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• Bloodborne
  • sleepysmiles: I’m very pleased at the difficulty of this game. It seems like a natural step up from Dark Souls and not an arbitrary one. It’s pleasantly surprising how the simple removal of your block button adds so much tension to each encounter
  • wourme: I was sold on Bloodborne the moment I encountered my first student. I still like Demon’s and Dark 1 better, but I’m glad I don’t have to choose and can simply play them all.
  • zeno: i’m pretty comfortable with declaring bloodborne the best game i’ve ever played, but it’s interesting how so little of the music does much of anything for me.
  • Doolittle: Bloodborne is the PS4 game if you liked an iota of Dark Souls.

• Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (also on: PC, Switch, XB1)
  • booji: It's not Symphony of the Night. That's OK. It shows off some of the weird problems of developing using other people's engines, but still is overall a pretty fun time. Just look up how to get the full ending; there's no point in wasting your own time trying to figure it out because it is silly.
  • Tony: you are looking at wonderful landscapes while cutting cardboard.

• Death Stranding (also on: PC)
  • Tulpa: I played for 2 hours in the middle of someone else's save, and I spent a lot of time learning the controls in the moment, falling down hills, chugging energy drinks and throwing jars full of piss at undead horrors. Game rules. Cutscenes looked like a bunch of tired Kojima shit so I recommend only playing on other people's saves so you don't have to experience those.
  • booji: it's pretty good Kojima shit if you happen to enjoy Kojima shit, though. Way more sincere than I expected. Also still pretty not great about women, but better than Ground Zeroes, so…?

• Dissidia Final Fantasy NT (also on: Arcade, PC)
  • Drem: Overall I’ve been finding it to just be a really cool game. I did not expect to like it as much as I do. The action feels good. Team Ninja has been developing action games for years and they made sure that carried over into Dissidia NT.

• Doom (a.k.a. Doom 4) (also on: Switch, XB1, PC)

• Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age

• Final Fantasy XV (also on: XB1, PC)

• Grand Theft Auto V (also on: 360, PC, PS3, XB1)

• Guilty Gear Xrd SIGN (also on: PC, XB1)

• The Last Guardian
  • Ni Go Zero Ichi: I don't even know what to fucking make of this game. It's got a few moments of classic Ueda brilliance (primarily in the last ~20% of this dozen-hour experience) buried underneath looming trash heaps of ill-conceived level design, monotonous video-gamey environments, poor controls and a barely-functioning game engine. It's so well-intentioned yet the bulk of the experience falls so painfully flat. For (sometimes) better and (often) worse, it's Ueda's purest homage yet to his beloved Another World.

• The Last of Us Remastered
  • Rudie: lol wat. murder dad will you stop murder? yes murder daughter. I believe you murder dad.
  • booji: played this game for like 20 minutes and then just couldn't handle the Prestiege Violent TV of it all.

• Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes (also on: PC, PS3, XB1)
  • Ni Go Zero Ichi: In retrospect, the one level you get here is probably better than anything that actually made it into Phantom Pain.

• Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (also on: PC, PS3, XB1)
  • Ni Go Zero Ichi: The worst best (or best worst?) game of the decade.

• Nier Automata (also on: PC, XB1)
  • rye: I actually like that this is a platinum game I can chill out with. I can be sloppy and messy yet still enjoy this premium movement and action.
  • Felix: my wife has been watching most of this (rare for her) and after the first hour of the third loop she turned to me and said “I hope you paid a lot of money for this game”
  • Bachelor: One of the hits I got doing an image search was a YouTube thumbnail that said “NIER AUTOMATA BUTTHOLE HOAX”. I didn’t watch that video, because I am a good man, but here I am telling you about it, so maybe I’m not that good.

• Persona 5 (also on: PS3)
  • booji: …or don't. Persona team continues to prove that while they want to engage with “issues”, they will almost always do it in a clumsy and bordering-on-reprehensible way. So don't expect any nuanced takes on the existence of women, sexual assault, or LGBT people. Really expect the opposite of that. The presentation is good though.

• Red Dead Redemption 2 (also on: PC, XB1)

• Republique (also on: PC, mobile)

• Sekiro (also on: PC, XB1)
  • Tulpa: Bottomline this is Shinobi Hawk’s Pro Ninja
  • BustedAstromech: I mentioned it above but it keeps rattling in my head how much this takes the encounter style western devs hav been working on in open world – the base camp with patrols and maybe a boss and multiple approaches, and a movement-empowered player – and by tightening every screw in sight, transforms it. Stealth is simplified even from modern action stealth, enemy awareness resets are much more generous, enemy communication is near entirely <30m to control base alert spreads, time-to-kill is so fast that the player can legitimately escape failed stealth before the base is alerted, camp bosses (Generals in this case) are so damn scary and so rewarding to stealth that they exert an enormous zone of danger, the enemy variety: crippled sentries, tiers of soldier, big heavies, sparse ranged units – so defined as to create real meaningful approach differences. The areas have clear cliff face, castle wall, and void boundaries so they can constrain routes and choices while still building magnificently vertical and complex areas and best of all, they reserve budget for one-shot enemies to spice up areas in a way almost nobody does since 2D games; an approach that values memorable moments over repeatable systemic characters, at a certain sparseness.
  • Anothersphere: this is a leaner cut than the meat trays before and everyone’s still thinking how it’s the same restaurant. Get at me

• Resident Evil 2 (also on: XBONE, PC)
  • 2501: I never played the original (fuck tank controls) but this remake is very very good. The “modernized” mechanics play like a greatest hits reel of all the best ideas from classic RE games (subweapons and large-scale progress-based environment changes from REmake, lite inventory management and weapon upgrades and precision aiming from RE4). Smart use of procedural difficulty and low-key RNG mechanics to lessen predictability and heighten tension. (Play it on Hardcore mode; you’ll suffer but you’ll thank me.) Modern AAA games not by FromSoft rarely feel so meticulous in their level design and demandingly tactical in their approach (watch yourself poring over maps to plot your route through danger zones, then try not to lose your head as you recalibrate your strategy on the fly). Only big criticism is that Leon doesn’t get quite enough stupid one-liners.

• Titanfall 2 (also on: PC, XB1)
  • Ni Go Zero Ichi: It's like Call of Duty meets Zone of the Enders with a little bit of Mirror's Edge. Whoa. I'm hearing a lot of heavy superlatives directed at the campaign and while I don't think it beats out the first two Modern Warfares, it is definitely Good. I like that the game periodically lets you exchange player-controlled snarky banter with your giant killer robot.
  • Felix: I am better at, and more engaged by, the multi in this than any other FPS since Quake 2. I'd have a hard time articulating what it does so well but it's certainly one of the best big-budget surprises I've had in a very long time. Plus, as everyone says, the campaign is basically perfect (if fundamentally mid-aughts and unambitious in its scope) too.

• Until Dawn
  • Doolittle: Until Dawn is a good take on the Telltale movie-game. It’s a worthwhile Redbox rental or sub-$10 purchase.

• Videoball (also on: Windows)

• Wolfenstein: The New Order (also on: 360, PC, PS3, XB1)
  • Ni Go Zero Ichi: Pretty much the last franchise and developer from which you'd expect actually good writing but that's (the artists formerly known as) Starbreeze for you. Basically the Inglorious Basterds of video games (and I don't even like Tarantino). In its winking pulpy excess it handles the topic of Nazism more responsibly than the vast majority of portrayals in popular media because it graphically depicts the full, unsanitized repulsiveness of both their actual beliefs and the atrocities committed under their regime, all via wacky grimdark alternate-history revenge fantasy. The mechanics are serviceable but they're not the main attraction. In conclusion, this game has a missable cutscene where you do peyote with an alternate-universe version of Jimi Hendrix in a secret resistance bunker underneath a statue of Hitler. Also you kill Nazis on the moon.

• Wolfenstein: The Old Blood (also on: PC, XB1)

• Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (also on: PC, Switch, XB1)
  • Ni Go Zero Ichi: The way this evolves the story and themes from The New Order is really clever and pretty bold (for a video game). The mechanical design has also been refined into something that, on harder difficulties, feels less like an old-school FPS and more like the closest thing AAA studio gaming has come to a true Hotline Miami-level tactical murder simulator. Which is really cool, if you have the stomach for it.

• Yakuza (series) (also on: it's complicated)
  • booji: I know you are going to probably start with Yakuza Zero (and really, that is OK) but I would totally tell people to go back and start with the original first game, except you have to be willing to put up iwht a hilariously expensive and unnecessary dub, a PS2 (or emulation), and some really boring PS2 design decisions that make the RPG nature of the series much more obvious. But if you do all that, I swear, it changes how you play Yakuza 0. You really only have to play the original first game (and not Kiwami) to get that effect, though Zero does have some good shout outs to other games in the series (mostly 2, but the Kiwami version of 2 is pretty great, so no big deal there). I can and will talk too much about this series. I am glad people are playing it finally. 6 was a great time.