As the name implies, Lies of P: Overture is a prequel to the original 2023 souls-like, shedding light on the events that led to the Puppet Frenzy massacre and subsequent collapse of the city of Krat. At its beating, mechanical heart, however, Lies of P's first DLC expansion is a tale of personal tragedy and vengeance. While developer Neowiz hasn't implemented any drastic changes to the game's underlying mechanics in Overture, its storytelling has improved, further building on the atmospheric Belle Epoque-infused world it created as a much darker and more twisted spin on Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio. "Most unfortunately, in the lives of puppets, there is always a 'but' that spoils everything," is a popular quote attributed to the Italian author. In the case of Overture, this is fortunately not the case.

Rather than being a conventional prequel, Overture sees Geppetto's eponymous puppet travel back in time alongside his faithful companion, Gemini. You can access the DLC from Chapter 9 by heading to the Path of the Pilgrim stargazer, but it feels like post-game content in terms of difficulty, providing a sterner test than the base game's final act. After emerging in a snowy forest on the outskirts of Krat, you're challenged almost immediately by a giant, petrified polar bear with a torture cage wrapped around its head. There's no sort of onboarding process if you've been away for a while, but with a moveset combining charges, grab attacks, and rhythmic combos, this angry carnivore is perfect for relearning your parry and dodging skills on the fly.

After the initial confusion surrounding how you ended up in the past, you're eventually hot on the heels of the Legendary Stalker--a mysterious figure who acts as a guide through Krat's final days of grandeur. At roughly 15 hours in length, there's less time to dabble, so Overture's pacing is tight, with the story's circumstances providing a sense of urgency and momentum. There's still intrigue and mystery, but it never drags and remains compelling throughout, even if you could make the argument that too much of the narrative is told through optional notes. While these letters, personal musings, and final words are well-written, it's the evocative imagery that stands out--particularly the macabre exhibitions staged by the game's villain with the corpses he leaves behind.

It's a universal truth that crosses cultural boundaries: Middle school is hard. The awkward early teenage years makes everyone feel self-conscious, like an outsider, whether it's an embarrassing pimple or your arms being permanently locked in a stiff T-pose. To A T, a narrative adventure from Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi, is a sweet-natured fable about growing up and accepting yourself. But while the narrative and world you occupy are cute and quirky, the act of playing never feels as playful as it should.

You play as a created character accompanied by your faithful canine companion, both of whom you grant personalized names at the start. Your arms are permanently stretched outward, stiff as a board, for reasons that you don't fully understand. But you've made the best of it, learning to adapt with special tools like an extra-long spoon to eat your breakfast cereal. You can turn sideways to shimmy your way through doors. And your dog is apparently well-trained enough to help you change clothes or use the bathroom.

Naturally, this quality makes you an outsider. Everything you do is just slightly awkward and harder than it should be, and you're bullied relentlessly by the other kids at your school. The writing is very sharp in capturing both the inherent silliness of schoolyard teasing and the way it can have a real impact on your mental health, making you preoccupied with the taunting even when the bullies aren't around. Your avatar is just a happy, friendly kid who loves his favorite cereal mascot, tries to do well in school and at sports, and just wants to fit in.

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.