In your hometown of Possum Springs, you’re not just trying to reconnect with the people you left behind you’re trying to figure out the kind of person you want to be. As a feline college dropout named Mae Borowski, you experience a homecoming in all of its bittersweet glory. In short, it’s cheaper than a vacation and it’ll make you feel almost as good.īehind its cutesy cartoon animal aesthetic lies the beating heart of a game that will both entertain you and make you confront some deep-seated truths about yourself. The game not only delivers a violent, grizzled crime drama, but it is packed to the gills with an oddball sense of humor, goofy side quests, and more ways to fritter away time than there are in actual Japan. Your heroes are Kazuma Kiryu, the series’ longtime protagonist, and the eyepatch-wearing Mad Dog of Shimano himself, Goro Majima. Take a trip down the neon-soaked streets of 1980s Tokyo in this epically weird and weirdly epic action adventure game that puts you in the shoes of two members of the Yakuza who are forced to become unlikely allies when they get caught up in a power struggle. What it lacks in interactivity, it makes up for in a deeply engrossing narrative that will make you laugh and cry, but mostly just make you glad that you gave this offbeat gem a shot.
Its series of vignettes about a seemingly cursed family from Washington unfold in a first-person perspective in which you slowly learn the terrible truth of America’s most unfortunate family. Much like 2013’s Gone Home, What Remains of Edith Finch is an unexpected treat that will build you up and break you down with undulating waves of emotion.
Platforms: PC, PS4 What Remains of Edith Finch Oddly enough, there are also 26 endings to this episode, but you’ll have to watch it differently each time to unlock them. The best part? There are 26 endings you can get, so you’ll have no shortage of reasons to keep playing and replaying this game long after you see the end of 2B and 9S’s melancholy tale.
Platinum Games’ long-awaited sequel to the cult classic NieR, NieR: Automata is equal parts lovely and lugubrious, oozing with stylish world-building and killer, combo-based combat. In a year of stellar action RPGs, NieR: Automata was one of the most unexpectedly rewarding. Yet the best part may be what too many games lack nowadays: the feeling of fist-pumping accomplishment and satisfaction that comes with finally, finally beating that boss that brutally murdered you three thousand times in a row. The years it spent in development hell were worth the unrelentingly adorable bullet hell that followed. The game is as difficult and devilishly challenging as it is gorgeously animated, which is to say: very. If you put Fleischer Studios’ animation, Contra, and old-school Mega Man games into a blender, then poured them into a nice mug, you would get Cuphead. Platforms: PC, Xbox One (coming soon) Cuphead The 100-person battle royale shooter is filled with epic kills, unexpected encounters, and the most satisfying chicken dinner since the original horrifying ending in the director’s cut of Chicken Run. But once you mute your fellow players, I’ll be damned if PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds isn’t one of the most addictive, tense, and thrilling shooters in ages.
Are you likely to spawn into a server full of people in their underwear screaming racial slurs at you? Yes.