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Carissa is a high-powered marketing executive that has given her entire life to ascending the corporate ladder, at the expense of her social life, romance, her video game hobby, and even her precious anime figures. On the day of her big promotion to VP of Marketing, a celebrating Carissa is accidentally run over by a truck driver, the playable character. Instead of dying, she is magically transported to the fantasy realm of Talinfold and morphed into an armoured elven warrior.

The rush of a train speeding through a forest, the anxiety of borderline out-of-control turns, the thrill of landing that last-second heelflip, and the surprise of completing an objective you weren’t gunning for: these are some of the feelings Denshattack! elicits. It’s easy at first to dismiss the game with “it’s Tony Hawk but trains”, but there’s so much more going on here.

Another day, another defeat for physical media fans everywhere. On 1st of July 2026, Sony revealed its intentions to end production of physical game discs for PlayStation games in January 2028. From that date, new PlayStation games will only be available in digital formats, including those copies still sold at retailers, which will now come as download codes in a case.

One of my big failures as a preeminent review artist is my bitchy, grouchy, temperamental moods. When the PC-based platformer Valkyrie Saga came to me in January almost everything poised about it being a relaxing, meditative platformer soured me. This is the weakness of a life lived in excess: something funny about it is that two months spent playing AAA games out of bitter curiosity at the state of what $70 video games looked like drove me right back into its wings — er, arms.

Mystery adventure games are having a huge moment right now. This phenomenon can be seen around the world: audiences are going crazy for games such as Urban Myth Dissolution Center, the Paranormasight duology, and The Roottrees are Dead. The developers of the latter, itself an open love letter to some modern-day classics of the genre, decided to capitalise on that and help a cult hit from last year get in front of some more eyeballs.

In fact, there are so many games and genres Letter Lost is sort of like, you could fill a bingo card. There’s the misty, Lovecraftian atmosphere; the rogue-lite meets Majora’s Mask time loop structure; I would even argue that the wide amount of player choice gives an immersive sim vibe, though it never quite delves into pure roleplaying mechanics.

From Vampyr in 2018 to Tell Me Why in 2020 to Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden in 2024, developer Don’t Nod is no stranger to ambitious games with high fidelity graphics similar to blockbuster games. True to the studio’s record, the presentation in Aphelion is excellent and rivals some of this console generation's most realistic-looking experiences.

The game's tutorial challenges deserve praise, as they avoid the common issue of being bare bones or hand-holding. They force players to master core mechanics to survive. If you fail to ferry troops between heroes or neglect to split your unit stacks, you will learn the value of those mechanics the hard way when giant insects tear your army apart in seconds.

D-topia is a welfare state where all baseline necessities for living — food, shelter, healthcare — are provided as a given, making work at the Factory, a facility that doesn’t produce anything other than a series of quite easy daily puzzles, optional (and giving the player an out if they want to skip this phase for any reason).

With apologies for the terrible pun, I’ll explain myself: as someone who picked this game up for review in the midst of starting a new Fields of Mistria save (come to me, 1.0!), I’d like to say I have some experience with the genre — and I really don’t think I’ve ever seen a so-called “cozy” farming sim be as unabashedly mean-spirited as Moonlight Peaks. Beneath the cutesy façade lives incomprehensible vitriol for the player, showing itself in every crevice despite my doubts it was ever intended.