Yakuza 6 is a game of firsts. It’s also a game of lasts.

Playing Sea of Thieves feels a bit like working in a theater before the set has been completely built. There’s plenty of space to goof around and a few swords in the wings to have mock fights with, but none of its quite ready for show time. A lack of features and polish has frustrated some players, but those willing…

The original Game Boy was the first device to push my fascination with gadgets to an obsession. I saved for months to buy one, and to this day it’s still one of my favorite gaming platforms. That explains why, despite every gadget I use having an alarm clock built-in, I now prefer waking up to this adorable Game Boy…

A Way Out merges narrative games with couch co-op, and the result is a smart and emotional experience so good that it had to be reviewed by two Kotaku writers. We’ve never played a cooperative experience like it.

I’ve spent a long time trekking across Far Cry 5’s fictional Hope County, Montana fighting the members of an apocalyptic cult led by a man called Joseph Seed, and I’m still not sure what their deal is. They drive around blasting weird Christian synth and shooting non-members on sight. It’s weird and terrifying and…

Vengeance is what happens when someone takes the murderous revenge tale of movies like Kill Bill and turns them into a board game. Or at least tries to.

It can be difficult, as a jaded adult, to appreciate a great fairy tale—one where the hero always wins and naivety is a character strength rather than something to grow out of. So it is with Ni no Kuni II. But if you can look past this game’s more childish tendencies, you’ll find a fairy tale worth experiencing.

A Bluetooth-connected foam ball packed with sensors and a battery you need to charge sounds like one of Silicon Valley’s worst ideas. Haven’t balls been adequately entertaining kids for centuries already? But it only took one toss of Play Impossible’s Gameball for me to understand why a ball upgraded with…

Great games are interesting, as are terrible ones. Mediocrity’s a bore. Too bad Nintendo’s newest Kirby game is just that.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance was a grand idea. In a genre awash with fantasy epics, it sought to ground a role-playing adventure not in some distant and imaginary land, but in history. There would be no wizards, no dragons, no giant rats—just you, a horse, some mud, and a cast of flawed human beings.

Before kids hunted for Carmen Sandiego, in a time when computers could barely muster a few on-screen colors, a game called The Oregon Trail taught students about the hardships of pioneer life. The graphics were terrible, the sound effects were awful, and more often than not, all your characters died. But it was the…

The early reactions to Ready Player One after its screening at SXSW were mostly positive, but don’t count io9's among them. It isn’t so much a movie about loving old video games and other cultural artifacts. It’s about loving to love those things, which makes Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation of the bestselling novel…

Secret of Mana is a broken game that I will always love. Playing through the recent remake forced me to reckon with why that is.

Metal Gear Survive is wreckage of the long battle between the series’ lead creator, Hideo Kojima, and Konami, his long-time employer who ditched him three years ago. Kojima split with Konami after a lifetime of making Metal Gear games, going back to the first in 1987. Survive is Konami’s attempt to make a new one…

Into the Breach is a game about the accumulation of small decisions, good or bad. It’s a game that never lets you forget your past runs, especially your failures.

The best thing about Adolescence is that it eventually ends.

If you’ve played an hour in one Dynasty Warriors game you’ve played an hour in all of them. That’s been the conventional wisdom for a while now and although Dynasty Warriors 9 doesn’t disprove it, it does point toward some interesting new possibilities for the series in its new open world setting.

There are too many board games about pirates. But Black Fleet is one you should fight through the fatigue for.

Most mechanical keyboard switches have two positions—off and on. Either the key is activated, or it’s not. The switches in the Wooting One keyboard are different. Like the analog trigger on a gamepad, they detect a range of motion. I wouldn’t say it’s something every PC gamer needs, but it can definitely change the…

The Longest Five Minutes presents its basic fantasy tale as a series of flashbacks experienced by its amnesiac main character during the game’s final battle. It takes an otherwise generic retro turn-based RPG and turns it into something special. Wait, I’m already at the end of the review? How did I get here?