Is the cat the savior of a dying planet? Or is the cat just a cat who happens to be the incidental shepherd of historic change? Like I said, typical cat stuff. The game’s creators keep your cat’s direct involvement ambiguous. But most engagement happens on your behalf through an adorable, English-speaking, artificially intelligent drone named B-12. Your cat participates in a harrowing adventure set in a dystopian, cyberpunk underworld in which robots echo the lives of their long-dead human counterparts.

You stretch, scratch, and occasionally leap between ledges at perilous heights. You don’t talk like Garfield or wink at the camera like Bubsy. (Hey, video games have come a long way since the SNES!) Developer MNKY also created bonus levels inspired by other retro classics, like Space Harrier, emphasizing its knack for refueling once exciting genres that have spent way too long collecting dust in the garage. Ex-Zodiac’s creators have done what Nintendo couldn’t for the past couple of decades: bottle the original magic of the space flight franchise and add just enough tweaks to make the adventure palatable for our collective evolved tastes. My love for the Star Fox series has evaporated with each new entry, to the point that I began to wonder if I ever really enjoyed those games or if I just liked chunky ’90s 3D graphics. If you look closely, you can spot all of these delicious individual ingredients, but when slurped from a big spoon all you’ll taste is one distinct flavor.

Cult of the Lambĭeep breath: Cult of the Lamb is Animal Crossing meets Hades meets the dark side of Catholic history meets Happy Tree Friends meets American cultism meets European occultism meets Dark Souls meets 1980s Satanic Panic meets Fractured Fairy Tales meets the waking dreams of Peter Molyneux.Ĭult of the Lamb is like a stew. Hero Kazuma Kiryu wants to make the world a better place, one city block at a time. Don’t be fooled by all of the violent combat and seedy locales this series (and especially this entry) has more heart and joy than 99% of games from big-budget publishers.

A sort of prequel to the series, the adventure takes place in 1980s Japan and provides lots of colorful backstories. If you don’t have time for every game, or just need a place to start, we recommend Yakuza 0. Which is to say, the portable Steam Deck provides the best chance at seeing the entirety of this Japanese gangster epic, especially in the form of short missions on lunch breaks.

The Yakuza series spans hundreds of hours across seven mainline entries, along with a handful of spinoffs.

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