Chris Carter

Despite playing every one of their recent award-winning games, I still can’t believe Naughty Dog went from “the Crash Bandicoot company” to a cornerstone of the age-old “games are art” conversation. Every once in a while when looking at Joel or Nathan Drake, I imagine Crash going “Booyah Grandma.”

I’m not even going to try to summarize the monumental impact Final Fantasy VII has had on countless lives, the JRPG genre and gaming as a whole.

Resident Evil is one of my most-played series in my three-decade-long gaming career. I still recall the first time I played the original: where I was, what my room looked like, how it felt to finally finish that last stand finale.

Back in 2016, Bethesda was following a policy that limited early review access to its games.

The cliched “games are art” discussion is bound to cause eye-rolling in 2020, but Ori and the Blind Forest feels like one of those examples that’s just unanimously celebrated.

All eyes are on you, whether it’s the general 50-ish-year fandom or newcomers, to really deliver. It’s one of the most unforgiving licenses known to man, especially after LucasArts gave us hit after hit to tee up later generations.

My first foray into the CRPG genre was the original Fallout. Yes, the Bethesda-era debut was called Fallout 3 for a reason, as Interplay and Black Isle Studios had been working their magic alongside of industry titans like (old) BioWare for several years before it became a modern-day RPG filled with busywork.

It’s nigh impossible to do justice to Death Stranding in just a few paragraphs. You’ve seen the promos, the famous faces, the web of intrigue spun by industry veteran Hideo Kojima; and either checked in or checked out of this hotel of madness.

For the uninitiated, when publishers wanted a sure-thing studio to come in and elevate an existing IP, Obsidian was the one developer you called. They rocked The Old Republic for BioWare and continued the Neverwinter Nights series. Look, they made the best modern Fallout game, New Vegas. Our audience even agrees!

I have a complicated history with Borderlands, and I suspect that’s a fairly common experience. Okay, so it’s not all that complicated but bear with me.

Days Gone feels like it’s a few years too late. Nothing against zombie media, despite the currently dangerous saturation levels, but it’s something you’d typically see released around the height of Walking Dead‘s popularity: before the show started to stagnate creatively and the shambling undead popped up on practically every network.

It’s really tough to talk about From Software without sounding like a cliche.

I’ll never forget a conversation one of our readers had with someone who was down on Devil May Cry 5 after the reveal. Their response to another community member who felt burned by DmC: “Mate, there’s a giant monster eating cars with his chest in the trailer, the game is going to be fine.”

After the bombastic Resident Evil 6 nearly killed the franchise, we’re starting to see a resurgence of the series.

Getting lost in another world is a perfectly good way for some people to cope with problems in reality.

Getting lost in another world is a perfectly good way for some people to cope with problems in reality.

I’ve been playing Dead Cells in early access for over a year now, but I never want to get too far if you know what I mean. I have a weird relationship with early access games in that unless I’m covering them professionally, I prefer to keep my distance until the thing is actually finished.

When people say “Square doesn’t make old-school RPGs anymore” I can’t understand it. We might have been lucky to get two Bravely Defaults, but they’ve been investing in other projects for years like Setsuna and Lost Sphear.

Sony seems to have a thing for storybook adventure games. They hosted Until Dawn in 2015, and have been steadily supporting Quantic Dream for the past eight years with PlayStation exclusivity for Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls.

Chop, cut, mince, craft, boil, eat, repeat. The life of a hunter is hard. Especially if you’re a vegetarian controlling one.