When playing Castlevania: Belmont's Curse, I couldn't stop thinking about Symphony of the Night. Almost 30 years ago, that game reinvented Castlevania as a search-action game, and did it so brilliantly that it earned half of the "metroidvania" portmanteau. Belmont's Curse does not attempt such a dramatic shift. It doesn't change genres or reinvent the series as something entirely new. What it does, however, is achieve a brilliant synthesis, with every component operating at peak performance to deliver a new high for the series. Castlevania is back, and it is fantastic.

Put simply, Belmont's Curse is the total package. A sprawling map bursting with mysteries to uncover, joyous traversal tools that make roaming the map feel great, a story that balances a macabre tone with occasional lightness, a cast of creative and well-drawn characters, and hands-down the best combat of any Castlevania game--in fact, among the best combat of any 2D action game, period.

What makes all of these synergize so well is the addition of the tarot cards, which serve as an elegant way to fuse the game's disparate elements, and makes them all feel like part of one cohesive whole. At different points your tarot deck serves as mission signposting, environmental puzzles, pieces of story lore, characters to serve as dialogue for Rose, boss locations, and ultimately, your pool of spells.

You play as Rose Belmont, daughter of Trevor Belmont, who has trained her whole life as the successor of the Belmont clan. Though silver-maned Trevor is still a capable fighter, Rose volunteers to investigate the otherworldly happenings in Paris, France, eager to prove herself worthy of the family name. But Rose is also afflicted with a cursed red mark on one arm, making her dangerously instrumental to the machinations of Dracula and his armies. 

The tarot deck is a set of magical cards gifted to Rose by her late mother, Sypha, who passed on the curse to her at birth. Each card represents a follower of Dracula, with honorific names like The Fallen, The Warrior, or The Builder. As you explore the castle you find clues that reveal story details and hints about how to find them, often both simultaneously, and they each have their own roles in Dracula's royal court. When Dracula's castle emerges in the heart of Paris--as you obviously knew it would, this is a Castlevania game, after all--the full deck is revealed, putting the complete array of monsters in your sights. Once you've tracked down and defeated one of Dracula's servants, their tarot card becomes an Arcana you can use as a spell, which then opens its own flexible progression system. It may sound complex, but the system is actually an ingenious way to merge different gameplay elements and make them all feel digestible and cohesive.

As an example, take the first boss, The Fallen. Finding him is a relatively simple task, given that it'

The soulslike genre has been around long enough now that it's easy to pick out its most recognizable traits. Whether it's managing stamina in combat, the risk of losing progression with each death, health items and enemies that respawn when you reach a bonfire, lantern, or some other recognizable checkpoint; all of the best in the genre adapt these in their own distinct ways. 

Valor Mortis is no different, but attempts to stand out through its shift in perspective. By moving the action to a first-person view, Valor Mortis affords itself novelty, which works well with snappy and satisfying combat that rewards deft parries and patience in equal measure. But it's also marred by a weak story and sluggishly paced opening hours that betray the more captivating moments in its second half, where Valor Mortis' most interesting narrative beats and combat encounters finally deliver on some of the potential you can see being established in the hours prior.

You play as William Dowsett, a very British-sounding member of Napoleon's army who returns from the dead only to find former allies taken over by corruption sweeping across Europe. The corruption has twisted people; large red boils replace the heads of riflemen, infantrymen have their spines snapped as they are transformed into grotesque and rabid attack dogs, and piles of bodies have become living masses of flesh that slowly crawl toward you when you least expect it. It's a familiar world that has been transformed into a nightmare for William as he attempts to reconnect with missing comrades and understand how the war has found itself in this state, leading him to answers that will likely be far less surprising for you as a player.

Valor Mortis' story is frustratingly straightforward, and wastes a setting so rarely used in action games. William's slow realization that the war he's been waging on behalf of the bloodthirsty Napoleon Bonaparte might not be as noble as he assumed is annoyingly drawn out for how predictable it is. It's hard to get invested with a main character who has little more going for him than verbalizing his disgust over the consequences of a war he so recently was proud to be a part of, blissfully ignorant to the horrors he was unleashing on innocent citizens along the way. Conversations with the game's supporting cast don't help either, with none making a lasting impression. 

Once Valor Mortis starts exploring the villages and cities besieged by Bonaparte and his corrupted forces, there are more compelling stories to discover. You'll come across brief echoes that capture fleeting conversations from the past, distilling short but often heartbreaking stories. They effectively convey the desperation some civilians endured when faced with a foreign, oppressive force taking over their day-to-day lives. There's an entire city filled with orphans who scurry around underground tunnels, and another nearly entirely underwater after a heinous war crime extinguished a rebellion without care for civilian casualties. They're effective at contextualizing why so much of the world around you is desolate and broken without having to see those events play out, and they do a great job of making you hate an antagonist you'll hardly ever see.

It's frustrating that it takes a while to get here, however, with many of Valor Mortis' opening hours taking place across battlefields that, while twisted by the corruption around them, ultimately blend together in forgettable ways. These areas are almost strictly linear, with clear paths from beginning to end and only slight detours to explore. Around the halfway mark, this monotonous world design flips around entirely--you move from abandoned villages to burning cities and down into labyrinthine catacombs beneath an eerily e

Capcom choosing the exact same subtitle for two separate expansions in two different games makes a lot of sense. Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen is not only a thematically relevant title, but thanks to the first game's expansion of the same name, it also conveys to longtime fans what to expect: namely, a new gameplay cycle focused on reworked loot and plenty of dungeon crawling. The key difference this time around is that instead of heading into the labyrinthine depths of a cursed island, you've got an entirely new region to explore.  

As someone who loved Dragon's Dogma 2, I couldn't really ask for much more. Yet changes to some of the game's core systems also dilute what made it so unique when it launched back in 2024. I know it's always been a fairly divisive game, and these changes are intended to make the experience more approachable, but they also strip away some of its magic in an effort to appeal to more people. Dark Arisen is still a great expansion, transporting you to a fascinating new region with more loot to earn, fantastical beasts to slay, and stories to behold, but it also shifts Dragon's Dogma 2 in a slightly different direction. 

To start with, Dark Arisen alleviates some of the game's intentional friction by reducing how often you need to travel on foot. The Eternal Ferrystone was already added to the game a few months ago, letting you freely fast travel to any portcrystal without expending a scarce resource. Those same portcrystals are located at every key location in Dark Arisen's new Norgan region. You still have to reach them on foot first to activate them, but once you do, you can simply teleport from one side of the map to the other. 

Using the Eternal Ferrystone is entirely optional; you can still traverse almost all of Norgan on foot if you desire,

Let's get the obvious out of the way: Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival is a grotesque game. It puts sex and extreme depictions of human mutilation front-and-center in its first-person perspective, and asks you to face it–even stick your hand in it. It's uncompromising in bringing Clive Barker's vision to a level of fidelity that not even the movies could dream of matching. It looks incredible.

While salacious in its nature, it can be easy–even forgiving–to fixate on Hellraiser: Revival for its lurid subject matter and blaze past its more considered themes of desire, abuse, and the darkest realms that linger in the human mind. But beyond the sensation of Revival's violence is a game that dares to be ambitious in both its gameplay and narrative.

Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival can feel like it's wearing the skin of other games at times. Each of its inspirations feeling like a Frankensteined limb attached to another. But by the end of this horror-action survival game, Revival becomes a beast all its own. Although it stumbles through an identity crisis in the early hours of its 10-hour runtime, it is unabashed in its display of grotesqueness and sexuality, and ascends as a game worth seeing through to the end.

Rooted in Clive Barker's original novella,The Hellbound Heart, and the first two films, Hellraiser: Revival takes place 20 years after the first movie. But don't worry--no prior knowledge of the franchise is required to engage with Revival's story. It focuses on Aidan Lynch and his girlfriend, Sunny–two folks from affluent families whose paths crossed in their joint journey to seek taboo and fringe forms of stimulation, by way of sexual desires and substance abuse. Sunny has a particular taste for collecting occult artifacts and manages to get her hands on the Genesis Configuration: one of the many mystical puzzle boxes that opens a gate to an eldritch realm of a neverending concrete labyrinth hellscape, home of the Cenobites–demon priest-like beings who seek to harvest souls and entrap them in an eternal hell of pain and pleasure.

Aidan, ignorant of the Genesis Configuration's otherworldly powers, uses the cube as a toy to evoke (consensual) pain on Sunny while making love, and in the process, triggers the box to summon the Cenobites, who mutilate Sunny in front of him and drag her away into The Labyrinth. Genesis Configuration in hand, Aidan marches into hell to get Sunny back.

It isn't long until Aidan finds himself at the center of the Scarlet Church, a cult of murderous psychopaths who worship the Cenobites and their god, The Leviathan, and seek ascension to become servants of its power. But on his journey, Aidan is haunted by much more than the terrors of the Cenobites, the monsters the realm produces, and the Scarlet Church itself. His own troubled past and vices, torment him too.

The setup for Revival paves way for myriad gameplay styles and design philosophies, and Revival attempts all of them, with the ga

A good puzzle game needs to constantly find new ways to challenge you, to walk you through skills and reward your observations, and to contain answers that make logical sense without being too obvious, or too obtuse. 

Order of the Sinking Star, the latest puzzler from developer Thekla Interactive and director Jonathan Blow, mostly hits those marks with impressive, cunning, and devious puzzle design. But even when it misses and gets frustrating, the game takes so many swings that it's easy to  head to another level and find another opportunity to bend your brain and stretch your smarts.

In fact, the best and worst part of Order of the Sinking Star is how expansive it is. Thekla touts over 1,000 puzzles to solve spread across an expansive overworld map that's full of discreet dungeon-like levels, mimicking the formula of 1987's The Legend of Zelda. And like the original Zelda, all of those puzzles involve pushing blocks around a grid, seen from a top-down perspective. Finding ways to keep the act of pushing blocks challenging, compelling, and unpredictable for hundreds of puzzles is Sinking Star's greatest feat, but that ingenuity can also make the game a little too sprawling and, at times, unwieldy.

All those puzzles are born of the many smart and intricate mechanics Order of the Sinking Star brings to bear on its simple underlying concept. The game finds you in what appears to be some kind of strange artificial garden facility, and you start by controlling a character who, after being plucked from some kind of battle, at first wonders if she's died and is now in the afterlife. But one assumes Valhalla or whatever would have more drinking and fewer brain teasers. As she sets about exploring, she discovers audio logs left behind by some other person who explored the place ahead of her and recorded his many findings.

Soon after, you enter a massive open overworld, where you can set out in four different directions, each representing a different set of mechanics. Those areas are each inspired by other, smaller puzzle games, and here those games' creators serve as level designers for their specific areas. From the overworld, you can enter different puzzle levels, activated from points on the ground like spaces on a game board. Completing those puzzles opens pathways forward to keep exploring the overworld.

What you soon discover is that each of these sections of the map, with its unique mechanics, represents a specific world in the multiverse sense. Each world has its own characters, whom you control within individual puzzle levels. The idea of different worlds and their denizens being pulled into this strange, ethereal place provides a story reason to include a ton of different mechanics, and then gives Order of the Sinking Star a handy excuse to combine them in fascinating and novel ways as the different worlds collide.

In the north, you run across levels inspired by the Heroes of Sokoban games, sporting traditional role-playing characters, like a Warrior, Mage, Thief, and so on. Each has their own capability: The Warrior can push multiple blocks at once as opposed to just one at a time, the Mage instantly swaps places with other characters or objects when he faces them, and the Thief can't push objects forward but can drag them behind her. The east draws its mechanics from the game Mirror Isles, where mirrors can teleport objects at right angles. The south, inspired by Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes, carries a series of puzzle