Video games have given us plenty of ways to traverse huge open worlds, but none have felt quite as oddly exhilarating as manipulating gravity in Control Resonant's twisted version of New York City. It's a game that lets you flip, twist, and fly through the air while exploring settings that look ripped out of Inception. It's as if you mashed up the meta storytelling of House of Leaves with the inventive platforming of Super Mario Galaxy and somehow turned it into a coherent experience. That strange combination is just the latest example of developer Remedy making games like nobody else out there.

Resonant is a sequel to 2019's Control - thou …

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You have to imagine that the team at Game Freak is bursting with ideas. The studio puts out new mainline Pokémon adventures with a machinelike precision. But every so often it launches a curious experiment, whether it's an action title about a militarized elephant or turning horse races into a card game, showing that it's capable of more than the latest generation of pocket monsters. That's part of what makes the idea of Beast of Reincarnation so enticing. Here is an established studio breaking free of the franchise it has become known for to make its take on a blockbuster action game. Unfortunately new ideas are in short supply in Beast, an …

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Untitled Goose Game is a tough act to follow. It was a silly experience that captured what I imagine it would feel like to be a sentient goose: a lot of waddling, a lot of honking, and a lot of shenanigans. That's why Big Walk, the next game from Goose Game developer House House, feels like a radical and unexpected departure. Instead of playing as a goose terrorizing a small village, Big Walk is a co-op multiplayer game where you explore a large island and have to work together to solve puzzles. I've been playing Big Walk as a duo with my wife, and while we're not done yet, we've spent more than 13 hours exploring the island and solving prob …

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The Mermaid Mask, the next point-and-click game from Tangle Tower developer SFB Games, has everything you could ask for in a great murder mystery.

It starts with a compelling setup: The captain of a submarine is found dead in a locked room, his body next to a mysterious cauldron with blood trickling across the floor. The colorful cast of suspects stationed aboard are delightful to talk to, including a grumpy author trying to draft a sequel to his hit novel, an actor playing the lead in a movie based on that novel, a young woman who puts on elaborate illusion performances, and even a man who studies dreams. The submarine works as an excellen …

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What Surrounds Us takes its title literally. You play as a circle surrounding a hole in its middle - it looks like a donut with frosting. You work together with other sentient moving circles, sometimes helping them joyfully meet with others. And you traverse a large map that's composed entirely of, you guessed it, a series of circles. But the circles everywhere aren't just an artistic choice; they underscore the game's themes about working in connection with the environment and the things around us.

Despite the trippy design, What Surrounds Us has a familiar format. I kept feeling echoes of The Legend of Zelda as I trekked across three dist …

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