It’s no surprise that HoYoVerse titles such as Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, and Zenless Zone Zero dominate the gacha market given their absurdly high quality and seemingly infinite budgets. Yet, is there room on the world stage for an unproven competitor to swing at the king and make some waves? Wuthering Waves is an open-world action RPG emphasizing stylish character action combat, much like its predecessor, Punishing: Gray Raven. At first glance, the game appears similar to the immensely popular open-world action RPG Genshin Impact. However, Wuthering Waves adopts a more modern sci-fi approach to its world-building and design while focusing on incorporating Chinese aesthetics and mythology into every nook and cranny. In terms of world design, Wuthering Waves has more in common with the Xenoblade games than Genshin Impact, thanks to its focus on a logistically plausible world following an apocalyptic event.

Players take on the role of an ever-so-important fish-out-of-water named Rover. While the character’s name (or title, more accurately) is meant to evoke similar thoughts as a Wanderer, Traveler, or even Trailblazer, it comes off as feeling more akin to the stereotypical dog name. The title feels more apt by the minute given how the citizens of the world constantly need help fetching items, guarding their communities, and guiding those in need. After an introductory cutscene with a mysterious woman (who totally isn’t Lucia from Punishing: Gray Raven), Rover is dropped into the world of Solaris-3—the third planet from the sun that is suspiciously similar to Earth. After a messy and confusing introduction sequence, it’s soon revealed that Rover is most like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s Hero of Time—someone called upon to help thwart an evil force with no memory of their past lives.

Wuthering Waves stumbles right out the gate with its introductory storyline as the developers scrambled to rewrite, adjust, and shuffle story beats in the game’s first three chapters after receiving a substantial amount of feedback on their closed beta tests. The feedback essentially boiled down to players wanting to feel special, being frustrated that the citizens of the world were hostile and suspicious of them, and finding the concept of gradual world-building to be less than exciting. A hasty rewrite followed to make NPCs practically worship the player, as well as reducing world events to Proper Nouns and technobabble. While this misstep makes the initial portion of the game slightly awkward, Chapter Four smooths out considerably as the narrative dives into its original version rife with drama, political intrigue, and darling characters.

Although the story flounders initially, it has an almost constant upward trajectory afterward. Mercifully, Wuthering Waves’ combat starts on a high note and continually climbs skyward. When looking at Punishing: Gray Raven, it’s quite obvious that Kuro Games are unapologetically massive fans of NieR: Automata and Devil May Cry. The stylish character action, soft genre shifts, and over-the-top set piece bosses show the developer proudly wearing their influences on their sleeve. To add to that, every single unit in Wuthering Waves has a wildly unique kit with a dizzying amount of depth. The move lists, gauges, and conditional systems would make a fighting game fan grin wide.

Every unit has its own moveset and playstyle, yet the Forte gauge is what makes each character feel that much more unique. Characters build Forte in their normal attack chains that they can then use for a variety of stronger moves. Some Forte gauges drastically change the playstyle, while others enhance the core abilities while adding simultaneous new ones. The icy Sanhua does a small amount of damage with her normal attacks, yet upon casting her ice skills or finishing her chain, she can create large fields of ice that detonate to deal massive damage. Yangyang, on the other hand, adds wind blades to her attacks while strengthening her aerial moves. The player character, Rover, can essentially swap elements and enter a Devil May Cry “Devil Trigger”-esque mode.

It’s easy to find a unit to fit any particular playstyle due to all the unique character kits. Some excel at aerial combat, while others focus on defensive counters. Some rain down hellfire at range while others ensure the party remains alive. My favorite—the bloody sword-wielding Danjin—consumes her own HP with each attack, pushing her closer and closer to the brink of death as the battle unfolds. The heightened risk in combat leads to some very exciting and incredibly stylish close calls and near misses, all for the sake of setting up allies to unleash powerful attacks with a bevy of buffs. With Wuthering Waves focusing on a three-character party, team synergy is crucial. Characters tagging out unleash an outro effect while incoming characters attack with unique intro attacks. Players should know their kits in and out while making choices between damage and survivability.

Another piece that sets Wuthering Waves apart from Genshin Impact is the Echo system. Echoes are the remnants of defeated foes. Once collected, players can equip them to characters in place of armor, accessories, and charms. Each Echo has a cost to prevent filling all five slots with boss Echoes, but only the topmost slot allows players to either summon or transform into said Echo for a brief period. Wuthering Waves‘ Echo system encourages both experimentation and exploration, alongside making the bestiary feel more lively and familiar. While the monster-catching aspect is fun and intriguing, I wish there were more uses for Echoes beyond the equipment and combat utility, such as battling other players or sending them out on missions to get materials. Much like Genshin Impact, farming and rolling for stats feels akin to smashing one’s face into a slot machine and hoping for more than a headache. Thankfully, materials to re-roll main stats have since arrived.

The cast of characters is vast and impressive, yet it’s clear the premium characters (five-star characters on timed/limited banners) get a lot more love than their standard four-star and launch five-star counterparts—some of which feel underpowered or far too niche. One of these forgettable characters is Lingyang, a young performer in a lion dancing troupe who has an awkward playstyle that feels experimental. Baizhi, a free standard healer, also has a few awkward abilities in her kit that make her offputting to use in combination with her lackluster healing. Verina, on the other hand, is a powerful healer and a staple in most teams, though this is due more to the lack of strong support units in Wuthering Waves than anything. Hopefully, the new four-star characters will get as much love as Punishing: Gray Raven‘s four-star equivalents.

Kuro Games is blessed with an incredibly talented art team. While the character designs and visual effects are top-notch, the game’s art direction is nothing short of stellar. The vistas found in the world of Solaris-3 are nigh-immaculate visual spectacles, ranging from ruined cities with floating remnants of skyscrapers above a field of burning flowers to jaw-dropping skyboxes with the most haunting moons imaginable. I found myself stopping time and time again to admire the world around me while taking dozens of pictures. The city of Jinzhou and its surrounding areas comprise the 1.0 region, and it’s easy to see that an immense amount of time and care went into polishing the world to be as awe-inspiring as possible.

Of course, the areas in the game’s patches expand the horizon and elevate the environmental beauty. Mt. Firmament is a gorgeous take on a winding mountain, while The Black Shores archipelago offers some of the most stunning skies above paired with intricately designed and displaced elements beneath. Naturally, with a full number version update to 2.0 comes a new region to explore: Rinascita. While slightly smaller than Jinzhou in width, Rinascita offers more verticality with its striking world design. Much like the launch region, Rinascita is awash with beautiful landscapes and stunning set pieces. Every new location feels like it has its Breath of the Wild moment, mixed with Elden Ring‘s design philosophy as far as populating the world with secrets.

Given Wuthering Waves is all about the concepts of vibration and waves (hence the title), one would hope the game sounds as great as it looks. At first, I was concerned with the absence of GhostFinal and Holoweak because their contributions to Punishing: Gray Raven resulted in some of the most fantastic and memorable soundtracks to date (such as Narwhal and Hikari). The soundtrack in Wuthering Waves is solid and exciting, but it initially lacks tracks that stir the heart. Of course, as the story progresses, the OST becomes elevated as dramatic moments and setpiece boss battles take the stage. Though there are fewer standout tracks in the beginning, the soundtrack soon finds its footing and develops an energetic identity that carries throughout the game.

While I’ve been largely positive on Wuthering Waves, the game is not without flaws. To start, Kuro Games is frankly notorious for rocky launches, embarrassing typos, and numerous minor bugs that mar the average player’s experience. Although it’s possible to forget or fix typos, bugs, and messy launches, some long-standing issues remain even a year after release. Most notably, the English voice cast is a collection of great European voice talents forced to do awful American accents. While this improves in later patches with more freedom in the voice direction and acting, early scenes remain blighted by poorly directed performances easily confused with bad acting.

Many of these issues are the product of intense crunch and hasty rewrites, but Kuro Games has gone back and re-recorded voice lines for Rover, so there is precedent for improvement. Now, if only they’d do the same for Yangyang—the game’s primary lore dump and story commentary for most of 1.0. Additionally, while the controls on PC and PS5 are solid, save the awkwardly mapped utility or two, the mobile touch screen controls are messy at best. Mercifully, native controller support mitigates this issue.

Lastly, regardless of how gorgeous the game looks, how fun and exciting the combat is, and how great the writing becomes, Wuthering Waves is a gacha game. While much can be said on the predatory nature of gacha games, I want to touch upon the ephemeral nature of live-service games. There’s a high chance of this game reaching end-of-service within the next decade, preventing access beyond that time. The only reminders of its existence will be the mass grave of game-specific wikis, obsolete theory-crafting videos, and the astounding number of fanart pieces that serve the same role as paintings of long-dead aristocrats. Therefore, it requires caution and care before investing time and money into Wuthering Waves. We’ve seen it time and time again: a hot new gacha comes out, tops the charts, and then sinks into irrelevance and shuts down after a year. That said, Punishing: Gray Raven is still going strong almost six years later, so there is precedent for long-term support from Kuro Games.

Wuthering Waves is a fantastic game and one of the best current gachas from a gameplay standpoint. While the shift to a more HoYoVerse-style gacha system is disappointing (pity of 80 pulls versus PGR’s pity of 60, 50/50 coin flips on banner characters with a 100% guarantee after failure versus PGR’s 100% guarantee with no coin flips), Kuro Games remains relatively generous with free currencies (often as an apology for some kind of screw up), log-in campaigns, and events. Overall, the game is gorgeous, a treat to listen to, and a blast to play. Lovable and endearing characters and an intricately detailed world make Wuthering Waves one of the most high-quality games in its specific market.

Solo developers hold a special place in my heart. Seeing one person do the arduous work of multiple disciplines all the way to release is nothing short of inspirational. Home runs like Papers Please are also easy enough to praise from the consumer’s perspective, with the developer’s dedication shining through in the final product’s polish. While Tunguska: The Visitation (Tunguska) falls short of the remarkable heights of the indie hallmarks, it remains a notable effort by Rotorist Workshop.

Set in an alternate history where the Krasnoyarsk Krai region of Siberia became a hotbed for “treasure” hunters in the decades following the Tunguska Event, you take the role of an independent journalist sent to interview these hunters and investigate rumors of a miraculous cure-all. Despite the initially straightforward mission parameters, you quickly find yourself entangled in the area’s politics as you complete favors for locals while traveling between smaller, instanced segments of the Tunguska Exclusion Zone.

Although many NPCs remain ready for conversation, interactions outside of dedicated quest givers are barren. There is a veneer of a community in every hub area, but trying to talk to anyone outside of the main NPCs results in little more than repeated filler dialogue. Sitting around campfires sometimes yields a piece of gossip you can report to your sleazy boss in Manhattan for a chunk of change, but does little to fill out the narrative gaps in worldbuilding.

Quest completion rewards you with narrative tidbits that shed some light on the history of the Exclusion Zone and stories you can also report for better cash rewards. Quest givers occasionally throw in special items and inventory upgrades for your work, but notable rewards are few and far between. Thankfully, you usually stumble upon some fantastic loot while completing these favors (especially if you take the scenic route), making for some great emergent gameplay moments in otherwise run-of-the-mill fetch or kill quests.

Unfortunately, the moment-to-moment gunplay you engage in during quests leaves something to be desired. Despite the satisfying feedback for landing shots, the default controls make gunfights an almost unplayable experience. I highly recommend switching over to auto-aim in the settings, as you otherwise waste even more ammo than your character naturally does with their shaky aim. Even with these changes, gunplay remains finicky, with shots often missing stationary targets.

This starkly contrasts with the human AI, which often has far superior accuracy or gangs up on you in the blink of an eye, shredding your health bar in seconds with focused fire. However, their distinct inability to flank or execute complex combat behavior makes it surprisingly easy to funnel them to their deaths. This gives Tunguska a nostalgic, early 2000s feel, where gaming the AI in this manner was fairly common, enemy firepower nonetheless feels over-tuned to compensate for this lack of complexity.

Adding to this frustration are some diabolical map instances that felt unbeatable. Ghouls—humans who have turned into blue, zombie-like monsters from prolonged exposure to the supernatural “Vistation” event— spawn freely in most hostile map instances, trying to overwhelm you with numbers alone to compensate for their limited attack range. This balance falters towards the endgame with the appearance of elite ghoul variants. Getting some key items requires engaging with these forces, but to say it’s a slog would be an understatement. Despite my best efforts to kite these elite variants into a zombie train, I frequently fell victim to their high attack range and absurd tankiness, despite my high-end gear.

Skills and weapon attachments somewhat address the gunplay issues, but many of the skills should have been baked into the baseline gameplay. Consisting mostly of gun handling upgrades for different weapon classes, large overlaps in the early skills (lower recoil, better stability, etc.) make these upgrades feel like fluff more than meaningful investments of your hard-earned points. Looking at this in a positive light, early combat skills aren’t significant enough to hamper experimenting with weapon classes you haven’t invested points into. But then there’s the question of why these early skills exist, given their minimal impact.

Survival skills fare far better, with more varied aspects of gameplay like crafting, fitness, and serum (Tunguska’s version of potions) efficacy. Though I initially dreaded that these skills were a method of managing arbitrary, constantly dwindling resources typical of survival games, I was pleasantly surprised at Tunguska’s ability to strip away much of the tedium associated with these mechanics.

Basic bodily needs, such as hunger and thirst, are consolidated into a generous and slowly draining energy bar, which eating and resting easily restores. Radiation poisoning and T-Syndrome are the two big environmental hazards to manage, inflicting debilitating debuffs if left unchecked and requiring initially rare serums to fully cure. Health is the most difficult resource to get a proper handle on, as HP-restoring serums are your only source of recovery beyond taking a nap in a safe zone. The catch here is that these serums, due to their experimental nature, poison you with trace amounts of radiation for every injection. This small feature loops back to add an appreciable depth to the combat, rewarding forethought and supply preparation as much as your ability to think on your feet under fire.

However, skills that affect crafting and serums are so strong as to almost discourage engaging in these mechanics until you are close to maxing them out. Making stronger, more efficient consumables is one thing, but octupling production for the most powerful serums in Tunguska only brought out the worst of my RPG hoarding sensibilities. The fastest way of grinding all the points necessary to max these skills out is a dull affair of planting and harvesting plants (not too unlike iron dagger crafting in the early days of Skyrim), but ready access to console commands lets you skip the grind if it becomes too much.

Aesthetically, Tunguska excels at capturing the drab, post-apocalyptic vibe you might be familiar with from the Metro and S.T.A.L.K.E.R series. Admittedly, the color palette is a bit too brown for my liking, but the map instances make up for this with their unique layouts and landmarks. My only gripe was the oddly restrictive fast-travel system involving vehicles. The motorbike was the strangest to use, as you cannot travel too many map segments at once, despite the bike itself being able to go to most places in the game. As you can imagine, sitting through loads of loading screens got old quickly, which is especially frustrating when backtracking to home base for items you forgot to take from your stash.

That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if Rotorist Workshop is already acutely aware of these issues, as they are one of, if not the most, active developers I have ever seen. Steam forum posts generally get responses within minutes, from lending a guiding hand to newer players to sifting through copies of save files to debug issues. Though this doesn’t fully dull the blow of the aforementioned game design issues, Rotorist Workshop’s sheer commitment to improving the overall experience is inspiring. With a recently announced sequel in the works, I hope they can continue this energy into that project too.

Tunguska: The Vistation leaves a strong impression, though it’s not always the right one. It gets the more esoteric game-feel aspects, like combat feedback and satisfying exploration rewards, down pat, but struggles with fundamental design elements like control schemes and narrative. There is an undeniably large amount of jank in the game, which will either endear you to the experience or turn you off it entirely. Still, Tunguska is an enjoyable enough experience on its own that it’s worth giving a try to find out for yourself.

I can’t believe we finally have a complete set of the remastered Neverwinter Nights series.

After the accomplished rework of the original CRPG game, Aspyr has brought the classic follow-up, Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition—a game some believed unlikely to make the journey—to modern devices. But now with a heavy +1 shield in hand, an ancient evil to destroy, and a band of rudimentary AI companions in tow, Neverwinter Nights 2 strides purposefully into the hinterlands like an old soldier with a newly polished set of armor and plenty of tales to tell. Yes, players may face the rather archaic Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 Edition rules and some cliched creatures and story beats, but they’ll have a bloody good time out there regardless.

Aspyr haven’t skimped on the basic package with Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition. Alongside the base game, all three of the premium expansions (Mask of the Betrayer, Storm of Zehir, and Mysteries of Westgate) are included and remastered. With all the modules, options are now updated to provide greater control over the visual fidelity of the upgraded graphics, and there’s support for modern resolutions across the board. There’s also cross-play support, Steam Deck compatibility, and the promise of Steam Workshop mods in the future. Everything boots and runs smoothly; loading times can seem a little long, though this is something that tweaks to optimization before launch may well fix.

After the reworked intro movie and splash screen, character creation for the selected adventure offers a large range of options that draw from the 3.5 Edition rules of the time. This means there’s a wide range of class options (expanded from the original game) as well as a huge number of feats, spells, and race ancestries. Players can freely build everything from basic fighters and clerics to more nuanced classes, like swashbucklers and favored souls. Theorycrafters will have a great time min-maxing the heck out of every possible multi-class option and feat combo, although the opaque class systems still pose a significant barrier to newcomers. The remaster offers no additional class build tutorial, so it’s entirely possible to build a cool character who is mechanically weak in combat or social situations. The default difficulty is pretty unforgiving, and considering there’s no way to respec your PC or your companions, it can feel punishing for players who aren’t familiar with the ruleset or with experience in similarly crunchy titles.

The original narrative remains untouched and, much like its predecessor, the story still doesn’t resonate too strongly. Players embody a young orphan from the small village of West Harbor who discovers a connection to a powerful artifact, the silver shard, and the looming threat of the King of Shadows. The path to understanding the shard and how it links to this ancient evil forms much of the heroic journey in and around the grand city of Neverwinter. There’s no sweeping social commentary here, but there’s something to be said about how the traditional story beats fit the system and the pastoral setting of the Faerun. It’s perhaps a reminder of where the genre was nearly twenty years ago. You’ll find plenty of incensed bandits, displaced refugees, and closed merchant roads as the story gets moving. Having said all that, the presence of githyanki in the narrative leads to some unexpected and satisfying connections to the most recent Forgotten Realms tale.

The vanilla game’s hackneyed moments notwithstanding, the writing and pacing remain effective, and the occasional voice-overs add verisimilitude even when some line deliveries are very flat. Heck, it’s a lot more traditional and internally consistent than some recent genre offers. In a manner akin to its earlier stablemate, Knights Of The Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights 2 does a much better job of writing and developing party companions, and it’s a pleasant surprise to remember the sequel allows more party companions than the lonely henchman system of the original. The morally reprehensible ranger, Bishop, provides a rich contrast to the do-goodness of the main plot. Others, like the wizard-spy Sand, are rooted in a deep sense of the world’s lore and history. Speaking of the audio, little else has changed. The sweeping orchestral soundtrack remains the same, and though it’s not one of the more memorable of the genre, it does fit the action seamlessly enough.

Once the familiar tutorial level of the core campaign spins up (the damned nostalgia of that village fair!), the camera options and reworked controls immediately stand out. Although it occasionally gets caught in ceiling rafters or shoved into a character’s cranium during large-scale combat, the camera generally behaves much better than previously. Graphics look sharp overall, with new textures, shadows, and luminosity bringing a noticeable boost. Foliage and water reflections show improvement, and the level of detail on smaller assets—chests, books, a cleaver embedded in a slab of meat—makes a real difference to the world’s vibrancy. Character clothing and facial details are equally crisp, aside from noticeable texture stretching. While performance is mostly stable, a few issues persist: occasional clipping, texture bugs, and rare instances where character models display grotesque distortions of their jaws and eyes. At times, upgraded textures give flat surfaces an oddly rounded or inflated appearance. New particle effects—like flaming weapons—add to the ambient detail. These enhancements don’t always carry over to the wider environment, as seen with the fireplaces and general flames still relying on basic animation loops. Overall, the remastered graphics succeed in enriching the world and revealing details that were either missing or obscured in the original. With time, it’s likely that some of the rougher visual glitches will be patched out as well.

Unlike the original Neverwinter Nights, Neverwinter Nights 2‘s zone areas feel smaller and more focused. While a few branching paths exist, they don’t offer the broader sense of discovery or exploration found in the first game or the even earlier spiritual predecessors. This is where the additional expansions shine more brightly. Their richer narrative nuance and the chances to travel through more varied locales—beyond simple druid groves and musty swamp caves—help elevate the experience. Given the party’s painfully slow movement speed, at least the zones don’t overstay their welcome. Still, the sluggish jog between locations to advance a quest chain is an unwelcome throwback to simpler times.

Gamepad control has been added, and it’s mostly a positive experience. Some of the menu nesting and triggers take some getting used to—I lost count of how many times I hit ‘Back’ trying to open my party menu—but I spent most of my time playing with the pad. Setting up the hotbar is easy enough, and the spell and ability sections work well as an extension of the d-pad. Don’t expect much beyond these conveniences, though: there’s no option to run, and targeting enemies or objects still sometimes means dancing around like a lunatic when your party crowds around you or when multiple loot drops are in play. The age of the systems also shows in the lack of tooltips or right-click functionality. Checking gear and moving it between companions remains as clumsy as ever, aside from some basic drag-and-drop features. Unfortunately, you can’t edit gamepad bindings, so you’ll need to manage any inefficiencies in the control throughout the game or rely on keyboard and mouse, which work almost identically to the original Neverwinter Nights 2.

When combat begins, the real-time-with-pauses system kicks in, and you’ll find yourself selecting abilities from the hotbar and manically clicking on enemies to attack. You can adjust companion behavior, and they’ll try to make smart decisions, albeit with an irritating compulsion to trigger as many fights as possible in a confined area, or provoke pointless attacks of opportunity by changing targets randomly. Besides damage numbers, there’s not a great deal of useful feedback in combat either, unless you follow the logbook assiduously. Much of this comes down to the older elements of the UI: it’s not immediately clear how to identify or cure effects that reduce ability scores or stats, and the conditions for sneak attacks remain a bit of a mystery. Ultimately, I found that setting combat to ‘puppet mode,’ where companions respond only to direct commands, offered the most tactical control, though battles ran significantly longer. The challenge and complexity of the creatures and critters evolve over the story, and this serves to keep the combat varied through the mid- to late-game. There’s no doubt Act 1 feels like a bit of a slog through countless thugs, orcs, and undead who don’t offer much strategic depth. Despite these frustrations, the sheer volume of available strategies and actions is staggering, and it’s genuinely rewarding to carefully prepare for a tough encounter and emerge victorious.

As well as the social and combat challenges, Neverwinter Nights 2 retains a detailed crafting system for both equipment and alchemy. You’ll need to scour zones for recipe books, base moulds, and source the right components. With the appropriate crafting skill, a character can then use a workbench to attempt creation. Aside from a few basic puzzles and companion quests, the game otherwise sticks closely to the core elements of the 3.5 ruleset. There’s some limited roleplaying, but given the limited resources of the time, these options mostly guide players to the same point in the story rather than allowing for major deviations. There is a simple influence system to keep tabs on, where companions view your actions against their own moral compass, but it doesn’t have much effect other than unlocked conversations and the chance they may cease to travel with you. Combat is the primary focus, and there’s plenty of it.

The bundled expansion and adventure packs add more variety to the core systems. In addition to continuing the main plot, Mask of the Betrayer retains the extra abilities and the ‘spirit-eating’ mechanic from earlier content. The challenge remains as punishing as ever, but the expansion provides a different perspective on both plot and gameplay. The overland map in Storms of Zehir and the enhanced party customization and collaboration also contribute variety, though the story feels a bit tepid. Finally, Mysteries of Westgate returns to urban-mystery storytelling, adding another dozen or so hours of content.

It’s fair to say the whole package offers solid value. Completing every expansion and experimenting with different builds, narrative branches, and companion combinations provides dozens upon dozens of hours of content. Add in cooperative multiplayer and Steam Workshop integration, and it’ll be fascinating to see how much traction Neverwinter Nights 2 gains this second time around given the continued success of the original (and its remaster) within the modding and player-creation community.

This is now the best way to experience Neverwinter Nights 2 in its entirety—whether you’re new to the game or returning after breaking your old copy with countless incompatible mods and error-strewn patches. Gamepad support and enhanced visuals and audio bring it much closer to modern expectations, while the lived-in world and even greater range of character options offer plenty to explore. The expansions, included here with the same level of polish, significantly enhance the package. Yes, there are archaic frustrations that cannot be ignored, but they have a less significant impact on the experience as a result of all the other improvements. Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition rekindles a game that never quite reached the heights of its legendary bloodline. But now, with a degree of acceptance and patience, it can step onto the stage with all the confidence of an old soldier, sharing stories of how adventures used to be. Are you ready to listen?

Actions speak louder than words, and they can even jumpstart much-needed conversations. The language of flowers embodies that sentiment, allowing for hidden meaning and symbolism behind the seemingly simple act of choosing a bouquet for someone. Such is the premise behind the visual novel Hanako’s Flower Shop, where the titular main character helps customers express their feelings through flower arrangements. It’s a charming VN centered around a recent high school graduate and her loving grandfather’s flower shop nestled within a close-knit community. I delighted in the game’s varied and diverse narratives while appreciating how thoughtfully and sensitively the title delves into serious subject matter. The plot’s beginning and middle portions are engaging, while the heartfelt ending made me tear up.

Hanako’s grandfather devotedly raised her after her parents moved away from their small city in Japan to live abroad, and helping him at the shop has been her lifelong dream. To help settle into the routine and find her rhythm, her grandfather makes Hanako take charge of the day-to-day activities of running the shop, all while offering a supportive shoulder for Hanako. It isn’t long before she comes into contact with many memorable customers, all wanting different things from the bouquets they seek to purchase. Can Hanako ensure the family business continues even as she tries to help those who visit it? What happens when an unexpected tragedy hits close to home? Hanako’s Flower Shop deals with universal themes of love and loss, joy and grief, pain and healing in equal measure. Because of this, the game has a content warning disclaimer that players should note.

To say more about the roughly twelve-hour plot would spoil it, so I’ll refrain. Suffice it to say, Hanako’s Flower Shop delves into some surprising territory at times, but it’s tinged with a sense of realism and care. There’s a core message that it earnestly wants to convey, and I feel it largely succeeds in doing so, given the game’s final moving portion. The realistic characters in Hanako’s orbit all have understandable situations and problems, some of which are easy fixes, while others aren’t. It’s endemic to what you come across in real life. The narrative manages to be both bittersweet and hopeful, as well as soft and powerful. Those with whom the story resonates will carry its poignant themes long after the credits roll.

A game day in Hanako’s Flower Shop begins with Hanako preparing for what lies ahead and entering the shop. From there, you can do several activities: listening to the radio for helpful weather forecasts or mood-improving music; visiting the garden; taking a walk to gather flowers should the weather permit; ordering extra seeds or flowers with your funds; stocking up on emotion-boosting sweets at the candy shop; getting two young neighbor kids to retrieve extra flowers for you; or waiting for a customer to arrive.

Of course, like in real life, even excellent customer service cannot solve every issue with sympathy and well-intentioned messages alone. Some of the problems the customers bring inside the shop are too big even for the helpful Hanako to tackle, and sometimes she allows customers to vent. There’s also an emotion meter that factors into the gameplay. If Hanako makes a mistake at work, the emotion meter lowers. Eating sweets or listening to music helps recharge the meter so she can begin anew. It’s relatively easy to keep the meter high, given all the break opportunities you get on a given game day.

Restocking your supplies is vital to ensuring you always have enough of a particular flower to meet customer demand, though each procurement method has drawbacks. For example, the twins can only gather so much at a time, and their picks are random. There’s also the fact that you’re limited to seven bushels of flowers to carry during walks, and the different flowers available change constantly. The colors differentiating flowers during walks can be similar for various types, so you’re never sure what you might pick up. Any seeds planted in the garden take a few game days to grow before harvesting, and getting orders delivered to the shop also takes time. Managing the different ways to collect flowers can be especially tricky in the beginning phases when you don’t have robust funds and when things like the weather impact how often you can go outside. Hanako won’t go out to the garden or for a walk if it is raining.

The game’s bouquet-creating portion is when the language of flowers and communication generally become relevant. When a customer enters the shop, a conversation begins between them and Hanako. You must listen carefully to what’s said, picking up vital clues about what they’re looking for in their order. Fortunately, you have access to a notebook to highlight key words that you believe are worth remembering, and there’s a dialogue log as well, should you need to go over things in more detail. Hanako then begins creating a bouquet using her stockpile of flowers, all of which have three “flower language” descriptors applied to them that will be added to the bouquet’s inherent message/meaning should you add a particular flower into the mix. The descriptors and the bouquet message remain handily displayed throughout the process, so you’re never unaware. Once the bouquet is complete, Hanako gets a monetary reward for her work, and the entire process more or less repeats with a new customer until she calls it a day.

Beyond the game’s flower shop simulation elements, visual novel mechanics also play a significant role. You play as both Hanako and her grandfather at different story points depending on the scene. What you decide and how you choose to respond to queries during these VN portions impact how other characters view you or how a future scene might play out. I was honestly very impressed by how often my choices came up throughout the plot, even after other things had occurred between them. Depending on how things play out in the story, the customers’ plotlines also evolve fascinatingly. Not only will they occasionally visit Hanako at the shop to tell her how things are going with them, but you also get lengthy and detailed letters from customers. It’s a nice touch that makes the world feel more lived in.

Because Hanako’s Flower Shop‘s story has an underlying message it wishes to convey, I’d say the game’s biggest weakness might be the copious amount of handholding to try and get players to the finish line. You’d have to work to “fail” at the game, as it provides numerous opportunities to restock supplies and improve Hanako’s mood. Yes, you do lose some points in the emotions meter should you make a mistake when flower arranging, but so long as you keep the emotions meter high enough, it isn’t a problem. Hanako gives you substantial clues as to which flower needs replacing and which substitutions would work. I imagine those wanting a less casual gameplay loop might find it too easy and forgiving. For the many initial tutorials, though, I found it extremely odd that the game doesn’t mention how to manually save (hint: the pause button in the corner of the screen is your friend!). Given the ease of the gameplay mechanics and the heavy realism of various scenarios, I feel Hanako’s Flower Shop has a story cycle best served by playing in short bursts rather than trying to complete it in one go.

Visually, Hanako’s Flower Shop is a mostly bright and colorful game with some creative and artistic reasons to go darker during specific story points. It isn’t a high-budget VN, but it creatively uses animation effects and expressive character sprites to counter that. The character designs are reminiscent of Studio Ghibli, beautifully conveying the characters’ reactions and emotions. The visuals are eye-catching and clever, helping convey the story’s emotional elements.

Soundwise, Hanako’s Flower Shop‘s BGM is lovely to listen to and helps players resonate with the emotional context of a given scene. I credit the game because it is fully voice-acted, with the English voice actors giving dynamic performances. The English script is easy to follow and understand, with only a few typographical errors and the odd occasion where a spoken line doesn’t completely match the dialogue text. Sometimes, the script’s English translation comes across as too stiff and formal for everyday speech, but it still manages to convey the emotions at work. The game’s entirely playable with just a mouse, so it’s easy enough to get into from a control schematic sense, even if you don’t have a controller for your PC.

Hanako’s Flower Shop is a VN that leans more into the simple side with its gameplay mechanics and overall presentation, but it has a lot of heart and a surprising amount of depth beneath the surface. Those looking for a more casual gaming experience that manages to bring a lot to the table in terms of thoughtful and universal narrative themes should give the title a chance. It communicates so much through what it says directly and what it has you inwardly think about, all in a language very much its own.

Covenant of Solitude is a KEMCO-published RPG from developer Magitec that was first released on mobile devices back in 2013. Now, it’s made its way to other platforms, including Steam. Covenant of Solitude unabashedly hearkens back to the 16-bit era of RPGs from the 1990s, but does it do enough to stand out among such a crowded field of retro-inspired games? 

Communicating with and summoning monsters is a rare ability that is misunderstood, feared, and exploited in Covenant of Solitude’s world. Those born with this power are called genies, and protagonist Fort is an orphan with genie blood in him. Fort resides in an orphanage in a remote village, where he gets bullied and outcast by its strongly anti-genie residents. His two best friends, a burly guy named Legna and a sympathetic girl named Elicia, protect and support him as best they can.

Life goes on until, in true RPG fashion, the evil empire razes the village, causing Fort’s latent powers to awaken. Unfortunately, Fort cannot fully control them, and tragedy befalls his friends as a result. Fort is then locked up in an imperial prison and sentenced to death. The day before Fort’s execution, a sassy demon named Wicca appears and offers him a new lease on life. With Wicca to help him figure out his genie powers, a skeptical Fort’s adventure of self-discovery in a war-torn land begins. Covenant of Solitude’s story may have an unremarkable premise, but it’s surprisingly dark and touches upon some heavy themes like prejudice. The game’s second half is far stronger than the first, thanks to some tense plot twists.

I admire the dynamic Covenant of Solitude has between emotional-roller-coaster Fort and Wicca’s cooler, more objective counterpoint to keep him grounded. Wicca is supportive and understanding, yet has a firm hand when needed. She also avoids the nagging and bickering typically associated with characters of her ilk, making her an ideal companion and my favorite character in the game.

The story, while good, has a rough localization that has not been updated from its original form. Conversations read awkwardly due to questionable sentence structure and word choice. The copy-pasted text affects non-story aspects as well. For example, one NPC talks about needing to use real-world money to buy “Solitude Points” to redeem for certain convenience items in a special shop (a.k.a microtransactions). Microtransactions do not exist in this version; you gain Solitude Points through battle.

Covenant of Solitude’s DLC does require real-world money, though. A few easy mode features (like a modifier to triple EXP gained) are available as paid DLC. I would have liked those easy mode features available in the base game, particularly given that many comparable retro-inspired J/J-style RPGs in Covenant of Solitude’s price bracket include those convenience options at no additional cost.

If you’ve played a retro or retro-inspired RPG of this style, Covenant of Solitude’s traditional gameplay is old hat. Progression and exploration consist of the usual town-overworld-dungeon loop with loads of battles throughout. Dungeons feel longer than they really are due to a high random encounter rate and some sudden difficulty spikes causing a need for level grinding. I finished the game in about 16 hours, but it felt longer than that.

Covenant of Solitude’s most interesting gameplay aspect is creating Fort’s monster companions using a simplified version of Final Fantasy V’s Job system. Monsters come in four classes (tanky Dragons, offensive speedster Beasts, support magic Fairies, and offensive magic Vampires) and can take up one of several jobs (Fighter, Healer, Thief, Wizard, and some hidden jobs). Approaching party creation similarly to how I’d create generic troops in SRPGs is fine, but because every new monster starts at level one, changing a job resets the monster’s stats back to level one, and the special job-change items are expensive, there is little motivation to make more than three companions at the very beginning to see you through to the end.

The menus provide all the necessary information an RPG fan needs, but navigating them feels clunky due to unintuitive arrangements. For example, the quest log is within the system menu. Why would the quest log be in the area where I adjust the BGM volume or screen resolution? It also doesn’t help that some interface tutorials mention using keyboard commands, yet I used a gamepad and had to peck and hunt to see which button performed the action the tutorial described. Items are not very well organized in battle menus and there are no sort options. I had to endlessly scroll through large numbers of filler items to find the ones I needed to use. The interface is not as bad as Shadow Madness’ messy menus, but it’s far from efficient.

Covenant of Solitude’s graphics are as basic as it gets. The tired engine used in many Magitec-developed KEMCO games does not look or run much better than games made using RPG Maker XP. I would have liked to see updated graphics in this re-release; a little HD sheen for 2025, at least. Character portraits feature an appealing, if generic, anime style. One stylistic choice I’m not fond of is that male versions of Dragon and Beast class monsters resemble animals, yet the female versions look like humans in “sexy animal” Halloween costumes. Fanservice is all well and good, but in Covenant of Solitude, it creates a nonsensically inconsistent look within the overall design context.

The music is decent, 16-bit MIDI-inspired JRPG fare. Every piece of music is nicely composed and fits its intended action or environment. I can’t say any tunes will get stuck in your head to the point where you hum them throughout the day, but you won’t turn them off and substitute your own music while playing. Sound effects get the job done, but some sound effects, like the teleportation one, are unpleasantly shrill and piercing.

I genuinely liked Covenant of Solitude, but have a hard time recommending it when other (arguably better) games like it exist that offer a better value for the money. That this 2025 re-release of Covenant of Solitude remains relatively unchanged from its 2013 iteration is disappointing. The potential for a good game is there, but it needs a remodel to compete in a supersaturated and highly competitive market. Regardless, Covenant of Solitude always has the wonderful Wicca; she absolutely makes the game.

From Clifftop Games comes the return of Kathy Rain, a beloved adventure gaming icon of the past decade, now with a new adventure that is twice the length and scope of the original game in Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer. Does it match up to or even surpass the original, or is it more of a sophomore slump?

Well, I’m delighted to say that Kathy Rain 2 presents a mystery adventure that’s leaps and bounds above the original game and even the impressive Director’s Cut it received five years later.

Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer picks the story up three years after the events of the first game, with Kathy now running her own private investigator agency. She picks up a hot lead from her former colleague Lucas, another, more grizzled private eye, about “the Soothsayer,” a sadistic killer who’s tearing up the streets of the city of Kassidy. From vague clues and even vaguer suspects, she must piece together the identity of this killer before they strike again.

By far the biggest upgrade from the original to Kathy Rain 2 is the visuals (unless you played the Director’s Cut, then the leap isn’t as substantial by comparison). The pixel art is gorgeous from beginning to end, with a few cinematic moments featuring fully detailed models that really pop in this game’s art style.

The environmental art is especially spectacular in every location, from Kathy’s cozy office to the large church in the middle of Kassidy’s stunning skyline and hilltop view that overlooks the entire cityscape; they all draw your eye and are rendered in stunning detail, with the pixellated style only adding to the depth and minutia of everything you see. Clifftop Games even leverage some gorgeous lighting effects and parallaxing in some locations to further sell the sense of scale in everything.

As the setting, Kassidy and its atmosphere are similarly impeccable—a neon-drenched, rain-soaked, dirty and dangerous metropolis where peril lurks at every corner and alleyway. It echoes the settings of the game’s inspirations, like the city from David Fincher’s Seven (1995), or the depiction of the seedy, crime-ridden streets of Los Angeles in L.A. Confidential (1997). It’s perhaps a cliche to say “the city is a character in itself,” but both Kassidy and Kathy Rain’s dark odyssey into human depravity tonally complement each other.

Speaking of complementing tone, a special shout-out to Daniel Kobylarz for the fantastic soundtrack in Kathy Rain 2, mixing dark synths with slower jazz tunes to great effect, bringing another dimension to both the story and setting.

When it comes to plot, Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer soars above the original game, whose plot was already solid. Where it thrives most is the more grounded elements of the story, as well as the development of Kathy as a character who has already gone through her arc in the first game. Here, she’s her same cocky and sardonic yet caring self, but she’s grown complacent and dismissive. She’s pushed Eileen, her best friend and former partner in (solving) crime, away due to her own stubbornness and inability to ask for help.

Now, she’s seeking to prove herself and make her mark by taking on “the Soothsayer,” a prolific new serial killer who has been tearing through Kassidy and the surrounding areas over the past several months. It’s in these parts of the story, the real boots-on-the-ground detective work and puzzle solving, where both the gameplay and story really shine. Uncovering the Soothsayer’s identity, and those of their victims, becomes a cat-and-mouse game across the city with high risk and the promise of a high reward.

Much like the first game, however, it’s when the story starts delving into the more metaphysical and supernatural aspects of its plot and lore that it loses focus a bit. I will say, I prefer how this game handles that stuff versus how the first game did, mainly because it closes a lot of the loops that were left unaddressed before, but the fact remains that the story’s higher concepts just weren’t as compelling as the grounded serial killer mystery that played out prior to that, at least for me.

The puzzles in Kathy Rain 2 have also seen quite the improvement. I wouldn’t say that they’re on the whole “above and beyond” the original, but the ratio of hits to misses definitely skews towards the former for much of the adventure.

The puzzles come out of the gate swinging, too, with one of the earliest puzzles being an elaborate challenge that asks you to find the names, dates, and locations of each of the Soothsayer’s victims, cross-referencing them with newspaper articles over the last year, a calendar, and even cycles of the moon. It’s pretty involved, and while not every puzzle in Kathy Rain 2 lives up to this one’s intricacy, it does go a long way in selling you on the game being of a much larger scale and scope than the previous adventure.

Speaking of the ratio of more hits than misses with the puzzles, there are countless “eureka” moments in Kathy Rain 2 where following the line of logic to ask “if this were me, how would I solve this?” usually gets you your answer. That may sound obvious to many, but for a lot of adventure games, there’s such a thing called “moon logic,” a trope for when the solution is so outside-of-the-box that no rational human being could come to the answer.

Generally, Kathy Rain 2 avoids moon logic even with its weakest puzzles, but it does come dangerously close with some of the more obtuse solutions, where it feels the solution comes from a standpoint of padding gameplay rather than making the most sense for Kathy as a character.

It’s also disappointing and kind of baffling that Kathy Rain 2 lacks controller support, despite the recent Director’s Cut of the original having it built in.

Despite its flaws, Kathy Rain 2 is another spectacular adventure from Clifftop Games that builds on the established characters wonderfully and, for the most part, pays off many of the original game’s lingering plot threads in satisfying ways. There are still some cliched, corny lines here and there, with some characters that feel very archetypal and stereotypical. It also feels like Clifftop Games wants to have their cake and eat it too with the supernatural stuff, considering it doesn’t always mesh with the otherwise grounded and gritty detective story, but it’s at least delivered better here than it was before.

Regardless, it’s a sound, engaging mystery that’s easy to get invested in. If you’re a fan of the original game, this character, or adventure games in general, Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer will not steer you wrong, and proves that despite innovation across the industry, good old-fashioned, LucasArts-inspired adventure games still have staying power.

If Lucille, late blues icon B.B. King’s immortalized guitar, could talk… oh, the stories she could tell! Francesca, WWE wrestler Xavier Woods’ trombone, is a famed character unto herself in pro wrestling lore. I named my #1 bass guitar Hepzibah. We’ve had many adventures together, and she’s even had some interesting adventures without me that I wish she could tell me. If you’ve ever talked soothingly to your car while wrenching on it, view your go-to chef’s knife as a beloved companion or loyal friend more than a mere tool, then Date Everything! might be for you. Date Everything! is a game where saying, “I have a date with my couch” literally means going on a date with your couch. Date Everything! is as delightfully wacky as it sounds and I approve of this nonsense!

Date Everything! is a sandbox-style dating sim where you walk around your house, interact with various objects who manifest into human-esque dateable beings (some of whom require point-and-click style problem solving to find), talk to five of these characters a day, and build personal and relationship stats through your interactions. Time of day plays a part in interactions as well, so keep note of characters’ schedules. The game’s nonlinear nature means that storytelling often feels out of order, particularly when various characters’ stories intertwine, but it’s nothing astute gamers can’t wrap their heads around.

Date Everything! has a silly-yet-amusing overarching narrative and multiple endings, including variations of “leave early” endings you can initiate at almost any time (I can’t call these bad endings, especially since my favorite version did not feel “bad”). Date Everything! is more about the journey than the destination, though. How you journey through the game, exposing the myriad characters and watching their dramas unfold, is up to you.

100 objects in the Date Everything! house, from physical objects like your desk to conceptual ones like existential dread, all transform into the various characters. With so many characters to interact with—all possessing an array of personalities, body types, genders/gender identities, ethnicities, and other traits— everyone will find favorites. Not every character is deep or even likeable, and some carry surprising baggage. Regardless, they all come to life thanks to Date Everything!’s golden combination of compelling writing and expert voice acting. The game issues content warnings (that also offer the option to skip story paths with no penalties) throughout. It’s possible to turn them off, but I kept them on because Felicia Day’s character narrates them, and who doesn’t want more Felicia Day?

Each character arc in Date Everything! has three possible outcomes: Love, Friendship, or Hate. Most are fairly short, so the game encourages you to, literally, “date” (befriend or hate) everything. Hate outcomes still award the game’s equivalent of experience points but lock out the best possible ending. I did not mind getting a few Hate endings and just moved on to other characters before trying new things in New Game +. Date Everything! is designed to be a low-stress, go-with-the-flow experience, unlike, say, Clannad, where it’s tempting to save scum because mucking up the most obscure and minuscule courses of action collapses intended paths like a game of Jenga. Think of Date Everything! like a Suikoden game in that you don’t need to collect all 108 stars of destiny to get a good ending.

The cozy, first-person, 3D polygon house you navigate looks decent, but the visual highlights are all the lushly drawn, energetically designed, and delightfully expressive character portraits. Artist Erin Wong brought her A-game with Date Everything!’s remarkably varied ensemble cast. Characters generally have a more Western comic-style look, but their design accoutrements have campy, anything-goes, anime flair. For example, I liked one character’s rockabilly/psychobilly mohawk hairstyle made of book pages. I was always giddy to discover new characters, and even those I didn’t care much for looked amazing.

I am an absolute sucker for soundtracks with character themes and Date Everything! has over 100 character themes! Not only that, but every character theme is quite good. Character themes perfectly encapsulate their respective characters through many genres and styles of music. I felt the heart and soul that the team of composers and musicians put into the music. I cannot tell you my favorite pieces because that would reveal characters you should discover for yourself. Given that Date Everything! is the brainchild of a voice actor collective and features an Avengers: Endgame gathering of apex voice actors (all from our favorite games and other multimedia), words cannot describe how epically awesome the acting is.

As good as Date Everything! is, it suffers from suboptimal controls. Walking around the house feels slippery, and navigating menus feels clunky with a gamepad. The play controls and menu interface are better optimized for WASD + mouse usage. The default button/key mapping is not my favorite, and I badly wanted to remap the keyboard hotkeys and gamepad buttons to my liking. Even a simple option to swap WASD with the arrow keys to accommodate lefties would be welcome. With so much love and thought put into Date Everything!’s other components, it’s a shame that play control received so little. 

Date Everything! is more than the sum of its individual components. It may not have the best graphics, gameplay, control, or story, but the heart, soul, and addictiveness of Date Everything! cannot be codified into numerical scores and categories. Simply put, Date Everything! rocked my world more than I expected it to; I spent more time playing it than I care to admit. It’s not a game for everyone, but if it’s your cup of tea, you will drink it with gusto.    

In 2011, Deus Ex: Human Revolution revitalized a franchise, garnering heavy praise yet alienating fans of the original who sought a faithful “immersive sim” follow-up. Two years later, Deus Ex: Human Revolution Director’s Cut launched to PC and all current consoles, including the series’ first foray into Nintendo territory (Wii U). This Director’s Cut added the standalone Missing Link DLC into the full product, refined some key dialogue and boss sequences, and cleaned up some other loose ends with combat and animation quality. In my opinion, it’s the definitive version of the game to play.

Regardless of the version you’re playing, however, questions remain: did this game stand the test of time? How does Human Revolution fare when playing it in the year 2025?

Honestly, I’d say it’s pretty swell! Mission-based action RPGs have certainly grown as a genre since 2011, so at times, I find myself imagining alternative mechanics and branching narratives that would make for a better experience today. Nonetheless, I enjoyed my brief return to Detroit, Hengsha, and Panchaea.

As I explored the world of DX:HR, I couldn’t help but think of the timeline built by this franchise. The original Deus Ex takes place in the year 2052. As a prequel, Human Revolution jumps back to 2027. Among the settings in this gritty dystopia, few predictions have come to pass. Mechanical and neurological augmentation is largely hypothetical and nothing like the unregulated mess and us/them dynamics of this series. Though we have anti-vaxxers in our post-COVID world who refer to themselves proudly as pure bloods, the idea that an mRNA vaccine is tantamount to a visit to a DX:HR LIMB clinic seems laughable to me.

Additionally, much as large language models boast impressive features and can serve as useful tools, I don’t think ChatGPT and its ilk can hold a candle to the global media-controlling AI, Picus Media’s Eliza Cassan. If we move from LLM to AGI in the next two years, I’d be shocked.

There is also the cute reference to Final Fantasy in-game. DX:HR came to us after Square Enix acquired Eidos, so the team was able to pull a few fun references. You may run across a poster for a Final Fantasy XXVII within the game’s environs, . Yes, that’s right, twenty-seven. Square Enix is ten entries behind the aggressive fictional timeline.

My desire to analyze the game’s timeline and prognostications derives from the game’s poignant insights into the human condition. Though critics over the years have chided the game’s narrative for waxing philosophical and on-the-nose preaching about humanity’s perch on the precipice, I found myself enjoying the tale told here more than memories of my first playthrough (in 2013) suggested I should.

Beyond the grand narrative, there are the smaller stories, the character interactions, the chapter arcs and side stories. I find myself particularly drawn to the iconic voice of protagonist Adam Jensen, portrayed by Elias Toufexis. And I’m not talking about the meme-worthy line “I never asked for this,” though that is undoubtedly a great delivery. Toufexis’ delivery is at its best during the lengthy persuasion dialogues, with my favorites being the interactions between Jensen and his boss, David Sarif (voiced by Stephen Shellen), and the climactic dialogue between Jensen and Hugh Darrow (voiced by Arthur Holden). Somehow, these dialogue sequences are more impressive to me now than they were in 2013. The dialogue and the delivery stand apart from most sci-fi and fantasy games and are on par with Geralt of Rivia (Doug Cockle) in The Witcher and Clive Rosfield (Ben Starr) in Final Fantasy XVI. If you’re wondering how I determined a sound subscore above 90%, it wasn’t just the music. In fact, much as I appreciate the Deus Ex: Human Revolution Original Soundtrack, I think it is precisely the voice acting that elevates the listening experience.

As an aside, I’ll note that I saw Toufexis’ name crop up in my most recent watch on Netflix: season 3 of Blood of Zeus. I’d forgotten that Elias Toufexis plays the role of Seraphim, one of the lead characters in that show. He did a great job there, but in my mind, Toufexis is inexorably linked with the voice of Adam Jensen.

Graphically, DX:HR holds up fairly well for a game released the same year as Skyrim. One thing that strikes me about the visual experience in 2025 is that the pre-rendered, recorded cutscenes sometimes look outdated compared to the in-game graphics if you’re playing at the highest settings with a high-end PC. In the realm of PC gaming, it’s understandable how this can happen, but even so, I imagine it’s somewhat rare.

When I put the intricate story aside and focused on the mission ahead of me, I found the game just as fun and enjoyable as I had long ago. Yes, the “stick-to-wall” phenomenon with taking cover can feel a little clunky. But once you get used to it, this is a great game for stealth experience. I should note, when I first played, I went after all of the achievements, requiring multiple playthroughs with differing goals. A pacifist playthrough was hard enough, but for my money, the greatest challenge was Foxiest of the Hounds, a stealth-related achievement for never tripping any alarms or allowing any guards to activate alarms. Back then, I found this achievement a frustrating-but-fair experience. This time around? I gave it a go in the first two combat settings, then switched up to a sort of berserker play mode, the opposite of stealth. This approach only works on the easiest difficulty setting, but it was a great deal of fun!

I had forgotten just how big and how small DX:HR was — environs that feel an inch wide, though the player can dig a mile deep. The game’s first open environment is the city of Detroit. You have limited access across a relatively small area, though there is something to be said for traversing different heights as well. Alongside the main quest, you gain access to sidequests through various means, and it’s all tracked conveniently in the game’s menu. As you change from one area to another (Hengsha, Montreal, etc.), sidequests expire, so those interested in seeing everything the game has to offer need to prioritize the sidequests over the main story.

At the end of the day, I think Deus Ex: Human Revolution remains a great experience, one worth returning to all these years later. However, the caveat remains: if you’re looking for a game that plays like the first Deus Ex, that is not what you’re going to find. This is a carefully crafted narrative title with relatively few degrees of freedom in puzzle-solving, combat, or autonomy in crafting the story. I am a fan of YouTube content creator hbomberguy, and his 3.5-hour video on DX:HR from 2022 is one I’ve watched several times over. I highly recommend it, as it provides background and insight on the game’s development and outcomes compared to its predecessor. However, I would push past his conclusion that DX:HR is merely “fine.” I think it’s still a great game to play, but you just have to know what you’re into and temper your expectations. An immersive sim, this is decidedly not.

The shining reputation the first Deus Ex enjoys is no accident. Director Warren Spector has stated that Ion Storm’s John Romero asked him to make the game of his dreams without budget restrictions and with a large marketing push. Under those circumstances, visions of grandeur seem inevitable. What is not inevitable, as shown by most other Ion Storm projects, is the artistic or commercial success of the product. Thankfully, Deus Ex pulled it off with its unique blend of genres, palpable atmosphere, and sparkling quality.

In the three years since the release of Deus Ex, the technology available to video game developers and consumers had progressed by surprising lengths. Physics simulations, fancy lighting effects, bump-mapped textures, and other advances promised to further connect players to their game experiences. Applying many of these advances to a sequel to Deus Ex is a tantalizing prospect… Until you realize it’s being developed for the Xbox. This comment deserves an explanation, but let’s understand the game first.

Deus Ex: Invisible War is set around twenty years after J.C. Denton merged his consciousness with the Aquinas A.I., triggering a new dark age of sorts known as The Collapse. The sequel thrusts you into the role of Alex D, a promising agent-in-training at the Tarsus Academy, which is experimenting with cutting-edge human enhancement technologies. After a devastating nanobot bomb targeting the Tarsus Academy’s Chicago branch disintegrated a huge swathe of the city, you are transferred to the Seattle branch. This branch is then immediately attacked by a shadowy religious organization called The Order.

Upon your escape, you meet the security forces of the World Trade Organization, whose interests sit directly opposite those of The Order. Later on you meet the Knights Templar, who are fanatically opposed to any human modification and discriminate against augmented persons. These are the main forces driving a story that transports you from Seattle to Cairo to Trier, Germany, to uncover the motivations of these factions and find your place in this mix of conspiracies. The story is a fun ride while you’re in it, nodding to our current time with commentary on the impact of artificial intelligence and a general meditation on free will in a high-tech world. Still, once it’s over and you look back on it, it’s rather flimsy and disappointing. Any potential branching of the story is betrayed by the fact that no matter how much damage you do to these factions, in the last 20 minutes of the game, they all leave the door open for you to deliver their version of a new world. The game reveals the provenance of The Order and the WTO in a way that appears intent on blowing your mind but is rather sad instead. Ultimately, the story will propel you forward, but it will not invite further reflection.

In Deus Ex games, the missions and the areas they take place in can often be well-designed and fun to play in, but the hubs between missions can be even more engaging. They are chock-full of places to explore, side quests to complete, and generally lots of details that make you believe in what you’re seeing. They don’t feel game-like, but instead like authentic places where people live and go about their lives. These sections are some of the most profoundly connecting of these games. In light of this, when one sets foot in Seattle, the first hub of Deus Ex: Invisible War, it is impossible to avoid the feeling of sinking melancholy.

The great city of Seattle is apparently a cramped series of nearly empty hallways. The time it takes you to walk until you hit a loading screen can be under a minute, but even if the whole area were seamless and load-time-free, it would be tiny for a Deus Ex hub. It gives you the impression that the technology used to power Invisible War can’t comfortably render more than three or so NPCs at once since the citizens are spread out and hidden in the corners of the narrow maze of a map. Yes, there are side quests and items to find while exploring hidden areas, but at the end of the day, what should be the most connecting part of a Deus Ex game is instead alarmingly disconnecting. The Seattle nightclub, for example, is one of the most depressing sights in the game, with its minuscule, nearly empty dance floor and cramped, deserted VIP room.

It’s not all bad, though. Deus Ex: Invisible War sports incredible lighting and shadow effects that remain highly convincing decades later and make great use of physics simulation, with nearly every object in an area being affected by the forces acting upon it in a believable way. Even in hub areas, Invisible War puts its worst foot forward, as each subsequent hub improves upon the previous one, with Trier being particularly believable. The missions and mission maps also tend to be pretty great, with ample opportunities to sneak, hack, and fight your way to each objective.

Thus, we see a game in conflict with itself, with contradictions bearing down on contradictions in a twisting pile of missed potential. Invisible War‘s lighting and physics systems represent an admirable effort to connect you to the game world, while the moribund hub areas rip you out of your suspension of disbelief. Engrossing missions can be ruined by running out of ammo for your favorite weapon. Which is the ammo for all the weapons.

Yes, Deus Ex: Invisible War contains the absolute head-scratcher of a decision to unify ammunition across all weapon types except grenades. Yes, flamethrower ammo is the same as rocket launcher ammo, tranquilizer dart ammo, etc. Not only does this kill any sense of authenticity in the world, but it also makes no sense from a gameplay perspective, as there’s no need to conserve ammo for a specific weapon or differentiation between lethal and non-lethal weapons.

This leads to the hair-pulling state of inventory management in general. It’s easy to understand how “Tetris-style” inventory management isn’t for everybody, but Invisible War‘s “streamlined” solution causes far more problems than it solves. Every item, from a bag of chips to a heavy flamethrower, takes up one slot. Thankfully, consumables stack in the inventory, but it further plunges the concept of this inventory system deeper into madness. It makes nothing easier. On occasion, you still must go into your inventory to drop an item so you can use the energy cell on the desk in front of you to replenish your power, then pick the first item back up.

In a similar fashion, the character building boils down to a biomod system that’s paltry for a Deus Ex game. You don’t gain skill points but instead install and upgrade biomods. Some are cool and useful, like Cloak and Bot Domination, and some are not, like Enhanced Vision or Defense Drone, but it’s all rather underwhelming and fails to provide any experience of worthwhile progression. You can cultivate an unstoppable build in the first third of the game and end up with many extra biomod upgrades you can’t use because you’ve maxed out all the ones you care about.

All of this brings us back to my earlier point about how unfortunate it is that they built this game for console before porting it to PC. The early 2000s was a time when rendering techniques new to video games had generally worked themselves ahead of the hardware available to most people, so the great lighting effects and physics calculations likely took a toll on the other aspects of the game. Of course there’s a degree of speculation there, but during this time there was indeed a dismal trend of developing games for console first, then poorly porting them to PC with spotty mouse support, bad optimization, and other issues. This is the case for Deus Ex: Invisible War. One example is that the inventory design seems to favor controller inputs. Thank goodness that Eidos Montreal realized you could do decent inventory management with a controller in the prequels that followed.

As for the cramped nature of Invisible War‘s maps, it would be tempting to blame the Xbox for that as well, but it’s more likely that the Unreal 2 engine, mixed with the aforementioned physics and lighting systems that it valiantly shoulders, are more to blame. Back then, these bells and whistles were especially expensive to implement from a performance standpoint. Perhaps related factors are also the cause of the sheer amount of bugs I found. Inventory glitches occur when certain items are placed in a new precious slot instead of a stack of the same items you already possess. There are also some ear-shattering sound bugs I experienced on at least two maps when an explosion happened. Even with my volume at twenty percent, these explosions were so loud that they came out of my speakers distorted. There were also no less than three occasions where loading a save put me back about 45 minutes from where I last saved.

Deus Ex: Invisible War is a fun game. The missions are well-designed with many approaches to success, the story is an enjoyable ride (for a while), and it can be graphically attractive. However, its failure to live up to its predecessor is an unavoidable inconvenience. Perhaps Invisible War‘s biggest crime is that it’s not the original Deus Ex, even if there’s a lot to enjoy on its own merits. Unfortunately, some frustrating decisions and circumstances let this game down, even divorced from its heritage.

In a world that enjoys the existence of three truly great Deus Ex games plus a whole landscape of great works that carry its legacy and influence forward, there is little reason to play Deus Ex: Invisible War. After the first Deus Ex shone a ray of light into what players thought was possible in a computer game, this sequel throws a curtain over it. The greatness behind desperately reaches out through pinpricks, but sadly, it fails to warm the room.

[Editor’s Note: June 23rd, 2025 marks the 25th anniversary of the original Deus Ex. In honor of this, we have asked our review team to offer fresh looks at all four mainline games in the series. Be on the lookout for those later this week!]

Twenty-five years ago today, we were given a glimpse into the dark future. A looking glass into a world very much like our own, yet steeped in rampant experimental technology, domineering corporations, despotic governments, and shadowy, far-reaching conspiracies running through all of it. While there are echoes of those descriptors in today’s world, Deus Ex perhaps didn’t set out to be such a prescient work from the outset. Yet, their foresight into the 21st century is downright eerie at times.

Basically, imagine a world where every conspiracy theory you’ve ever heard is all simultaneously true. That’s essentially the setting of Deus Ex.

You play as JC Denton, a newly minted agent for UNATCO, the United Nations Anti-Terrorism Coalition. We learn right away that JC’s placement into the agency is a decision viewed with equal parts fervor and fear since he and his brother, Paul, are UNATCO’s (and the world’s) first nano-augmented humans.

While biomechanical augmentations such as robotic arms and legs are widely represented and accepted as a part of society in 2052, nano-augmentations are less familiar to the populace as a technology, making JC and Paul outcasts of a sort in Deus Ex society. The feeling is compounded by the fact that the nanites allow their users to do things humans normally could not, namely, turn invisible and perform feats of superhuman strength.

Together with Paul, JC’s first mission for the agency involves thwarting an attack on Liberty Island by the radical terrorist group NSF (National Secessionist Forces). From this, you soon find out that Paul has betrayed UNATCO and defected to the NSF for reasons unknown. What follows is a rollercoaster political thriller plot full of twists and turns at every interval as JC uncovers a conspiracy that reaches all the way to the top and beyond.

On its own, Deus Ex‘s story is a very campy, pulpy one. I don’t mean that as an insult, but rather that it doesn’t try to take itself too seriously and is capable of having fun with its premise, thanks mostly to JC’s dry wit and deadpan delivery. If you were to read the game’s broad plot strokes as a novel, for instance, removed from all gameplay contexts, you might find it somewhat dull and uninspired. However, it’s those very gameplay contexts that made Deus Ex a one-of-a-kind narrative experience and what keeps it in such high regard to this day.

Above all else, the reason for this narrative/gameplay success is that Deus Ex functions as an immersive sim. While it certainly wasn’t the first, Deus Ex is what many consider to be the finest example of its subgenre. You see, an immersive sim is defined as being “driven by its systems.” In many ways, it’s the polar opposite of linearity in a game design sense. Immersive sims encourage full, untethered player exploration and experimentation. It essentially takes the phrase “there are no wrong answers” as a core design principle—players can tackle each of Deus Ex‘s levels and many objectives in whatever order and by whatever means they desire.

The number of times I asked a question starting with “I wonder if I can…” only for the game to immediately answer that I could is frankly staggering. This happened on every level of Deus Ex, from something as innocuous as skipping past a particularly taxing locked door by blowing it up to shortcutting entire questlines by making a series of story or gameplay decisions in a certain order. It really exemplifies how remarkable and ahead of its time Deus Ex is.

Despite being the blueprint for most beloved immersive sims of the 21st Century (Dishonored, Prey 2017, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines), Deus Ex is still roundly considered the best in the genre, and for good reason. It’s a reactive, tactile world that engages the player in a tug-of-war with its systems to see what works and what doesn’t, in ways that few games can match, even to this day.

When it comes to approachability, that’s where Deus Ex loses a lot of people. It’s not entirely the game’s fault, only that it hails from an era of gaming where RPGs were more niche and could afford to take a lot more risks by design. With every detail, it’s clear that the team built Deus Ex for an enthusiast audience more than the average casual consumer. Further supporting this idea, the PS2 port, Deus Ex: The Conspiracy, had to redesign many of the game’s fundamentals to the point where one could argue that it’s an entirely different gameplay experience.

In my opinion, Deus Ex doesn’t put its best foot forward in onboarding new players. True, it has a training mission (accessible from the main menu) that’s fairly robust and extensive in explaining all of the game’s mechanics and ways to exploit them; however, the opening Statue of Liberty mission throws players in the deep end with a fairly tricky scenario and level layout and lets you have at it without a gradual build-up to get more intimately acquainted with its systems.

Now, I acknowledge that there probably is an optimal way to tackle this level that more or less covers those criteria, but newcomers wouldn’t be privy to that info, leading to a rather poor first impression. In fact, I put off playing Deus Ex for a long time precisely because the opening level is so overwhelming. Anecdotally, I’ve heard the same from others, too. While I’m grateful I pushed past it for this review and to celebrate the game’s 25th anniversary, I can easily see myself not bothering otherwise and continuing to play the series’ modern installments instead.

Again, this isn’t necessarily the game’s fault; in many ways, Deus Ex is a relic of its time, genre, and platform. Its open-ended playground design is both a blessing and a curse. It can be very intimidating for those unfamiliar with the other immersive sim RPGs that preceded it, like Thief: The Dark Project, System Shock 1+2, and Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, a game widely considered to be the original imsim.

It also doesn’t help that stealth, while still mostly reliable, fleshed out, and providing options and alternative routes for each of Deus Ex‘s 13 levels, can occasionally behave differently than you want or expect. Granted, this generally only applies to sneaking around enemies, with the game being touchy about what counts as “hiding in the shadows” or not. Thankfully, taking a stealth approach is merely one of dozens of potential strategies, and even then, stealth still functions well enough at the best of times.

In totality, Deus Ex presents as a game that’s a mile wide and five miles deep. Many of its components, on the surface, may not look like much, but when you take them apart and see how many moving parts there are, you can truly appreciate their worth.

This principle applies to its level design, systems, story, and every facet of its gameplay. The gunplay, for instance, can be initially very frustrating. Not just in a modern context either, since surely many FPS fans were used to the Quake, Half-Life, and Unreal school of shooters, which Deus Ex does not approach. That’s not for a lack of capability, but more than it’s just a different kind of shooter. Really, it’s tricky to say that it is a shooter at all. It’s a lot more deliberate, calculating, and strategic.

The more you play the game and invest in certain weapon skills, the more you realise that each of Deus Ex‘s arsenal of guns serves a specific purpose and can be useful in specific situations. In summary, the less you treat it like a shooter, the more you’ll appreciate its combat for what it is.

The same is true of Deus Ex‘s story. Sure, it’s a hokey, hammy cyberpunk political spy thriller with the occasional corny line of dialogue, odd line delivery, or the uncomfortable racist depiction of Chinese people in the Hong Kong level. Yet, despite that, it’s still incredibly clear that its themes, messages, and almost Nostradamus-like foresight into 21st-century politics, technology, and socioeconomics resonate even now.

This “mile wide, miles deep” principle arguably extends even to its soundtrack. Initially, I found some of its tracks to not be much. I even found some kind of annoying and repetitive. Yet, I kept coming back to them and found myself humming along as the levels went on. Straylight Productions truly indoctrinated me, and over the course of the game, I came to love the ambient, darksynth sound. Apparently, even game director Warren Spector had the same experience as I, initially becoming irritated by the main theme before catching himself humming along to it constantly.

For those who have yet to play the original Deus Ex, whether due to lack of interest, being overwhelmed by the opening mission, or the fact that it’s nothing like Human Revolution or Mankind Divided, I highly encourage you to give it another, proper go, and try and meet it where it is and not where you’d ideally want it to be.

More than many classic games I’ve gone back and played, while it may seem dated on the surface, Deus Ex is more than meets the eye and stands tall as one of those universally acclaimed video games that’s well and truly earned its reputation and placement in the annals of gaming history. Its influence resonates far and wide in the industry today, inspiring countless games and helping to usher in a new era of Western RPGs.

For the optimal (or, shall we say, “augmented“) way to play Deus Ex today and still have a vanilla experience, I cannot recommend Deus Ex Community Update highly enough (which is how I played it). It’s a compilation of quality-of-life mods that fix some essential issues, provide widescreen support, and don’t really interfere with the game’s systems. Otherwise, the new PS2 Classics re-release of the PS2 version of Deus Ex on PlayStation Plus can be a suitable, albeit somewhat different, experience that still comes impressively close to matching up with the PC version.