Perhaps because he's so cute and marketable, Yoshi's adventures have been designed for a younger and younger audience for the last several years. 2006's Yoshi's Island DS was not out-of-step with the difficulty of a mainline Mario game, but since then, the challenge of mainline Yoshi games has been slowly softened to target younger audiences. With Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, Nintendo has made the gameplay even more gentle for gaming novices--but what it lacks in difficulty, it mostly makes up for in creativity and a playful gimmick built around discovery and exploration.

Yoshi and the Mysterious Book isn't a typical platformer. You don't move left to right to reach a finish line, Yoshi can't die, and there aren't enemies to overcome in a traditional sense. Instead, the stages are little biospheres teeming with natural flora and fauna. Rather than fight them, you're there to study and document them--Yoshi is less of an adventurer this time around, and more of a research assistant.

You're conducting research inside the pages of Mister Encyclopedia, aka Mr. E, a conscious compendium of all life on a remote, unnamed island. The Yoshis volunteer to jump into the pages of the book and document their findings, putting each of the creatures there through their paces. That usually includes documenting how they taste, what happens if you throw them, how they interact with their environment, and even how they interact with each other. This transforms stages into little standalone playgrounds where you experiment with a new creature and see what it can do. The play is about the discovery itself, as you observe different reactions and the game gently guides you to try new things.

It's surprising how well this works. Instead of reaching a goal line, the stages conclude when you make some pre-defined, especially significant discovery. For a set of flowers called ​​Crazee Dayzees, for example, it's using them to grow large flower buds. For Shy Guys, it's finding all of their hiding spots. For Casterway, a creature with a fishing pole, it's catching a huge lunker of a fish lurking in the water below. I wasn't sure how well the game would approach guiding you towards your goals when no two goals are exactly the same, but it works remarkably well. You can always ask Mr. E for a hint, but I rarely needed to. The rhythms of the stages and cascading discoveries often just led me to the right conclusion.

Years of Mario platformers, of which Yoshi owes its lineage, makes the general controls feel natural and fluid. You can run, jump, swallow things with your sticky tongue, and throw eggs using the left stick for aiming. But Yoshi and the Mysterious Book also gets a delightful amount of variety out of both its differentiated goals, and its myriad strange creatures. A Snurfboard creature functions like a surfboard, letting you ride on it and do tricks. Meanwhile, a Slugarang, a bug shaped like a boomerang, lets you toss it away as a projectile to mow down grass and trim trees, allowing you to make new discoveries. Each world has at least one creature like these two examples, and their inclusion mixes up the gameplay in some new and surprising way, which helps maintain a brisk pace of variety. And as you get deeper into the game, you start to find creatures that interact with other, earlier ones you had already discovered. You can go back and spend coins to buy hints for interactions you may have missed in a previous area if you want to see them all.

I should say here, by the way, that each of these creature

Imagine a Lego set that represents Batman 89, the Tim Burton classic that helped create the modern superhero blockbuster. Then imagine other sets that represent Batman Returns, Batman Begins, The Batman, and so on. You start breaking pieces apart from each set and piecing them back together. At first you can identify a chunk from one movie and distinguish it from another, but the more you mix, the more unrecognizable they become. Before long it's difficult to tell exactly where one begins and another ends. That's what it feels like to play Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, a game that litters its influences so liberally that the pastiche becomes its own reality. In the process, it recaptures the glory days of licensed Lego games by feeling, for the first time in a long time, fresh.

The freshness is what I kept coming back to throughout my time with Legacy of the Dark Knight. Like lots of people, I played Lego Star Wars: The Video Game, the 2005 Traveller's Tales game that established a house style for Lego games and began a flurry of licensed tie-ins. I loved it, and I spent countless hours plumbing its depths and unlocking every character. It was a simple game bursting with secrets to find as well as a playful take on a mythology that mattered to me.

Since then, though, the franchisification of licensed Lego became supercharged, to its detriment. At the height of its power there would be three or even four licensed Lego games released in a single year, and the series burned itself out. You can only find hidden doodads so many times. In recent years, Lego has seemed more cautious, producing more artsy takes like Lego Builder's Journey or Lego Voyagers, with far fewer licensed games. Against that backdrop, Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight feels like a statement of intent. With additional care and time, this is what a Lego game can be.

Legacy of the Dark Knight tells an original story, kind of, cobbled together and reassembled from the stories of various other Batman media. Most often these are pulled directly from the myriad movie adaptations and reboots, but it's also informed by stray influences from well-known comic arcs and at least one very notable video game influence. And since characters have crossed multiple movie adaptations and interpretations, there's some loose justifications put in to explain how the characters change over time. Jack Napier starts as a member of a regular gang, before donning the Red Hood and falling into a vat of chemicals, but he was always a sadist who liked to taunt his victims, and in this telling he even had the plan to poison people with Smilex before he succumbed to its effects himself. The Penguin is a low-level thug a la The Batman universe before he transitions to a mayoral candidate with animalistic habits as seen in Batman Returns. There are lots of other surprising developments that I'll let you discover on your own.

By imitating and remixing so many classic movie moments, though, it does invite direct comparisons to the originals. It's simply strange to hear iconic moments with new voices. Jack Nicholson's lines as the Joker are especially seared into my mind, so it sounds just slightly off to hear him imitated by a voice that is meant to be a broader take on the character, to facilitate his various transformations. It feels unfair to lay that at the feet of the actor, who does a fine job with the material, but telling any actor to do an exact re-take of some of the most famous lines in superhero cinema history is a rough assignment. Similarly, the story can sometimes feel a little shaggy, briskly connecting two movie plots that weren't ever meant to connect. Usually this is pla

Imagine a Lego set that represents Batman 89, the Tim Burton classic that helped create the modern superhero blockbuster. Then imagine other sets that represent Batman Returns, Batman Begins, The Batman, and so on. You start breaking pieces apart from each set and piecing them back together. At first you can identify a chunk from one movie and distinguish it from another, but the more you mix, the more unrecognizable they become. Before long it's difficult to tell exactly where one begins and another ends. That's what it feels like to play Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, a game that litters its influences so liberally that the pastiche becomes its own reality. In the process, it recaptures the glory days of licensed Lego games by feeling, for the first time in a long time, fresh.

The freshness is what I kept coming back to throughout my time with Legacy of the Dark Knight. Like lots of people, I played Lego Star Wars: The Video Game, the 2005 Traveller's Tales game that established a house style for Lego games and began a flurry of licensed tie-ins. I loved it, and I spent countless hours plumbing its depths and unlocking every character. It was a simple game bursting with secrets to find as well as a playful take on a mythology that mattered to me.

Since then, though, the franchisification of licensed Lego became supercharged, to its detriment. At the height of its power there would be three or even four licensed Lego games released in a single year, and the series burned itself out. You can only find hidden doodads so many times. In recent years, Lego has seemed more cautious, producing more artsy takes like Lego Builder's Journey or Lego Voyagers, with far fewer licensed games. Against that backdrop, Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight feels like a statement of intent. With additional care and time, this is what a Lego game can be.

Following up a game as lauded as Disco Elysium would be an unenviable task for any developer, but especially one as fractured as ZA/UM. With many of the key creative minds behind the detective RPG separated from the studio following an ugly, and very public, legal dispute, it's up to those left behind to pick up the pieces. That's a lot of baggage to carry going into a brand-new, albeit familiar, game, so it's not surprising how ZA/UM has tried to distance itself from too many comparisons with its previous hit. 

As a spy thriller, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies largely strikes a different tone than Disco Elysium. Aspects of it are still inescapably familiar, however, and it's this looming shadow--and sense of imitation--that prevents it from matching the same highs as its spiritual predecessor. Yet there are also enough fresh ideas for it to stand on its own two feet, even if its footing is slightly uneven and less creatively distinct.

Zero Parades' opening does little to quell the comparisons as you wake up on the floor of a small, dirty apartment. Hershel Wilk, codename Cascade, is here on an espionage mission. That's as much as both you and she know. The groggy spy was supposed to get more details from her mission partner, codenamed Pseudopod, but he's permanently indisposed--you find him unresponsive and sitting in a chair in his underwear, overlooking the city of Portofiro through the apartment's grimy first-floor windows. Rummaging through his pockets reveals an invoice for socks and a business card that simply reads, "All you need is a miracle." Figure out the rest on your own, agent.

From here, Zero Parades follows the Disco Elysium blueprint incredibly closely. It's another high-concept, combatless, and verbose RPG, played from an isometric perspective with an emphasis on dialogue choices and skill checks. Like its forebear, it also lives and dies on the strengths of its narrative and loquacious writing. In this regard, it makes a good first impression and carries it through to the end--albeit with a few notable caveats. 

Your skills, for instance, form different parts of your mind and will regularly comment on your dialogue choices and the world around you, sometimes providing you with helpful pointers, interesting observations, or quirky remarks. Unlike in Disco Elysium, however, they don't feel like defined characters of their own and are largely interchangeable. 

This is partly due to the game's writing failing to distinguish among the different parts of Hershel's psyche, but also because they all share a similar voice. I'm convinced Boo Miller's raspy performance as Hershel and her skills will be divisive, but her vocal-fry-infused delivery eventually grew on me. The issue is that there's not much deviation between one inner thought and the next, unlike in Disco Elysium, where each skill's defined written voice was also brought to life by either Lenval Brown or Mikee W. Goodman--the latter of whom is a master at creating disparate sounds. Zero Parades' espionage vibes don't quite suit the same kind of eccentric performances, but it's disappointing that they're so samey either way.

Following up a game as lauded as Disco Elysium would be an unenviable task for any developer, but especially one as fractured as ZA/UM. With many of the key creative minds behind the detective RPG separated from the studio following an ugly, and very public, legal dispute, it's up to those left behind to pick up the pieces. That's a lot of baggage to carry going into a brand-new, albeit familiar, game, so it's not surprising how ZA/UM has tried to distance itself from too many comparisons with its previous hit.

As a spy thriller, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies largely strikes a different tone than Disco Elysium. Aspects of it are still inescapably familiar, however, and it's this looming shadow--and sense of imitation--that prevents it from matching the same highs as its spiritual predecessor. Yet there are also enough fresh ideas for it to stand on its own two feet, even if its footing is slightly uneven and less creatively distinct.

Zero Parades' opening does little to quell the comparisons as you wake up on the floor of a small, dirty apartment. Hershel Wilk, codename Cascade, is here on an espionage mission. That's as much as both you and she know. The groggy spy was supposed to get more details from her mission partner, codenamed Pseudopod, but he's permanently indisposed--you find him unresponsive and sitting in a chair in his underwear, overlooking the city of Portofiro through the apartment's grimy first-floor windows. Rummaging through his pockets reveals an invoice for socks and a business card that simply reads, "All you need is a miracle." Figure out the rest on your own, agent.