The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom offers a link between the two worlds of Nintendo's iconic action-adventure franchise. It has the playfulness and freeform puzzles of Tears of the Kingdom and the traditional dungeon design the franchise was known for prior to Breath of the Wild's seismic shake-up. Echoes of Wisdom deftly bounces from past to present and establishes its own identity, turning the page to start a new legend for Princess Zelda.

By now, you're probably well-aware that the major change here is that the franchise namesake is finally the playable character. Technically, the Philips CD-i game Zelda's Adventure was the first to do this, but that abysmal game was nothing like Nintendo's Zelda games--it wasn't even published by Nintendo. Echoes of Wisdom is the first proper game starring Zelda, which sounds rather ridiculous when you consider the fact that Tingle has starred in three games and a multi-function DSiWare app where you can have your fortune read by the creepiest dude from Hyrule.

From a narrative perspective, the role reversal makes little impact, largely because Echoes of Wisdom is light on story. A malevolent force is creating rifts across Hyrule that turn residents of Hyrule, including Link and Zelda's father, into statues inside the dark and dreary dimension known as the Still World. Much like how Link was accused of wrongdoing in A Link to the Past, Zelda is accused of creating the rifts and is subsequently imprisoned; you'll even find Wanted posters around Hyrule, this time showing Zelda's face instead of Link's. In her cell, she meets Tri, an ethereal being who accompanies Zelda on her quest and is essentially Zelda's version of Navi from Ocarina of Time. Though some express momentary shock that Zelda is the kingdom's only hope, she is mostly viewed as the one person capable of defeating the evil threatening to consume Hyrule.

Discovery in video games has changed over the last 40 years. While we are arguably in a golden age of creativity and innovation in the medium, it's a different type of creativity than when games were in their infancy--learning to crawl, grappling for new ideas, and guessing at best practices. Modern-day games have become largely standardized, and that's mostly for the better. But when we look back at retro game collections like the NES Classic or compilations from Digital Eclipse, we're often remembering the trailblazers, not the oddballs. That's what makes UFO 50 so special--it invokes the sense of wild experimentation and surprise that you would find in a cross-section of the earliest video games.

The pitch is simple: UFO 50 is a compilation of fictional retro games made throughout the 1980s by a prolific developer called UFO Soft. They range from 1982 to 1989, and span across the entire gamut of retro genres. The presentation leans into this, as selecting a game for the first time has you blowing the dust off of it. You get the sense that you discovered these forgotten gems in an attic or garage sale. And for the most part, the games carry the design and story aesthetic that was common in '80s games, which I would describe as "sci-fi pulp as reimagined by early computer programmers."

In reality, of course, the games were created by a team of modern-day developers led by Spelunky's Derek Yu. That makes the decision to make not just a retro game but 50 retro games remarkably ambitious. One would expect such a massive undertaking to result in minigames at most, but that is not the case. These are almost universally the size and scope of actual games you would buy in the 1980s--still often smaller than the games we'd expect today, but not compromised for their fictional time period.

As a high schooler in 2006, I spent many months and what little money I had renting screen time with an Xbox 360 in a mall store that had dozens of TVs and consoles available for use at hourly rates. Several visits and two years later, I'd saved up enough money to buy myself the console, no longer willing to be only a part-time player of the game I'd wanted: Capcom's Dead Rising. Nearly 20 years since then, it's been entertaining to discover that it still holds up as an endearing, open-world zombie game that undoubtedly has its flaws. Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster isn't a new entry in the series I hope we one day get, but it's a fun return to the roots of a series that has a unique voice and, for better or worse, strange design choices.

Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster (DRDR) is not a remake. The title should give that away, but the line between remake and remaster has been blurred as of late, so I stress that as a means to explain that this game is, in most major ways, the same as it was. Changes come largely in the form of quality-of-life fixes and a welcome visual overhaul, but the bones of the original game--the dimensions of its mall setting, the tonally chaotic cutscenes, the feel of protagonist Frank West's wrestling moves and melee attacks--that's all as it was before. This puts a cap on the game's appeal in 2024, as several of its systems were awkward even in 2006, and have aged poorly since.

Essentially playing as Capcom's other zombie saga alongside the much older Resident Evil, and a darkly comedic take on Romero's Dawn of the Dead, Dead Rising is about a zombie outbreak that begins in a mall in Willamette, Colorado. Photojournalist Frank West, a self-serious investigator whom you can nonetheless dress up in a significant number of absurd costumes, arrives to look into the matter, then gets trapped in the mall with dozens of other human survivors. Surrounded by hordes of the undead whenever he steps out of the safe room, his mission is to determine the cause of the zombie plague, survive the outbreak until rescue arrives, and save as many others as he can.

In Frostpunk 2, I was responsible for a growing population of desperate people, trying to forge a new life in a world that had frozen over. One of the city's factions pleaded that I, the steward, repeal a law that would require citizens to rotate relationships in order to increase childbirth, and instead enact a law that forced mandatory marriage. By my personal morals, neither law was the right one, but I was at the mercy of my people, the communities they had built, and the radical factions that had formed from extreme ideologies. This is what they wanted. Still, my doubt outweighed their request and I denied. In turn, that faction conducted a protest that would erupt into a civil war. Chaos ran rampant, tension rose, and the trust I had forged with my people diminished. I knew this would happen. After all, it's the fragile society I built, whether I liked it or not. After 30 hours in Frostpunk 2, to me, it was just another day as a steward attempting to mitigate the downfall of a civilization hanging on a thread wearing thin.

Frostpunk 2 is a compelling, while cynical, view of survival, and a challenging strategy game that sets itself apart from its contemporaries in the city-building genre. Did I feel good watching a city I had developed over the course of nine in-game years start to come apart at the seams, despite having a stockpile of resources to survive for years to come? No. But Frostpunk 2 taught me that I'm not supposed to feel good about it. Instead, it conditioned me to accept that, no matter my best-laid plans, unifying a society with a shared vision of the future was a fool's errand.

Like the first Frostpunk, this sequel is a survivalist city builder that sees you managing your resources to, hopefully, thrive in a world that's been frozen over and where fatal storms loom on the horizon, all while navigating the harrowing needs of the planet's last known survivors. Surviving mother nature's greatest woes is one thing, but surviving human nature is the true adversary. This means that while you build a city, you're also building the values of society's future, creating two distressing challenges to juggle at once. Governing the laws and vision of the future was a defining characteristic of the first Frostpunk, and what separated it from other city builders of the genre at the time--Frostpunk 2 is a natural evolution of that.

The Plucky Squire is a game that will rightly receive a lot of attention for its eye-catching visual gimmick, which merges the worlds of 2D and 3D art around a clever story hook. But more than just its whizbang artistry, The Plucky Squire is a game that takes full advantage of its premise--telling a kid-friendly and heartfelt story, filling its well-realized world with lovable characters, and delivering constant surprises. It is a reminder, appropriately, to never judge a book by its cover.

You play as Jot, the titular "Plucky Squire" in a series of children's books of the same name. The series of picture books is popular enough to have inspired a large fan base and merch, which is absolutely believable given how playful and inviting it is. While Jot himself is the classic silent protagonist, the surrounding cast of characters are exuberant and frequently funny, and the world of Mojo itself, which the characters occupy, is colorful and imaginative.

Over time, the game reveals itself in layers of complexity. You begin playing through what appears to be a standard top-down adventure game, with the neat visual flourish that screen changes and cutscenes are marked by turning pages of the book. Before long though, the book's recurring villain, Humgrump, reveals his dastardly plan: the ability to kick Jot out of the book altogether. You're ejected forcefully out of the book and into the real world. That reveals the second layer, as Jot finds his way back into the book and then gains the power to jump in and out at will, using special "Metamagic" portals. When he jumps out of the book he roams around the desk of Sam, a 10-year-old boy who loves the Plucky Squire books.