The immersive sim is arguably gaming's worst-named genre, as it really doesn't tell you much. Aren't most video games designed to immerse you, and aren't they all, in a sense, simulating something? Trying to define what makes an "immersive sim" has long been a running bit among creators and players. I've previously joked that it's a game in which you can flush the toilets, due to how oddly ubiquitous that feature is in games like Prey, BioShock, and other genre standouts. Sincerely, though, I think of immersive sims as games that give you a puzzle box with a multitude of solutions, and it's up to you how you solve it. In that sense, Skin Deep is a great immersive sim.

In the sci-fi comedy Skin Deep, you play Nina Pasadena, an Insurance Commando whose job is to save cats who have been kidnapped by space pirates--so long as their coverage is active. One crew, The Numb Bunch, is causing all sorts of havoc, commandeering a number of ships and keeping Nina busy saving her feline policyholders. If the setup sounds ridiculous, that's on purpose. Eschewing the dystopian darkness and unflinching seriousness of many, if not most, "im-sims," Skin Deep is reliably laugh-out-loud funny, whether it's the quips enemies grunt as you sneak around various spaceships, or the emails you read from rescued cats in between missions.

Played in first-person, Skin Deep flexes its im-sim muscles in levels that feel excitingly open-ended and demand careful planning, while still asking you to improvise on-the-fly when things go awry. Each mission has a number of locked-up cats to save and enemies to evade or eliminate, and there's no one right way to complete these objectives. A cat's lockbox needs a key, for example, and you can find those by pickpocketing guards, reading memos and tracking one down some place, finding a Duper--a ranged device that instantly duplicates whatever item you've shot at--and doubling an otherwise hard-to-reach key, or via other methods I won't spoil.

Yes, the original version of Oblivion did not have any scruff in sight. No beards in the character creator and not a single mustache can be found in the enormous province of Cyrodiil. Adding beards to a handful of NPCs throughout the world doesn't change Oblivion's core experience. In fact, even with the facial hair and improved graphics, half of the characters I met during my adventure still looked unsettling. To some, this may be off-putting--especially when juxtaposed with the remaster's otherwise astounding visuals--but for me, Oblivion isn't Oblivion without some truly uncomfortable character models. It's all part of that "charm" that game director Todd Howard mentioned in the reveal stream.

The folks at Virtuous seem to understand that trademark Oblivion "charm," too, because the remaster keeps the best of the Bethesda jank intact while gently reworking some of Oblivion's more dated mechanics. Purists will certainly find things to nitpick, and first-timers may scratch their heads at some of the jank that was left in, but Oblivion Remastered feels like the most logical compromise. The visuals have been entirely recreated to take advantage of Unreal Engine 5, but the characters still don't look quite right. The attack animations have been redone, but the combat is still generally bad. The streamlined leveling mechanics retain the class system, but it's much harder to get soft-locked. The UI and menus have been consolidated and refreshed, but Oblivion's iconic map screen is identical to the original. For the most part, Oblivion Remastered manages to walk that thin line of familiarity and freshness.

The biggest surprise is its presentation. Oblivion Remastered looks stunning. Virtuous and Bethesda Game Studios have taken advantage of Unreal Engine 5 and it is without a doubt the most technically impressive game Bethesda Game Studios has ever released. The dynamic lighting, vibrant skyboxes, broader color palette, and hyper-realistic textures give the remaster that current-gen AAA sheen that players expect. These enhancements extend to the character models as well, as NPCs are lavishly detailed. You can see the strands of hair on their freshly grown beards and the pores on their faces, but they're still a little uncanny. In most cases, the NPCs look even stranger when they open their mouths. There's a bizarre disconnect between the hyper-realistic visuals and the weird faces and dated facial animations. The thing is, that awkwardness is part of what makes Oblivion so special, and there's plenty of it in this remaster.

Everybody dies. It's the one thing we all have in common. Most of us won't know when it will happen, but that's not the reality for those living with a terminal diagnosis. Though the estimated timeframe isn't exact, that doesn't really matter when faced with a death sentence. Over the past year, I've become all too familiar with terminal illness and its inevitable conclusion. It's an odd thing to live through; on one hand, I was essentially grieving for someone who was still alive, while on the other, I was trying to stay positive and act as if everything was normal for their sake, savoring each and every moment I still had left with them. Because of this experience, I instantly resonated with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and its unusual premise. Developed by French studio Sandfall, this turn-based RPG introduces a world where humanity faces a collective terminal diagnosis, of sorts. It's a moving tale, complemented by engaging combat that blends aspects of traditional JRPGs with reactive, parry-heavy action.

The origins of Clair Obscur's premise begin 67 years prior to the start of the game's story, when a cataclysmic event known as the Fracture destroyed the Continent and shattered the land into pieces. One of those pieces is the city of Lumière, a surreal facsimile of Belle Époque era Paris, where landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe have been twisted, warped, and broken by the fantastical effects of the Fracture. The last remaining humans reside in Lumière, but with each passing year, humanity edges closer to extinction due to an ominous entity called the Paintress. Each year, this embodiment of death carves a new number into the monolithic structure looming on the horizon, and then a year later, everyone of that age dies. For 67 years, she's been counting down. Clair Obscur's prologue concludes with every 34-year-old disintegrating into dust and crimson petals as the Paintress moves onto number 33.

There's almost no one alive in Lumière who hasn't been touched by death in some way. The city's orphanages are overflowing with children, as couples debate whether to have kids of their own to keep humanity going or choose not to bring new life into such a bleak world. Some are at ease with death and content to live out their days managing market stalls or creating art on canvases and with musical instruments. Others dedicate their lives to researching new technologies and weapons to aid the expeditions that venture onto the Continent each year with the goal of killing the Paintress and preventing extinction. For those with one year left to live, joining an expedition is an appealing choice. The success rate might stand at 0%, with all previous expeditions failing to stop the Paintress or even return home, but what else do they have to lose?

Though the names Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat certainly aren't new, the newest installments in each franchise has reinvented the tenured fighting series' in different ways--one with a fresh coat of hip-hop-infused paint, the other with a total reboot of its lore.

Fatal Fury: City Of The Wolves, then, might be expected to try and reinvent its wheel with a similar kind of wild ambition, but it doesn't stray too far from its Garou roots. At the core of the experience is a mechanically sound fighting system in which skill rises above luck and the thrills of gameplay are heightened by the new REV System, which I find to be one of the most balanced ideas in recent fighting games. That said, the limited ways to explore this new system, coupled with some baffling decisions regarding its roster, makes City Of The Wolves lose some of its bite.

At the core of this new Fatal Fury is the aforementioned REV System, a risk/reward mechanic that can completely change the flow of a match in an instant and leads to some exciting finishes against CPU and human opponents alike. A small, semi-circular meter called the REV Gauge will build up as players use specific moves and abilities, like REV Arts or REV Accel, as well as every time you block.

Sunderfolk feels at its best when you're playing together with friends on the couch during what would have otherwise been an uneventful weekend afternoon. The game embodies two of my favorite aspects of tabletop RPGs: strategic teamwork and memorable anecdotes. It does struggle to be fun when you're playing solo, but that feels like it's clearly the wrong way to play the tabletop-inspired, turn-based tactical RPG, which really only comes together when different minds are working together to coordinate their respective perks and customized deck of card-based abilities to strategically accomplish the task at hand.

In Sunderfolk, each player takes control of one of six anthropomorphic heroes: an arcanist crow, a pyromancer axolotl, a ranger goat, a bard bat, a berserker polar bear, or a rogue weasel. After proving themselves capable bouncers in a tavern, the heroes band together to protect their home village, Arden, from a series of escalating threats and try to find a way to prevent the growing corruption of the magical tree that keeps everyone safe from the coming darkness. It's your typical run-of-the-mill fantasy setup, with would-be heroes rising to heed the call of adventure when no one else will, and for the first few hours, Sunderfolk doesn't do much to differentiate itself from contemporary stories.

But then you get to really know the NPCs, and Sunderfolk's story starts to make its mark with its varied cast of characters, all of whom are voiced by actor Anjali Bhimani to replicate the experience of playing a tabletop adventure with a Game Master who is portraying all the non-hero characters. Bhimani does an incredible job adjusting the pitch, tone, accent, and speed of her voice to add a distinct flavor to every character, injecting a feeling of life into the narrative that makes it easy to love the heroes' allies and effortless to hate the villains. My friends and I were far more invested in saving the village and discovering what was going on upon meeting an adorable, one-armed penguin orphan named Amaia who was doing her best to keep Arden's mines running, especially once her cruel and lying uncle was introduced. We vowed to do everything to save the little bird (and desperately hoped her uncle would be revealed as the true big bad so that we'd have a chance to destroy him), and much of that emotional investment, as well as our feelings about the other characters, was derived from Bhimani's portrayal.