Capcom choosing the exact same subtitle for two separate expansions in two different games makes a lot of sense. Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen is not only a thematically relevant title, but thanks to the first game's expansion of the same name, it also conveys to longtime fans what to expect: namely, a new gameplay cycle focused on reworked loot and plenty of dungeon crawling. The key difference this time around is that instead of heading into the labyrinthine depths of a cursed island, you've got an entirely new region to explore.  

As someone who loved Dragon's Dogma 2, I couldn't really ask for much more. Yet changes to some of the game's core systems also dilute what made it so unique when it launched back in 2024. I know it's always been a fairly divisive game, and these changes are intended to make the experience more approachable, but they also strip away some of its magic in an effort to appeal to more people. Dark Arisen is still a great expansion, transporting you to a fascinating new region with more loot to earn, fantastical beasts to slay, and stories to behold, but it also shifts Dragon's Dogma 2 in a slightly different direction. 

To start with, Dark Arisen alleviates some of the game's intentional friction by reducing how often you need to travel on foot. The Eternal Ferrystone was already added to the game a few months ago, letting you freely fast travel to any portcrystal without expending a scarce resource. Those same portcrystals are located at every key location in Dark Arisen's new Norgan region. You still have to reach them on foot first to activate them, but once you do, you can simply teleport from one side of the map to the other. 

Using the Eternal Ferrystone is entirely optional; you can still traverse almost all of Norgan on foot if you desire,

Let's get the obvious out of the way: Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival is a grotesque game. It puts sex and extreme depictions of human mutilation front-and-center in its first-person perspective, and asks you to face it–even stick your hand in it. It's uncompromising in bringing Clive Barker's vision to a level of fidelity that not even the movies could dream of matching. It looks incredible.

While salacious in its nature, it can be easy–even forgiving–to fixate on Hellraiser: Revival for its lurid subject matter and blaze past its more considered themes of desire, abuse, and the darkest realms that linger in the human mind. But beyond the sensation of Revival's violence is a game that dares to be ambitious in both its gameplay and narrative.

Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival can feel like it's wearing the skin of other games at times. Each of its inspirations feeling like a Frankensteined limb attached to another. But by the end of this horror-action survival game, Revival becomes a beast all its own. Although it stumbles through an identity crisis in the early hours of its 10-hour runtime, it is unabashed in its display of grotesqueness and sexuality, and ascends as a game worth seeing through to the end.

Rooted in Clive Barker's original novella,The Hellbound Heart, and the first two films, Hellraiser: Revival takes place 20 years after the first movie. But don't worry--no prior knowledge of the franchise is required to engage with Revival's story. It focuses on Aidan Lynch and his girlfriend, Sunny–two folks from affluent families whose paths crossed in their joint journey to seek taboo and fringe forms of stimulation, by way of sexual desires and substance abuse. Sunny has a particular taste for collecting occult artifacts and manages to get her hands on the Genesis Configuration: one of the many mystical puzzle boxes that opens a gate to an eldritch realm of a neverending concrete labyrinth hellscape, home of the Cenobites–demon priest-like beings who seek to harvest souls and entrap them in an eternal hell of pain and pleasure.

Aidan, ignorant of the Genesis Configuration's otherworldly powers, uses the cube as a toy to evoke (consensual) pain on Sunny while making love, and in the process, triggers the box to summon the Cenobites, who mutilate Sunny in front of him and drag her away into The Labyrinth. Genesis Configuration in hand, Aidan marches into hell to get Sunny back.

It isn't long until Aidan finds himself at the center of the Scarlet Church, a cult of murderous psychopaths who worship the Cenobites and their god, The Leviathan, and seek ascension to become servants of its power. But on his journey, Aidan is haunted by much more than the terrors of the Cenobites, the monsters the realm produces, and the Scarlet Church itself. His own troubled past and vices, torment him too.

The setup for Revival paves way for myriad gameplay styles and design philosophies, and Revival attempts all of them, with the ga

A good puzzle game needs to constantly find new ways to challenge you, to walk you through skills and reward your observations, and to contain answers that make logical sense without being too obvious, or too obtuse. 

Order of the Sinking Star, the latest puzzler from developer Thekla Interactive and director Jonathan Blow, mostly hits those marks with impressive, cunning, and devious puzzle design. But even when it misses and gets frustrating, the game takes so many swings that it's easy to  head to another level and find another opportunity to bend your brain and stretch your smarts.

In fact, the best and worst part of Order of the Sinking Star is how expansive it is. Thekla touts over 1,000 puzzles to solve spread across an expansive overworld map that's full of discreet dungeon-like levels, mimicking the formula of 1987's The Legend of Zelda. And like the original Zelda, all of those puzzles involve pushing blocks around a grid, seen from a top-down perspective. Finding ways to keep the act of pushing blocks challenging, compelling, and unpredictable for hundreds of puzzles is Sinking Star's greatest feat, but that ingenuity can also make the game a little too sprawling and, at times, unwieldy.

All those puzzles are born of the many smart and intricate mechanics Order of the Sinking Star brings to bear on its simple underlying concept. The game finds you in what appears to be some kind of strange artificial garden facility, and you start by controlling a character who, after being plucked from some kind of battle, at first wonders if she's died and is now in the afterlife. But one assumes Valhalla or whatever would have more drinking and fewer brain teasers. As she sets about exploring, she discovers audio logs left behind by some other person who explored the place ahead of her and recorded his many findings.

Soon after, you enter a massive open overworld, where you can set out in four different directions, each representing a different set of mechanics. Those areas are each inspired by other, smaller puzzle games, and here those games' creators serve as level designers for their specific areas. From the overworld, you can enter different puzzle levels, activated from points on the ground like spaces on a game board. Completing those puzzles opens pathways forward to keep exploring the overworld.

What you soon discover is that each of these sections of the map, with its unique mechanics, represents a specific world in the multiverse sense. Each world has its own characters, whom you control within individual puzzle levels. The idea of different worlds and their denizens being pulled into this strange, ethereal place provides a story reason to include a ton of different mechanics, and then gives Order of the Sinking Star a handy excuse to combine them in fascinating and novel ways as the different worlds collide.

In the north, you run across levels inspired by the Heroes of Sokoban games, sporting traditional role-playing characters, like a Warrior, Mage, Thief, and so on. Each has their own capability: The Warrior can push multiple blocks at once as opposed to just one at a time, the Mage instantly swaps places with other characters or objects when he faces them, and the Thief can't push objects forward but can drag them behind her. The east draws its mechanics from the game Mirror Isles, where mirrors can teleport objects at right angles. The south, inspired by Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes, carries a series of puzzle

I felt such a sense of whiplash jumping into Star Wars Galactic Racer after playing Zero Company. Unlike Zero Company--and plenty of the other Star Wars games we've gotten in recent years, like Survivor and Squadrons--Galactic Racer isn't trying to emulate the science-fantasy drama that defines the majority of the Star Wars movies and other assorted fiction. Instead, it's silly. We're not making morally gray decisions in a fight against an evil empire here. No, we're trying to win a racing league in order to dethrone the comically evil rich competitor mounting some kind of hostile takeover of the league. Oh, and we have an infinite number of chances to qualify, and protagonist Shade can walk away from the most violent of wrecks without a scratch. It's such a ludicrous situation that makes no sense if you think through the logistics of it for even a moment. 

And yet that very absurdity is exactly what racing in the Star Wars universe is all about. It sees competitors strapping themselves into barely functioning death machines to jockey against each other at breakneck speeds while soaring past lava, through narrow desert canyons, over acid-filled valleys, and alongside icy cliffs to the cheers and jeers of a bloodthirsty audience. Everything about the competition is comically ridiculous, and by leaning into that irrationality, Galactic Racer not only feels authentic to that fantasy, but it's also a hilariously good time. 

You race through the game as Shade, a former-racer-turned-cargo-pilot, who finds themselves brought back into the sport as both a favor to the league's commissioner and as a means of seeking revenge against Kestar Bool, an arrogant champion who wronged Shade in the past. Galactic Racer doesn't do too much to set up the stakes for this plot, framing Shade's revenge through a lens of a mystery. What did Kestar do to Shade? Why does Shade always wear a helmet? Why is it so important for Shade to get Kestar to remember who they are beneath that helmet? Don't you want to learn these things? Yes, yes, I do.

However, while the mystique surrounding Shade, their relationship to Kestar, and the ramifications of the racing league at large for the galaxy are all intriguing setups that drive much of the drama in the early hours of Galactic Racer's story, the payoff to these questions is disappointing. The story eventually tells us the answers, but they're often hand-waved off in brief conversations, while Shade and the rest of the cast barely show any emotion--the direction for the voice acting is pretty good, but the final result sounds a little stiff, and the character models barely move and don't seem to change expression at all. These shortcomings don't ruin the experience of playing Galactic Racer, but they do detract from any sort of emotional depth that might be provided by the story.

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The best prequels typically share the same thing in common. Whether it's Red Dead Redemption 2, Yakuza 0, Metal Gear Solid 3, or Halo: Reach, each game tells a story that recontextualizes what came before. Revisiting a game after playing its prequel should alter the experience, providing you with new knowledge that changes how you perceive certain characters, places, and scenes. 

The events of Red Dead Redemption 2 add emotional weight to the first game and John Marston's mission by humanizing his targets, just as Yakuza 0 deepens the bond between Kazuma Kiryu and Akira Nishikiyama, making the first game's tragic finale much more impactful.

Gears of War: E-Day doesn't do anything like this. 

The Coalition's latest venture back to the world of COGs and Locusts is a prequel to the 2006 original with nothing new to say. You already know where it's going: protagonists Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago go to war as the human world of the surface is invaded by the subterranean Locust, and the heroes survive to fight another day. Even then, there aren't any surprises on the way there. 

The most notable changes occur within the framework of its third-person, cover-based shooting. It's still distinctly Gears of War--full of meaty men wielding crunchy weapons--just with a few new bells and whistles added to improve aspects of its signature action. It's good, and the increased spectacle is impressive, but it doesn't do enough to elevate to greatness.   

For a series that has struggled, or been unwilling, to let go of the past, purposefully going back 14 years prior to the surprise attack that incited the series at least sounded like a solid idea. By tackling the past head-on, with one of the most important days in the series' fictional history, The Coalition gave itself the chance to examine the origins of Marcus, Dom, and the antagonistic Locust Horde from the very moment their fates intertwined. 

Instead, E-Day tells a fairly boilerplate story; one that feels like it was written specifically for series newcomers, rather than anyone who's already fought to the conclusion of the Locust War. There's one moment, for instance, when a character explains that throwing a grenade into a Locust-spawning Emergence Hole will close it, while familiar enemy types like Boomers, Tickers, and Reavers--creatures fans have been fighting for two decades--are given grand entrances.

Introducing or refamiliarizing players with certain aspects of the Gear's universe isn't a knock on the game in and of itself, but the heavy emphasis on treating these known quantities as novel is indicative of a wider issue. E-Day seems uninterested in surprising longtime fans or appealing to the series' own history. 

Marcus is still as gruff, authority-bucking, and no-nonsense as ever, despite a 14-year gap and everything that happened in between, while Dom's still going through the same emotional beats as before, worrying about the fate of his wife Maria. The pair haven't fully developed the close relationship they share in the original game, and mostly bond over their shared grief for the loss of Dom's brother, but their relationship isn't explored deeply enough to add anything interesting to what we already know. 

Even something like the invention of the iconic Mark 2 Lancer--the assault rifle with a chainsaw bayonet that has been a staple of the Gears of War games since the beginning--happens off-screen with a character you only briefly meet twice. It's a throwaway scene that demonstrates just how much this prequel feels disappointingly superfluous.