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.

Once imagined as an open-world spin-off of the Forza Motorsport series, Forza Horizon has grown into the main event. Across the last five games, the globe-trotting, open-world racing series has taken players from the Australian Outback to the beaches of Mexico and beyond. But one location has been on the community's wishlist for years and years. In Forza Horizon 6, we finally head to Japan, and it's the pairing of this huge, diverse racing playground with best-in-class gameplay that makes Forza Horizon 6 so hard to put down.

In Forza Horizon 6, the Horizon Festival has descended on Tokyo and the surrounding region, taking its brightly colored decor and cheerfully car-obsessed people to a map that feels larger and more interesting than any before it. The last few entries of the series had been chasing the high of Forza Horizon 3's Australian map, but here, the team has finally raised the bar. Drifting through Shibuya Crossing, barreling down snowy roads in the Alps, and cutting stylishly through bamboo forests or past the country's iconic cherry blossoms are among the many thrills the open world offers.

Like its predecessors, Forza Horizon 6 reimagines Japan, taking artistic license to condense its many different settings into one drivable area, and it's done so thoughtfully that arriving in a new region often feels like a cinematic event. The enormous roadside snowbanks in the northern part of the map are intimidating, blanketing the streets in shadow, while speeding past the bullet train in the opening set-piece proves right away that developer Playground Games still understands what makes this series memorable. Simply put, it is the exploration of the game's map that is its best feature, even more than racing through it.

Much of the game's appeal comes from its incredible flexibility in difficulty settings and its driving model, bringing back a lengthy list of options that previous games have also enjoyed. Fine-tuning your experience is entirely up to you, and while the default settings masterfully walk the line between sim and arcade racing, you can lean more toward one or the other with a huge selection of customization options. This gives each player the flexibility to experience Forza Horizon 6 on their own terms.

If you want driving controls that demand precision and punish you with a more realistic damage model, you can have them. If you want more assists, like having the game gently aid you in braking, you can have that, too. There's even an auto-drive function, where your vehicle will head to the destination marked on your map, or even race for you, if you really want it to, leaving you to focus on other joys as you define them.

The series' popular rewind function also means that, whatever you decide, you'll have a proverbial eraser on-hand to quickly fix any mistakes. It's all as challenging as you want it to be, and Playground doesn't care what your preferences are--it'll accommodate. With its sunny disposition, Forza Horizon 6 makes it clear once more: This is your festival, and what fun looks like is entirely up to you.

Each race type, from neon-soaked street races and slippery dirt circuits, to elaborate cross-country excursions--my favorite racing event in the game--succeeds because of how fundamentally sound and flexible Forza Horizon 6's driving mechanics are. There are around 600 cars in the game at launch, and no two seem exactly the same. For those who want an experience you could call more sim than arcade, mastering one of your favorite vehicles becomes like learning the kit for your favorite hero in Overwatch or Marvel Rivals. That's especially true when you take them online, where other players can often challenge you even more than the CPU racers, and where user-generated content might have goals in mind that Playground Games hadn't implemented or even considered. There, players can create custom races with their own stipulations.

The use of seasons, first seen in Forza Horizon 4, returns and demands that players account for variables such as changing weather patterns and limited-time events meant to highlight those conditions. Races can unfold differently depending on which car you've chosen and the season at that time. If you're a real gearhead, you can spend a lot of time tweaking a car's performance to your liking, effectively making every vehicle a nearly blank slate for those who want to pop the hood, and the moving target of seasonal events means you can practically live in this game if you want to, tweaking cars endlessly to best take on each one.

As much as Forza Horizon is a racing game, it's also simply a driving game, and the difference is more interesting than that may sound at first. Much of what there is to do on the sprawling Forza Horizon 6 map isn't interested in speeding ahead of the pack to claim victory. Instead, you'll take tours with sightseers, help a photographer find the perfect cover photos, and perform food deliveries, among other events. I didn't particularly care for the delivery jobs, which play out sort of like Crazy Taxi, but less fun. Still, most of the time, I loved these non-racing events as they introduced each region on a different level, and literally at a different pace. In these moments, Horizon 6 is more about appreciating what is in front of you, rather than zooming past it.

My favorite activity, which I actually wish there was more of, is finding all nine treasure cars. With one in each region of the map and only a photo of its location to use as a clue, I needed to track down these hidden gems, and the light detective work of matching visual markers in the photo to real life was a lovely change of pace. This string of side missions returns unchanged from the last game, but is a big part of why I didn't see the game's opening credits until I was several hours deep. Horizon 6 leaves you to your devices for a while, and what that meant for me was an early obsession with these secret cars that overtook the more intended introduction.

As fantastic as the map is this time around, I think one aspect that works in its favor is just how many cars are made in Japan. More than Australia, the UK, or Mexico, the series' other most recent destinations, Japan is a hub of car manufacturers. Forza Horizon 6 seems to revel in this fact, going deep on Japanese auto and racing history, specifically, and spanning all the makes and models you'd expect to find in a series with such a sincere appreciation for car culture. In a way, despite this being the sixth game in a series that spans the globe and is developed in the UK, Forza Horizon 6 feels like it's the series coming home.

Perhaps the series' special sauce is how often it doles out rewards and how varied they can be. It feels like anything you do in this game earns you a virtual high five. If you compete in a race, you'll get a bunch of points for your campaign progress, which unlocks more events around the world, including what you could call the game's boss missions, the Showcase events. You don't even need to win races, though you'll get a bit more progress if you do. If you drive without crashing into anything for a bit, you'll get a clean driving bonus and earn some experience points. If you crash into lots of objects, that's fine too; you'll earn XP for wreckage. XP will grant you more skill points to spend on your car, so that you can, in turn, perform even greater feats and earn more XP in the game's cycle of rewards.

You'll frequently unlock wheelspins, too, which will randomly award you money, cars, or other rewards such as custom car horns. You'll routinely unlock new mission types, such as the series' popular Barn Finds, hidden fixer-upper vehicles stashed off the beaten path. It feels like you can't drive for 30 seconds without amassing some new reward, and it's rare that you won't have enough money to buy whatever it is that's attracted your attention. Every time I went into the menus, I had more stuff to claim. It was overwhelming, but not in a bad way. It's almost comical how much the game cheers you on and showers you with gifts in the form of customization options for your car and character, cash, and new events. It's like a less insidious social media scroll, sending you down a dopamine highway. It's a formula Forza Horizon nailed years ago, and though it hasn't changed, it remains difficult to put the game down because the next cool thing to see or do is forever just around the corner.

Continuing a tradition for the series, Forza Horizon 6 is a visual and technical showpiece for Xbox. Whether on my Series X or PC, the game looks stunning, with car exteriors and interiors meticulously crafted with a keen attention to detail. Transitioning from car to car also seems to be quicker than in past entries, with hardly a pause when I'd swap out one car for another. Jumping to a first-person perspective so I could listen to each car or truck from the driver's seat was a persistent point of interest for me, too, as they're each given their true-to-life engine roars, or--in the case of the electric cars--their faint hums.

Like before, you can buy properties around the map to use as fast travel points. In past games, they haven't done much else and didn't seem to serve much purpose, since you can also fast travel to any piece of road you've previously visited. But now these properties have been equipped with full customization tools akin to those in Fallout 4, where you can drop in assets and create your own spaces as a means of self-expression and let other players visit them. This does make them more interesting than before, but the idea of others visiting your space doesn't seem to mean much. Sure, they can check out which cars you've displayed, and maybe you've reshaped your garage into some absurd art project, but the fun seems to stop there. I have a lot more fun in this game on the road than in the garage, and without walkable spaces for avatars to explore others' creations in a hands-on way, I don't see that changing. I'd get as much enjoyment from seeing my friends' projects if I merely saw images of them in a text message.

All of this attention to detail amounts to a massive playground full of real-life landmarks, thrilling courses, and surprising side jobs, and it's certainly a great time, though occasionally--and more so early on--I couldn't shake the feeling that I knew the formula too well. I've played all the games in this series, so things like the boss-style Showcase events didn't do as much to dazzle me as they did a decade ago, or even as much as they did in the previous game. Sure, I've not raced a Gundam-like mech before, so the details have changed, but the way it unfolds was all too familiar. I know by now that, so long as I stay roughly on the pace the game expects me to be on, it's going to let me win in the end, and so these boss races feel like a lot of style without much substance.

The two-pronged campaign, one being the Festival proper and the other being the Discover Japan sightseeing tour, means you can focus on one or the other for a long time, or switch between them if you prefer. But eventually the game's admirable flexibility becomes more rigid, demanding you nearly perfect all of its races and PR stunts to unlock its final Showcase and see everything it has to offer. I understand wanting this final Showcase to feel well-earned, but for about 30 hours, Forza Horizon 6 reassured me that I was in total control of my experience, only to switch it up in the final stretch and demand I play by its rules.

In these ways, Forza Horizon 6 suffers, though I suspect that's only true if you've spent a lot of time in each of these games. If you're coming to it with fresh eyes, you'll likely find yourself completely enamored of everything it has to offer. If you have a lot of miles on your Forza career, you may find, like I did, that diminishing returns have begun to set in, and the inevitable Forza Horizon 7 ought to figure out how to shake up the formula in a big way.

Nevertheless, Forza Horizon 6 is a gorgeous open-world game that is as much about racing as it is about taking a virtual vacation. Moving the series to Japan is an overdue high note, giving players the best map to date, while the hundreds of cars once again look and feel incredible, no matter the type or terrain. The customization options and an obsession with showering you in positive stimuli make every mile feel worthwhile, but if you're very familiar with the series, you might agree that some of the formula has become predictable by now. There's still lots of tread on these tires, though, and it's enough to make Forza Horizon 6 another joy ride in the most adaptable and enjoyable racing series out there.

Once imagined as an open-world spin-off of the Forza Motorsport series, Forza Horizon has grown into the main event. Across the last five games, the globe-trotting, open-world racing series has taken players from the Australian Outback to the beaches of Mexico and beyond. But one location has been on the community's wishlist for years and years. In Forza Horizon 6, we finally head to Japan, and it's the pairing of this huge, diverse racing playground with best-in-class gameplay that makes Forza Horizon 6 so hard to put down.

In Forza Horizon 6, the Horizon Festival has descended on Tokyo and the surrounding region, taking its brightly colored decor and cheerfully car-obsessed people to a map that feels larger and more interesting than any before it. The last few entries of the series had been chasing the high of Forza Horizon 3's Australian map, but here, the team has finally raised the bar. Drifting through Shibuya Crossing, barreling down snowy roads in the Alps, and cutting stylishly through bamboo forests or past the country's iconic cherry blossoms are among the many thrills the open world offers.

Like its predecessors, Forza Horizon 6 reimagines Japan, taking artistic license to condense its many different settings into one drivable area, and it's done so thoughtfully that arriving in a new region often feels like a cinematic event. The enormous roadside snowbanks in the northern part of the map are intimidating, blanketing the streets in shadow, while speeding past the bullet train in the opening set-piece proves right away that developer Playground Games still understands what makes this series memorable. Simply put, it is the exploration of the game's map that is its best feature, even more than racing through it.

Much of the game's appeal comes from its incredible flexibility in difficulty settings and its driving model, bringing back a lengthy list of options that previous games have also enjoyed. Fine-tuning your experience is entirely up to you, and while the default settings masterfully walk the line between sim and arcade racing, you can lean more toward one or the other with a huge selection of customization options. This gives each player the flexibility to experience Forza Horizon 6 on their own terms.

If you want driving controls that demand precision and punish you with a more realistic damage model, you can have them. If you want more assists, like having the game gently aid you in braking, you can have that, too. There's even an auto-drive function, where your vehicle will head to the destination marked on your map, or even race for you, if you really want it to, leaving you to focus on other joys as you define them.

The series' popular rewind function also means that, whatever you decide, you'll have a proverbial eraser on-hand to quickly fix any mistakes. It's all as challenging as you want it to be, and Playground doesn't care what your preferences are--it'll accommodate. With its sunny disposition, Forza Horizon 6 makes it clear once more: This is your festival, and what fun looks like is entirely up to you.

Each race type, from neon-soaked street races and slippery dirt circuits, to elaborate cross-country excursions--my favorite racing event in the game--succeeds because of how fundamentally sound and flexible Forza Horizon 6's driving mechanics are. There are around 600 cars in the game at launch, and no two seem exactly the same. For those who want an experience you could call more sim than arcade, mastering one of your favorite vehicles becomes like learning the kit for your favorite hero in Overwatch or Marvel Rivals. That's especially true when you take them online, where other players can often challenge you even more than the CPU racers, and where user-generated content might have goals in mind that Playground Games hadn't implemented or even considered. There, players can create custom races with their own stipulations.

The use of seasons, first seen in Forza Horizon 4, returns and demands that players account for variables such as changing weather patterns and limited-time events meant to highlight those conditions. Races can unfold differently depending on which car you've chosen and the season at that time. If you're a real gearhead, you can spend a lot of time tweaking a car's performance to your liking, effectively making every vehicle a nearly blank slate for those who want to pop the hood, and the moving target of seasonal events means you can practically live in this game if you want to, tweaking cars endlessly to best take on each one.

As much as Forza Horizon is a racing game, it's also simply a driving game, and the difference is more interesting than that may sound at first. Much of what there is to do on the sprawling Forza Horizon 6 map isn't interested in speeding ahead of the pack to claim victory. Instead, you'll take tours with sightseers, help a photographer find the perfect cover photos, and perform food deliveries, among other events. I didn't particularly care for the delivery jobs, which play out sort of like Crazy Taxi, but less fun. Still, most of the time, I loved these non-racing events as they introduced each region on a different level, and literally at a different pace. In these moments, Horizon 6 is more about appreciating what is in front of you, rather than zooming past it.

My favorite activity, which I actually wish there was more of, is finding all nine treasure cars. With one in each region of the map and only a photo of its location to use as a clue, I needed to track down these hidden gems, and the light detective work of matching visual markers in the photo to real life was a lovely change of pace. This string of side missions returns unchanged from the last game, but is a big part of why I didn't see the game's opening credits until I was several hours deep. Horizon 6 leaves you to your devices for a while, and what that meant for me was an early obsession with these secret cars that overtook the more intended introduction.

As fantastic as the map is this time around, I think one aspect that works in its favor is just how many cars are made in Japan. More than Australia, the UK, or Mexico, the series' other most recent destinations, Japan is a hub of car manufacturers. Forza Horizon 6 seems to revel in this fact, going deep on Japanese auto and racing history, specifically, and spanning all the makes and models you'd expect to find in a series with such a sincere appreciation for car culture. In a way, despite this being the sixth game in a series that spans the globe and is developed in the UK, Forza Horizon 6 feels like it's the series coming home.

Perhaps the series' special sauce is how often it doles out rewards and how varied they can be. It feels like anything you do in this game earns you a virtual high five. If you compete in a race, you'll get a bunch of points for your campaign progress, which unlocks more events around the world, including what you could call the game's boss missions, the Showcase events. You don't even need to win races, though you'll get a bit more progress if you do. If you drive without crashing into anything for a bit, you'll get a clean driving bonus and earn some experience points. If you crash into lots of objects, that's fine too; you'll earn XP for wreckage. XP will grant you more skill points to spend on your car, so that you can, in turn, perform even greater feats and earn more XP in the game's cycle of rewards.

You'll frequently unlock wheelspins, too, which will randomly award you money, cars, or other rewards such as custom car horns. You'll routinely unlock new mission types, such as the series' popular Barn Finds, hidden fixer-upper vehicles stashed off the beaten path. It feels like you can't drive for 30 seconds without amassing some new reward, and it's rare that you won't have enough money to buy whatever it is that's attracted your attention. Every time I went into the menus, I had more stuff to claim. It was overwhelming, but not in a bad way. It's almost comical how much the game cheers you on and showers you with gifts in the form of customization options for your car and character, cash, and new events. It's like a less insidious social media scroll, sending you down a dopamine highway. It's a formula Forza Horizon nailed years ago, and though it hasn't changed, it remains difficult to put the game down because the next cool thing to see or do is forever just around the corner.

Continuing a tradition for the series, Forza Horizon 6 is a visual and technical showpiece for Xbox. Whether on my Series X or PC, the game looks stunning, with car exteriors and interiors meticulously crafted with a keen attention to detail. Transitioning from car to car also seems to be quicker than in past entries, with hardly a pause when I'd swap out one car for another. Jumping to a first-person perspective so I could listen to each car or truck from the driver's seat was a persistent point of interest for me, too, as they're each given their true-to-life engine roars, or--in the case of the electric cars--their faint hums.

Like before, you can buy properties around the map to use as fast travel points. In past games, they haven't done much else and didn't seem to serve much purpose, since you can also fast travel to any piece of road you've previously visited. But now these properties have been equipped with full customization tools akin to those in Fallout 4, where you can drop in assets and create your own spaces as a means of self-expression and let other players visit them. This does make them more interesting than before, but the idea of others visiting your space doesn't seem to mean much. Sure, they can check out which cars you've displayed, and maybe you've reshaped your garage into some absurd art project, but the fun seems to stop there. I have a lot more fun in this game on the road than in the garage, and without walkable spaces for avatars to explore others' creations in a hands-on way, I don't see that changing. I'd get as much enjoyment from seeing my friends' projects if I merely saw images of them in a text message.

All of this attention to detail amounts to a massive playground full of real-life landmarks, thrilling courses, and surprising side jobs, and it's certainly a great time, though occasionally--and more so early on--I couldn't shake the feeling that I knew the formula too well. I've played all the games in this series, so things like the boss-style Showcase events didn't do as much to dazzle me as they did a decade ago, or even as much as they did in the previous game. Sure, I've not raced a Gundam-like mech before, so the details have changed, but the way it unfolds was all too familiar. I know by now that, so long as I stay roughly on the pace the game expects me to be on, it's going to let me win in the end, and so these boss races feel like a lot of style without much substance.

The two-pronged campaign, one being the Festival proper and the other being the Discover Japan sightseeing tour, means you can focus on one or the other for a long time, or switch between them if you prefer. But eventually the game's admirable flexibility becomes more rigid, demanding you nearly perfect all of its races and PR stunts to unlock its final Showcase and see everything it has to offer. I understand wanting this final Showcase to feel well-earned, but for about 30 hours, Forza Horizon 6 reassured me that I was in total control of my experience, only to switch it up in the final stretch and demand I play by its rules.

In these ways, Forza Horizon 6 suffers, though I suspect that's only true if you've spent a lot of time in each of these games. If you're coming to it with fresh eyes, you'll likely find yourself completely enamored of everything it has to offer. If you have a lot of miles on your Forza career, you may find, like I did, that diminishing returns have begun to set in, and the inevitable Forza Horizon 7 ought to figure out how to shake up the formula in a big way.

Nevertheless, Forza Horizon 6 is a gorgeous open-world game that is as much about racing as it is about taking a virtual vacation. Moving the series to Japan is an overdue high note, giving players the best map to date, while the hundreds of cars once again look and feel incredible, no matter the type or terrain. The customization options and an obsession with showering you in positive stimuli make every mile feel worthwhile, but if you're very familiar with the series, you might agree that some of the formula has become predictable by now. There's still lots of tread on these tires, though, and it's enough to make Forza Horizon 6 another joy ride in the most adaptable and enjoyable racing series out there.

In the underappreciated 2008 comedy Role Models, Christopher Mintz-Plasse's character, the exceedingly nerdy Augie, is asked if he likes Coca-Cola. "I like the idea of it more than I actually like it," he answers.

I always found it a funny, confusing answer, but this fifth entry in The Dark Pictures horror anthology, with its grating performances, rote stealth sequences, and signs of an aging formula, makes me realize I can relate; I like the idea of this anthology more than I actually like playing its games.

In Directive 8020, developer Supermassive Games takes us to outer space for the first time in the series. Following stories focused on a cursed shipwreck, New England witchcraft, monster-infested caves, and a modern slasher inspired by H.H. Holmes, the latest one-off title is heavily inspired by two giants of its genre: Alien and John Carpenter's The Thing. A crew of heroes-to-be surveys a potential new home planet for humanity, Tau Ceti f, before a disaster leaves them stranded on it with an alien organism that can steal organic likenesses, such as human faces and bodies.

Directive 8020 is not just the fifth Dark Pictures entry, but speaks to a longer, broader trend that has seen the studio make movie-like games designed around branching gameplay and story choices, stressful quick-time events, and the threat of permadeath when you screw something up, be it a branching choice or a sequence of button-mashing. When the studio first started making these types of games with 2015's Until Dawn, it presented them like movies, with fixed camera angles meant to mimic the cinematic touch of a feature film. But Supermassive has been moving away from that approach in recent projects, to the point that now Directive 8020 plays like an over-the-shoulder third-person action game.

This change is for the worse, and I'm curious how we got here. I admit, sometimes it could be clunky controlling characters from the traditional fixed angles, but without those cinematic touches, these games are worsening. They're less immersive and less visually interesting, and what this more typical perspective highlights is just how shallow other parts of the formula can be.

More than any entry before it (including recent offshoots The Quarry and The Casting of Frank Stone), Directive 8020 offers gameplay mechanics of a traditional, third-person action game, where you'll solve environmental puzzles to navigate dangerous hallways patrolled by a shapeshifting monster. There are also a lot of stealth sequences that ask you to crouch-walk behind waist-high walls, moving from cover to air duct to stairwell whenever the monster's predictable pathing turns them away from you.

Neither of these elements feels all that exciting, and more often the puzzles of Directive 8020 outright frustrated me, as their solutions were either boringly obvious or surprisingly obtuse. That said, even good versions of these puzzles may have soured me on the experience a bit, as including any puzzles hurt the pacing that I tend to prefer in a game mimicking Hollywood movies like this series used to. But what's actually in the game is worse, and only served to grind me down even more.

On the surface, Supermassive's decision to draw from two hugely influential movies like Alien and The Thing is exciting. Alien has inspired countless other horror stories in the decades since it arrived, but there's always room for another if it finds an intriguing hook of its own. Meanwhile, The Thing suits Supermassive's multiplayer mechanics very well; in Directive 8020's multiplayer, players are assigned different characters to nurture over the course of the game, creating conflict. I might choose to save my character over yours when it's my turn to control the story, for example. It's a fun mechanic that's made even better by the presence of a monster that steals people's likenesses. Instead of simply choosing to save my character over someone else's, Directive 8020 made me question who to trust at all, even when it came to my own character. Am I actually prioritizing who I think I'm playing, or has the monster already killed and replaced them, and am I dooming the whole team with my self-serving choices?

Directive 8020 does a pretty good job of delivering on this tense wrinkle to The Dark Pictures' usual multiplayer set-up, and the game's central monster and storyline are intriguing enough that I was invested in seeing where it went. I especially liked one scene in which the characters are ordered by their commanding officer to pass through a bioscanner to prove their humanity. Recalling scenes from The Faculty and Among Us, it felt like a tropey but welcome--and even necessary--beat to hit. But this moment and others were often hamstrung by issues that have hindered other games in the series, and increasingly feels like they're getting in the way at this point.

While some performances in Directive 8020 are fine or even good, others are distractingly bad. One character in particular has so many confusing line deliveries that I wondered if it was voiced by generative AI. It was whiff after whiff. With so many story branches to account for and too many different angles that must be covered, I lost my sense of who these characters are, as different takes are sometimes jarringly spliced together.

In cutscenes, the camera often moves oddly slowly, in a way that shirks the past games' cinematic quality for something that feels either thoughtless, or is the result of some unseen technical requirement. I wasn't sure which was to blame. There are other signs of technical limitations too, like when two characters had only just set off to perform an important task together before they immediately stopped walking so they could talk, offering players the chance to shape their personalities (and thus their fates in the permadeath system). There was no reason for them not to walk and talk at the same time, Sorkin-style, so it felt like the game just couldn't make that happen for some vague under-the-hood reason that leaves it all feeling a bit uncanny.

Directive 8020 does offer one really cool innovation for these games, however. Its new Turning Points system lets you more easily explore unseen branches of the story--either right in the moment, letting you rewind as soon as a pivotal outcome has occurred, or later, by opening to the story's timeline and hopping into new-to-you sections.

Though I'm the type to prefer to see only my version of events, ignoring other branches as fiction that effectively doesn't exist, the Turning Points system serves a few practical purposes. For one, anyone collecting the game's many secrets can more easily jump around and get what they need without much hassle. Naturally, it also lets you fix what you might regret, if you're less committed to your one-true-path than I am. I did test it a few times for the purposes of this review, and to the team's credit, they did a good job of implementing it, letting you rewind quickly and with a simple button press akin to racing in Forza. That doesn't make Directive 8020 a better story, and really it only subjects you to more of the poor performances, but it does make it a more malleable story for completionists or the exceedingly curious.

After a delay took the game out of its more-fitting Halloween window, it's disappointing to feel like this one is still grinding down its gears to get to the finish line. It's not the first Dark Pictures entry to show these signs, but it gets more apparent with each new one that doesn't overhaul the game's foundational jank. It reminds me of the latter-era Telltale games, where the engine was really chugging and the games' charms, often the writing and player-driven decisions, were held back by an aging formula, technical woes, or both. I've wondered if some future installment of The Dark Pictures will unveil a dramatic technical overhaul, allowing Supermassive to get back to the more interesting, more cinematic version of itself.

The Dark Pictures, as a broad project, feels like it's at a crossroads with Directive 8020. With plans to do several more installments, I feel like the inherent flaws are giving way to diminishing returns. I've said before that I'd take a new one of these games every year, forever, and I still feel that way, but I think I've hit my limit on forgiving some of the series' increasingly obvious hang-ups. The conscious rejection of Supermassive's past cinematic flair confuses me, while the shoddy voice work creates a barrier between the game's intent and its execution.

If Supermassive needs to take some extra time off to bring this series into modernity, I'd happily sit out a while, in the hopes that The Dark Pictures can eventually get the studio back to that high bar set by Until Dawn over a decade ago.

In the underappreciated 2008 comedy Role Models, Christopher Mintz-Plasse's character, the exceedingly nerdy Augie, is asked if he likes Coca-Cola. "I like the idea of it more than I actually like it," he answers.

I always found it a funny, confusing answer, but this fifth entry in The Dark Pictures horror anthology, with its grating performances, rote stealth sequences, and signs of an aging formula, makes me realize I can relate; I like the idea of this anthology more than I actually like playing its games.

In Directive 8020, developer Supermassive Games takes us to outer space for the first time in the series. Following stories focused on a cursed shipwreck, New England witchcraft, monster-infested caves, and a modern slasher inspired by H.H. Holmes, the latest one-off title is heavily inspired by two giants of its genre: Alien and John Carpenter's The Thing. A crew of heroes-to-be surveys a potential new home planet for humanity, Tau Ceti f, before a disaster leaves them stranded on it with an alien organism that can steal organic likenesses, such as human faces and bodies.

Directive 8020 is not just the fifth Dark Pictures entry, but speaks to a longer, broader trend that has seen the studio make movie-like games designed around branching gameplay and story choices, stressful quick-time events, and the threat of permadeath when you screw something up, be it a branching choice or a sequence of button-mashing. When the studio first started making these types of games with 2015's Until Dawn, it presented them like movies, with fixed camera angles meant to mimic the cinematic touch of a feature film. But Supermassive has been moving away from that approach in recent projects, to the point that now Directive 8020 plays like an over-the-shoulder third-person action game.

This change is for the worse, and I'm curious how we got here. I admit, sometimes it could be clunky controlling characters from the traditional fixed angles, but without those cinematic touches, these games are worsening. They're less immersive and less visually interesting, and what this more typical perspective highlights is just how shallow other parts of the formula can be.

More than any entry before it (including recent offshoots The Quarry and The Casting of Frank Stone), Directive 8020 offers gameplay mechanics of a traditional, third-person action game, where you'll solve environmental puzzles to navigate dangerous hallways patrolled by a shapeshifting monster. There are also a lot of stealth sequences that ask you to crouch-walk behind waist-high walls, moving from cover to air duct to stairwell whenever the monster's predictable pathing turns them away from you.

Neither of these elements feels all that exciting, and more often the puzzles of Directive 8020 outright frustrated me, as their solutions were either boringly obvious or surprisingly obtuse. That said, even good versions of these puzzles may have soured me on the experience a bit, as including any puzzles hurt the pacing that I tend to prefer in a game mimicking Hollywood movies like this series used to. But what's actually in the game is worse, and only served to grind me down even more.

On the surface, Supermassive's decision to draw from two hugely influential movies like Alien and The Thing is exciting. Alien has inspired countless other horror stories in the decades since it arrived, but there's always room for another if it finds an intriguing hook of its own. Meanwhile, The Thing suits Supermassive's multiplayer mechanics very well; in Directive 8020's multiplayer, players are assigned different characters to nurture over the course of the game, creating conflict. I might choose to save my character over yours when it's my turn to control the story, for example. It's a fun mechanic that's made even better by the presence of a monster that steals people's likenesses. Instead of simply choosing to save my character over someone else's, Directive 8020 made me question who to trust at all, even when it came to my own character. Am I actually prioritizing who I think I'm playing, or has the monster already killed and replaced them, and am I dooming the whole team with my self-serving choices?

Directive 8020 does a pretty good job of delivering on this tense wrinkle to The Dark Pictures' usual multiplayer set-up, and the game's central monster and storyline are intriguing enough that I was invested in seeing where it went. I especially liked one scene in which the characters are ordered by their commanding officer to pass through a bioscanner to prove their humanity. Recalling scenes from The Faculty and Among Us, it felt like a tropey but welcome--and even necessary--beat to hit. But this moment and others were often hamstrung by issues that have hindered other games in the series, and increasingly feels like they're getting in the way at this point.

While some performances in Directive 8020 are fine or even good, others are distractingly bad. One character in particular has so many confusing line deliveries that I wondered if it was voiced by generative AI. It was whiff after whiff. With so many story branches to account for and too many different angles that must be covered, I lost my sense of who these characters are, as different takes are sometimes jarringly spliced together.

In cutscenes, the camera often moves oddly slowly, in a way that shirks the past games' cinematic quality for something that feels either thoughtless, or is the result of some unseen technical requirement. I wasn't sure which was to blame. There are other signs of technical limitations too, like when two characters had only just set off to perform an important task together before they immediately stopped walking so they could talk, offering players the chance to shape their personalities (and thus their fates in the permadeath system). There was no reason for them not to walk and talk at the same time, Sorkin-style, so it felt like the game just couldn't make that happen for some vague under-the-hood reason that leaves it all feeling a bit uncanny.

Directive 8020 does offer one really cool innovation for these games, however. Its new Turning Points system lets you more easily explore unseen branches of the story--either right in the moment, letting you rewind as soon as a pivotal outcome has occurred, or later, by opening to the story's timeline and hopping into new-to-you sections.

Though I'm the type to prefer to see only my version of events, ignoring other branches as fiction that effectively doesn't exist, the Turning Points system serves a few practical purposes. For one, anyone collecting the game's many secrets can more easily jump around and get what they need without much hassle. Naturally, it also lets you fix what you might regret, if you're less committed to your one-true-path than I am. I did test it a few times for the purposes of this review, and to the team's credit, they did a good job of implementing it, letting you rewind quickly and with a simple button press akin to racing in Forza. That doesn't make Directive 8020 a better story, and really it only subjects you to more of the poor performances, but it does make it a more malleable story for completionists or the exceedingly curious.

After a delay took the game out of its more-fitting Halloween window, it's disappointing to feel like this one is still grinding down its gears to get to the finish line. It's not the first Dark Pictures entry to show these signs, but it gets more apparent with each new one that doesn't overhaul the game's foundational jank. It reminds me of the latter-era Telltale games, where the engine was really chugging and the games' charms, often the writing and player-driven decisions, were held back by an aging formula, technical woes, or both. I've wondered if some future installment of The Dark Pictures will unveil a dramatic technical overhaul, allowing Supermassive to get back to the more interesting, more cinematic version of itself.

The Dark Pictures, as a broad project, feels like it's at a crossroads with Directive 8020. With plans to do several more installments, I feel like the inherent flaws are giving way to diminishing returns. I've said before that I'd take a new one of these games every year, forever, and I still feel that way, but I think I've hit my limit on forgiving some of the series' increasingly obvious hang-ups. The conscious rejection of Supermassive's past cinematic flair confuses me, while the shoddy voice work creates a barrier between the game's intent and its execution.

If Supermassive needs to take some extra time off to bring this series into modernity, I'd happily sit out a while, in the hopes that The Dark Pictures can eventually get the studio back to that high bar set by Until Dawn over a decade ago.

It was only about a year ago when I learned that not everyone gets goosebumps from listening to music. There's a French word for it--frisson--which describes the feeling some get when music or other powerful stimuli trigger a physiological response. This rush is felt in only about 50% of people in the world, it turns out. I used to think it was all of us. That's probably a big part of why music means so much to me, because I'm in the lucky camp that gets to enjoy this positively overwhelming response when the right song hits at just the right time. Mixtape is an adventure game that leans into this magical sensation, pairing its heartfelt, often hilarious moments with a sweeping soundtrack to create a coming-of-age story I'll never forget.

Mixtape is the second effort from Beethoven & Dinosaur, a small Australian team that includes some former rockstars who pivoted to game dev and brought their love for music with them. In it, you play the music-obsessed Stacey Rockford, whose headphones may as well be an organic appendage. Inspired by movies like Superbad and the works of John Hughes, the driving force of the '90s-set story is Stacey's attempt to make it to a killer beach party with her best pals Slater and Cassandra in tow.

The morning after this party, Stacey is off to chase her dream as a music supervisor--basically a professional mixtape maker for Hollywood projects--so this is her and her friends' last hurrah together, whether they're ready for life to drag them into adulthood and see them go their separate ways or not. While relatively small, these stakes are deeply relatable, revealing a lot of big, honest emotions across the four-hour runtime.

The starring trio is incredibly well-written and all three foster empathy and investment from the very start of the game, as they coast down the hills of their town on skateboards, calling out cars to dodge and doing flip tricks over trash cans. As Stacey breaks the fourth wall, announcing to you, the player, the song she picked for the moment, you understand she's no phony. She knows her stuff when it comes to music, but her decision to leave town for New York has driven a wedge in the friend group, who once made plans for a lengthy west coast road trip that's now up in the air.

Mixtape does so much so well, but one of the things I love most about it is its emotional honesty. Sure, as an adult with the benefit of hindsight, a friend moving away isn't the end of the world. But when you're a kid, it's your whole world blowing up. For Stacey, Slater, and Cassandra, they're on the verge of so much changing, and their comfortable routines are being thrown out, exchanged for the ambiguous world of growing up. Though the trio often joke around and give off a level of youthful sarcasm, they're also capable of letting down their emotional barriers and spilling how they feel.

It endears me to each of them and their journeys, whether it be Stacey's bold career-planning maneuvers, Cassandra's desperate desire to wiggle out from beneath her cop-dad's iron fist, or Slater's somewhat untapped potential as a musician himself. How they stand up for each other, challenge each other, and even just how they, for lack of a better phrase, dick around, feels authentic, and it mesmerized me in each scene. Even then, sometimes it's the things they don't speak that affected me the most. Through it all, excellent performances bring these characters and others to vibrant life.

The structure of those scenes is another tremendous highlight. As the night unfolds and the friends remain hellbent on hunting down some alcohol and/or weed for the party, you'll spend hangout time in each of their bedrooms. There, flashbacks unfold to the tune of Stacey's carefully curated mixtape, designed with the explicit intent to become the soundtrack to their grand finale in town together.

Though the game often carries a punky, middle-finger of a spirit, the soundtrack is eclectic, from favorites like Devo and Siouxsie and the Banshees to lesser-known (to me anyway) standouts like Harpers Bizarre and Stan Bush. You won't be shunned for not knowing them all, as Stacey acts as the studio's proxy, providing a bit of musical history with each entry when she breaks the fourth wall a la Ferris Bueller. I loved hearing these new-to-me tracks nearly as much as I loved revisiting some all-time favorites, like The Cure.

Each of these flashback moments is given relatively light gameplay mechanics, often bespoke for just a singular sequence and then quickly disposed of. Like the studio's previous game, The Artful Escape, Mixtape isn't meant to challenge most players on the sticks. Though occasional fail states exist, like if you crash into a car on your skateboard, there's no penalty for messing up. It just rewinds instantly and resumes. This is a game that uses the language of games to tell its story, not test you. And thanks to the story perfectly marrying a killer soundtrack and clever mechanics together, it hits just right.

In one moment, you may be toilet-papering the principal's house, then in another, you'll be stumbling through a video store as the employee calls out to you beyond the fog of your drunken stupor. And this must be the first game to ever let you control a pair of French-kissing tongues, swapping spit and twisting in a fervor of adolescent hormones.

In one of my favorite sequences, the kids fly high above the town, soaring out of the forest, over the nearby lake, and into town, deriding their high school as they coast over the pool of yellow buses. It's all set to the tune of Atmosphere by Joy Division--by my estimation, one of the greatest bands there ever was. Of course, the kids didn't really learn to fly that night, but it sure as hell felt that way to them. How lucky we must be to have had moments in our lives where we felt the same. Mixtape is telling you its story, but it trusts you'll recall moments of your own that resonate.

As great as the game feels and sounds, it also looks exquisite. Built in Unreal, it takes advantage of the engine's impeccable lighting. Coated in a hyper-stylized cartoonishness, it still manages to give its characters the emotiveness their excellent performances deserve. This puts the game on full display, averting the all-too-common video game problem of a great story and performances let down somewhat by wooden character models.

Every frame is a rad painting, and like the gameplay controls, the perspective shifts often, giving each scene what it needs. In one scene, for example, in which the kids flee a party crashed by the cops, you'll seamlessly transition from a traditional third-person perspective to the view from the news helicopter above, watching the runaways take their out-of-control shopping cart onto the interstate.

Broadly speaking, Mixtape is an adventure game, if only because that's often the bucket one might drop a game like this into--a game where the rules of establishing and then iterating on gameplay don't apply. Not one of these moments frustrates or overstays its welcome, with the minor exception being the time spent in the kids' bedrooms, when you're allowed to peruse for a bit and trigger missable dialogue by interacting with objects in each space.

Collectively, it's less like you're playing a game with a great soundtrack and more like someone has turned a soundtrack into an interactive experiment. It had to be a game, and that's partly what makes it so much more affecting than if this were a movie, but still, the music leads. Mixtape is whatever it needs to be in each moment, and the studio makes a strong case for why it must be that way.

By tying each memory or moment to a particular song, Mixtape delivers on its main idea: Music isn't something we do; it's something we are. When we work out, we put on the playlist that gets us ready to run through a brick wall. On our wedding day, we play a song that reminds us of when we first met or whose lyrics speak to our journey. When we scream the words to our favorite songs in a venue of 300 sweaty strangers, it bonds us to one another in a way nothing else does or even could do. Music can behave like a time machine, carrying you to a place and time as though you're there again. Stacey gets this intimately, as does Beethoven & Dinosaur, quite obviously.

Music can make us feel incredibly powerful or cathartically vulnerable. And when the right song hits at the right moment, it may just send a happy shiver down your spine, which is how I spent much of my time with Mixtape, and why I'll never forget it.

It was only about a year ago when I learned that not everyone gets goosebumps from listening to music. There's a French word for it--frisson--which describes the feeling some get when music or other powerful stimuli trigger a physiological response. This rush is felt in only about 50% of people in the world, it turns out. I used to think it was all of us. That's probably a big part of why music means so much to me, because I'm in the lucky camp that gets to enjoy this positively overwhelming response when the right song hits at just the right time. Mixtape is an adventure game that leans into this magical sensation, pairing its heartfelt, often hilarious moments with a sweeping soundtrack to create a coming-of-age story I'll never forget.

Mixtape is the second effort from Beethoven & Dinosaur, a small Australian team that includes some former rockstars who pivoted to game dev and brought their love for music with them. In it, you play the music-obsessed Stacey Rockford, whose headphones may as well be an organic appendage. Inspired by movies like Superbad and the works of John Hughes, the driving force of the '90s-set story is Stacey's attempt to make it to a killer beach party with her best pals Slater and Cassandra in tow.

The morning after this party, Stacey is off to chase her dream as a music supervisor--basically a professional mixtape maker for Hollywood projects--so this is her and her friends' last hurrah together, whether they're ready for life to drag them into adulthood and see them go their separate ways or not. While relatively small, these stakes are deeply relatable, revealing a lot of big, honest emotions across the four-hour runtime.

The starring trio is incredibly well-written and all three foster empathy and investment from the very start of the game, as they coast down the hills of their town on skateboards, calling out cars to dodge and doing flip tricks over trash cans. As Stacey breaks the fourth wall, announcing to you, the player, the song she picked for the moment, you understand she's no phony. She knows her stuff when it comes to music, but her decision to leave town for New York has driven a wedge in the friend group, who once made plans for a lengthy west coast road trip that's now up in the air.

Mixtape does so much so well, but one of the things I love most about it is its emotional honesty. Sure, as an adult with the benefit of hindsight, a friend moving away isn't the end of the world. But when you're a kid, it's your whole world blowing up. For Stacey, Slater, and Cassandra, they're on the verge of so much changing, and their comfortable routines are being thrown out, exchanged for the ambiguous world of growing up. Though the trio often joke around and give off a level of youthful sarcasm, they're also capable of letting down their emotional barriers and spilling how they feel.

It endears me to each of them and their journeys, whether it be Stacey's bold career-planning maneuvers, Cassandra's desperate desire to wiggle out from beneath her cop-dad's iron fist, or Slater's somewhat untapped potential as a musician himself. How they stand up for each other, challenge each other, and even just how they, for lack of a better phrase, dick around, feels authentic, and it mesmerized me in each scene. Even then, sometimes it's the things they don't speak that affected me the most. Through it all, excellent performances bring these characters and others to vibrant life.

The structure of those scenes is another tremendous highlight. As the night unfolds and the friends remain hellbent on hunting down some alcohol and/or weed for the party, you'll spend hangout time in each of their bedrooms. There, flashbacks unfold to the tune of Stacey's carefully curated mixtape, designed with the explicit intent to become the soundtrack to their grand finale in town together.

Though the game often carries a punky, middle-finger of a spirit, the soundtrack is eclectic, from favorites like Devo and Siouxsie and the Banshees to lesser-known (to me anyway) standouts like Harpers Bizarre and Stan Bush. You won't be shunned for not knowing them all, as Stacey acts as the studio's proxy, providing a bit of musical history with each entry when she breaks the fourth wall a la Ferris Bueller. I loved hearing these new-to-me tracks nearly as much as I loved revisiting some all-time favorites, like The Cure.

Each of these flashback moments is given relatively light gameplay mechanics, often bespoke for just a singular sequence and then quickly disposed of. Like the studio's previous game, The Artful Escape, Mixtape isn't meant to challenge most players on the sticks. Though occasional fail states exist, like if you crash into a car on your skateboard, there's no penalty for messing up. It just rewinds instantly and resumes. This is a game that uses the language of games to tell its story, not test you. And thanks to the story perfectly marrying a killer soundtrack and clever mechanics together, it hits just right.

In one moment, you may be toilet-papering the principal's house, then in another, you'll be stumbling through a video store as the employee calls out to you beyond the fog of your drunken stupor. And this must be the first game to ever let you control a pair of French-kissing tongues, swapping spit and twisting in a fervor of adolescent hormones.

In one of my favorite sequences, the kids fly high above the town, soaring out of the forest, over the nearby lake, and into town, deriding their high school as they coast over the pool of yellow buses. It's all set to the tune of Atmosphere by Joy Division--by my estimation, one of the greatest bands there ever was. Of course, the kids didn't really learn to fly that night, but it sure as hell felt that way to them. How lucky we must be to have had moments in our lives where we felt the same. Mixtape is telling you its story, but it trusts you'll recall moments of your own that resonate.

As great as the game feels and sounds, it also looks exquisite. Built in Unreal, it takes advantage of the engine's impeccable lighting. Coated in a hyper-stylized cartoonishness, it still manages to give its characters the emotiveness their excellent performances deserve. This puts the game on full display, averting the all-too-common video game problem of a great story and performances let down somewhat by wooden character models.

Every frame is a rad painting, and like the gameplay controls, the perspective shifts often, giving each scene what it needs. In one scene, for example, in which the kids flee a party crashed by the cops, you'll seamlessly transition from a traditional third-person perspective to the view from the news helicopter above, watching the runaways take their out-of-control shopping cart onto the interstate.

Broadly speaking, Mixtape is an adventure game, if only because that's often the bucket one might drop a game like this into--a game where the rules of establishing and then iterating on gameplay don't apply. Not one of these moments frustrates or overstays its welcome, with the minor exception being the time spent in the kids' bedrooms, when you're allowed to peruse for a bit and trigger missable dialogue by interacting with objects in each space.

Collectively, it's less like you're playing a game with a great soundtrack and more like someone has turned a soundtrack into an interactive experiment. It had to be a game, and that's partly what makes it so much more affecting than if this were a movie, but still, the music leads. Mixtape is whatever it needs to be in each moment, and the studio makes a strong case for why it must be that way.

By tying each memory or moment to a particular song, Mixtape delivers on its main idea: Music isn't something we do; it's something we are. When we work out, we put on the playlist that gets us ready to run through a brick wall. On our wedding day, we play a song that reminds us of when we first met or whose lyrics speak to our journey. When we scream the words to our favorite songs in a venue of 300 sweaty strangers, it bonds us to one another in a way nothing else does or even could do. Music can behave like a time machine, carrying you to a place and time as though you're there again. Stacey gets this intimately, as does Beethoven & Dinosaur, quite obviously.

Music can make us feel incredibly powerful or cathartically vulnerable. And when the right song hits at the right moment, it may just send a happy shiver down your spine, which is how I spent much of my time with Mixtape, and why I'll never forget it.