With Mina the Hollower, Yacht Club Games has cemented itself as one of the premiere independent studios in the industry today. Its breakout hit, Shovel Knight, was a retro-throwback platformer that merged classic 8-bit-style action with some modern touches. Mina the Hollower looked similarly old-school, with a look and feel that obviously pays tribute to the Zelda Game Boy spin-offs. But this time, the fusion of newer souls-like design sensibilities makes it more than a freshened-up homage. It resembles those Zelda games, but it's so densely packed with secrets and intertwining cause-and-effect outcomes that at times it feels more like Elden Ring than Link's Awakening.

The comparisons to Link's Awakening, and Game Boy Color games Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages, are visually obvious. Mina has a similar color palette, the sprite artwork is familiar, and it uses an overhead camera. But whereas those games were relatively simple iterations on the template set by the classic Legend of Zelda and Link to the Past, Mina the Hollower is much darker, much denser, and much more difficult. The challenge level can be brutal and unforgiving, and there are elements of gothic horror, body horror, and gruesome violence--at least, as expressed through cute pixelated animals.

The story starts when Mina gets a letter from Baron Lionel, the leader of Tenebrous Isle, who requests her help with the island's power generators. Mina is a Hollower, which in this world essentially means a sort of structural engineer and earth scientist. Mina is the best of them, having invented the spark technology that powers the generators, which in turn makes all of the modern technological wonders of Tenebrous possible. But the generators have been breaking down, so Mina is asked to come see to the problem. 

After her boat to Tenebrous is attacked by a monster, Mina chooses her weapon. You're presented with just three at the start, and already, this feels like a statement of intent. Link's trusty sword has always seen him through, and Mina's twin daggers, Whisper and Vesper, offer a very similar play-feel. But this time you could also select the Nightstar, a whip-like morningstar with longer reach, or the Blaststrike Maul, a massive bludgeoning hammer. The message, which becomes even clearer as you play, is that this is a game that wants you to take combat seriously. And you'll need to.

Once you make landfall and enter the city of Ossex, you start to gain a better idea of what's going on. The generators have been sabotaged by an eco-terrorist named Thorne. Lionel tasks Mina with going to repair the six main generators surrounding the city, and you're vaguely pointed in a handful of directions to pursue. Immediately as you head out, though, you realize that this world does not spoonfeed its structure to you. It's not immediately clear where to go. The city itself is massive and bustling, loaded with named characters who all drop meaningful bits of information, though the game doesn't log these for you. What you do with that information is up to you--whether you commit it to memory, write it down, or chase a lead immediately. Like the open world of Elden Ring, the freedom initially feels overwhelming. A city newspaper points you in the direction of a dungeon, but the fact is that you can do them in almost any order.

The dungeons themselves are unique--not only as compared to a game in this template, but in relation to each other. Rather than enter into a bespoke dungeon area, they are built into the structure of the world itself. You might weave your way through crypts or caves or swamps while exploring, but there is no clear delineation between the open world and a dungeon. It's all part of the same cohesive, connected reality. There are often shortcuts and secret passageways connecting pieces of the world together, making it feel even more part of a whole. 

Even so, the parts of the world have their own distinct personalities that each feel inventive and fresh. My first quest was to Queensbury Crypt to the east, a creepy graveyard full of tombs and statues, complete with a macabre meta-puzzle that led to a boss battle with an implied tragic story at its core. Next I headed to Nox's Bayou, a poisonous swamp that tested my ability to make tricky leaps across waterways. Then I went to Septemburg, a personal favorite, a harvest-themed farm town being terrorized by a spooky monster that the local youth call the Carving Man. The Carving Man ends up stalking you, introducing a surprising survival-horror element akin to Resident Evil's Mr. X or Nemesis. Every dungeon is just packed with these kinds of surprising touches that make them feel distinct.

Unlike a traditional Zelda game, though, you aren't obtaining new items in each dungeon that help you solve puzzles. At first I missed this element, but I found that Mina the Hollower didn't need it. Items in Zelda games help to facilitate new types of puzzle or platforming challenges, but Mina manages to maintain such a constant pace of fresh reinvention without items. The world and dungeon design itself kept the same pacing by themselves. Progress isn't gated behind keys, but rather, behind skill. If you can reach from one end of a room to the other, you can proceed. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Fx0aJCRRpE

That is made all the more impressive by how absolutely dense the world is. Every screen is packed with interconnected secrets and things to uncover, many of which you may not even realize are there the first time you trod past them. I've completed the game and I still don't feel like I've even scratched the surface. Playing alongside others on staff, we would frequently find ourselves surprising each other with small details we found and character interactions we uncovered. There are moments that I triggered that other players didn't, and vice-versa, and we still have no clear idea why. The world is so complex and intertwining that I suspect players will be experimenting and discovering new things for some time.

Combat is similarly nuanced. In addition to the three starter weapons, you have access to more that can be found or bought. Each one can be upgraded, and all of them have their own intricacies. I preferred the twin daggers because it felt most familiar to me with its quick short-ranged strikes, but I also had to adjust to its rhythm of two quick stabs in succession. The Nightstar has reach and flexibility, but it also means you have to commit to an attack. A gun-like weapon gives you long range but with very limited ammo. You won't need to master all of them, but they each feel precise enough to accommodate someone's playstyle.

In addition to your main weapon, you'll find Sidearms, which deplete a mana pool upon use. Those could be a heavy axe that you can toss a la Castlevania, an umbrella that blocks enemy attacks and then can be thrown, a boomerang-like throwing disc, a pet beast that follows you around on a leash, and more. There are tons of Sidearms, and it's always exciting to find a new one and see how it mixes up gameplay and adds to your combat options.

Combat is one area, and the only one, where Mina the Hollower's ambition mildly exceeds its grasp. This game admirably iterates on the form and function of classic Game Boy Zelda games, but those were never built for complex combat. Mina succeeds in giving this structure style a much higher skill ceiling, but it isn't flawless. With a flattened 2D perspective, it's not always clear when enemies are in the air, requiring a jump-attack to make contact. Many enemies charge directly at you, which makes the lack of a dodge or backstep command stand out. Instead, you can jump, or jump into a burrow and dig underground. Both of those do in a pinch--and you'll need to master their timing to withstand the combat challenges--but it does feel like combat is just slightly straining against the limitations of its homage.

On that note, Mina the Hollower is brutally difficult at times. Boss battles can be especially tricky, but even a handful of regular enemies can take you down if you're not careful. Mina is just a vulnerable little mouse, after all. Your safe spot is the Underlab, an underground base you burrow into where you can heal and swap equipment. Sometimes Underlabs are spread very thin, and you'll be desperate to find the next one because you're on the verge of death. Runbacks between Underlabs and bosses can be unforgiving and require several tries. You can crack a vial to restore your health, but you need to defeat enemies to extend the amount it will restore, and you have a limited number of uses. Dying means losing your spark, after which you have one chance (by default) to regain it before you lose all your currency.

The difficulty is certainly an intentional choice, and slight reservations about the combat's limitations aside, it does feel great to have your skills tested and slowly feel yourself improving. Like any other game in the souls-like genre, you do actually need to get good.

Unlike a souls-like game, though, you actually can make the game easier on yourself. Mina the Hollower has loads of optional modifiers--reducing damage, adding more Underlab save points, adjusting the world speed, and so on. It's generous enough to let you turn on as many or as few as you'd like, tweaking the game difficulty to your liking. You can even make it harder if you're looking for additional challenge after mastering the mechanics. And even more are added after game completion, giving you a massive array of different things to try that will either add limitations or even more freedom.

Bones (which are their money) accrue by defeating enemies and exploring. After you've gathered enough, you can buy stacking upgrades to strength, defense, or Sidearm mana, or you can convert your pool into Bonestone, which is kept safe in your Underlab and therefore can't be lost when you die. Bones can also be used to buy a variety of permanent upgrades for Mina, or weapons, upgrades, various items, or Trinkets. 

Trinkets are one of the most important aspects to customizing Mina to your playstyle. These have strong effects like extending your burrow time, letting you carry extra health vials, or even giving you a one-time emergency revive. None of these are strictly necessary for completion like items in a Zelda game, but many of them are extremely useful, and combining them as you find new ones is part of the joy of learning and earning your own safe path through this dangerous world. 

And again, this world feels dangerous and unstable. Even in areas where you'd ordinarily feel safe, like wandering through the streets of the central city, you may be surprised to find yourself violently grabbed by a giant shopkeeper who pulls you into his store and orders you to buy his wares. I once wandered into a boss fight in the city without even realizing it, thinking I was in a safe space, and had to fight my way out by the skin of my teeth or risk losing my precious bones. Everything about the world accentuates the feeling that it is treacherous and unpredictable.

As impressed as I was throughout, Mina the Hollower finishes especially strong with a pair of final dungeons that are somehow even more bursting with creativity. Whereas every dungeon up to that point had its own distinct flavor and personality, the last few hours packed multiple ideas and puzzle types into single dungeons, making them a feast of creative level design that honestly, at some points, felt like Yacht Club was just showing off.

Each time you finish a dungeon, you play an extended platforming sequence with a neat effect that reminded me of Mode 7 on the Super NES. The generator towers themselves are cylindrical, and you can fully run around them while climbing upward, all while avoiding a trail of electrical current coming after you. It's an exciting way to cap off the dungeon after fighting a memorable boss, and like the environments themselves, each one has its own distinct flavor that matches the dungeon's themes.

Upon restoring each generator, you find a letter--most of them from Thorne, the eco-terrorist who is always one step ahead of you in sabotaging the generators. Thorne describes his reasoning and implores you to rethink helping Lionel. For a generation raised by eco-tainment like Fern Gully and Captain Planet (RIP Ted Turner), it was clear from the start where all of this was going. However, the execution found room for surprising turns. This is a fable about environmentalism, but it's not clean or preachy. Fixing the generators has positive effects on the world, but Thorne's destruction of them does too. It seems like this world is stuck in a devil's bargain where they've become too reliant on technology to stop now without incurring heavy costs, but they can't safely continue either. Any path leads to pain. It certainly resonates.

I am awed by what Yacht Club Games has created here. Mina the Hollower is so ambitious and dense and sprawling that it is hard to believe that it is contained in such a modest presentation. It surpasses the boundaries of mere homage or retro throwback to become something new, fresh, inventive, and exciting. Shovel Knight was a well-deserved successful debut for Yacht Club. Mina the Hollower may be its masterpiece.

With Mina the Hollower, Yacht Club Games has cemented itself as one of the premiere independent studios in the industry today. Its breakout hit, Shovel Knight, was a retro-throwback platformer that merged classic 8-bit-style action with some modern touches. Mina the Hollower looked similarly old-school, with a look and feel that obviously pays tribute to the Zelda Game Boy spin-offs. But this time, the fusion of newer souls-like design sensibilities makes it more than a freshened-up homage. It resembles those Zelda games, but it's so densely packed with secrets and intertwining cause-and-effect outcomes that at times it feels more like Elden Ring than Link's Awakening.

The comparisons to Link's Awakening, and Game Boy Color games Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages, are visually obvious. Mina has a similar color palette, the sprite artwork is familiar, and it uses an overhead camera. But whereas those games were relatively simple iterations on the template set by the classic Legend of Zelda and Link to the Past, Mina the Hollower is much darker, much denser, and much more difficult. The challenge level can be brutal and unforgiving, and there are elements of gothic horror, body horror, and gruesome violence--at least, as expressed through cute pixelated animals.

The story starts when Mina gets a letter from Baron Lionel, the leader of Tenebrous Isle, who requests her help with the island's power generators. Mina is a Hollower, which in this world essentially means a sort of structural engineer and earth scientist. Mina is the best of them, having invented the spark technology that powers the generators, which in turn makes all of the modern technological wonders of Tenebrous possible. But the generators have been breaking down, so Mina is asked to come see to the problem. 

After her boat to Tenebrous is attacked by a monster, Mina chooses her weapon. You're presented with just three at the start, and already, this feels like a statement of intent. Link's trusty sword has always seen him through, and Mina's twin daggers, Whisper and Vesper, offer a very similar play-feel. But this time you could also select the Nightstar, a whip-like morningstar with longer reach, or the Blaststrike Maul, a massive bludgeoning hammer. The message, which becomes even clearer as you play, is that this is a game that wants you to take combat seriously. And you'll need to.

Once you make landfall and enter the city of Ossex, you start to gain a better idea of what's going on. The generators have been sabotaged by an eco-terrorist named Thorne. Lionel tasks Mina with going to repair the six main generators surrounding the city, and you're vaguely pointed in a handful of directions to pursue. Immediately as you head out, though, you realize that this world does not spoonfeed its structure to you. It's not immediately clear where to go. The city itself is massive and bustling, loaded with named characters who all drop meaningful bits of information, though the game doesn't log these for you. What you do with that information is up to you--whether you commit it to memory, write it down, or chase a lead immediately. Like the open world of Elden Ring, the freedom initially feels overwhelming. A city newspaper points you in the direction of a dungeon, but the fact is that you can do them in almost any order.

The dungeons themselves are unique--not only as compared to a game in this template, but in relation to each other. Rather than enter into a bespoke dungeon area, they are built into the structure of the world itself. You might weave your way through crypts or caves or swamps while exploring, but there is no clear delineation between the open world and a dungeon. It's all part of the same cohesive, connected reality. There are often shortcuts and secret passageways connecting pieces of the world together, making it feel even more part of a whole. 

Even so, the parts of the world have their own distinct personalities that each feel inventive and fresh. My first quest was to Queensbury Crypt to the east, a creepy graveyard full of tombs and statues, complete with a macabre meta-puzzle that led to a boss battle with an implied tragic story at its core. Next I headed to Nox's Bayou, a poisonous swamp that tested my ability to make tricky leaps across waterways. Then I went to Septemburg, a personal favorite, a harvest-themed farm town being terrorized by a spooky monster that the local youth call the Carving Man. The Carving Man ends up stalking you, introducing a surprising survival-horror element akin to Resident Evil's Mr. X or Nemesis. Every dungeon is just packed with these kinds of surprising touches that make them feel distinct.

Unlike a traditional Zelda game, though, you aren't obtaining new items in each dungeon that help you solve puzzles. At first I missed this element, but I found that Mina the Hollower didn't need it. Items in Zelda games help to facilitate new types of puzzle or platforming challenges, but Mina manages to maintain such a constant pace of fresh reinvention without items. The world and dungeon design itself kept the same pacing by themselves. Progress isn't gated behind keys, but rather, behind skill. If you can reach from one end of a room to the other, you can proceed. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Fx0aJCRRpE

That is made all the more impressive by how absolutely dense the world is. Every screen is packed with interconnected secrets and things to uncover, many of which you may not even realize are there the first time you trod past them. I've completed the game and I still don't feel like I've even scratched the surface. Playing alongside others on staff, we would frequently find ourselves surprising each other with small details we found and character interactions we uncovered. There are moments that I triggered that other players didn't, and vice-versa, and we still have no clear idea why. The world is so complex and intertwining that I suspect players will be experimenting and discovering new things for some time.

Combat is similarly nuanced. In addition to the three starter weapons, you have access to more that can be found or bought. Each one can be upgraded, and all of them have their own intricacies. I preferred the twin daggers because it felt most familiar to me with its quick short-ranged strikes, but I also had to adjust to its rhythm of two quick stabs in succession. The Nightstar has reach and flexibility, but it also means you have to commit to an attack. A gun-like weapon gives you long range but with very limited ammo. You won't need to master all of them, but they each feel precise enough to accommodate someone's playstyle.

In addition to your main weapon, you'll find Sidearms, which deplete a mana pool upon use. Those could be a heavy axe that you can toss a la Castlevania, an umbrella that blocks enemy attacks and then can be thrown, a boomerang-like throwing disc, a pet beast that follows you around on a leash, and more. There are tons of Sidearms, and it's always exciting to find a new one and see how it mixes up gameplay and adds to your combat options.

Combat is one area, and the only one, where Mina the Hollower's ambition mildly exceeds its grasp. This game admirably iterates on the form and function of classic Game Boy Zelda games, but those were never built for complex combat. Mina succeeds in giving this structure style a much higher skill ceiling, but it isn't flawless. With a flattened 2D perspective, it's not always clear when enemies are in the air, requiring a jump-attack to make contact. Many enemies charge directly at you, which makes the lack of a dodge or backstep command stand out. Instead, you can jump, or jump into a burrow and dig underground. Both of those do in a pinch--and you'll need to master their timing to withstand the combat challenges--but it does feel like combat is just slightly straining against the limitations of its homage.

On that note, Mina the Hollower is brutally difficult at times. Boss battles can be especially tricky, but even a handful of regular enemies can take you down if you're not careful. Mina is just a vulnerable little mouse, after all. Your safe spot is the Underlab, an underground base you burrow into where you can heal and swap equipment. Sometimes Underlabs are spread very thin, and you'll be desperate to find the next one because you're on the verge of death. Runbacks between Underlabs and bosses can be unforgiving and require several tries. You can crack a vial to restore your health, but you need to defeat enemies to extend the amount it will restore, and you have a limited number of uses. Dying means losing your spark, after which you have one chance (by default) to regain it before you lose all your currency.

The difficulty is certainly an intentional choice, and slight reservations about the combat's limitations aside, it does feel great to have your skills tested and slowly feel yourself improving. Like any other game in the souls-like genre, you do actually need to get good.

Unlike a souls-like game, though, you actually can make the game easier on yourself. Mina the Hollower has loads of optional modifiers--reducing damage, adding more Underlab save points, adjusting the world speed, and so on. It's generous enough to let you turn on as many or as few as you'd like, tweaking the game difficulty to your liking. You can even make it harder if you're looking for additional challenge after mastering the mechanics. And even more are added after game completion, giving you a massive array of different things to try that will either add limitations or even more freedom.

Bones (which are their money) accrue by defeating enemies and exploring. After you've gathered enough, you can buy stacking upgrades to strength, defense, or Sidearm mana, or you can convert your pool into Bonestone, which is kept safe in your Underlab and therefore can't be lost when you die. Bones can also be used to buy a variety of permanent upgrades for Mina, or weapons, upgrades, various items, or Trinkets. 

Trinkets are one of the most important aspects to customizing Mina to your playstyle. These have strong effects like extending your burrow time, letting you carry extra health vials, or even giving you a one-time emergency revive. None of these are strictly necessary for completion like items in a Zelda game, but many of them are extremely useful, and combining them as you find new ones is part of the joy of learning and earning your own safe path through this dangerous world. 

And again, this world feels dangerous and unstable. Even in areas where you'd ordinarily feel safe, like wandering through the streets of the central city, you may be surprised to find yourself violently grabbed by a giant shopkeeper who pulls you into his store and orders you to buy his wares. I once wandered into a boss fight in the city without even realizing it, thinking I was in a safe space, and had to fight my way out by the skin of my teeth or risk losing my precious bones. Everything about the world accentuates the feeling that it is treacherous and unpredictable.

As impressed as I was throughout, Mina the Hollower finishes especially strong with a pair of final dungeons that are somehow even more bursting with creativity. Whereas every dungeon up to that point had its own distinct flavor and personality, the last few hours packed multiple ideas and puzzle types into single dungeons, making them a feast of creative level design that honestly, at some points, felt like Yacht Club was just showing off.

Each time you finish a dungeon, you play an extended platforming sequence with a neat effect that reminded me of Mode 7 on the Super NES. The generator towers themselves are cylindrical, and you can fully run around them while climbing upward, all while avoiding a trail of electrical current coming after you. It's an exciting way to cap off the dungeon after fighting a memorable boss, and like the environments themselves, each one has its own distinct flavor that matches the dungeon's themes.

Upon restoring each generator, you find a letter--most of them from Thorne, the eco-terrorist who is always one step ahead of you in sabotaging the generators. Thorne describes his reasoning and implores you to rethink helping Lionel. For a generation raised by eco-tainment like Fern Gully and Captain Planet (RIP Ted Turner), it was clear from the start where all of this was going. However, the execution found room for surprising turns. This is a fable about environmentalism, but it's not clean or preachy. Fixing the generators has positive effects on the world, but Thorne's destruction of them does too. It seems like this world is stuck in a devil's bargain where they've become too reliant on technology to stop now without incurring heavy costs, but they can't safely continue either. Any path leads to pain. It certainly resonates.

I am awed by what Yacht Club Games has created here. Mina the Hollower is so ambitious and dense and sprawling that it is hard to believe that it is contained in such a modest presentation. It surpasses the boundaries of mere homage or retro throwback to become something new, fresh, inventive, and exciting. Shovel Knight was a well-deserved successful debut for Yacht Club. Mina the Hollower may be its masterpiece.

When IO Interactive was first announced as developing a James Bond game, people connected the obvious dots: James Bond inspired Hitman, the series IO is best known for, so the studio seemed like a great fit to take on a proper 007 game. But it's where those two experiences would need to be different that had me most intrigued. A 007 game can't just be a Hitman game with different hair. Thankfully, IO's first foray into the James Bond world proves the team knows this and leans into it, delivering a thrilling Bond experience worthy of the character, while also applying lessons learned from the studio's own international man of mystery.

Though it isn't the first to tell an original story, 007 First Light is IO's very own take on Ian Fleming's iconic spy himself. With a new leading man in Patrick Gibson, and a story that takes Bond back to the age of 26, when he's still serving in the military sans any ties to MI6, it's a natural on-ramp for people who may not be familiar with Bond or who have been waiting since 2021's No Time to Die for the next reboot. This is a fresh start, and the team makes it their own.

In First Light, the Bond we meet is younger than ever, and this invites a more stubborn, mistake-prone version of the character, whom I quickly found myself interested in. Recruited to MI6's soon-to-be-rebooted 00 program, Bond can't catch a break, making enemies of his fellow recruits and his irritable supervisor, John Greenway, played by The Walking Dead's Lennie James, who shines in his newfound role in the Bond universe. 

In the movies, I loved how Daniel Craig's take on the hero often saw him receive his fair share of beatings. I strongly prefer that to an untouchable good guy who can do no wrong. That aspect of Bond feels ramped up even more in First Light, with a version of the spy who is hardly out of the figurative cradle at the intelligence agency. James Bond is a headstrong young man, and his tendency to ask for forgiveness rather than permission is both his best and worst attribute in the eyes of his superiors.

Before long, Bond is on assignment, using his tricks of social engineering and stealth to infiltrate a lavish hotel, where the agency believes a disgruntled ex-00 agent is plotting something. While this plot thread initially sounds a bit too much like Skyfall, it quickly finds its own path forward, eventually erasing my concerns that the 20-hour story would lean too much on things I've already seen. It's also during this early mission that First Light starts to reveal its familial ties to Hitman, so to speak. Like IO's flagship game, you'll be dropped into a massive gala full of NPCs, some of whom are guardians of certain areas of the hotel. And like IO's bald assassin, Bond will need to trick, sneak past, or otherwise dispatch the security to get where he needs to be. 

While the game rightly doesn't have the same level of dark humor as Hitman, many of the ways you'll move about the world feel plucked right out of it. You can distract guards, then sneak from cover to cover when they look away, shimmy across hand-holds and pipes outside the building, eavesdrop on conversations to get crucial information, and lie to people to get what you need--be it a keycard, the whereabouts of a particular person, or for them to simply step aside and let you pass, which First Light gamifies as the Bluff mechanic. It won't work on everyone, but some enemies will simply take you at your word, as Bond is a charming young man good at acting like he belongs somewhere he doesn't. Once in a while, you'll even don a disguise. In these moments, First Light and Hitman share a lot in common.

When things break down--maybe your cover has been blown, or you were spotted by enemies who don't fall for your charms--the game's very best attribute kicks into high gear. Combat in First Light is incredibly fun, especially the melee combat. Some of its systems are tried and true, like enemy attacks that must be blocked or dodged with good timing, but the things First Light does best are those that feel the most Bond-like. 

For example, you can slide over surfaces to stagger enemies, kicking their guns from their hands, catching them, then shooting your foe in the leg to cause them to kneel for a quick finisher. Alternatively, you can rush them and toss them into a computer desk, where things like a monitor and keyboard fly into the air as you buy some time with a handful of other armed villains behind you. Environments are awesomely reactive. If you throw a guy into a railing, you can then toss him over it. If you throw him into an electrical board, you'll see him get zapped and take heavy damage. Weaving in and out of combos against a group of enemies looks and feels awesome, whether you're perfectly nailing every hit and dodging every attack or you're just scraping by in fist fights that feel like trying to win an eye-gouging contest. 

Gunplay is fun too, and though I preferred to use my fists because I felt it fit the character better at times, I love how First Light's guns never have much ammo in them, demanding you frequently change what you're armed with by taking them off defeated enemies--you can even chuck your gun at their heads when it's out of ammo. Combined with a slow-motion focus-aim mechanic, enemies who effectively flank you, and lots of destructibility, the end result makes for frenetic shootouts of precision headshots and creative explosions every time you've been given the license to kill. The exciting setpieces, once starring Connery, Brosnan, Craig, and the others, are faithfully captured in First Light, but what makes them even better is how often these moments aren't scripted. They're a result of my own improvisational input, navigating a complex battlefield and using every tool at my disposal to capture the specific biorhythms of a Bond movie.

Speaking of tools, it's funny how well a Bond story maps onto video games. Not only do you trot around the globe in a way that suits distinct missions, but Bond is always aided by Q and his Q-Lab spy gadgets. With his nearly ever-present Q-Watch, Bond can scan an area for enemies and interaction points, even through walls, using the sort of "detective vision" mechanic that Arkham Asylum popularized in 2009. Bond can also hack electronics with that same watch; he can make people feel queasy and move them off their spot using a fake phone that shoots poison darts, and he can blow stuff up with a fake pen, among several other gadgets at his disposal. 

On many missions, you'll pick which two or more of these you want, leaving you with many answers to the same question: how to get from A to B when the space between is littered with villains. I found it hard to pick which gadgets I wanted on any mission because they all had their uses. It was very common for me to get into a mission, thankful I had a particular gadget but also longing for another I had left behind, depending on the situation. A few late-game changes to how gadgets are used also shake up this system in two distinctly different but enjoyable ways.

These gadgets ensure the spirit of the Bond character is alive, and the game is rich with other true-to-form touches, like a well-rounded cast of characters, such as MI6 boss M, workplace ally Moneypenny, and a memorable villain whose quest is an interesting dark reflection of Bond himself. He's also the type of bad guy who feels plucked right out of the headlines. A Bond story is essentially a superhero story, but the best of them ground themselves in reality by speaking to the social and political context in which they've arrived, and First Light shines in this regard. 

Watching the Bond movies recently for the first time, my wife jokingly wondered if the "Bond Girl" is always going to betray him, given how often it happens. I was glad to see First Light toy with this expectation a lot during its runtime. As for 007 himself, Patrick Gibson did so well to become the hero in my mind that, while I used to think of him as the actor who plays the title role on Dexter: First Blood, by the end of the game, he'd become James Bond first and foremost. It's hard to see him any other way.

Of all the boxes IO had to check to make First Light feel authentic, the only area where the team noticeably falters is driving sections. It's not really a Bond story without some car chases, and though First Light uses several different vehicles in several different ways, most of them feel like you're rather rigidly barreling down something close to a straight line. Nearly feeling on-rails, these flashy scenes of Aston Martins and speedboats still look and sound cool, but they're best for moving Bond from one shootout to another, while the driving sections themselves don't add much.

Another issue that stems from telling a 20-hour Bond story is that you, perhaps necessarily, lose some of the supreme pacing the best of the movies have to offer. I enjoyed seeing Bond in his MI6-provided apartment with other recruits. That felt like the sort of downtime a movie wouldn't allow for, which managed to add layers to these new versions of old characters. But there are a couple of other sections later where you're meant to solve puzzles, usually involving locked doors, and in these sections, the pacing can grind to a halt, pulling me out of the otherwise-exciting story. 

That's a hard problem to solve, given how a game necessarily differs from a movie. One area in which the pacing doesn't suffer is First Light's secondary mode, TacSim (short for Tactical Simulation). The in-universe excuse for this challenge mode is that it's Bond's way of staying frosty, beating up virtual bad guys in virtual kitchens, villas, and military installments. What this amounts to for you is a highly replayable mode that gets right down to the game's best bits: its combat. Across many levels, you can attempt to complete dozens of challenges, which is something this studio has designed very well before.

I like this mode out of the gate, though the rewards feel lacking for now, with some lukewarm weapon skins and outfits on offer. IO plans to support TacSim with updates, and I look forward to seeing how it evolves. But for those who wondered if this could be the equivalent of Hitman's incredible Freelancer mode, it's far from that as of now. 

In the end, IO's take on James Bond was actually more like Hitman than I expected, but that's not to say it's simply Hitman by another name. As someone who has loved that series for nearly 25 years, it's fascinating to see IO apply everything it's learned. 007 First Light wisely repurposes what works in both universes but isn't afraid to reimagine or ditch those parts that don't. Though some aspects of the game do hinder the pacing, so much else feels authentic and riveting. As Hollywood seems uncertain about where to take Bond next, IO Interactive's debut effort is supremely confident. "James Bond will return," the movies always like to say. If and when IO's Bond returns, it'll have a great first act to follow.

When IO Interactive was first announced as developing a James Bond game, people connected the obvious dots: James Bond inspired Hitman, the series IO is best known for, so the studio seemed like a great fit to take on a proper 007 game. But it's where those two experiences would need to be different that had me most intrigued. A 007 game can't just be a Hitman game with different hair. Thankfully, IO's first foray into the James Bond world proves the team knows this and leans into it, delivering a thrilling Bond experience worthy of the character, while also applying lessons learned from the studio's own international man of mystery.

Though it isn't the first to tell an original story, 007 First Light is IO's very own take on Ian Fleming's iconic spy himself. With a new leading man in Patrick Gibson, and a story that takes Bond back to the age of 26, when he's still serving in the military sans any ties to MI6, it's a natural on-ramp for people who may not be familiar with Bond or who have been waiting since 2021's No Time to Die for the next reboot. This is a fresh start, and the team makes it their own.

In First Light, the Bond we meet is younger than ever, and this invites a more stubborn, mistake-prone version of the character, whom I quickly found myself interested in. Recruited to MI6's soon-to-be-rebooted 00 program, Bond can't catch a break, making enemies of his fellow recruits and his irritable supervisor, John Greenway, played by The Walking Dead's Lennie James, who shines in his newfound role in the Bond universe. 

In the movies, I loved how Daniel Craig's take on the hero often saw him receive his fair share of beatings. I strongly prefer that to an untouchable good guy who can do no wrong. That aspect of Bond feels ramped up even more in First Light, with a version of the spy who is hardly out of the figurative cradle at the intelligence agency. James Bond is a headstrong young man, and his tendency to ask for forgiveness rather than permission is both his best and worst attribute in the eyes of his superiors.

Before long, Bond is on assignment, using his tricks of social engineering and stealth to infiltrate a lavish hotel, where the agency believes a disgruntled ex-00 agent is plotting something. While this plot thread initially sounds a bit too much like Skyfall, it quickly finds its own path forward, eventually erasing my concerns that the 20-hour story would lean too much on things I've already seen. It's also during this early mission that First Light starts to reveal its familial ties to Hitman, so to speak. Like IO's flagship game, you'll be dropped into a massive gala full of NPCs, some of whom are guardians of certain areas of the hotel. And like IO's bald assassin, Bond will need to trick, sneak past, or otherwise dispatch the security to get where he needs to be. 

While the game rightly doesn't have the same level of dark humor as Hitman, many of the ways you'll move about the world feel plucked right out of it. You can distract guards, then sneak from cover to cover when they look away, shimmy across hand-holds and pipes outside the building, eavesdrop on conversations to get crucial information, and lie to people to get what you need--be it a keycard, the whereabouts of a particular person, or for them to simply step aside and let you pass, which First Light gamifies as the Bluff mechanic. It won't work on everyone, but some enemies will simply take you at your word, as Bond is a charming young man good at acting like he belongs somewhere he doesn't. Once in a while, you'll even don a disguise. In these moments, First Light and Hitman share a lot in common.

When things break down--maybe your cover has been blown, or you were spotted by enemies who don't fall for your charms--the game's very best attribute kicks into high gear. Combat in First Light is incredibly fun, especially the melee combat. Some of its systems are tried and true, like enemy attacks that must be blocked or dodged with good timing, but the things First Light does best are those that feel the most Bond-like. 

For example, you can slide over surfaces to stagger enemies, kicking their guns from their hands, catching them, then shooting your foe in the leg to cause them to kneel for a quick finisher. Alternatively, you can rush them and toss them into a computer desk, where things like a monitor and keyboard fly into the air as you buy some time with a handful of other armed villains behind you. Environments are awesomely reactive. If you throw a guy into a railing, you can then toss him over it. If you throw him into an electrical board, you'll see him get zapped and take heavy damage. Weaving in and out of combos against a group of enemies looks and feels awesome, whether you're perfectly nailing every hit and dodging every attack or you're just scraping by in fist fights that feel like trying to win an eye-gouging contest. 

Gunplay is fun too, and though I preferred to use my fists because I felt it fit the character better at times, I love how First Light's guns never have much ammo in them, demanding you frequently change what you're armed with by taking them off defeated enemies--you can even chuck your gun at their heads when it's out of ammo. Combined with a slow-motion focus-aim mechanic, enemies who effectively flank you, and lots of destructibility, the end result makes for frenetic shootouts of precision headshots and creative explosions every time you've been given the license to kill. The exciting setpieces, once starring Connery, Brosnan, Craig, and the others, are faithfully captured in First Light, but what makes them even better is how often these moments aren't scripted. They're a result of my own improvisational input, navigating a complex battlefield and using every tool at my disposal to capture the specific biorhythms of a Bond movie.

Speaking of tools, it's funny how well a Bond story maps onto video games. Not only do you trot around the globe in a way that suits distinct missions, but Bond is always aided by Q and his Q-Lab spy gadgets. With his nearly ever-present Q-Watch, Bond can scan an area for enemies and interaction points, even through walls, using the sort of "detective vision" mechanic that Arkham Asylum popularized in 2009. Bond can also hack electronics with that same watch; he can make people feel queasy and move them off their spot using a fake phone that shoots poison darts, and he can blow stuff up with a fake pen, among several other gadgets at his disposal. 

On many missions, you'll pick which two or more of these you want, leaving you with many answers to the same question: how to get from A to B when the space between is littered with villains. I found it hard to pick which gadgets I wanted on any mission because they all had their uses. It was very common for me to get into a mission, thankful I had a particular gadget but also longing for another I had left behind, depending on the situation. A few late-game changes to how gadgets are used also shake up this system in two distinctly different but enjoyable ways.

These gadgets ensure the spirit of the Bond character is alive, and the game is rich with other true-to-form touches, like a well-rounded cast of characters, such as MI6 boss M, workplace ally Moneypenny, and a memorable villain whose quest is an interesting dark reflection of Bond himself. He's also the type of bad guy who feels plucked right out of the headlines. A Bond story is essentially a superhero story, but the best of them ground themselves in reality by speaking to the social and political context in which they've arrived, and First Light shines in this regard. 

Watching the Bond movies recently for the first time, my wife jokingly wondered if the "Bond Girl" is always going to betray him, given how often it happens. I was glad to see First Light toy with this expectation a lot during its runtime. As for 007 himself, Patrick Gibson did so well to become the hero in my mind that, while I used to think of him as the actor who plays the title role on Dexter: First Blood, by the end of the game, he'd become James Bond first and foremost. It's hard to see him any other way.

Of all the boxes IO had to check to make First Light feel authentic, the only area where the team noticeably falters is driving sections. It's not really a Bond story without some car chases, and though First Light uses several different vehicles in several different ways, most of them feel like you're rather rigidly barreling down something close to a straight line. Nearly feeling on-rails, these flashy scenes of Aston Martins and speedboats still look and sound cool, but they're best for moving Bond from one shootout to another, while the driving sections themselves don't add much.

Another issue that stems from telling a 20-hour Bond story is that you, perhaps necessarily, lose some of the supreme pacing the best of the movies have to offer. I enjoyed seeing Bond in his MI6-provided apartment with other recruits. That felt like the sort of downtime a movie wouldn't allow for, which managed to add layers to these new versions of old characters. But there are a couple of other sections later where you're meant to solve puzzles, usually involving locked doors, and in these sections, the pacing can grind to a halt, pulling me out of the otherwise-exciting story. 

That's a hard problem to solve, given how a game necessarily differs from a movie. One area in which the pacing doesn't suffer is First Light's secondary mode, TacSim (short for Tactical Simulation). The in-universe excuse for this challenge mode is that it's Bond's way of staying frosty, beating up virtual bad guys in virtual kitchens, villas, and military installments. What this amounts to for you is a highly replayable mode that gets right down to the game's best bits: its combat. Across many levels, you can attempt to complete dozens of challenges, which is something this studio has designed very well before.

I like this mode out of the gate, though the rewards feel lacking for now, with some lukewarm weapon skins and outfits on offer. IO plans to support TacSim with updates, and I look forward to seeing how it evolves. But for those who wondered if this could be the equivalent of Hitman's incredible Freelancer mode, it's far from that as of now. 

In the end, IO's take on James Bond was actually more like Hitman than I expected, but that's not to say it's simply Hitman by another name. As someone who has loved that series for nearly 25 years, it's fascinating to see IO apply everything it's learned. 007: First Light wisely repurposes what works in both universes but isn't afraid to reimagine or ditch those parts that don't. Though some aspects of the game do hinder the pacing, so much else feels authentic and riveting. As Hollywood seems uncertain about where to take Bond next, IO Interactive's debut effort is supremely confident. "James Bond will return," the movies always like to say. If and when IO's Bond returns, it'll have a great first act to follow.

Perhaps because he's so cute and marketable, Yoshi's adventures have been designed for a younger and younger audience for the last several years. 2006's Yoshi's Island DS was not out-of-step with the difficulty of a mainline Mario game, but since then, the challenge of mainline Yoshi games has been slowly softened to target younger audiences. With Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, Nintendo has made the gameplay even more gentle for gaming novices--but what it lacks in difficulty, it mostly makes up for in creativity and a playful gimmick built around discovery and exploration.

Yoshi and the Mysterious Book isn't a typical platformer. You don't move left to right to reach a finish line, Yoshi can't die, and there aren't enemies to overcome in a traditional sense. Instead, the stages are little biospheres teeming with natural flora and fauna. Rather than fight them, you're there to study and document them--Yoshi is less of an adventurer this time around, and more of a research assistant.

You're conducting research inside the pages of Mister Encyclopedia, aka Mr. E, a conscious compendium of all life on a remote, unnamed island. The Yoshis volunteer to jump into the pages of the book and document their findings, putting each of the creatures there through their paces. That usually includes documenting how they taste, what happens if you throw them, how they interact with their environment, and even how they interact with each other. This transforms stages into little standalone playgrounds where you experiment with a new creature and see what it can do. The play is about the discovery itself, as you observe different reactions and the game gently guides you to try new things.

https://youtu.be/1d7IdzUK2MM?si=_8yC48jkJYyAqeXC

It's surprising how well this works. Instead of reaching a goal line, the stages conclude when you make some pre-defined, especially significant discovery. For a set of flowers called ​​Crazee Dayzees, for example, it's using them to grow large flower buds. For Shy Guys, it's finding all of their hiding spots. For Casterway, a creature with a fishing pole, it's catching a huge lunker of a fish lurking in the water below. I wasn't sure how well the game would approach guiding you towards your goals when no two goals are exactly the same, but it works remarkably well. You can always ask Mr. E for a hint, but I rarely needed to. The rhythms of the stages and cascading discoveries often just led me to the right conclusion.

Years of Mario platformers, of which Yoshi owes its lineage, makes the general controls feel natural and fluid. You can run, jump, swallow things with your sticky tongue, and throw eggs using the left stick for aiming. But Yoshi and the Mysterious Book also gets a delightful amount of variety out of both its differentiated goals, and its myriad strange creatures. A Snurfboard creature functions like a surfboard, letting you ride on it and do tricks. Meanwhile, a Slugarang, a bug shaped like a boomerang, lets you toss it away as a projectile to mow down grass and trim trees, allowing you to make new discoveries. Each world has at least one creature like these two examples, and their inclusion mixes up the gameplay in some new and surprising way, which helps maintain a brisk pace of variety. And as you get deeper into the game, you start to find creatures that interact with other, earlier ones you had already discovered. You can go back and spend coins to buy hints for interactions you may have missed in a previous area if you want to see them all.

I should say here, by the way, that each of these creatures can be named however you wish. You're the archeologist discovering them, so Mr. E lets you name them. I didn't use this functionality much, preferring to hear their canonical names per Mr. E's suggestion, but it's a cute touch that I'm sure kids will enjoy.

The story is light to the point of being almost non-existent. Somehow, Bowser Jr. and Kamek have found themselves in the titular book as well and they're searching for a rare species. You restore the pages of the book to unlock new areas, and naturally that means you're on their trail, but you aren't given any particular motivation otherwise.

That said, the main story culminates in a plot twist, of sorts, that is so bizarre and left-field that you really need to see it to believe it. The story was too bare-bones to evoke a strong emotional reaction from me, but I was still amused that such a cute game had such a dark idea lurking inside it.

Speaking of seeing and believing, the visual style in Mysterious Book is gorgeous. Inside the book, the whole game has a visual layer that makes it look like illustrations on a page, with a colored pencil aesthetic and skipped frames to accent the effect. Especially when played in TV mode, Yoshi is full of expressive reactions to everything he sees, and in particular, everything he tastes. These playful cartoon expressions help to even further accentuate its appeal for younger players.

This clear targeting of younger gamers has its drawbacks, though. Most notably, while this is a game that seems aimed at early- or pre-readers, it's absolutely chock full of text to read, and there is no voice acting or spoken dialogue to make the experience more accessible to the audience that will likely be enjoying this game most. Mr. E speaks in simlish-like vocalizing but the dialogue has to be read. Discoveries pop up as text as well. The hint system is all text too. A younger player without strong reading skills might be able to play with the systems and make discoveries, but it may be hard for them to progress without someone around to interpret the text for them.

For older players, there is a little more complexity hidden behind the first ending. It's actually one of the coolest features the game has to offer, which makes it strange to rope it behind game completion. Once you finish the main story you open up a modular UI, with "Exploration Tools" that can be bought in exchange for the Smiley Flowers you've been gathering throughout the journey and then mapped to a grid overlay. These tools are unlocked in a particular order so you can't select which ones you want, but a few of them include a Bioscanner to track nearby creatures, thermometers to track temperature, and more. There's even a lifebar for Yoshi, which confusingly doesn't seem to do anything since you can't die--but when Yoshi gets low enough in health he visibly reacts. Presumably this system was running under the hood the whole time but I never even noticed until unlocking the tool.

Those tools can be applied to extra biomes that open up after the first ending as well. That extends the adventure into new areas with new creatures, as well as allowing you to discover how those creatures and your new Exploration Tools interact with all the ones you've already found.

How much mileage you get out of those extra stages, and in fact out of the entire game, relies largely on your level of curiosity. Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is fundamentally a game about poking and prodding at the world and seeing what happens. It won't test your precision platforming skills, but it serves as a gentle introduction for novices, and an experiment for even experienced gamers to see an audacious, expanded idea of what a platformer can be.

Perhaps because he's so cute and marketable, Yoshi's adventures have been designed for a younger and younger audience for the last several years. 2006's Yoshi's Island DS was not out-of-step with the difficulty of a mainline Mario game, but since then, the challenge of mainline Yoshi games has been slowly softened to target younger audiences. With Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, Nintendo has made the gameplay even more gentle for gaming novices--but what it lacks in difficulty, it mostly makes up for in creativity and a playful gimmick built around discovery and exploration.

Yoshi and the Mysterious Book isn't a typical platformer. You don't move left to right to reach a finish line, Yoshi can't die, and there aren't enemies to overcome in a traditional sense. Instead, the stages are little biospheres teeming with natural flora and fauna. Rather than fight them, you're there to study and document them--Yoshi is less of an adventurer this time around, and more of a research assistant.

You're conducting research inside the pages of Mister Encyclopedia, aka Mr. E, a conscious compendium of all life on a remote, unnamed island. The Yoshis volunteer to jump into the pages of the book and document their findings, putting each of the creatures there through their paces. That usually includes documenting how they taste, what happens if you throw them, how they interact with their environment, and even how they interact with each other. This transforms stages into little standalone playgrounds where you experiment with a new creature and see what it can do. The play is about the discovery itself, as you observe different reactions and the game gently guides you to try new things.

https://youtu.be/1d7IdzUK2MM?si=_8yC48jkJYyAqeXC

It's surprising how well this works. Instead of reaching a goal line, the stages conclude when you make some pre-defined, especially significant discovery. For a set of flowers called ​​Crazee Dayzees, for example, it's using them to grow large flower buds. For Shy Guys, it's finding all of their hiding spots. For Casterway, a creature with a fishing pole, it's catching a huge lunker of a fish lurking in the water below. I wasn't sure how well the game would approach guiding you towards your goals when no two goals are exactly the same, but it works remarkably well. You can always ask Mr. E for a hint, but I rarely needed to. The rhythms of the stages and cascading discoveries often just led me to the right conclusion.

Years of Mario platformers, of which Yoshi owes its lineage, makes the general controls feel natural and fluid. You can run, jump, swallow things with your sticky tongue, and throw eggs using the left stick for aiming. But Yoshi and the Mysterious Book also gets a delightful amount of variety out of both its differentiated goals, and its myriad strange creatures. A Snurfboard creature functions like a surfboard, letting you ride on it and do tricks. Meanwhile, a Slugarang, a bug shaped like a boomerang, lets you toss it away as a projectile to mow down grass and trim trees, allowing you to make new discoveries. Each world has at least one creature like these two examples, and their inclusion mixes up the gameplay in some new and surprising way, which helps maintain a brisk pace of variety. And as you get deeper into the game, you start to find creatures that interact with other, earlier ones you had already discovered. You can go back and spend coins to buy hints for interactions you may have missed in a previous area if you want to see them all.

I should say here, by the way, that each of these creatures can be named however you wish. You're the archeologist discovering them, so Mr. E lets you name them. I didn't use this functionality much, preferring to hear their canonical names per Mr. E's suggestion, but it's a cute touch that I'm sure kids will enjoy.

The story is light to the point of being almost non-existent. Somehow, Bowser Jr. and Kamek have found themselves in the titular book as well and they're searching for a rare species. You restore the pages of the book to unlock new areas, and naturally that means you're on their trail, but you aren't given any particular motivation otherwise.

That said, the main story culminates in a plot twist, of sorts, that is so bizarre and left-field that you really need to see it to believe it. The story was too bare-bones to evoke a strong emotional reaction from me, but I was still amused that such a cute game had such a dark idea lurking inside it.

Speaking of seeing and believing, the visual style in Mysterious Book is gorgeous. Inside the book, the whole game has a visual layer that makes it look like illustrations on a page, with a colored pencil aesthetic and skipped frames to accent the effect. Especially when played in TV mode, Yoshi is full of expressive reactions to everything he sees, and in particular, everything he tastes. These playful cartoon expressions help to even further accentuate its appeal for younger players.

This clear targeting of younger gamers has its drawbacks, though. Most notably, while this is a game that seems aimed at early- or pre-readers, it's absolutely chock full of text to read, and there is no voice acting or spoken dialogue to make the experience more accessible to the audience that will likely be enjoying this game most. Mr. E speaks in simlish-like vocalizing but the dialogue has to be read. Discoveries pop up as text as well. The hint system is all text too. A younger player without strong reading skills might be able to play with the systems and make discoveries, but it may be hard for them to progress without someone around to interpret the text for them.

For older players, there is a little more complexity hidden behind the first ending. It's actually one of the coolest features the game has to offer, which makes it strange to rope it behind game completion. Once you finish the main story you open up a modular UI, with "Exploration Tools" that can be bought in exchange for the Smiley Flowers you've been gathering throughout the journey and then mapped to a grid overlay. These tools are unlocked in a particular order so you can't select which ones you want, but a few of them include a Bioscanner to track nearby creatures, thermometers to track temperature, and more. There's even a lifebar for Yoshi, which confusingly doesn't seem to do anything since you can't die--but when Yoshi gets low enough in health he visibly reacts. Presumably this system was running under the hood the whole time but I never even noticed until unlocking the tool.

Those tools can be applied to extra biomes that open up after the first ending as well. That extends the adventure into new areas with new creatures, as well as allowing you to discover how those creatures and your new Exploration Tools interact with all the ones you've already found.

How much mileage you get out of those extra stages, and in fact out of the entire game, relies largely on your level of curiosity. Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is fundamentally a game about poking and prodding at the world and seeing what happens. It won't test your precision platforming skills, but it serves as a gentle introduction for novices, and an experiment for even experienced gamers to see an audacious, expanded idea of what a platformer can be.

Imagine a Lego set that represents Batman 89, the Tim Burton classic that helped create the modern superhero blockbuster. Then imagine other sets that represent Batman Returns, Batman Begins, The Batman, and so on. You start breaking pieces apart from each set and piecing them back together. At first you can identify a chunk from one movie and distinguish it from another, but the more you mix, the more unrecognizable they become. Before long it's difficult to tell exactly where one begins and another ends. That's what it feels like to play Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, a game that litters its influences so liberally that the pastiche becomes its own reality. In the process, it recaptures the glory days of licensed Lego games by feeling, for the first time in a long time, fresh.

The freshness is what I kept coming back to throughout my time with Legacy of the Dark Knight. Like lots of people, I played Lego Star Wars: The Video Game, the 2005 Traveller's Tales game that established a house style for Lego games and began a flurry of licensed tie-ins. I loved it, and I spent countless hours plumbing its depths and unlocking every character. It was a simple game bursting with secrets to find as well as a playful take on a mythology that mattered to me.

Since then, though, the franchisification of licensed Lego became supercharged, to its detriment. At the height of its power there would be three or even four licensed Lego games released in a single year, and the series burned itself out. You can only find hidden doodads so many times. In recent years, Lego has seemed more cautious, producing more artsy takes like Lego Builder's Journey or Lego Voyagers, with far fewer licensed games. Against that backdrop, Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight feels like a statement of intent. With additional care and time, this is what a Lego game can be.

https://youtu.be/DfJaUpW_P00?si=E7H8uGwVttzcUqkR

Legacy of the Dark Knight tells an original story, kind of, cobbled together and reassembled from the stories of various other Batman media. Most often these are pulled directly from the myriad movie adaptations and reboots, but it's also informed by stray influences from well-known comic arcs and at least one very notable video game influence. And since characters have crossed multiple movie adaptations and interpretations, there's some loose justifications put in to explain how the characters change over time. Jack Napier starts as a member of a regular gang, before donning the Red Hood and falling into a vat of chemicals, but he was always a sadist who liked to taunt his victims, and in this telling he even had the plan to poison people with Smilex before he succumbed to its effects himself. The Penguin is a low-level thug a la The Batman universe before he transitions to a mayoral candidate with animalistic habits as seen in Batman Returns. There are lots of other surprising developments that I'll let you discover on your own.

By imitating and remixing so many classic movie moments, though, it does invite direct comparisons to the originals. It's simply strange to hear iconic moments with new voices. Jack Nicholson's lines as the Joker are especially seared into my mind, so it sounds just slightly off to hear him imitated by a voice that is meant to be a broader take on the character, to facilitate his various transformations. It feels unfair to lay that at the feet of the actor, who does a fine job with the material, but telling any actor to do an exact re-take of some of the most famous lines in superhero cinema history is a rough assignment. Similarly, the story can sometimes feel a little shaggy, briskly connecting two movie plots that weren't ever meant to connect. Usually this is played for laughs, so it works well enough since it gives the impression that the writing is in on the joke.

Through all of these vignettes, the story mostly focuses on building the Bat-family, suggesting that's really the most important part of his legacy. Each chapter focuses primarily on befriending a new crime-fighter like Robin or Batgirl and learning their unique mechanics for battles and puzzle-solving. You're always playing as Batman alongside one ally, though your secondary character can be switched at will most of the time. This focus keeps the characters selection relatively small, a marked change from the sprawling roster in most Lego games that has led to sorting them into character types. Jim Gordon has a pair of special guns--one that fires sticky goo and another that fires a ricochet bulb--and he's the only one with that particular set of skills. Batgirl is the only one who can hack computers, Robin can pry open cracks with his bo staff, and so on.

Lego games are always collect-a-thons, and this one is no exception. But rather than a humongous roster, you're collecting currency to unlock new looks for your core crew, color modifiers that can be applied to any outfit, upgrade material, and trophies for your headquarters. It all feeds into itself very nicely, and I would often make a point of visiting the in-game shop to unlock new costumes. As both a Batman and Lego fan, it's just endlessly cool to see how different suits have been visualized in this style, and there are tons of extremely specific references to particular comic arcs alongside suits representing every movie and TV adaptation you can think of. I never cared much about unlocking every Droid in a Lego Star Wars game, but I want to see every single deep-cut Bat-suit this game has to offer.

Legacy of the Dark Knight also pays homage to Rocksteady's Arkham universe, most notably as the foundation of its gameplay. The rightly praised Arkham combat makes a return here, with the same basic cadence of punches, dodges, and parries, augmented with gadgets as you upgrade your gear. It's a little slower-paced, but as the enemy count and combo meter increases it almost feels like an Arkham game with a Lego visual overhaul mod. It lacks some of the brutality and precision of the Arkham games, especially with more limited gear and gadget upgrades, but it very accurately recaptures the spirit of Arkham's rhythmic combat style.

I don't want to oversell the Arkham connections, because the combat in Lego Batman doesn't reach that level of finesse. This is more Arkham Lite than a true successor to the Rocksteady games. However, the injection of even just some Arkham DNA does make combat much more satisfying than it has been in traditional Lego games, showing that even a little bit of that secret sauce goes a long way toward making a game feel more engaging.

Similarly, traversal throughout the open world of Gotham feels almost a match for the traditional Arkham games. You have access anytime to your choice of Batmobile from across the spectrum of Batman's iconic car. For the most part these feel very similar, with the ability to quickly accelerate across straightaways as well as navigate hairpin turns. They do differ where it makes sense, though. The Tumbler from the Nolan movies feels much heavier and tank-like compared to the light and nimble Batman 89 version, for example. Most of the time, though, it's quicker and easier to simply grapple up to the nearest, highest point and leap, using your natural glide to cover long distances. Again, this doesn't quite match the balletic grace of the Arkham games, but it's remarkably close.

The one spot where the Arkham comparisons fall short, though, is the stealth. The Arkham games were notable for living the fantasy of Batman, turning you into the predator and criminals--a cowardly and superstitious lot--into the prey. Stealth in Legacy of the Dark Knight is passable but unremarkable. You can sneak up on enemies for an instant takedown, but you have fewer tools to inspire fear in a room full of enemies or disappear if you're spotted. Instead of clearing a full room, I would often take out a couple enemies, get spotted, and finish off the rest with traditional combat. It's an unfortunate weak spot in a game that is otherwise extremely effective at emulating what are widely regarded as the best Batman games.

And within those strong underpinnings, Legacy of the Dark Knight thrives on variety without feeling bloated or overstuffed with half-baked characters and mechanics. The open world of Gotham has tons of caches to find, Riddler and Cluemaster puzzle challenges, AR combat and racing challenges, crimes to stop, and even short environmental puzzles to unlock fast-travel points. Even within an individual mission you're never doing one thing for too long, as you'll transition from combat to puzzle to platforming challenge and back again. The story campaign itself moves at a brisk pace with lots to do, but you can also just get lost in Gotham finding things to unlock and empower your Bat-family.

With so many options at my fingertips between multiple allies, I appreciated the addition of a sonar ping similar to Arkham's Detective Vision that would highlight objects of interest. Sometimes this would be necessary to scan a clue or follow footprints, but you can also use it to show the way forward. I have felt incredibly stupid at times playing past Lego games, knowing that I'm overlooking something obvious that's gating my progress forward. I never struggled with that in Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, because the ping system was always there to highlight objects of interest. Most of the level gating involves breaking apart certain objects and then building them into some prop to move forward, so in a pinch this helped me identify which objects to break or even which ones were breakable.

Adding another wrinkle of strategy is a stud-multiplier system that, if it has been in other Lego games, it must have been one that passed me by. Other Lego games have featured multipliers as unlockable bonuses, but in Legacy of the Dark Knight, it's a meter you build that then slowly drains. This actually adds a layer of decision-making to your wanton destruction, since it's best to build up a multiplier before going after a particularly high-value stud. It's just another way this game adds a tiny bit of extra depth--not enough to be overwhelming or feel out of place in a Lego game, but enough to keep it engaging for adults.

And on that note, this is certainly a game aimed at adult Batman fans who are familiar with the character's rich history in cinema. Batman himself is portrayed with his trademark stoicism, but he's also a puckish, Bugs Bunny-style mischief maker. Nested within the reference-laiden story are individual references to influences as diverse as It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Street Fighter 2. The writing is sharp and frequently laugh-out-loud funny. This game in particular shows off a knack for timing and sight gags with cinematic flair.

Silly as it often is, this is a game that makes a point to show the passage of time. Bruce gets visibly older as the story proceeds and enters different phases of his life and his relationships with his allies. The iconic Bat Cave itself slowly develops from a natural rock formation with a handful of computer consoles to a sprawling technological marvel that documents your accomplishments and unlocks and allows you to customize many parts of it to your liking.

In a larger sense, Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is fundamentally about time and the changes that come with it. It's been more than 20 years since Lego games hit it big with Lego Star Wars, and for a while, it felt like it had lost its way and become a whirring franchise-printing machine. Legacy of the Dark Knight rights the ship by getting back to fundamentals with deeper focus, razor-sharp writing, and just the right amount of mechanical complexity. For the first time in a long time, this is a return to form for the Lego series. It's still simple, but not quite as simple, it's bursting with even more secrets, and it's another playful take on a mythology that I love. It's the most fun I've had with a Lego game since 2005, and a template for how Lego games can rebuild into something greater, piece by piece.

Imagine a Lego set that represents Batman 89, the Tim Burton classic that helped create the modern superhero blockbuster. Then imagine other sets that represent Batman Returns, Batman Begins, The Batman, and so on. You start breaking pieces apart from each set and piecing them back together. At first you can identify a chunk from one movie and distinguish it from another, but the more you mix, the more unrecognizable they become. Before long it's difficult to tell exactly where one begins and another ends. That's what it feels like to play Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, a game that litters its influences so liberally that the pastiche becomes its own reality. In the process, it recaptures the glory days of licensed Lego games by feeling, for the first time in a long time, fresh.

The freshness is what I kept coming back to throughout my time with Legacy of the Dark Knight. Like lots of people, I played Lego Star Wars: The Video Game, the 2005 Traveller's Tales game that established a house style for Lego games and began a flurry of licensed tie-ins. I loved it, and I spent countless hours plumbing its depths and unlocking every character. It was a simple game bursting with secrets to find as well as a playful take on a mythology that mattered to me.

Since then, though, the franchisification of licensed Lego became supercharged, to its detriment. At the height of its power there would be three or even four licensed Lego games released in a single year, and the series burned itself out. You can only find hidden doodads so many times. In recent years, Lego has seemed more cautious, producing more artsy takes like Lego Builder's Journey or Lego Voyagers, with far fewer licensed games. Against that backdrop, Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight feels like a statement of intent. With additional care and time, this is what a Lego game can be.

https://youtu.be/DfJaUpW_P00?si=E7H8uGwVttzcUqkR

Legacy of the Dark Knight tells an original story, kind of, cobbled together and reassembled from the stories of various other Batman media. Most often these are pulled directly from the myriad movie adaptations and reboots, but it's also informed by stray influences from well-known comic arcs and at least one very notable video game influence. And since characters have crossed multiple movie adaptations and interpretations, there's some loose justifications put in to explain how the characters change over time. Jack Napier starts as a member of a regular gang, before donning the Red Hood and falling into a vat of chemicals, but he was always a sadist who liked to taunt his victims, and in this telling he even had the plan to poison people with Smilex before he succumbed to its effects himself. The Penguin is a low-level thug a la The Batman universe before he transitions to a mayoral candidate with animalistic habits as seen in Batman Returns. There are lots of other surprising developments that I'll let you discover on your own.

By imitating and remixing so many classic movie moments, though, it does invite direct comparisons to the originals. It's simply strange to hear iconic moments with new voices. Jack Nicholson's lines as the Joker are especially seared into my mind, so it sounds just slightly off to hear him imitated by a voice that is meant to be a broader take on the character, to facilitate his various transformations. It feels unfair to lay that at the feet of the actor, who does a fine job with the material, but telling any actor to do an exact re-take of some of the most famous lines in superhero cinema history is a rough assignment. Similarly, the story can sometimes feel a little shaggy, briskly connecting two movie plots that weren't ever meant to connect. Usually this is played for laughs, so it works well enough since it gives the impression that the writing is in on the joke.

Through all of these vignettes, the story mostly focuses on building the Bat-family, suggesting that's really the most important part of his legacy. Each chapter focuses primarily on befriending a new crime-fighter like Robin or Batgirl and learning their unique mechanics for battles and puzzle-solving. You're always playing as Batman alongside one ally, though your secondary character can be switched at will most of the time. This focus keeps the characters selection relatively small, a marked change from the sprawling roster in most Lego games that has led to sorting them into character types. Jim Gordon has a pair of special guns--one that fires sticky goo and another that fires a ricochet bulb--and he's the only one with that particular set of skills. Batgirl is the only one who can hack computers, Robin can pry open cracks with his bo staff, and so on.

Lego games are always collect-a-thons, and this one is no exception. But rather than a humongous roster, you're collecting currency to unlock new looks for your core crew, color modifiers that can be applied to any outfit, upgrade material, and trophies for your headquarters. It all feeds into itself very nicely, and I would often make a point of visiting the in-game shop to unlock new costumes. As both a Batman and Lego fan, it's just endlessly cool to see how different suits have been visualized in this style, and there are tons of extremely specific references to particular comic arcs alongside suits representing every movie and TV adaptation you can think of. I never cared much about unlocking every Droid in a Lego Star Wars game, but I want to see every single deep-cut Bat-suit this game has to offer.

Legacy of the Dark Knight also pays homage to Rocksteady's Arkham universe, most notably as the foundation of its gameplay. The rightly praised Arkham combat makes a return here, with the same basic cadence of punches, dodges, and parries, augmented with gadgets as you upgrade your gear. It's a little slower-paced, but as the enemy count and combo meter increases it almost feels like an Arkham game with a Lego visual overhaul mod. It lacks some of the brutality and precision of the Arkham games, especially with more limited gear and gadget upgrades, but it very accurately recaptures the spirit of Arkham's rhythmic combat style.

I don't want to oversell the Arkham connections, because the combat in Lego Batman doesn't reach that level of finesse. This is more Arkham Lite than a true successor to the Rocksteady games. However, the injection of even just some Arkham DNA does make combat much more satisfying than it has been in traditional Lego games, showing that even a little bit of that secret sauce goes a long way toward making a game feel more engaging.

Similarly, traversal throughout the open world of Gotham feels almost a match for the traditional Arkham games. You have access anytime to your choice of Batmobile from across the spectrum of Batman's iconic car. For the most part these feel very similar, with the ability to quickly accelerate across straightaways as well as navigate hairpin turns. They do differ where it makes sense, though. The Tumbler from the Nolan movies feels much heavier and tank-like compared to the light and nimble Batman 89 version, for example. Most of the time, though, it's quicker and easier to simply grapple up to the nearest, highest point and leap, using your natural glide to cover long distances. Again, this doesn't quite match the balletic grace of the Arkham games, but it's remarkably close.

The one spot where the Arkham comparisons fall short, though, is the stealth. The Arkham games were notable for living the fantasy of Batman, turning you into the predator and criminals--a cowardly and superstitious lot--into the prey. Stealth in Legacy of the Dark Knight is passable but unremarkable. You can sneak up on enemies for an instant takedown, but you have fewer tools to inspire fear in a room full of enemies or disappear if you're spotted. Instead of clearing a full room, I would often take out a couple enemies, get spotted, and finish off the rest with traditional combat. It's an unfortunate weak spot in a game that is otherwise extremely effective at emulating what are widely regarded as the best Batman games.

And within those strong underpinnings, Legacy of the Dark Knight thrives on variety without feeling bloated or overstuffed with half-baked characters and mechanics. The open world of Gotham has tons of caches to find, Riddler and Cluemaster puzzle challenges, AR combat and racing challenges, crimes to stop, and even short environmental puzzles to unlock fast-travel points. Even within an individual mission you're never doing one thing for too long, as you'll transition from combat to puzzle to platforming challenge and back again. The story campaign itself moves at a brisk pace with lots to do, but you can also just get lost in Gotham finding things to unlock and empower your Bat-family.

With so many options at my fingertips between multiple allies, I appreciated the addition of a sonar ping similar to Arkham's Detective Vision that would highlight objects of interest. Sometimes this would be necessary to scan a clue or follow footprints, but you can also use it to show the way forward. I have felt incredibly stupid at times playing past Lego games, knowing that I'm overlooking something obvious that's gating my progress forward. I never struggled with that in Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, because the ping system was always there to highlight objects of interest. Most of the level gating involves breaking apart certain objects and then building them into some prop to move forward, so in a pinch this helped me identify which objects to break or even which ones were breakable.

Adding another wrinkle of strategy is a stud-multiplier system that, if it has been in other Lego games, it must have been one that passed me by. Other Lego games have featured multipliers as unlockable bonuses, but in Legacy of the Dark Knight, it's a meter you build that then slowly drains. This actually adds a layer of decision-making to your wanton destruction, since it's best to build up a multiplier before going after a particularly high-value stud. It's just another way this game adds a tiny bit of extra depth--not enough to be overwhelming or feel out of place in a Lego game, but enough to keep it engaging for adults.

And on that note, this is certainly a game aimed at adult Batman fans who are familiar with the character's rich history in cinema. Batman himself is portrayed with his trademark stoicism, but he's also a puckish, Bugs Bunny-style mischief maker. Nested within the reference-laiden story are individual references to influences as diverse as It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Street Fighter 2. The writing is sharp and frequently laugh-out-loud funny. This game in particular shows off a knack for timing and sight gags with cinematic flair.

Silly as it often is, this is a game that makes a point to show the passage of time. Bruce gets visibly older as the story proceeds and enters different phases of his life and his relationships with his allies. The iconic Bat Cave itself slowly develops from a natural rock formation with a handful of computer consoles to a sprawling technological marvel that documents your accomplishments and unlocks and allows you to customize many parts of it to your liking.

In a larger sense, Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is fundamentally about time and the changes that come with it. It's been more than 20 years since Lego games hit it big with Lego Star Wars, and for a while, it felt like it had lost its way and become a whirring franchise-printing machine. Legacy of the Dark Knight rights the ship by getting back to fundamentals with deeper focus, razor-sharp writing, and just the right amount of mechanical complexity. For the first time in a long time, this is a return to form for the Lego series. It's still simple, but not quite as simple, it's bursting with even more secrets, and it's another playful take on a mythology that I love. It's the most fun I've had with a Lego game since 2005, and a template for how Lego games can rebuild into something greater, piece by piece.

Following up a game as lauded as Disco Elysium would be an unenviable task for any developer, but especially one as fractured as ZA/UM. With many of the key creative minds behind the detective RPG separated from the studio following an ugly, and very public, legal dispute, it's up to those left behind to pick up the pieces. That's a lot of baggage to carry going into a brand-new, albeit familiar, game, so it's not surprising how ZA/UM has tried to distance itself from too many comparisons with its previous hit. 

As a spy thriller, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies largely strikes a different tone than Disco Elysium. Aspects of it are still inescapably familiar, however, and it's this looming shadow--and sense of imitation--that prevents it from matching the same highs as its spiritual predecessor. Yet there are also enough fresh ideas for it to stand on its own two feet, even if its footing is slightly uneven and less creatively distinct.

Zero Parades' opening does little to quell the comparisons as you wake up on the floor of a small, dirty apartment. Hershel Wilk, codename Cascade, is here on an espionage mission. That's as much as both you and she know. The groggy spy was supposed to get more details from her mission partner, codenamed Pseudopod, but he's permanently indisposed--you find him unresponsive and sitting in a chair in his underwear, overlooking the city of Portofiro through the apartment's grimy first-floor windows. Rummaging through his pockets reveals an invoice for socks and a business card that simply reads, "All you need is a miracle." Figure out the rest on your own, agent.

From here, Zero Parades follows the Disco Elysium blueprint incredibly closely. It's another high-concept, combatless, and verbose RPG, played from an isometric perspective with an emphasis on dialogue choices and skill checks. Like its forebear, it also lives and dies on the strengths of its narrative and loquacious writing. In this regard, it makes a good first impression and carries it through to the end--albeit with a few notable caveats. 

Your skills, for instance, form different parts of your mind and will regularly comment on your dialogue choices and the world around you, sometimes providing you with helpful pointers, interesting observations, or quirky remarks. Unlike in Disco Elysium, however, they don't feel like defined characters of their own and are largely interchangeable. 

This is partly due to the game's writing failing to distinguish among the different parts of Hershel's psyche, but also because they all share a similar voice. I'm convinced Boo Miller's raspy performance as Hershel and her skills will be divisive, but her vocal-fry-infused delivery eventually grew on me. The issue is that there's not much deviation between one inner thought and the next, unlike in Disco Elysium, where each skill's defined written voice was also brought to life by either Lenval Brown or Mikee W. Goodman--the latter of whom is a master at creating disparate sounds. Zero Parades' espionage vibes don't quite suit the same kind of eccentric performances, but it's disappointing that they're so samey either way.

Fortunately, ZA/UM is still adept at crafting memorable personalities elsewhere. Hershel herself is an immediately compelling protagonist: messed up and haunted by past failures, but in a very different way to Disco Elysium's Harrier Du Bois. Hailing from a communist megastate known as the Superbloc, Herschel is a spy for a sprawling intelligence outfit called the Operant Bureau. This isn't her first time in Portofiro, but things didn't go to plan the last time she was here, leaving her former crew to fend for themselves. She's been in the Freezer (essentially condemned to ignominious desk duty) ever since, but this is a chance to potentially make amends and prove herself again.

Once you hit the streets and begin to unravel not just your role in this story, but the world's layered history and the lives of Portofiro's varied denizens, Zero Parades makes for some fascinating spy fiction. At its covert heart, the writing emulates the dissociative and morally ambiguous style of John le Carré, but it doesn't box itself into this style either. Its literary prose is sharp, witty, and very funny on occasion, too, balancing surrealist undertones with geopolitics, spycraft, and interpersonal drama. 

It's not as poetic or as arthouse as Disco Elysium, and its off-kilter moments are rarer and often feel crammed-in because it was popular in ZA/UM's previous game, not necessarily because it works for the character or the story here. There's a moment early on, for example, where you're asked to fix a fax machine. A simple task, but one Zero Parades describes as though Harrier Du Bois is trying to break into the game, with Hershel explaining that she must pacify the machine's spirit of the demonic entities possessing it. This whole spiel feels out of place and highlights the sense of imitation that occasionally rears its head in Zero Parades, unable to escape Disco Elysium's daunting shadow.

The city of Portofiro is, at least, a very different beast to Disco Elysium's Revachol. Parts of it are similarly dilapidated and decayed, echoing a more fruitful past, but it's still a much more vibrant city. It feels alive, caught within a three-way clash for cultural and ideological power that hums along just below the surface. On the opposite side to the communist Superbloc lies the Illuminated Empire, or La Luz, a techno-fascist state that used to be a vast colonial empire. Now it's trying to recapture its former glory by pursuing a strategy of cultural victory. 

You see it in the bustling marketplace of the Bootleg Bazaar, where a couple of children are transfixed by a small TV showing Sixty-Six Wolves, a Luzian cartoon filled with subtle techno-fascist propaganda. Nearby, there's a clothes vendor whose dad went missing after getting hopped up on conspiracy theories spewed forth by an Alex Jones-adjacent menace. A few streets away, you'll find a man so consumed by the latest imported fashion trends from La Luz that he's fallen into crippling debt. 

Most characters you meet have something interesting to say, whether they're shining a light on your current mission or revealing more about Zero Parades' world. Your quests often overlap in surprising ways as well, to the point where someone you interacted with earlier proves useful later for a completely unrelated task. This interconnected feeling makes Portofiro a captivating place to explore, which is only enhanced by the ways you engage with it. Narratively, as a spy, you can choose to be a disruptor, deploying subterfuge, deduction, and moments of violence to get what you want. Mechanically, you're doing this via dialogue choices, exploration, and skill checks.

You have three main faculties that represent the key branches of an operant's training: Action, Relation, and Intellect. Each faculty consists of five skills that you can upgrade when leveling up. An Action skill, like Shadowplay, affects your ability to sneak and steal without being noticed, while an Intellect skill, such as Grey Matter, dictates how adept you are at using logic to pick up on inconsistencies and patterns. 

It's a familiar setup, but Zero Parades expands on the Disco Elysium formula by introducing three ailments that are tied to each faculty. Action is tied to Fatigue, Relation is tied to Anxiety, and Intellect is tied to Delirium. Each one has its own pseudo health bar, which rises and falls based on your actions and the events you witness. Examining your incapacitated partner at the start of the game increases your anxiety, but another outcome later on might lower it, for instance. You can also consume cigarettes, drugs, alcohol, and soft drinks to regulate these stressors, choosing to raise one in order to lower another. If an ailment exceeds the threshold, you're forced to reduce one of your faculty skills, so keeping them in check is a constant balancing act.

This introduces some interesting decisions, as you can opt to intentionally increase an ailment in order to give yourself a better chance of passing a skill check. Typically, you roll two dice to determine a passing or failing grade, but by "exerting" yourself, you're given a third die in exchange for increasing one of your stressors. It's a systemic approach that's more gamified than anything in Disco Elysium, but one that suits your role as a trained operative, able to push your physical and mental limits to potentially gain an advantage.

However, even if you might occasionally boost your chances of success, Zero Parades is still very much a game built around failure. In fact, it embraces the act of failing and the resulting consequences in a way few games do. It's baked into its branching quest design, where you might choose to solve a quest one way, only to stumble down a completely different avenue after a skill check gone awry. This feeds into the shift to a slightly larger map, allowing ZA/UM to create a multitude of literal branching paths. I won't get into specifics, but many quests can be solved in numerous ways, whether you know about each path or not. It blends failure with your own choices and chosen skillset, adding a sense of improvisation to how you navigate each situation. 

It's these systemic enhancements that most notably separate Zero Parades from Disco Elysium. It struggles in other areas, often feeling like a pale imitation of the studio's predecessor--dangerous territory when the likelihood of reaching the same heights is marginal at best. But even with these hiccups, this is still an excellent RPG, with varied and mostly well-defined characters, a fully realized setting encompassed by insurmountable depth, and an endlessly captivating narrative that offers myriad ways to maneuver through its fantastic twists and turns. It might not capture the same rarified magic, but it's well worth venturing into Zero Parades: For Dead Spies' clandestine world.

Following up a game as lauded as Disco Elysium would be an unenviable task for any developer, but especially one as fractured as ZA/UM. With many of the key creative minds behind the detective RPG separated from the studio following an ugly, and very public, legal dispute, it's up to those left behind to pick up the pieces. That's a lot of baggage to carry going into a brand-new, albeit familiar, game, so it's not surprising how ZA/UM has tried to distance itself from too many comparisons with its previous hit. 

As a spy thriller, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies largely strikes a different tone than Disco Elysium. Aspects of it are still inescapably familiar, however, and it's this looming shadow--and sense of imitation--that prevents it from matching the same highs as its spiritual predecessor. Yet there are also enough fresh ideas for it to stand on its own two feet, even if its footing is slightly uneven and less creatively distinct.

Zero Parades' opening does little to quell the comparisons as you wake up on the floor of a small, dirty apartment. Hershel Wilk, codename Cascade, is here on an espionage mission. That's as much as both you and she know. The groggy spy was supposed to get more details from her mission partner, codenamed Pseudopod, but he's permanently indisposed--you find him unresponsive and sitting in a chair in his underwear, overlooking the city of Portofiro through the apartment's grimy first-floor windows. Rummaging through his pockets reveals an invoice for socks and a business card that simply reads, "All you need is a miracle." Figure out the rest on your own, agent.

From here, Zero Parades follows the Disco Elysium blueprint incredibly closely. It's another high-concept, combatless, and verbose RPG, played from an isometric perspective with an emphasis on dialogue choices and skill checks. Like its forebear, it also lives and dies on the strengths of its narrative and loquacious writing. In this regard, it makes a good first impression and carries it through to the end--albeit with a few notable caveats. 

Your skills, for instance, form different parts of your mind and will regularly comment on your dialogue choices and the world around you, sometimes providing you with helpful pointers, interesting observations, or quirky remarks. Unlike in Disco Elysium, however, they don't feel like defined characters of their own and are largely interchangeable. 

This is partly due to the game's writing failing to distinguish among the different parts of Hershel's psyche, but also because they all share a similar voice. I'm convinced Boo Miller's raspy performance as Hershel and her skills will be divisive, but her vocal-fry-infused delivery eventually grew on me. The issue is that there's not much deviation between one inner thought and the next, unlike in Disco Elysium, where each skill's defined written voice was also brought to life by either Lenval Brown or Mikee W. Goodman--the latter of whom is a master at creating disparate sounds. Zero Parades' espionage vibes don't quite suit the same kind of eccentric performances, but it's disappointing that they're so samey either way.

Fortunately, ZA/UM is still adept at crafting memorable personalities elsewhere. Hershel herself is an immediately compelling protagonist: messed up and haunted by past failures, but in a very different way to Disco Elysium's Harrier Du Bois. Hailing from a communist megastate known as the Superbloc, Herschel is a spy for a sprawling intelligence outfit called the Operant Bureau. This isn't her first time in Portofiro, but things didn't go to plan the last time she was here, leaving her former crew to fend for themselves. She's been in the Freezer (essentially condemned to ignominious desk duty) ever since, but this is a chance to potentially make amends and prove herself again.

Once you hit the streets and begin to unravel not just your role in this story, but the world's layered history and the lives of Portofiro's varied denizens, Zero Parades makes for some fascinating spy fiction. At its covert heart, the writing emulates the dissociative and morally ambiguous style of John le Carré, but it doesn't box itself into this style either. Its literary prose is sharp, witty, and very funny on occasion, too, balancing surrealist undertones with geopolitics, spycraft, and interpersonal drama. 

It's not as poetic or as arthouse as Disco Elysium, and its off-kilter moments are rarer and often feel crammed-in because it was popular in ZA/UM's previous game, not necessarily because it works for the character or the story here. There's a moment early on, for example, where you're asked to fix a fax machine. A simple task, but one Zero Parades describes as though Harrier Du Bois is trying to break into the game, with Hershel explaining that she must pacify the machine's spirit of the demonic entities possessing it. This whole spiel feels out of place and highlights the sense of imitation that occasionally rears its head in Zero Parades, unable to escape Disco Elysium's daunting shadow.

The city of Portofiro is, at least, a very different beast to Disco Elysium's Revachol. Parts of it are similarly dilapidated and decayed, echoing a more fruitful past, but it's still a much more vibrant city. It feels alive, caught within a three-way clash for cultural and ideological power that hums along just below the surface. On the opposite side to the communist Superbloc lies the Illuminated Empire, or La Luz, a techno-fascist state that used to be a vast colonial empire. Now it's trying to recapture its former glory by pursuing a strategy of cultural victory. 

You see it in the bustling marketplace of the Bootleg Bazaar, where a couple of children are transfixed by a small TV showing Sixty-Six Wolves, a Luzian cartoon filled with subtle techno-fascist propaganda. Nearby, there's a clothes vendor whose dad went missing after getting hopped up on conspiracy theories spewed forth by an Alex Jones-adjacent menace. A few streets away, you'll find a man so consumed by the latest imported fashion trends from La Luz that he's fallen into crippling debt. 

Most characters you meet have something interesting to say, whether they're shining a light on your current mission or revealing more about Zero Parades' world. Your quests often overlap in surprising ways as well, to the point where someone you interacted with earlier proves useful later for a completely unrelated task. This interconnected feeling makes Portofiro a captivating place to explore, which is only enhanced by the ways you engage with it. Narratively, as a spy, you can choose to be a disruptor, deploying subterfuge, deduction, and moments of violence to get what you want. Mechanically, you're doing this via dialogue choices, exploration, and skill checks.

You have three main faculties that represent the key branches of an operant's training: Action, Relation, and Intellect. Each faculty consists of five skills that you can upgrade when leveling up. An Action skill, like Shadowplay, affects your ability to sneak and steal without being noticed, while an Intellect skill, such as Grey Matter, dictates how adept you are at using logic to pick up on inconsistencies and patterns. 

It's a familiar setup, but Zero Parades expands on the Disco Elysium formula by introducing three ailments that are tied to each faculty. Action is tied to Fatigue, Relation is tied to Anxiety, and Intellect is tied to Delirium. Each one has its own pseudo health bar, which rises and falls based on your actions and the events you witness. Examining your incapacitated partner at the start of the game increases your anxiety, but another outcome later on might lower it, for instance. You can also consume cigarettes, drugs, alcohol, and soft drinks to regulate these stressors, choosing to raise one in order to lower another. If an ailment exceeds the threshold, you're forced to reduce one of your faculty skills, so keeping them in check is a constant balancing act.

This introduces some interesting decisions, as you can opt to intentionally increase an ailment in order to give yourself a better chance of passing a skill check. Typically, you roll two dice to determine a passing or failing grade, but by "exerting" yourself, you're given a third die in exchange for increasing one of your stressors. It's a systemic approach that's more gamified than anything in Disco Elysium, but one that suits your role as a trained operative, able to push your physical and mental limits to potentially gain an advantage.

However, even if you might occasionally boost your chances of success, Zero Parades is still very much a game built around failure. In fact, it embraces the act of failing and the resulting consequences in a way few games do. It's baked into its branching quest design, where you might choose to solve a quest one way, only to stumble down a completely different avenue after a skill check gone awry. This feeds into the shift to a slightly larger map, allowing ZA/UM to create a multitude of literal branching paths. I won't get into specifics, but many quests can be solved in numerous ways, whether you know about each path or not. It blends failure with your own choices and chosen skillset, adding a sense of improvisation to how you navigate each situation. 

It's these systemic enhancements that most notably separate Zero Parades from Disco Elysium. It struggles in other areas, often feeling like a pale imitation of the studio's predecessor--dangerous territory when the likelihood of reaching the same heights is marginal at best. But even with these hiccups, this is still an excellent RPG, with varied and mostly well-defined characters, a fully realized setting encompassed by insurmountable depth, and an endlessly captivating narrative that offers myriad ways to maneuver through its fantastic twists and turns. It might not capture the same rarified magic, but it's well worth venturing into Zero Parades: For Dead Spies' clandestine world.