for expectations, for comfort and familiarity, for the idea of a tidy game that neatly fits within a genre.

Sam Barlow’s and Half Mermaid’s Immortality is many things. It’s an original fusion of cinema and gaming, putting the player in charge of a virtual Moviola machine in order to scrub footage from three unreleased films starring the missing actress Marissa Marcel. It’s a demanding experiment in ergodic storytelling, requiring considerable effort from the player to piece together its non-linear, layered, and satisfyingly unsettling narrative. It’s a disconcerting commentary on the role of female leads across three eras of cinema (even if two of Marcel’s films are separated by only two years). And perhaps less obviously, Immortality is a fascinating insight into our own critical thinking.

The Moviola mechanic relies on full-motion video from one of Immortality’s 202 clips, distributed across three films and some of their behind-the-scenes footage, interviews, backstage parties, and other, far stranger, pieces of lost history. These can be played and rewound at different speeds, including frame by frame for maximum granularity. At any point the action can be stopped and an object selected as the focal point of a match cut — an attempt to find another frame anywhere amongst the 202 clips that matches as closely as possible the composition of the paused footage. In this way new clips are uncovered and some unexpected themes revealed. It’s film restoration by way of Blade Runner’s Esper machine, if you will.

The clips are added to a library that can be sorted in order of filming or in the chronology of the films, while the scenes used for the match cuts compose a separate repository of images. This repository is bespoke to each player — a kind of diary of their route through Immortality. By extension, it’s a kind of diary of the reasoning they applied to link one scene to the next.

Immortality throws you in at the deep end: Your first several dozen match cuts can follow whatever route you wish. You may choose to cut wildly from one scene to the next, picking objects at random and seeing where they take you. You may, if you are like me, choose to rewind each scene you cut to and watch it in full before cutting again while you attempt to hold other objects of interest from the scene in your memory. You may focus on key actors, on crew members, on objects of ritual, on fruit, bags, shoes, tables and chairs, and so on.

But in the end we all come to the same set of credits. And so, despite handing us a gameplay mechanic that initially seems to accommodate any way of reasoning, it is interesting to think about the common factors that Immortality relies on in our critical thinking to get us through its runtime — to look for commonalities in those match-cut repositories.

In the most reductive analysis, Immortality is a game that relies on pattern recognition. There are the narrative arcs of Immortality’s three films: Ambrosio, Minsky, and Two of Everything. There is the secret narrative arc behind the game’s core question: What happened to Marissa Marcel? (And for that matter, what happened to some of her key co-stars and co-creators?) But there are also multiple smaller stories and relationships, like the hilarious but ultimately toxic meltdown from a veteran actor too uncomfortable with Minsky’s edgy script, or director Arthur Fischer’s overbearing personality on the set of Ambrosio. And there are the more abstract thematic associations among objects like weapons, crosses, flames, and others.

These are patterns that our brains are hard-wired to look for. Given enough scenes from Ambrosio, for example, even if they are match cut at random and from very different parts of the film, we automatically start to look for an overarching narrative to tie them together. If we have the beginning and the end, we hypothesize the middle and might look for a match cut to get us there. If that second act proves to be different from what we supposed, our hypothesis is dismissed and a new one is put in its place — a kind of scientific method applied to fiction.

It is for this reason that Immortality’s secret story, which in the final account proves to be much more biblical in scope than simply what happened to Marissa Marcel, works as well as it does. That tale is unveiled gradually, scene by creepy hidden scene, first through suggestions or dialogue that make little sense in isolation and later through more explicit exposition. The player’s reasoning now races to fill in the blanks, as it is by this point trained to piece together the stories of Ambrosio, Minsky, and Two of Everything, which are each in their own way thematically linked to the hidden narrative, and each more complex than the last.

Immortality’s lack of full clarity about its story works as well as it does precisely because the game continuously primes and trains the player for interpretation. If anything, it would be jarring to have the narrator step in with a definitive version of events.

The game employs other tricks too, sometimes deliberately subverting the way we might typically think in order to unsettle, highlight something, and ultimately move the story along. For example, our innate ability to quickly recognize and remember faces clashes with scenes where Immortality match cuts between two very different faces. These are so jarring as to force the player to reflect on what they are experiencing — to hypothesize about the story, if they don’t already have a dozen different hypotheses competing for attention.

In the latter third, particularly after the credits roll, the match-cut mechanic shows its limitations. It becomes increasingly difficult to find the remaining scenes; the act of matching objects starts to feel more like random stabs in the dark or point-and-click busywork than a considered route of investigation. Yet even here there are interesting lessons about the way we think, as we are forced to consider objects that might have been overlooked on the first few passes through a scene.

In particular, it’s an insight into salience and the availability bias — the idea that certain objects in an environment are more prominent to us than others and that certain memories, concepts, or examples are more available to recall than others. It is for this reason, for instance, that what seemed to me like the innocuous placement of apples in Two of Everything only late on became a key tool for match cutting and an important addition to the thematic vocabulary I’d drawn up for the game.

Whatever else it might be, then, Immortality is a puzzle for the player. Like other puzzles, it has something to show about player reasoning. But unlike other puzzles, because it is really unlike them in every respect, what Immortality has to show is unique — a singular experiment in player engagement.

As Dishonored is to Thief and Prey to System Shock, so Arx Fatalis is to Ultima Underworld. Indeed, Arx Fatalis was originally conceived as a direct sequel to Ultima Underworld II but ended up its own thing due to licensing issues. Twenty years later, particularly with the weight of Arkane’s increasingly polished back catalogue behind it, it is difficult to take a balanced look at Arx. On one hand, it remains unmatched for its staggering ambition, innovation, and atmosphere — a proof of concept for many of the ideas Arkane went on to refine in subsequent years. On the other, its internal rules, controls, and balancing are infuriatingly inconsistent.

Arx’s biggest draws are its attempt to simulate a real, breathing world and its magic system. Light a torch, throw it at some logs, and it will kindle a flame. Use the flame to cook raw food or bake bread, which can then be eaten to regain health. Find a mortar and pestle and you can use it to grind up herbs. Drink some wine and you can put the ground powder into the empty bottle, then heat it in an alembic to create a potion or a poison. Interactions like this might not seem especially novel or complex in 2022, particularly in the wake of the wonderfully reactive Divinity: Original Sin titles, but they pushed the envelope in 2002. There is a thrill to looking around the world and your inventory and wondering how they might be combined.

Meanwhile, the magic system in Arx Fatalis tries to capture a sense of genuine spellcasting by requiring the player to learn runes, which must then be drawn with the mouse and combined to invoke different spells. For instance, a line drawn from left to right followed by right-down-right casts a series of magic missiles. Up to three spells can be precast and mapped to hotkeys for a quick invocation in the heat of battle. As a result, sorcery feels tactile and involved — a kind of first-person interpretation of 8-bit- and 16-bit-era cheat codes. Like learning those codes, the magic system demands investment, first to memorize various rune combinations and then to practice their casting until it becomes second nature.

The world itself is a dungeon set in a “Dying Earth” universe. It’s a premise that has become more popular in recent years but that remains on the fringes of fantasy and science fiction — underexplored and with plenty of opportunities for unusual storytelling.

Arx’s sun has faded and its races — humans, goblins, trolls, dwarves, rat-men, snake people, and others — have been driven underground away from the inhospitably cold surface. They occupy various levels of a vast network of caverns and continue with their old politics and schemes. It’s a dark, oppressive, and at times overbearingly claustrophobic place underpinned by some of the period’s best sound design. Chainmail echoes through stony corridors and against metal grids, underground streams churn and gurgle, and vents howl and rattle as they draw fresh air in from the icy surface.

And yet, for all that, these elements frequently fail to come together. The emphasis in Arx Fatalis on a simulated world provides opportunities for interesting combinations, but just as often the game doesn’t do enough to telegraph its full repertoire of rules. An early quest, for example, requires the player to find a stolen idol. There are narrative clues to identify the thief and his key, but not to find the lock that the key unlocks. As a result, completing the quest can be a frustrating exercise in trying the key on every locked door and chest in the vicinity.

In fact, many of Arx’s interactions reduce to point-and-click trial and error as you select an item in your inventory and then click the cursor on random bits of the world to see if it responds. Can you bash open a wooden door? As it happens, you might not be strong enough. But unlike in the aforementioned Original Sin titles, neither can you set the door on fire or destroy it with magic. Your torch, for example, which can be used to light fires, inexplicably cannot be equipped as a weapon.

These frustrations are compounded by Arx’s controls, a Frankensteinian mix of three different schemes that often feel more like playing a flight simulator than an RPG. The movement scheme allows you to look around, walk, jump, crouch, attack, and engage in basic interactions with items. But if you’d like to pick anything up or attempt a more sophisticated interaction, you must tap a button to switch over to another set of controls.

Meanwhile, in order to cast spells, you have to hold yet another button to bring up a third UI that allows you to freely draw runes. The controls are reminiscent of System Shock 2, but they felt quaint in 2002 and feel antique in 2022. Faced with multiple enemies, navigating between the three overlays can be completely overwhelming, especially if you’ve made the wrong choices in Arx Fatalis’ RPG system.

This system allows you to invest points into a series of stats at the start of the game and upon leveling up, to chat and trade with NPCs, as well as to manage your quest log and your inventory. They are familiar genre staples, but they don’t offer the sort of flexibility seen in Arx’s RPG contemporaries, like Morrowind or Neverwinter Nights. Put too many points into anything other than stealth or close-quarters combat at the start of the game, for example, and you will be faced with a miserably difficult first few hours. Despite the in-depth rune system, the game does not cater to spell-casters until well into its second act, nor does it care if you can pick locks or disarm traps if you aren’t able to sneak or defend yourself. And with just 10 experience point levels across the entire game, character progression feels slow and unrewarding.

At times, Arx Fatalis seems like it’s crying out for the modern obsession with objective markers, mini-maps, quest summaries, codices, hints, and tutorials — something to tie its ideas together and better guide the player through its dense systems. At other times, however, it feels like a collection of grand experiments that could not hang together even with the most egregious hand-holding.

Despite all that, it’s difficult not to be fascinated by Arx Fatalis. Its attempt to craft an unconventional and demanding game on the foundations laid by Ultima Underworld serves as a manifesto for everything that Arkane Studios has done since. The emphasis on player trust and agency, simulation, and rich world-building is present in every title.

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic iterated Arx’s combat and magic, and Dishonored refined it further still, leading to outrageous gameplay opportunities. Prey offers sophisticated object interactions in the form of item mimicry, recyclers that can break down almost anything in the world, constructors that can build any inventory item, and the GLOO Cannon, which can be used to temporarily rewrite the way levels function and the routes they offer. Meanwhile, Deathloop found a way to package its quests and set pieces into a single, evolving, narratively coherent whole. In that sense, even if the various parts of Arx Fatalis don’t always come together, they have found their way into every game Arkane has made since.

Cyberpunk is inherently dystopian — from Blade Runner to Deus Ex, it’s a genre that examines the excesses of privatization, corporate deregulation, pollution, unfettered technological advancement and experimentation, overpopulation, and other evils of late-stage capitalism. Cyberpunk worlds are often cluttered, cramped, and dirty, drenched in a neon glow pouring over a melting pot of cultural and architectural styles.

Given descriptors like “neon-lit” and “cybercity,” it’s no surprise how well Stray’s world fits this template. Walled City 99 — no doubt a reference to Hong Kong’s infamous Kowloon Walled City, one of the original inspirations for cyberpunk fiction – is a trove of cyberpunk tropes. It is locked from the outside following an unspecified environmental disaster and overrun by decay, accelerated by flesh- and metal-consuming bacteria that we eventually learn to be human-made. What is surprising is the extent to which Stray is able to offer a fresh, gently hopeful perspective on the genre with just two narrative and design choices.

The most obvious, of course, is the choice to cast the player in the shoes (paws?) of a feline protagonist. The titular cat is meticulously modeled in the game’s lavish implementation of the Unreal Engine, with convincing animations and sound for everything from running and jumping to curling up on a cushion. It feels like a subtly tongue-in-cheek riposte to AAA titles’ obsession with the fidelity of human models. It also forces developer BlueTwelve Studio to bring the camera closer to the game world than it might have done with a larger player avatar. The result is an experience that feels more intimate and more literally and figuratively grounded than many cyberpunk counterparts.

You can’t help but linger to look at a book spine, for example, even if you aren’t able to read the script that adorns it. Or you might try to glean a story from an arrangement of cutlery on a kitchen table — particularly when it’s often possible to divert Stray’s tightly paced and breezy (if not always responsive) platforming to the wanton destruction of these arrangements. The narrower field of view and the need to look for feline-friendly footholds also force a different assessment of the environment than the typical cyberpunk fare.

Anti-roosting spikes on top of air conditioning units, for instance, aren’t just set dressing for a cruel world, but an active obstacle to traversal. They are a reminder of humanity’s penchant for keeping animals on humanity’s terms. By the same token, however, the cat’s ability to survive and thrive in this world despite these obstacles, and indeed to outlive the humans, prompts a consideration of nature’s adaptability.

This is particularly apparent when viewed in light of Stray’s second major narrative and design choice. It only becomes obvious after an hour or two, but Walled City 99’s population is entirely robotic; there isn’t a single human in sight. As you delve deeper into the city’s mysteries, you learn that the human population died out hundreds of years ago, even if the so-called Guardians seem quite happy to ape their creators in their day-to-day tasks and ambitions. Some weave clothes from disused wiring, some conduct research to stop the spread of the aforementioned bacteria, and others simply sit huddled in doorways or sprawled drunk across bar tops.

It’s a dog’s life, in other words — one that could quite easily slip into the grimdark excesses of the genre. That it doesn’t is a testament to BlueTwelve’s success with these two design choices and their broader world-building. The robots’ emotional states are instantly readable via their CRT-screened faces. They display an amusing range of moods, but more often than not they show happiness or contentment. Even when the Guardians are angry or annoyed, it’s difficult not to smile at a screen displaying an over-exaggerated angry face emoji.

Likewise, Stray makes for an intrinsically uplifting silent protagonist. There is a raft of anecdotal and scientifically backed benefits for humans to interact with cats, and there is no doubt that BlueTwelve tries to channel many of these.

At the heart of the narrative are the bonds of friendship and companionship: Stray is trying to rejoin a family of cats that live outside the city and in the process forms a bond with a small companion droid and many of the city’s Guardians. These relationships never hit the same gut-wrenching notes as, say, the ending of The Last Guardian, but they do not need to. The point is that they provide an effective counterweight to the grim surroundings — a reminder that even a seemingly hopeless dystopia that’s devoid of humans need not be devoid of humanity.

It helps that many of Stray’s encounters are delivered with a Pixar-like sense of humor and gentleness. There are the obvious gags, like the way Stray mimics FromSoftware’s now infamous animation when opening one set of double doors, or how the controls stop working correctly if it puts a paper bag over its head. And there are the simpler moments of warmth, like the first time the cat meets a Guardian that’s willing to interact with it, or the love heart that’s displayed on an old robot’s screen if Stray chooses to rub against her legs.

Likewise, without spoiling anything, Stray’s ending is not just happy, but hopeful — it offers a future for Walled City 99 that would have seemed impossible at the start of the game. In this way, despite the dystopian setting, Stray may best be understood as an example of so-called “hopepunk” – a positive and uplifting counterweight to the cyberpunk staples that focus on misery.

Kubrick and Clarke’s 2001 is a classic of so-called hard science fiction, a genre concerned with scientific rigor and a pro-scientific outlook, but it’s representative of the way science fiction often skirts the nuts and bolts of its subject matter. We imagine travel to faraway stars, but we often take little time to look in any depth at our means of getting there.

Hardspace: Shipbreaker turns all of this on its head. As a salvager of disused spaceships, it’s your job to take a long time looking in a lot of depth at every craft that comes through your orbital zero-gravity decommissioning rig. Your aim is always to scrap the craft as quickly as possible, but where, when, and how to cut, pull, and detonate its various parts is a matter of careful planning. Accidentally cut through a fuel tank, for example, and you will blow away a chunk of the ship and risk getting caught in the blast. But take too long separating out each constituent and you may need to take a break to top up your fuel and oxygen, not to mention reduce your earning capacity for the day.

In career mode, the difficulty ramps up gradually. The first ship you decommission is barely more than a few sheets of nanocarbon welded together — the simplicity of the job is counterbalanced by the initial hour or two of frustration with Shipbreaker’s precise but often unforgiving zero-gravity simulation. But as you progress through the career or try free play, you eventually take on enormous, structurally complex cargo ships that present multiple hazards and require deft maneuvering through Shipbreaker’s space.

Despite the fictional subject matter, Hardspace: Shipbreaker is most at home in the burgeoning job simulator genre. So it’s not surprising that it eventually settles into a similar kind of dangerously addictive, serenely relaxing rhythm as in the likes of Euro Truck Simulator. It’s a rhythm that’s ripe for reflection.

Pulling ships apart forces a confrontation with how they are put together. And as you melt away countless joists with your laser cutter, it’s difficult not to wonder whether anything in front of you could ever be convincingly space-worthy. Your scanner renders each vessel like a fake Owners’ Workshop Manual, but it focuses on the gratifying complexity of cutting points, structural weaknesses, and salvage types, rather than on the exponentially greater complexity of the ship’s flight. A nacelle, for example, cannot be broken down but gets scrapped wholesale, and so there is no explanation of the engines that drive these ships.

In other words, Hardspace: Shipbreaker is not exactly the inverse of 2001. It’s not that 2001 skims over the details of space flight while Shipbreaker zeroes in on the nuts and bolts of it. It’s that Shipbreaker zeroes in on the literal nuts and bolts. Even if its ships look suspiciously like something out of the Homeworld franchise (not a surprise, perhaps, given developer Blackbird Interactive’s other projects), Shipbreaker is not interested in their function. At the end of the day — or, more accurately, work shift — they all reduce to more or fewer parts.

In this sense, Hardspace: Shipbreaker is a subtly clever subversion of hard science fiction. Unlike the genre classics that revel in space flight or take it for granted, Shipbreaker points to its cost — the literal credit cost of each piece of a spacefaring vessel, but also the human risk bound up with it. The result is a deconstruction of some of science fiction’s oldest staples into the most prosaic bits and pieces and a weighing of these against the human element. Put simply, it’s difficult to romanticize space flight when you spend every day risking your life to recycle a lightbulb for a few credits.

These subtler queues are complemented by Shipbreaker’s more on-the-nose narrative. The world is a dystopia of late-stage capitalism and hyperinflation. Space flight has turned our solar system into an industrialized junkyard, and the all-powerful LYNX Corporation profits endlessly both from space flight and space salvage. Its salvage operation is thinly disguised indenture — you start the game with a LYNX package that puts you over 1.2 billion credits in debt to the corporation, and your career is a slog to pay off the debt, exacerbated by the need to buy your own oxygen, fuel, suit repairs, and even your own “resurrection.” LYNX has the right to clone you and put you back to work should you die, but you have to pay for the privilege. Your time off work is spent in a tiny one-room apartment adjacent to the decommissioning rig, reading spam and work emails, listening to peppy ads, and sleeping.

It’s an existence that’s both worryingly precarious and bleakly constant, one more at home in a cyberpunk dystopia than traditional science fiction. But that is precisely the point of Hardspace: Shipbreaker — its anatomical butchering of spaceships doesn’t fuel an obsession with future technology, so much as it prompts a hard look at some of the costs of that obsession.

Spice Wars entered early access last week with an impressive debut build. It’s stable, runs well, and already passes the all-important “just one more turn” test for compulsively moreish gameplay, even if strictly speaking there are no turns. You pick one of four currently available factions – Atreides, Harkonnen, the Smugglers, or the Fremen – and embark on a freeform campaign that wouldn’t feel out of place next to any classic 4X franchise, like Civilization or Galactic Civilizations. The main difference with those franchises is that, although there is a pause button, decisions in Spice Wars play out in real time, so there is an added urgency and pressure to the gameplay.

The real-time elements are also a smart nod to Dune’s RTS heyday that don’t feel like a retread of those older titles. They are not the only callback either. The soundtrack is a suitably mood-setting mix of synths that references Frank Klepacki’s work on Dune II and its reimagining, Dune 2000.

The art isn’t up to par with something like Amplitude Studios’ beautifully drawn Endless series, but it’s evocative nonetheless. The desert in particular looks phenomenal — sand clouds obscure the map in a fog of war until scouted by an ornithopter, giant craters and plateaus interrupt purple-and-red spice fields, sandstorms blanket entire regions, and crashed vessels present exploration opportunities. The game does an excellent job of conveying the sense of a mysterious, dangerous, and unforgiving landscape without ever succumbing to monotony.

The aesthetics underpin a number of more or less complex gameplay systems. Unsurprisingly, the spice Melange is at the heart of Dune: Spice Wars. In Dune’s fiction, it is a drug found only on the desert planet that makes interstellar travel possible, by enabling the Spacing Guild Navigators to enter a state of prescient awareness to search for safe routes between the stars.

Therefore, no matter which faction you pick, your first task is to establish a spice supply. This first requires the conquest of a region, which in turn means recruiting some military at your main base and then sending them to that region’s controlling settlement. The ensuing battle has little strategy to it and relies almost entirely on relative unit strength. Send two early-game units against a village defended by three squads, for example, and you are pretty much guaranteed to lose.

Spice can be stockpiled to pay a tax to the Emperor or a bribe to the Spacing Guild. In line with the source fiction, the Navigators’ prescience allows them to observe unsanctioned activities, but they value the flow of spice above all other political concerns. Therefore, they can be bought off if you are playing as the Fremen and mining spice without the Emperor’s knowledge or permission.

Alternatively, spice can be exchanged into Solari, the game’s only monetary currency. It can be a delicate balance to strike. On one hand, there are penalties for not paying your taxes or bribes, and certain events and diplomacy options require a healthy stockpile of the drug. On the other hand, most things are bought at least partially with Solari and require Solari for upkeep.

Other resources include plascrete as building material (an odd choice of terminology, given that Frank Herbert’s novels relied on plasteel, and plascrete was apparently introduced in Brian Herbert’s fiction), manpower to generate troops and spice mining crews, fuel cells to power buildings and certain high-end technology, water, and authority to spend on conquest. Some resources are even more abstract, such as standing in the Landsraad (the body that represents Dune’s various houses, like the Atreides and Harkonnen), additional influence in the Landsraad, knowledge to spend on research, intel that is used on espionage actions, and hegemony, which is used to measure overall power and progress towards one of the game’s victory conditions.

It’s an initially dizzying array of variables to keep track of, particularly as you start to notice slight faction variations, (The Fremen do not use fuel cells, for example.) are offered a regular vote in the Landsraad, recruit agents to send on espionage missions, face scripted events to take part in, and learn various combination options. Build a wind trap in a region that has a wind strength of 4, for instance, and that wind trap will produce 12 water instead of the base 3.

However, after a few hours, the limitations begin to rear their disappointing head. With the notable exception of a few cross-genre titles like Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, combat and diplomacy have long been the Achilles’ heel of the 4X genre. But they are especially basic in Dune: Spice Wars at the moment. Even in the late game, unit variety doesn’t fundamentally change the numbers game you play in the opening hour. And diplomacy boils down to little more than flinging resources and treaties at rival factions.

This is especially disappointing given the importance of diplomacy in Herbert’s fiction. After all, the first novel effectively ends with the meeting of a diplomatic council, while the sequels have countless scenes that take place in audience chambers, embassies, petitions, and so on. This speaks to a wider issue with Spice Wars.

Shiro Games certainly uses all the Dune terminology correctly (except maybe that plasteel/plascrete issue) and clearly has a handle on the lore, but none of it feels inextricably integrated into the gameplay. You could change spice to gold reserves, Solari to cash flow, and the Spacing Guild to the taxman, and the underlying system would feel at home in a modern day city-building simulator.

Eventually you start to feel the absence of other important players from Herbert’s books. Where are the Bene Gesserit, the Tleilaxu, or the Ixians? Wouldn’t it be great, for instance, to defy the advice of a Bene Gesserit counselor, purchase a ghola as an espionage agent, and send them to impersonate a member of the Imperial House? Where, for that matter, is the Imperial House Corrino? I can pay them taxes, but I can’t play as them or engage them in diplomacy.

Some of these elements aren’t altogether absent from Spice Wars, but they are exceptionally limited in the current build. When starting a campaign, you get a choice of advisors, which can include some mentats and Bene Gesserit. However, the mentat is not someone to draw on for on-the-fly calculations of probable outcomes during the campaign, but simply a pre-game statistic modifier. Likewise, the Bene Gesserit cannot be used to more accurately read someone during a diplomatic meeting or to try to predict a future outcome — she, too, merely changes some overall gameplay statistics.

These problems aren’t insurmountable. Avalon Hill’s 1979 board game Dune (recently reprinted by Gale Force Nine) directly integrates each of its playable factions’ defining characteristics into the gameplay. The Bene Gesserit, for example, steal the victory if at the start of a campaign they accurately predict which faction will win the game.

Nonetheless, it may well be that Spice Wars’ limitations point to a broader problem with the Dune license. Just as for many years it was claimed that the novel is unfilmable, perhaps we are now finding that Frank Herbert’s fiction cannot be rendered into a video game without sacrificing some of its deeper themes and complexity.

Darren Mooney has argued in an excellent essay for this publication that, contrary to initial appearances, Dune is not a chosen one “mighty whitey” narrative. One of the reasons for this is that Paul Atreides, Dune’s protagonist, is ultimately a failure. Not just a failure — by the time of the second and third Dune novels, he is the most genocidal leader in the history of humanity. In Dune: Messiah, Paul laments that his leadership and cult of personality have led to over 60 billion deaths, the sterilization of 90 planets, the moral downfall of more than 500 other worlds, and the erasure of over 40 religions. That doesn’t make for a very happy marriage with a gameplay loop premised on conquest and domination, especially when that loop is supposed to lead to a satisfying and enjoyable victory.

Dune is also a study in the importance of ecology and ecosystems. Indeed, some have argued that Dune is one of the earliest examples of climate fiction — a currently popular genre that tends to focus on climate change issues. There is an entire chapter, which was greatly simplified for the recent film, in which Dune’s ecologist and the Fremen faction leader in Spice Wars considers the relationships between the planet’s giant sandworms, their habitat, and spice. There are many choice lines, but here is one: “You cannot go on forever stealing what you need without regard to those who come after. The physical qualities of a planet are written into its economic and political record.” How does one reconcile such sentiments with gameplay mechanics that are premised on the unthinking and inconsequential exploitation of a planet’s natural resources?

Then again, it’s not like these themes haven’t been tackled in video games, albeit separately and in vastly different titles. Look no further than Crusader Kings 3, for example, for a set of systems that are able to model the complexity of leadership, including its frequent vanity, insanity, and ultimately failure — where personal and dynastic survival and ambition often outweigh the needs of the governed population. Or consider Terra Nil, a simplistic but effective “reverse city builder” about ecosystem reconstruction.

Neither example should be taken to imply that the next Dune: Spice Wars update should receive a Crusader Kings-style overhaul. However, I would pay good money for DLC that lets you play as a 3,500-year-old gradually evolving man-sandworm hybrid.

The introduction is unassuming enough: You wake up a prisoner on a ship headed for Vvardenfell, an island in Morrowind, itself a province of Tamriel – the continent where every Elder Scrolls game has taken place. The ship docks at the port of Seyda Neen, and your release paperwork acts as a character creator. Here you pick your class or create a custom class, which determines your major, minor, and miscellaneous (“misc”) skills. Major skills increase the quickest and make the most significant contribution to overall leveling up, while misc skills make no contribution to leveling up at all.

Oblivion shed the misc skills category, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim removed these distinctions altogether. Looking back, however, it cheapened the role-playing fantasy. When your character can be a master of any skill, there is little incentive to role-play a particular approach or style. And your avatar, sufficiently leveled up, struggles to stand out amidst a crowd of similar jacks of all trades.

Morrowind’s skill systems are far from perfect, of course. The enemy AI is often astoundingly dumb. Even though the graphics are impressive by 2002 standards – particularly the implementation of weather effects and the day-night cycle – the animations feel stiff and floaty. That makes character builds focused on combat unsatisfying and extended dungeon crawls at times deeply frustrating. But the fundamental distinction between different skill types encourages replays and ultimately presents an interesting balance between nature and nurture – your character is naturally talented at some things, could be nurtured to passable skill at others, but can’t hope to master everything.

Skill choices complement an ambitious spell system, which allows the player to learn existing spells or craft their own in time. The player’s magicka pool or low skill level might make a spell inaccessible, but in principle any combination of effects is possible.

It’s difficult to forget stepping out of Seyda Neen, only to have an elf fall from the sky to his death immediately in front of you. His journal reveals that he crafted a spell that granted the power of flight. In reality, it’s a huge buff to jump, which allows the caster to leap across most of the game map but can only be used safely when countered with another spell for slow fall.

It might have looked absurd for characters to levitate by effectively walking through the air or to run so fast they triggered loading screens every couple of seconds – presumably one reason spellcrafting was simplified for Oblivion and left out of Skyrim. But spellcrafting in Morrowind trusted the player with a degree of freedom and experimentation rarely seen in open-world games since. In effect, Morrowind freely handed players the means to try to break it – a design approach usually associated more with immersive sims than with RPGs.

Meanwhile, Seyda Neen might look like many generic high fantasy settings at first glance – medieval-looking architecture, weapons, and armor, elves and orcs milling around, and copious references to imperial rule. The game’s limited draw distance and resolution at the time of release, especially on the original Xbox, obscured the sheer strangeness of the world beyond the port town.

But listen out and you’ll hear the guttural call of a silt strider, a giant flea-looking creature that is used for paid transportation between major towns and cities. Along with boats, gondolas, and some limited teleportation, silt striders represent the extent of Morrowind’s fast travel system. They might be less convenient than Skyrim’s unrestricted fast travel to any discovered location, but the limitation forces exploration and helps to cultivate the sense that the world exists apart from the player, rather than built specifically for their convenience.

The silt striders are also representative of Morrowind’s strangeness. In contrast to Oblivion, which can be more or less summarized as rolling green hills and forests, or Fallout 3, which inspired mods to add variety to its uniformly green-and-brown post-apocalypse, Morrowind combines a dizzying array of artistic, architectural, and genre influences.

There are the aforementioned oversized mushrooms, of course, but equally memorable are the steampunk-like dungeons of the Dwemer (which made a return in Skyrim), the flying jellyfish, the houses that look like they are built from the shells of giant crabs and specially cultivated flowers, the Mediterranean-like architecture of Balmora, or the great ziggurats that make up the capital Vivec, complete with a moonlet suspended above the city. Indeed, there is so much variety and so much that is unique, strange, or surreal that emerges as a result of those influences intersecting that it is impossible to do it real justice here.

To some extent, Morrowind’s story plays second fiddle to these influences. It’s a fairly typical “chosen one” narrative, as the player character works to prove themselves to be the reincarnation of a great hero by completing a set of preordained tasks, including uniting the land’s Great Houses and eventually leading an assault against the game’s main antagonist Dagoth Ur. In that sense, it shares many core beats with Oblivion and Skyrim.

But it’s in how Morrowind builds its world around this archetypal arc that it comes into its own. Morrowind’s religion, for example, is based on the Tribunal, a triumvirate of demigods that had once called Dagoth Ur an ally and that had come by their divine powers in suspicious circumstances. It’s a complex history, faith, and set of relationships, made more so by the fact that Vivec – one of the three demigods – still resides in the capital city of Vvardenfell and brings many human follies to his deific role. Like the capricious Greek gods, he is as vain and arrogant as he is brilliant.

The sense of wonder is reinforced by Morrowind’s sparse voiceover. Many characters meet the player with a line or two of voiced greeting, but the bulk of their dialogue is confined to text boxes. It leaves much to the imagination, as well as space for more elaborate and longer exposition.

That isn’t to say that the writing is on par with that of contemporaries like Planescape: Torment or Baldur’s Gate II. The dialogue system is based on a set of keywords that can be mentioned to any NPC, for example, rather than a choice between concrete prompts and responses. And much like with the bafflingly disorganized quest journal, it can make it difficult to keep track of conversations and progress. Often, it can seem like many NPCs have nothing new or interesting to say or repeat each other verbatim.

Nonetheless, in other ways these obtuse idiosyncrasies helped Morrowind‘s sense of immersion. When the game mechanics do such a poor job of holding your hand in such an interesting world, there is an incentive to learn and memorize what’s going on around you. It’s a shame that as Bethesda sought to streamline its quality-of-life features in later Elder Scrolls and Fallout titles, like with better quest tracking and inventory management, it also ended up streamlining out a lot of what made Morrowind worth playing. Perhaps it’s nostalgia talking, but it’s telling that my favorite part of Skyrim was Solstheim – the setting for its Dragonborn DLC and for Morrowind‘s Bloodmoon expansion.

This economy of resources is characteristic of NORCO as a whole. It builds its narrative gradually, layering new findings over established canon. You initially play as Kay, returned to her hometown of Norco, Louisiana after her mother Catherine dies of cancer and her brother goes missing. Later, you play as Catherine and switch between the two perspectives to piece together the surprising twists in NORCO’s story. Meanwhile, the town is slowly swallowed by an oil company that runs a ruthless refinery business, driving its inhabitants into poverty.

The squalid conditions are plain to see. But that they may be the product of deliberate devaluation of real estate, the exploitation of racial inequalities, or a combination of the two is suggested by a book optionally available to the player on Catherine’s bookshelf. These themes are then gradually expanded over the course of a few hours through conversations with the game’s colorful cast. It’s a typical trick for NORCO — start small, with a few peripheral suggestions at themes and story beats, then gradually bring them into focus to build a rich tapestry that ends up somewhere much more interesting than NORCO’s dystopian beginnings.

The game’s emphasis on Norco’s failings as a town make for a brooding, miserable start that has something of the languid deliberateness and much of the same sense of place as the first season of True Detective. The pixel art bird’s-eye-view vistas of foggy swamps and rivers and road trips across empty freeways do a particularly good job of channeling that atmosphere. But it soon evolves into a kind of lo-fi cyberpunk with a touch of supernatural mystery, existential deliberation, and humor.

Like everything else, the cyberpunk elements creep in slowly. There is the family robot Million, the shop run by a fully automated AI, the app reminiscent of Westworld’s RICO, which is used to accept quick-turnaround illicit work. There is versioning, a kind of digital backup of a person’s consciousness that would be at home in any Philip K. Dick novel. There are even multiple visual references to Blade Runner, from the opening shot of industrial chimney stacks silhouetted against a darkening sky, to an eye framing a flame venting from one of those stacks.

The futuristic elements jostle for space with the rundown, dirty, old pieces of town. It’s the sort of place that would have a landline payphone operated by a self-aware AI, or a dying man in a boarded-up shack with access to a corporate security network. So it’s not surprising to find elements of horror, mystery, and existential despair between NORCO’s focus on the old and the new — possible UFO sightings, fantastical creatures running the illicit app, grave robberies, a conspiracy behind Norco’s oil company, a religious prophecy, and many smaller secrets.

Likewise, the game finds plenty of time for humor. Early on, for example, Kay can advise a comically arrogant director to adapt his script to include local slang. He will then browbeat his actors into using Kay’s suggestions, no matter how absurd. In another episode, Catherine can persuade a bystander to buy expired hot dogs, and the vendor will provide vital information in exchange. Indeed, almost all of the characters in NORCO have a warmth and earnest humor to them that stands in stark contrast to their miserable surroundings.

Given the emphasis on place and narrative, it’s perhaps not surprising that NORCO’s gameplay flexes around the requirements of the story. Ostensibly, it’s a point-and-click adventure in the vein of classic titles like Broken Sword, The Secret of Monkey Island, and Westwood Studios’ Blade Runner.

The player is presented with largely static panels that offer various points of interaction to progress the story. However, in reality it eschews most point-and-click conventions in favor of a set of minigames that range from navigating a 2D boat through a Louisiana swamp to turn-based combat, pattern-matching, and timed clicking. The minigames are aimed primarily at breaking up the panels, rather than delivering meaningful gameplay. It speaks to how well those panels build atmosphere and progress the story that the relative lack of gameplay depth does little to hurt the game.

Overall, it’s an eclectic mix of influences that transforms NORCO’s initial sense of misery into a kind of relaxing, upbeat resignation. The feeling of standing in the backyard of Catherine’s house, staring out at the chimney stacks looming in the distance and listening to Gewgawly I and Thou’s soundtrack, for instance, is not dissimilar to the feeling evoked by standing on the balcony of Ray McCoy’s apartment, listening to “Blade Runner Blues” and the din of a futuristic Los Angeles. It’s not a world you’d want to live in, but it’s one that’s difficult not to get lost in.

So it is with FAR: Changing Tides. You start the game as a boy alone in a half-flooded city, picking your way through ruined buildings towards a sailboat that you steer into the wide unknown. There is no dialogue, text, or cutscenes — only the evocative art and the stirring soundtrack. The game leaves you free to make your own mind up about who the boy is or why he is sailing out. It might be to find family or a way to fix the city, but his singular focus on moving forward suggests something more grounded — the boy is simply looking for something different, hoping he can outrun the environmental disaster he is trapped in.

It makes the scenery the boy travels through all the more poignant. Uprooted forests, melting ice caps, and dead machinery linger in the background. Houseboats and other abandoned vehicles are strewn across his way, indicating a mass exodus long ago. No matter how far he goes, there is no escape from the detritus of civilization. Worse still, there is no escaping the feeling that the journey has been attempted by many before him, to no avail.

The boy upgrades his vessel as he journeys: a steam engine for when the winds are too quiet to sail, an overdrive module to power through the hardiest obstacles, and a submersion system to turn the ship into a submarine. These are managed through an array of analogue switches and levers. A button ignites the engine, a set of bellows must be jumped up and down on to keep it going, a pump toggles between a vacuum and a hose to dispense or remove water, a switch raises the mast, and a line is drawn to hook the sail. The boy needs to dash between them, climbing ladders and rigging, occasionally wielding a blowtorch, to keep the overall system balanced and in good working order.

It feels more fiddly than in Changing Tides’ predecessor, FAR: Lone Sails, and as a result it loses some of that game’s elegance and sense of pace. There were multiple times when I smashed my mast against an obstacle, for example, either because I did not read the game’s 2.5D design well enough or because the obstacle arrived before I could respond to it. But the payoff is that FAR: Changing Tides is more varied than Lonely Sails, with a greater breadth of navigational challenges and puzzles and a broader range of environments that tell their own stories.

Early in the game, a massive wave rips the stern from the boy’s ship. Later, there is a suggestion that the wave was due to a breach of the city’s flood wall. Later still, as the boy raises another city from the oceanic depths, we might infer that the entire civilization has adapted itself to rising sea levels. It isn’t the hopeless post-apocalypse of something like The Last of Us, nor the cheerful nihilism of Fallout’s retrofuture, but a kind of Ballardian melancholy — the boy’s energetic obsession with his journey foregrounded against a listless world.

There are murals to be found throughout FAR: Changing Tides that suggest the crisis may be of human making, perhaps a bomb, a nuclear accident, or over-exploitation of resources. Certainly, the ship’s reliance on steam sits in uncomfortable tension with the slow death of the boy’s world. This tension is underscored, perhaps, by the fact that the only fuel available to burn is relics of the old world: fuel canisters, luggage, boxes, and other bits of rubbish. It’s as if the boy is burning his history, because everything else has already been exhausted.

On the other hand, the murals could just as easily be interpreted as a story of the struggle to adapt to changes in the climate. Some of them look like maps of the flood wall, for example, while others a possible council meeting to discuss solutions. FAR: Changing Tides works because it doesn’t force an interpretation. For that reason, it is also particularly effective at putting the focus on the consequences of the disaster. The cause and therefore the blame do not matter so much when the world is already broken.

And yet not everything is quite so bleak. In addition to the game’s bittersweet ending, which I won’t spoil here, there are signs of healing. Elk or deer can be seen in the distance, shoals of small fish and even groups of manta rays swim under the waters, and new plants flourish in some of the game’s dryer areas. Even the boy — should the player choose to let him — can bring a flower from the flooded city to the end of his journey. FAR: Changing Tides doesn’t preach at the player, but the silent effort of traversing its dying world speaks volumes.

The post-apocalypse is well-trodden territory in video games, from Wasteland to Fallout or The Walking Dead to Dying Light. All these settings share a common premise: humanity trying to carve out a new kind of existence in the shell of the old world following a cataclysmic tipping point. Sometimes they represent our world, but in miniature and stripped down to its barest essentials and cruelest of interactions. Yet despite the bleak premise, these games are often built around hope and a sense of progress as humanity tries to move beyond whatever catastrophe broke the world. People band together into new communities, rebuild, carry out new research, even make art, and they try to look to the future.

FromSoftware turns the post-apocalypse on its head. Its best-known games are also built around civilizations living in the wake of cataclysms, but their high fantasy worlds look backwards to better, grander times. The narrative endpoint is imitative restoration rather than progress, while the existing populations languish in the ruins of the old worlds, decaying or falling into decadence as they obsess over leftover pieces of those worlds. As a result, FromSoftware’s games cultivate a singular sense of forlorn bleakness and lonely abandonment.

In Demon’s Souls, Boletaria is menaced by the return of the world-eating Old One. In the Dark Souls series, its worlds are subject to cycles of kindling and waning of the Flame, with successive generations living within or atop the ruins of their predecessors. In Bloodborne, the city of Yharnam is tainted by a growing blood sickness and an ever-present eldritch nightmare, while the city’s obsession with blood has led it to become insular and driven its inhabitants insane. In Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, the setting is Japan’s infamous Sengoku period of civil war, with a focus on a dying clan corrupted by the promise of immortality.

In all cases, there is an emphasis on repeated mistakes, decline, or patterns of cultural ebb and flow. Buildings decay and crumble while creatures grow grotesque and twisted. Those in power obsess over the source of their power, while the rest eke out a miserable existence in their shadow, often as isolated individuals from defunct factions or fraternities.

All these FromSoftware games share an obsession with an idealized version of their fictional pasts — the suggestion is always that as civilization waxes and wanes, it moves further downwards, away from its historical peak. The next cycle might approximate the previous one, but it will never quite live up to it. So, for example, Dark Souls 3’s final DLC, The Ringed City, opens upon a literal heap of discarded architecture — buildings piled on top of each other like layers of fossilization. The player, in one way or another, is always given the choice to break the cycle or become part of the new one.

Elden Ring is no exception to these themes, but it is perhaps their clearest expression yet. The Lands Between, the game’s open-world setting, has been subjected to the Shattering. The titular Elden Ring has been broken; its shards have found their way into the hands of the demigod children of the Queen of the Lands Between, who are corrupted by the shards’ power. As the exiled Tarnished, it’s your role to return to the Lands Between and restore the Elden Ring.

Even if it might have been written by George R.R. Martin, the premise is quintessentially FromSoftware. A majestic civilization brought low by a cataclysm. Corruption eating away at the lords of the land, who covet profane knowledge and power, and who are a mere shadow of the land’s old leaders. And all the while there is a yearning for the old days, for restoration and a climb back to the old peak of civilization.

Elden Ring is the clearest expression of FromSoftware’s obsession with cultural and social decadence not just because of the premise, but because the size of its world lets you witness more of it. There are fields strewn with collapsed masonry, towns half-submerged in swamps, dilapidated churches occasionally occupied by lonely and singular NPCs — the Pope hat-wearing tortoise, for example, or the ornery recluse obsessed with boiled shrimp.

Above all, Elden Ring is the first FromSoftware game that lets you gaze out at the horizon and see fairytale castles perched atop impossible cliffs, only to draw near and have that illusion fall away, gradually replaced by a perception of decay and ruin. Look to Stormveil Castle, for example, and it will seem like an imposing and impressive work of engineering. Draw closer, however, and you will find that it is riddled with holes, like an enticing apple eaten by a worm. The castle is home to Godrick the Grafted, one of the Queen’s demigod children, obsessed with harvesting body parts to graft onto himself and spider-like abominations.

You will come across guarded caravans pulled by giants and thronged by processions of standard-bearing undead, but it is unclear where they are going or why. You will clear out encampments flying banners that mean nothing to you but likely recall alliances long dead or forgotten. You will stumble into mines that are hard at work excavating smithing materials, but you won’t know where they are being transported or why. You will come across gigantic lifts that connect disparate regions but find that they are inactive and the enormous halls they are housed in are deserted. Despite the fact that the Lands Between never leave you short of things to do, galloping across them conjures up a similar feeling of melancholy as Shadow of the Colossus’s minimalist treks atop Agro.

It may be more instructive to view the world of Elden Ring less as some kind of inverted post-apocalypse or high fantasy nightmare and more as an example of the so-called Dying Earth subgenre, exemplified by the likes of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series and Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun. In the latter, protagonist Severian journeys across an Earth so ravaged by a dying sun and repeating patterns of decay and conflict that it can offer him nothing more hopeful than an opportunity to break that pattern. So with Elden Ring and so perhaps even the greater FromSoftware canon — after seven games and 12 years of refinement and renewal, what will the next title look like?