Only a few years ago, the Silent Hill name was considered a relic of the horror genre. Its best efforts were its earliest from 20 or more years ago, and it had since lost its way. Lately, though, it's found its footing again, first with Bloober Team's remarkable remake of Silent Hill 2 in 2024, then with 2025's brilliantly rule-breaking Silent Hill f. Now, with Screen Burn's Silent Hill: Townfall, the comeback feels complete. Townfall is the third memorable entry in as many years, reviving a legendary series for a new era.

Like Silent Hill f, Townfall defies tradition and takes the series outside the United States, this time to Scotland. There, an American man named Simon Ordell washes up on the shore of a blue-collar island town, St. Amelia. Right away, Townfall captures the all-important tone of a Silent Hill game. It's more than the fog that's become synonymous with the series: It's the unsettling stillness, the sense of sadness lurking in every shop and down every alleyway that lingers like a harbinger of the dread that will certainly follow. Though it adheres to some of the series' touchstones, it's a fully standalone entry. It works just as well if this is your first Silent Hill game.

As you explore the town, it becomes clear early on that St. Amelia has suffered a tragedy so severe that the community was shuttered almost overnight. Heartfelt memorials in the town square dedicate pictures and words to loved ones taken too soon, and the displays are only matched in number and emotion by the many protest signs demanding accountability. The finer details, of course, aren't yours to understand for a long while. Like the fog and its accompanying melancholy, Silent Hill also serves as the stage for startling truths that only emerge late in a character's journey. 

But if you think you know where it's going, I bet you don't. Screen Burn's founder and Townfall's writer Jon McKellan once ran a fansite dedicated to this series, and that sort of lifelong devotion is clear by the end of Townfall. He and his team understand what Silent Hill has been, but also--and more importantly--what it can be. The rules of this universe are played a bit fast and loose, and it's better for it. Is Silent Hill a physical place, or an idea? Is everyone found there sent to suffer? While some themes re-emerge like somber notes on a mandolin, some of Townfall's best parts are how it toys with expectations, twisting them into new shapes and sometimes rejecting them.

Townfall feels a lot like Silent Hill 2 early on. The original music, as great as it is in its own right, deliberately recalls the series' heyday, and you'll spend some early hours navigating through the roundabout corridors of a hospital and an apartment complex. But this is more than a "fan game" liberally reusing what's worked before. Screen Burn makes it its own.

That's most obvious in how it's played. Townfall is presented in first-person, as few games in the series have been before it, and introduces a new gameplay element that relies on a handheld piece of analog tech--the sort of physical contraption this team made its name on with games like Stories Untold and Observation. Whereas many games in the series use a radio to passively alert you to nearby threats, Townfall's CRTV is closer to Alien Isolation's mot

Remedy Entertainment's signature style has often made gameplay feel secondary to story. Games like Alan Wake, Quantum Break, and Control had fun gameplay hooks, but the depth mostly lived in their narrative puzzle-boxes, where the answer to each strange mystery created three more questions. Control Resonant breaks from tradition magnificently, revealing a whole new side to Remedy. Armed with deep, engaging combat mechanics in a stunning version of Manhattan that is unforgettable, Control Resonant is a confident delivery of Remedy's best gameplay experience ever that never sacrifices the team's unique brand of weirdness. 

Control Resonant takes place seven years after the first game, with the mystical Oldest House still under siege from the Hiss invasion. Now, outside the Oldest House's once-secret doors, a second Altered World Event is threatening Manhattan. With Federal Bureau of Control director Jesse Faden gone AWOL for reasons unknown and much of the bureau dead or displaced, her brother Dylan is released from his holding cell as Plan B. 

If that paragraph of proper nouns leaves your head swimming, I understand. And although Control Resonant doesn't shy away from throwing a lot at you in its story, it does give newcomers a helpful recap of the first game to get them up to speed. The important thing to know is that New York City is under attack from a paranatural threat, and Dylan Faden, once the puppet of the Hiss and blamed for much of the carnage to date, is reluctantly given a chance at redemption.

Whereas Control was a third-person shooter, Control Resonant is a melee-focused action game that winds up feeling like a dark superhero-adjacent adventure akin to Infamous or Prototype. However, Resonant has so much Remedy flair that these comparisons are best understood as suboptimal shorthand for something ultimately deeper and more enjoyable.

Dylan's weapon of choice is the Aberrant, a piece of shape-shifting metal that becomes the basis for intricate combat builds. The Aberrant has several forms ranging from a pair of quick-strike clubs with a chance for critical hits and a larger scythe that does slower but more sweeping damage, to a tweener form that is neither especially fast nor slow but does bonus damage from behind enemies. 

The game encourages you to switch up your build often with respec tokens and a huge tree of upgrades--it's hard to see any of the many options as obviously advantageous, allowing you to experiment without feeling like you're being funneled down a specific path. I loved experimenting with the many different abilities and combinations. Over the course of the 30-40 hour story, you'll fortify the Aberrant and Dylan alike with this treasure trove of combat enhancements, equipping up to six special abilities at a time and combining different sets of them nearly whenever you want to. Each of them gives Dylan a distinctly different feel, but what they have in common is how good they look and feel to use. 

There are shields, telekinetics, friendly summons, and more to pick from the deeper you go. My experience with Resonant may feel very different from yours, and that's partly why it works so well.

Control Resonant's power climb over those hours is supremely satisfying because it invites--and then rewards--thoughtful decisions by the player. For instance, rather than c

Even for a series known for its sprawling scope, Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave is ambitious. Nintendo and developer Intelligent Systems clearly approached this latest entry in the series having learned from its success in Three Houses, its missteps in Engage, and even some of the series' historical oddities. Fortune's Weave rewards those craving both deep interconnected stories and intricate, interlocking RPG systems in equal measure, creating a new high-water mark for the series.

The structure of Fortune's Weave often feels like a series of concentric circles, constantly broadening and deepening your understanding of its systems and its characters. It's so massive it's hard to even know where to start, so I'll begin where the game does: in the future.

Or at least, in a futuristic, science-fiction setting that is strikingly different from the series' norm. Right from the beginning of Fortune's Weave, your created character, Eshmel, is literally created, birthed by sci-fi-coded magic as the last hope for humanity against the army of the Demon Lord, who is already on the verge of total victory. Fortuna, the Goddess of Fate, is cooperating with the last bastions of humanity and sees an opportunity to turn the tide in your favor. Four instrumental heroes, the legendary Flame Lords, can be recruited to help in the coming fight, so Fortuna sends Eshmel back in time to a key moment in the Flame Lords' lives to guide them. That moment is their participation in the Heroic Games, a sort of gladiatorial and tactical version of the ancient Greek Olympics. 

Right away, this imbues the story, and the Flame Lords' individual stories, with propulsive force. You know from the very beginning that your ultimate destiny is leading toward a major escalation, but you also know these four characters are special, destined for greatness in ways that make them inflection points in history. In many stories like this, you see individual protagonists and slowly come to learn of a mysterious visitor who reveals a greater destiny. In Fortune's Weave, you are the mysterious visitor, and you have hidden knowledge that they don't, creating an interesting dynamic as you watch the events of their lives unfold.

This premise also creates a setting that confidently blends tropes from the Age of Antiquity, smooth futuristic science-fiction, and high fantasy. Regardless of the particular details in your character creation, Eshmel has an otherworldly quality to them that seems distinctly out of place in the nation of Dagda, which is obviously inspired by ancient empires, and both Eshmel and the Flame Lords themselves all regularly interact with actual gods and goddesses. It's a compelling blend of storytelling motifs that feels fresh and new for this series.

Fortuna emphasizes the importance of recruiting the Flame Lords to have any real hope of defeating the Demo

A few hours into Wolverine I found myself asking, “Why did Insomniac Games make this?” There are obvious answers, of course: It has three excellent Spider-Man games under its belt; it's an opportunity to expand its Marvel Universe; and Wolverine presents ample opportunities for a brutal and bloody action game. But none of that explains why Insomniac Games, specifically, made Wolverine.

Spider-Man is an ideal fit for the studio: an energetic and dynamic hero in the hands of a team known for open-worlds that are sprawling jungle gyms, where it can let players loose with thrilling traversal mechanics and varied combat systems for crime fighting fun. Insomniac also excels at crafting narratives that are as earnest as they are dramatic--perfect for the tumultuous lives of Peter Parker and Miles Morales.

Wolverine is much less ideal of a pairing, as was evident throughout my time with the game. Insomniac doesn't make bad games and Wolverine certainly isn't one. It's a solid, cinematic, and occasionally thrilling experience that ticks all the necessary boxes for a decent action game. But it does so in a workman-like fashion and never aspires to much more than the essentials. Wolverine is an action game that serves the character well enough, but it doesn't lean into Insomniac's strengths or leverage its creativity, and the game feels unremarkable because of it.

Straying too far from who Wolverine is and how he operates would no doubt create questions around the authenticity of the adaptation, but only coloring inside the well-defined lines means never offering anything new or exciting. It turns out that the most authentic version of Wolverine, in this case, is also the embodiment of the character action genre at its plainest.

In a world where pretty much every superhero game subscribes to the Batman: Arkham template of combat design, describing how you fight would belabor how familiar it all is. Suffice it to say: light attack, heavy attack, dodge, parry, a few special abilities, and some attribute modifiers. 

There are very few distinguishing elements of Wolverine's combat system that make it stand out. The closest it comes is a leaping attack, which allows players to launch him across distances to close the gap and begin an assault on unsuspecting enemies. It's an undeniably satisfying tool to keep up the intensity of each skirmish and ensure you're always applying pressure, but loses its luster after a couple of hours when it becomes clear that it can be employed pretty mindlessly.

The other unique element, a mechanic that represents an escalation of power and brutality as Wolverine's rage boils over, has more longevity in how drastically it shifts the dynamic of combat and amps up the satisfaction of it. As players dispatch enemies, an on-screen rage meter builds until the point where Wolverine goes berserk, putting him in a state where you can chain together executions to tear enemies apart in quick succession. In just a few seconds, Wolverine can create piles of brutally mauled bad guys, and there's a feral savagery to the whole thing that is very effective. 

It's a consistently exhilarating moment because, as well as shifting to desaturated visuals to emphasize how unstable and blinded by rage Logan is, these sequences are strong instances of synchronicity between the character and the player. As Wolverine's rage builds, the player needs to be more efficient in dispatching enemies

NBA 2K has long been the standard-bearer for high-quality sports games. It's the pinnacle that other series like Madden, FC, and even the oft-beloved MLB The Show aspire to emulate in whatever ways their respective sports allow. That's not to say it gets everything right, but it often feels like the team at Visual Concepts is competing against itself. It creates trends; it doesn't chase them.

That's always been most obvious in The City, the series' social PvPvE hub and the lifeblood of the game's community. Though some other parts of the game are more uneven with this year's entry, The City proves that if you only plan to play one sports game this year, NBA 2K27 is the way to go.

The City is where players can meet up for basketball games of varying sweat levels, buy cosmetics, and complete live-service challenges--it is the center of NBA 2K27's solar system. This hub is thoughtfully attached to the single-player MyCareer mode at the proverbial hip, and this pairing offers more enjoyable and immersive things to do as a tandem than most other sports games taken in their totality. 

This year, The City makes several smart changes. At the core of it all is the long-awaited ability to import custom women characters into the mode. Aesthetically, this is a nice change that lets the hub world better reflect real-life streetball communities--it's always been true that women have existed in these spaces in real life, so they should be included in NBA 2K, too. 

However, this positive change does come with a frustrating caveat: The MyCareer mode doesn't account for them, thereby siloing these women avatars into The City exclusively. Plus, this requires anyone who wants to run around in The City as a woman to create a second avatar as a man if they want to go into MyCareer's story mode. So as awesome as this all is to see, it also feels like a frustrating half-step forward.

New landmarks in The City, Casual Corner and Crew HQ, build out the virtual world to be much more inviting and social. In Casual Corner, beginner-friendly pick-up games, including some that are co-op PvE against rather lowly bots, are happening whenever you want to queue for them. Meanwhile, NBA 2K's clan-like "Crews" system gets a big upgrade in Crew HQ, a space for you and your crew to meet up, practice, play crew-only games, and socialize. 

These two additions will better onboard new players and, by being tied to the Learn 2K suite added in recent years, speak to the team's commitment to not feel so dizzying to new players. They also become two more diverse ways to play in a hub world already full of so many different offerings, from ultra-sweaty Proving Grounds games that ditch the shot meter to The Rec's full-length 5v5 games. 

There's always The Park too, where some players spend the entire year building out their in-game legend and dominating on a particular court as though they actually live in the neighborhood. In more than one corner of the game's social world, these various mo