Battle Princess Madelyn is a Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts-inspired action-platformer whose “honorary assistant creative director” is a 7-year-old girl. Madelyn Obritsch wanted to be in Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts, so her dad, game designer Christopher Obritsch, decided to grant her wish—and involve her in the creative process. The…

Void Bastards is a strategy-shooter inspired by BioShock and System Shock 2. In it, you guide a group of prisoners through “derelict spaceships and myriad dangers.” You plot a course, study ship layouts, infiltrate ships, and fight/sabotage/distract your way through them. Also, your distraction tool is a kitty. Oh,…

Somewhere deep inside Valve’s labyrinthine compound of Steam-sustaining tubes, wires, and pipes, somebody is thanking their lucky stars for Artem Moskowsky. The self-described “bug hunter” came across a glitch that allowed him to generate thousands of free keys for any game on Steam. A lesser person might have kept…

Skatebird is a game about a bird who skateboards. Not sure what else you were expecting, really. In it, you skate around an “expansively tiny world,” do Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater-inspired tricks, and try to cheer up your “big,” probably human friend. It’ll be out sometime next year.

Since hearing about it at this year’s E3, I keep asking myself one question: what the hell is the The Quiet Man? Developed by Human Head Studios and Square Enix, every new trailer for the game was more confusing than the last. Now that the game is out, I finally have my answer. It is an FMV game. It is a brawler…

If I didn’t know Save Me Mr. Tako: Tasukete Tako-San was a tribute to retro handheld games, I could easily be convinced it was a long-lost Game Boy classic.

Disgaea 5, the latest in publisher Nippon Ichi Software anime tactics series, released on PS4 in 2015. Since then, NIS has been working to port it to other platforms, including Switch in 2017 and now, finally, PC. This version, called Disgaea 5: Complete, supposedly included all of the game’s downloadable content. It…

When you’re a busy monster hunter, it’s easy to focus on the next big thing, whether that’s sieges against golden dragons or getting caught up in challenging event quests. That means the game’s other option, arena quests are easy to ignore. I’d been putting them aside for a long time and it might be my biggest gaming…

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is, to hear people (including Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo) tell it, pretty good, despite some questionable narrative decisions. Last week, however, it committed a crime that some Steam users decided couldn’t be forgiven: a 34 percent off sale. Cue the review bombs.

I’m just gonna cut to the chase: The Hex is this year’s Frog Fractions, Undertale, or—perhaps most aptly, given that it’s from the same creator—Pony Island. It’s a game that makes confetti of genre conventions and reassembles the scraps into a surprising story about how we interact with games.

The Void Rains Upon Her Heart is an early access bullet-hell game available on PC. It’s all about earning randomized loot and learning to love the monsters you face. Random sequences of difficult bosses challenge the player to adjust their strategies, while special rewards augment your abilities and encourage…

On October 17, 2013, farcical indie adventure The Stanley Parable was released on Steam. It features an achievement called “Go Outside,” which requires not playing the game for five years. Today is October 17, 2018. Achievement unlocked?

Last night, I finished The Missing. My initial impression of the game was that it’s a sweet but extremely bloody puzzle-platformer, peppered with queer overtones. As I pressed forward, I found a game that was transgressive and shockingly frank in talking about LGTBQA+ issues. It’s been on my mind all morning.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey packs a lot of activities into its massive world, letting players wander to their heart’s content hunting down cultists or doing side-quests. As a result, the game’s main story is split into multiple branches. Frustratingly, this structure makes some of the game’s best quests and most…

It’s tough being a ship captain in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Naval combat is one of the game’s trickier aspects and while it’s always going to be tough, these tips should help you deal with any blockades or pirates you come across.

Does an overtly low-budget game in which a controversial politician smacks down black and gay people count as “straight up trolling” by Valve’s new anything-goes standards? Is it an effort to “incite and sow discord”—which Valve also recently said can be disqualifying? These are the questions surrounding Bolsomito 2K18…

Wandersong starts with bad news: the world is dying. The good news is that it is also packed with excellent people worth saving. Setting out from your tiny, colorful village, you solve puzzles and dispatch grumpy ghosts with music. It combines point and click adventure and rhythm games into an adorable experience full…

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey balloons the further you get into it, adding layers of complex systems from nation-conquest battles to mercenary bounties. These help give a sense of how fragile and war-torn Greece has become in the game’s storyline. But a later system is more devious, and an important addition to the…

A little more than a week ago, Steam developer HyperReuts was at rock bottom. The studio had given out 10,000 free keys for its multiplayer arena space game Evolvation, only for scammers to snap up a chunk of them. In response, HyperReuts tried to delete the offending keys, but in the process, it accidentally zapped…