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.

As far as sequels with the word "Revenge" in the title go, Revenge of the Savage Planet is far from the dark second act the naming convention is known for. This follow-up to 2020's Journey to the Savage Planet amplifies its predecessor's zaniness and scale, with four lush alien planets to explore as you go about cataloging every plant and creature on the way to unfurling the game's many secrets. It's an impressive mishmash of genres, too. While predominantly a pulpy sci-fi action-adventure with metroidvania stylings, Revenge of the Savage Planet also incorporates elements of puzzle-solving, survival-crafting, creature-capturing, and even Animal Crossing-style decorating to its eclectic mix. Much like the first game, combat is still a glaring weakness, but this is a sequel that improves upon the original by almost every other metric.

In what would be a humorous twist if the situation weren't so common, Revenge of the Savage Planet's narrative is clearly influenced by the circumstances that led to the game's creation. Typhoon Studios, the developer behind Journey to the Savage Planet, was acquired by Google in 2019, just a few short months before the game's release. The Canadian studio was purchased to create games for Google's cloud-based platform, Stadia, but was unceremoniously shuttered when the short-lived platform failed. Much of the team formed a new studio called Raccoon Logic and managed to secure the Savage Planet IP, leading to the creation of Revenge of the Savage Planet and its story of familiar corporate incompetence.

You play as a nameless intergalactic colonizer who, after emerging from a 100-year cryosleep, discovers that they're now a member of Alta Interglobal, a holdings company that acquired your former employer, Kindred Aerospace, while you were sleeping. Oh, and you've also been made redundant, as Alta laid off all the ex-Kindred staff immediately following the acquisition. Sound familiar? Now marooned in an unfamiliar galaxy, your ultimate goal is to exact revenge on your former employer and return home by any means possible.

Doom Eternal built upon the strong foundations that the series' 2016 reboot established, evolving the classic and frenetic first-person action by introducing a complex layer of strategy and quick decision-making. It was a change that, while popular, did alienate some players looking for something akin to its more straightforward predecessor, with its emphasis on consistent movement, resource juggling, and frequent weapon switching, all of which could detract from the core principles of gratuitous demon slaying. As a response to that, Doom: The Dark Ages doesn't retreat backwards, but instead threads the needle by reestablishing an engrossing power fantasy with simple but satisfying mechanics that push its combat into uncharted territory for the series.

Doom: The Dark Ages puts a big emphasis on standing your ground in a fight, rather than moving around it. To do this, you're permanently equipped with a shield that lets you parry enemy attacks and block incoming damage. It's a versatile tool that soaks up damage or redirects it with timely blocks and parries, giving you the ability to go toe-to-toe with far more enemies than before. In typical Doom fashion though, the best defense is often also an incredibly aggressive offense. Your shield is far more than a means to defend yourself--it's a weapon in every sense of the word. When you're not slicing a demon's head off with its chainsaw edges, you can bounce it between enemies or shatter armor that has been super-heated by your bullets. It's a great tool for closing distance, too, since it substitutes Eternal's air dash for a long-reaching shield bash that comes in handy across the larger battlefields. The shield locks onto distant targets and at the press of a button the Slayer launches towards enemies and obliterates them with devastating effect. For a series so hyper focused on its array of weaponry, it's curious to have the biggest change come in the form of a defensive addition. But with the variety the shield alone adds to the existing formula, it's an addition that will be difficult to move on from.

You'll still have to manage how you kill demons in order to keep your health and ammo topped up, but the importance of this has been de-emphasised when compared to Doom Eternal. Instead, that focus shifts towards a rhythm that arises from balancing parries and melee attacks in equal measure. You're given powerful attacks that you can deliver routinely with your fists and other melee weapons, all of which are tied to refresh timers that you can shorten by parrying incoming attacks. It's deeply satisfying to rush into the face of a towering demon with a shield bash, parry a string of attacks, and then deliver a flurry of your own in their dazed state. Each reverberating parry and subsequent crushing counter-attack pauses the action ever so slightly to emphasize the impact of your actions, giving each skirmish a crunchy feel that never gets old.

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.