New York Times critics recommended three very different video games released in May, including Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a turn-based role-playing game about a grieving family that left the critic emotionally shaken.
Also receiving Critic’s Picks were Doom: The Dark Ages, a grounded reinvention of the hellish shooter franchise, and What the Clash?, an addicting mobile game filled with humorous absurdity.
The three critics who banded together to play Elden Ring Nightreign, the punishing fantasy franchise’s first cooperative adventure, felt generally frustrated by the Fortnite-esque additions meant to speed up gaming sessions.
Here are three other games you may have missed this month:
Deliver at All Costs
Reviewed on the PlayStation 5. Also available on the PC and Xbox Series X|S.
I approach driving in video games with outlandish care — painstakingly trying to stick to the right lane and avoid pedestrians — while getting a feel for how much chaos the virtual world will tolerate. I keep up the charade until I inadvertently cause enough property damage that my reserve cracks and my domesticated psycho comes out.
It certainly didn’t take long for that moment to arrive in Deliver at All Costs, a spry game with a crisp, coastal visual style that captures America’s mid-20th-century love affair with cars and picturesque winding roads.
The game follows Winston Green, a 24-year-old gifted engineer with a shady past who has hit a rough patch in life. To catch up on his late rent, Winston talks himself into a job at We Deliver, a transportation company with a colorful clientele whose requests can’t help but loosen one’s morality. Over the dozen hours I’ve spent in the cutthroat delivery business, I’ve stolen packages from rival delivery services, helped a shady businessman offload rotten melons and driven around with a trail of napalm leaking behind my company truck.
Deliver at All Costs features spectacularly destructible environments, a pleasant soundtrack of easy jazz and surfer music, and a lightly entertaining story about persevering in a tough working environment. If you dig things steeped in oddball Americana, give it a spin.
— Christopher Byrd
The Midnight Walk
Reviewed on the PlayStation 5 and PlayStation VR2. Also available on the PC.
The occasionally unsettling beauty of The Midnight Walk’s handmade characters and landscapes is magnificently effective because of stirring yet creepy stop-motion animation. Its look is clearly inspired by Ray Harryhausen and Tim Burton, and some of the creatures — hooknosed, haunted, darkly cute — bear passing resemblances to those in the Oddworld series.
Yet The Midnight Walk is its own construction, a world made of 700 clay objects that inspire awe throughout a sometimes confounding dream world. The experience is better with a virtual reality headset; without one, the game’s unique feature — closing your eyes to move forward — made me feel as if I were spinning.
Within virtual reality, I shut my character’s eyes to banish monsters that would otherwise attack. Initially, it was satisfying to watch the horrifying creatures fade away. But moving through an adventure in a fantastical dream world alone is no fun.
Thankfully I met Potboy, a slightly cracked clay pot with holes for eyes and a prominent navel, like a thinner and shorter E.T. Potboy carried fire in its head and lit the way forward, a traveling companion and guide who helped bring optimism to this cruel ebony land.
The quirky narrative deals with abuse, loneliness and the lack of love. In Potboy’s case, it involves the perseverance needed to make the worst of life into a positive. Some of the other beings weren’t so adaptable. Despite that, there was hope in the darkness, a feeling that the blackness was actually a place that fosters love and community.
— Harold Goldberg
The Horror at Highrook
Available on PC.
You wouldn’t think a smattering of colorful cards laid out on a grid could properly represent the terror of exploring a haunted house, but The Horror at Highrook uses its tabletop mechanics to wonderfully spooky effect. On hand are four paranormal investigators intent to solve the mysterious disappearance of a family from a manor where something otherworldly has taken place.
The name of the game is investigation. Each character can be assigned to dig up the grounds of the manor, peer through its library stacks and even conduct dark rituals in its chapel. Little by little, a grand mystery is unraveled and everyone responds in a particular way. Class struggle is reflected in the way that the back-alley heavy, Atticus Hawk, dismisses the ivory-tower eccentricity of the occult specialist Scholar Vitali. Guilt and longing come to the surface in the ways that Doctor Caligar and Mecanist Astor work to rectify and put to bed past failures.
The game’s writing crafts a rich Lovecraftian world, and it doesn’t need much more than a two-dimensional floor plan and a few cards to do it. The manor’s ghouls and shambling zombies don’t feel any less threatening when contained within the tiny square portraits of a card. It’s a reminder that you don’t need glossy 3-D models and renderings to feel engrossed in a good story.
— Yussef Cole
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