One of the biggest video game stories of the year — the delay of Grand Theft Auto VI — is about a hotly anticipated title that will not be playable in 2025. But there still has been plenty to enjoy in the first half of this year. Here’s an alphabetical list of the 10 games that have wowed our critics most.
The Alters
When the sole survivor of a space mining expedition initiates a procedure on his ship’s quantum computer that allows him to select an alternative life path, he must learn to live with the other selves he might have been.
The Alters, by the studio behind Frostpunk and This War of Mine, is an extraordinary survival game that explores miscommunication, human fallibility and conflicting motivations. By contrast with so many games that urge perfectionism, it wants you to embrace your errors and remember that out of mistakes, good things can happen. (PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S)
Avowed
With its first-person dungeon-crawling, two-handed combat, and prolific spells and skills, Avowed owes much to role-playing games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. What’s novel is the chance to play as, if not entirely a villain, an unsympathetic tool of power.
Your character is the envoy of a distant emperor who has arrived in the untamed Living Lands to root out the source of a mysterious plague and soften the ground for your benefactor’s future colonization efforts. You can try toeing the line and opt for a less violent, if no less hegemonic, version of control. Or you can reject your birthright, toss off the yoke of legacy and try to forge your own path forward. (PC, Xbox Series X|S)
Blue Prince
The puzzles — logic riddles, word games, math problems and more — in Blue Prince start with its title, a play on words that takes on increasing significance as you unravel its parable of the price of dissent under autocratic rule. You are poised to inherit an eccentric manor from your great-uncle if you can prove yourself by locating its rumored 46th room.
Complicating the assignment is that the manor’s layout changes each day, although some is within your control: Each time you open a door, you may choose one of three rooms it leads into. At first you find ordinary chambers like the hallway or the den; deeper inside you begin to uncover tantalizing rarities like the clock tower and the secret garden. (PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S)
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which draws inspiration from Japanese role-playing games like Final Fantasy in addition to the viciously challenging Souls series, is a stunning debut title whose story moves from a grandiose save-the-world premise to a smaller drama about a grieving family.
Throughout the Paris-like city of Lumière, 33-year-olds are wearing floral necklaces on occasion of an annual ritual when a mysterious figure known as the Paintress will write the number on the monolith that triggers their disappearance. In this difficult game, which uses turn-based combat with real-time elements, you embark on an expedition to kill the Paintress and free the city. (PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S)
Deltarune
Very early on in Deltarune, as a group of lovable misfits tread through the darkness to bring balance back to their world, the question one could ask is, How could these “prophesied heroes” save anything, even themselves? Perhaps that feeling of doubt surfaces because the pixel artwork is reminiscent of 1980s Atari visuals.
But the simplicity makes these sprites more endearing in a stunningly imaginative role-playing adventure. This merry merging of computer dots transforms into beings who are edgy, flirty and multifaceted. (PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Switch, Switch 2)
Expelled!
Over the course of her very bad day, the heroine of Expelled! will have to brave all manner of indignities to avoid being kicked out of school. A classmate has claimed that the heroine pushed her out of an upper-story window, and the protagonist must chat with students, teachers and staff members to vanquish her rivals and burnish her social standing.
Expelled! feels like a visual novel crossed with a roguelite game. Players are incentivized to relive the school day several times because information gleaned in one playthrough carries over to the next, opening up new lines for investigation. (iOS, PC, Switch)
Keep Driving
Set in the fantasized memories of nascent adulthood in the early 2000s, Keep Driving is a fun, low-stakes adventure about hopping in a car and going on a long drive somewhere, or nowhere in particular. Your ostensible task is to make your way to a music festival a few towns over. To simulate the hazards you’ll encounter along the way, the game cleverly retrofits classic card game mechanics.
A virtual deck of cards, each card with its own thematically appropriate skill — “Drive Fast” uses extra fuel to clear obstacles — will help you make it past slow-moving tractors, flocks of sheep and even distracting rainbows. (PC)
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II explores what it means to simulate medieval life down to the granular detail. Sword fighting will be grueling at first. Traveling without a horse will take forever. And you must keep yourself dressed, fed and bathed the whole time.
This may sound like a lot of work, but the game’s endless systems manage to make its hardships engaging and fill its world with nuance and rich detail. (PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S)
Split Fiction
The cooperative game Split Fiction is a manic mash-up of science fiction and fantasy that brings together space marines, trolls, cyberninjas, dragons, robots, magical cats and other stock figures. Over eight chapters, players hopscotch among settings to help two aspiring authors escape a computer simulation that has turned their imaginations against them.
The game’s influences are legion: Contra, Marble Madness, Metroid, Portal, Mario, Halo, Dark Souls and more. Early stages find the pair in a bucolic forest and a neon-lit cyberpunk city, where the smooth camerawork hints at the astonishing kinetic sequences to come. (PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S)
What the Clash?
In the year’s most addictive, fast-paced mobile game, a jolly, round-bellied character with a hand for a head uses a green, flopping fish as a table tennis ball. It later shoots arrows at a bull’s-eye that pops up from a toaster like an Eggo waffle.
What the Clash?, inspired by Nintendo’s irreverent WarioWare microgames, keeps your attention by keeping things moving. It’s possible to win a best-of-five match during a commercial break, and one game may take 30 frantic seconds. The tense battles are about balanced play and sanguine oddness. (Apple Arcade)
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