The Roundtable Hold has seen better days. There are weeds breaking through cracks in its rotting floorboards, the room in the east wing that Gideon Ofnir once used as an office is now an abandoned mess of dust and clutter, and sunlight is bleeding through a gaping hole in the stone wall where the giant pair of fingers previously resided. It's a familiar space, but one that's also noteworthy for its differences, which feels reflective of Elden Ring Nightreign as a whole. Anyone who's played Elden Ring will recognize Roundtable Hold and enemies like the Bell Bearing Hunter and Ancient Hero of Zamor. Nightreign's combat mechanics are almost identical, too, making it easy to fall into a habitual groove as you roll through attacks and strike back with a vengeance. Elden Ring's DNA is ever-present, but Nightreign is also a game of striking subversions: a From Software game that asks you to play it unconventionally, disregarding meticulous exploration, isolation, and measured combat for a cooperative multiplayer game built on speed and aggression. In many ways, it's the antithesis of what people typically come to From Software games for, and yet somehow, someway, this experimental non-sequel is an absolute triumph.

It all starts with Nightreign's enticing structure. First, you choose the boss you want to fight, then embark on a 35- to 45-minute Expedition that takes place across three in-game days. During the day, you and two teammates (doing multiplayer is the ideal scenario) will quickly explore the land of Limveld, an alternate version of Elden Ring's Limgrave where the topography stays the same but locations and enemies randomly change from one Expedition to the next. Everyone starts at Level 1, so you'll want to kill enemies to accrue runes and level up, as well as find new weapons, tools, and character upgrades to aid you in the battles ahead.

At some point during both the first and second days, a deadly battle-royale-style circle begins closing in, funneling you into a mandatory showdown against a random boss. These bosses are selected from a pool of familiar foes, so there's a lot of variety, but you'll also run into the same few opponents if you're repeating the same Expedition over and over again. If you manage to survive for two days and defeat the boss at the end of Day 2, you'll move onto the third day and square off against the Night Lord you chose to fight at the beginning of the Expedition in what is typically a grandiose, challenging, and ultimately thrilling battle. Whether you win or lose, you'll earn relics that you can equip to provide various advantages in future Expeditions, from adding elemental damage that targets a boss's weakness to improvements to attributes like strength and vigor.

There can be a hypnotic nature to repetitive tasks, and plenty of games have leaned into that to give otherwise humdrum jobs a surprising allure. Deliver At All Costs goes in the opposite direction and transforms the unforgiving tedium and thankless nature of a courier job into an explosive, slapstick adventure. This makes for some fun and brief thrills, but too often Deliver At All Costs falls into repetitive monotony with an overly cyclical format, a dragging story, and unexciting in-game upgrades.

Narratively, Deliver At All Costs has a fantastically intriguing opening. You play as Winston, an extremely gifted engineer who's late on rent, bereft of friends, and prone to outbursts of anger. He sees visions of a strange fox, someone is spying on his apartment, and he's hiding something about his past. It's all very mysterious and strange, and the setup immediately draws you into the story in hopes of uncovering who Winston truly is and what's going on.

The mystique hangs over the first hour of Deliver At All Costs, which sees Winston take a truck-driving job at We Deliver, a courier service. Every delivery forces Winston, and by extension the player, to contend with a new type of challenging cargo, like surprisingly strong balloons making Winston's truck extremely buoyant and prone to soaring over buildings at the smallest bump, or a statue that attracts a flock of seagulls obsessed with carpet bombing the statue with poop.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are in the midst of, pardon the pun, a video game renaissance. In the last few years alone we've received the excellent retro compilation Cowabunga Collection, the retro-style brawler Shredder's Revenge, and the Hades-inspired roguelike Splintered Fate. Not since their breakout success on Saturday morning cartoons have the turtles been so ubiquitous in games, but this time around, developers are more emboldened to experiment with different game styles. Enter TMNT: Tactical Takedown, a grid-based tactics game that feels both authentically nostalgic and like creative new ground for the heroes. While it suffers slightly from a limited scope, the short adventure is a great time while it lasts.

Tactical Takedown is presented with a clean, bright visual style reminiscent of the old Saturday morning cartoon. The turtles' beaks are rounded just like you drew on your Trapper Keeper during geometry class. But this story takes place well after the original series--Splinter and Shredder are both dead, and the boys' relationship has grown contentious as they've all gone in different directions and coped with the loss. The combination of Saturday morning aesthetics with this new story premise make this feel like a progression of that continuity and an opportunity to show us something new.

It's also the conceit for the game's core mechanic, which limits you to one turtle at a time as you fight your way through legions of Foot Clan goons. Objectives are usually to survive a certain number of turns or to defeat certain starred enemies. The stages are isometric grids like you've seen in lots of tactics games, but limiting you to one character at a time means a lot of focus on prioritization and crowd control. You're always outnumbered, but they're always outmatched. The stages are designed with a particular turtle in mind, which is explained by the story: Donatello is investigating happenings underground, so each of his stages take place in the sewer, while Raphael's take place across the rooftops, and so on. These differences are mostly cosmetic, but some are more substantial. Hopping along rooftops of a Raphael stage requires you to reach the edge of one roof to clear another, for example, and Donatello's sewer stages are rife with toxic waste which is, thankfully, purple.

Back in September, Capcom fighting game fans had a major wish granted with Marvel Vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics, which bundled the entire collection of 2D Marvel-centric fighting games--and a side-scrolling beat-'em-up to boot--in an all-in-one package. It was what fans of Marvel Vs. Capcom had wanted for years, particularly with Marvel Vs. Capcom 2's inclusion, and it made multiple fighting games seemingly lost to time reappear on the scene in an instant.

Now, Capcom has the unenviable task of following it up with Capcom Fighting Collection 2, the true sequel to the first classic fighting compendium from 2022. This new collection features the same great quality-of-life additions as the others: a "museum" with concept art and design documents, a music player with each game's soundtrack at the ready, rollback netcode, etc. However, there are only so many old fighting games in Capcom's vault to collect, and Capcom Fighting Collection 2 has a few indicators that the well may be drying up.

The "marquee" games in this bundle--based on the key art, at least--are the Capcom Vs. SNK games, which paired fighters from the libraries of both Capcom and SNK in one big battle. Both games utilized the brilliant Ratio system, which lets you change the strength of the characters you choose. Each game implemented this system differently; Capcom Vs. SNK assigned ratio levels, from one to four, to specific characters, while the sequel let you assign the ratios after selecting your character.

For as much as change can be scary, it can be all the lonelier to remain stagnant while the world and the people in it continue moving on without you. That's the crux of Old Skies, a point-and-click adventure game in which you play as Fia Quinn, a professional time traveler immune to the effects of the shifting timeline. On the surface, Old Skies first appears to be your typical time-travel story about the pitfalls of affecting time, but the story surprises in how it instead delves into the negatives of not influencing the flow of time, of being someone that no one remembers, regardless of what you accomplish. It makes for an incredibly affecting tale, one that has stuck with me since the credits rolled.

As Fia Quinn, you're tasked with traversing the timeline through a handful of moments in New York's history, ranging from the Gilded Age to the morning of September 11, 2001 to an impactful afternoon in 2042. Fia works for ChronoZen, an agency that takes wealthy clients back in time to relive moments of the past, solve their long-forgotten mysteries, or change minor details about their life that they regret. The work rarely goes as planned, forcing Fia to adapt on the fly and deduce the best way to get the client what they want without affecting aspects of history that the algorithm-following higher-ups have decreed must remain unchanged.

For better and worse, Old Skies is extremely linear, with only one solution to each of the problems that Fia comes up against. In terms of narrative theming, I like this a lot--it reinforces that Fia's fate in this story is unyieldingly static and that the timeline in general must follow a set series of events. But this structure hurts the gameplay, too. There were times when I thought of a way to solve the problem at hand, and it didn't work--forcing me to guess a bunch of random solutions instead--and if the right answer was nonsensical, I'd grow irritated, especially if the solution I'd presented utilized a throughline of logic the game had already established in an earlier puzzle. If I have to use cash for Fia to bribe someone in the very first mission, using money to bribe people should be a valid way of collecting information later when speaking to people who are clearly looking for cash. And yet, I don't think I could bribe a single other person for the rest of the story, despite money appearing in Fia's pocket with every time jump--a constant reminder of an item I could not use and was foolish for thinking otherwise.