Imagine a piece of complex origami. You want to understand how it works, so you start looking for a place to begin unfolding it. With each corner of the paper you peel back, you notice an even more intricate structure underneath. So you unfold that too, and find even more fine detail underneath yet again. You start to wonder how many layers it can have, and marvel at the intricacy. You remember at the start, when you already thought it was complex, but you had no idea how elaborate it really was. That is the experience of playing Blue Prince.

It can be difficult to describe a game like this, in which so much of the design is about curiosity and discovery. But at its most basic level, Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle game built around exploring a shapeshifting manor house. The executor of the Mount Holly estate has left it to you, but it will only become yours if you reach the mysterious Room 46. You cannot spend the night inside the house, so you set up camp just outside the grounds. After each day, the rooms reset and all of the doors close again. The exact layout of the manor is never the same twice. It takes place in first-person, making it an unfolding puzzle box that you live inside.

You start each day at the entrance, the bottom-center square of a 5x9 grid, faced with three doors. Each time you interact with a door, you're faced with three choices of which room to "draft" on the other side. Some rooms are dead ends, others are straight pathways, others only bend, and so on. You have a limited number of steps, and crossing the threshold into a new room ticks down one of them. From the start, you understand the objective to be that carving a pathway using these interlocking pieces, without expending too many steps, will successfully lead to the top of the 5x9 grid, to the Antechamber where there sits the entrance to Room 46. At this point, Blue Prince feels very much like a prestige board game, complete with a grid and tiles to place.

In April 2019, my life fell apart. Despite enduring what felt like month-long panic attacks leading up to this ordeal, I only realized how bad everything had gotten when I woke up in the hospital, body draped in a violently purple hospital gown that I still have no recollection of putting on. I spent a couple days and a thousand or so dollars in that hospital room, an uncomfortable combination of dazed and defeated, mostly. But I also remember feeling absurdly grateful. I was in a space where nothing was expected of me. I had been completely removed from the rest of the living, breathing, working population. It was as if I didn't exist. And it's terrifying to think about how desperately I wanted that back then.

Prior to my rejoining society, I was given a choice: I could seek further treatment and attempt to address my various ailments, or I could walk out those doors largely unchanged (apart from being hundreds of dollars poorer). Treatment meant time and money: two things I never felt I had enough of. But as I considered my next steps, the psychiatrist across from me set down her clipboard and told me something I'll never forget.

"If you don't make time to take care of yourself, your body will make time for you--and you probably won't like when or how it does."

South of Midnight is a remarkable celebration of the myths, sounds, culture, and language of the American Deep South, using the framework of a 3D action-platformer to spin a yarn about contending with pain and the strength necessary to rise above it. Developed by Compulsion Games--the team behind Contrast and We Happy Few--South of Midnight builds on the Canadian studio's strengths: intriguing narrative concepts, perturbing atmosphere, and memorable characters. Much like Contrast and We Happy Few, South of Midnight's gameplay pales in comparison to its narrative elements, but Compulsion Games' latest effort is its strongest game by far, delving into a setting and lore rarely seen in major video games to tell an incredible story.

In South of Midnight, you play as Hazel, a teenage track star who lives in Prospero, a town in the American Deep South. After a hurricane sweeps her home away with her mother inside, Hazel vows to track down and save her. However, she soon discovers that the storm has not only transformed the rural town and surrounding swampland into a dangerous jungle gym but also knocked loose a lot of lingering dark magic, making this journey all the more perilous. Hazel quickly learns that she is a weaver, a person born with the innate ability to see the underlying strands that tie the world together and can also knot into terrifying monstrosities in places where powerful negative emotions like grief, rage, and fear gather. Armed with surprisingly sharp textile-spinning tools, Hazel's search for her mom sees her stumble across numerous legendary spirits inspired by real-world myths, which she can help by uncovering the trauma that created them and doing her best to capture those feelings in magical bottles so that they can be taken away. To whom or where? That's just another mystery to solve.

It's a strong story that dips into Southern Gothic themes and cultivates a sense of dread that you cannot fully dismiss, for each of its tales exists in that unnerving middle ground of clearly being fantastical whilst pulling from real-world terrors like bigotry and child abuse. And when confronted with absurd displays of evil cruelty or agonizing tragedy in these stories, you can't easily discern where exactly reality ends and the myth begins--the pain in these gothic tales cling to you, much as they do to Hazel, and keep South of Midnight emotionally compelling all the way through.

Atomfall is not Fallout. The comparison has been a popular one, but the developers wanted to make it clear that this new IP from the creators of Sniper Elite is "its own thing for sure," and they're right. It is. But there are times when the similarities jump off the screen. Both focus on a post-apocalyptic world full of mutants, warring factions, and--most relatable of all--they both feature a sprawling locked bunker at the heart of their stories. But where the inciting incident in most Fallout games is escaping that bunker, Atomfall asks you to get inside its mysterious facility, The Interchange. It's in that simply stated objective that Atomfall's open-ended world design elevates the game to be something different and interesting in its own right, even as things like stealth and combat drag it down at times.

Just as Atomfall's major brushstrokes are derivative of Fallout and other post-apocalyptic fiction, its story starts with a similar penchant for the cliche. You awaken as an amnesiac in a 1950s-set British countryside. A nearby phone booth rings, and the voice on the other side demands you destroy someone or something called "Oberon." That same voice will call back nearly each time you approach a phone booth in the wild. The cryptic messages don't make a bit of sense, but it does swiftly push you toward your objective: Find and get inside The Interchange, a locked-down facility of some sort that seems to have been the site of a science experiment gone wrong. In there, Oberon can perish, if you so choose.

The region's people have been left to put the pieces back together following this event, and it's resulted in the forming of several opposing groups, such as the military force that claims authority, roaming bandits who use the chaos as an invitation to resort to lawlessness, and a cult of pagans who believe the catastrophe was good, actually. These territorial factions are often isolated to their own regions, which are experienced as a series of open-world maps that can be explored without limitations as soon as you start the game.

Juan Soto hopped on the subway and swapped one New York borough for another to become the highest-paid player in baseball. The Japanese phenom, Roki Sasaki, reunited with the growing list of his compatriots in Dodgers blue, making the World Series champions an even more formidable outfit. Corbin Burnes headed to the Arizona desert, the Cubs swung a trade for Kyle Tucker, and the Red Sox beefed up their rotation by acquiring ace Garrett Crotchet. It was an offseason of typical upheaval that even saw the Oakland Athletics leave their 57-year-old home for a temporary stay in Sacramento. But as the weather warms and spring training draws to a close, the return of the MLB season is just a few days away, which can only mean it's also time for the newest iteration of MLB The Show. While last year's game was one of minor iterations, MLB The Show 25 takes a few steps in the right direction by introducing a few long overdue changes to modes like Road to the Show and Franchise.

Road to the Show (RTTS) has grown stale over the past couple of years, with little to no improvements and an irritating connection to the card-collecting mode, Diamond Dynasty. This isn't the case in The Show 25, as it severs that link and completely overhauls the opening few hours of your career with the addition of amateur baseball. Now, you begin your journey to the Major Leagues as a fresh-faced high school student. By playing well in the three available games, potentially winning a high school championship, and showcasing your talents at the MLB combine, you'll garner interest from both MLB teams and the eight different college programs included in the game, such as Vanderbilt, LSU, UCLA, and Texas. You can opt to sign with an MLB team straight out of high school as an 18-year-old--like previous years' games--or head to college for four years to further improve your attributes and, ideally, increase your draft stock.

Each college has a rating from one to five stars in "exposure," which impacts your draft status and rating among scouts, and "skill development," which determines how many upgrade tokens you'll earn to improve your ballplayer. Once you've chosen a college that fits your needs, the game fast-forwards to your senior year as you prepare to compete in the College Baseball World Series in Omaha, Nebraska. Depending on the outcome of each game, you can potentially play in all four on the way to winning the national championship, which will significantly boost your standing in the draft if you also play well enough. After signing for an MLB team, you can expect to be fast-tracked through the minor leagues, as opposed to spending more time in AA and AAA if you decided to skip college, so there are some impactful choices to consider.