In Shadow Man: Remastered, the world itself is the main hero. It is hellishly confusing, but extremely satisfying to figure out. Even with the addition of higher-resolution textures, it remains vague, which works in its favour: your imagination does the work. It’s colourful, yet dark and moody. While not wholly unique – we’ve seen similar examples of the combination of natural and mechanical elements in the depiction of otherworldly places – it still has its own style. It’s great!

Mechanically, the game is a 3D Metroid-like, which, given how rare those are, deserves some attention in its own right. And it’s a good one, provided you can tolerate its very hands-off approach. By that, I mean that it doesn’t provide any guidance beyond the bare minimum. The remastered version rectifies this to some extent by providing a lot more information than the original. I think not knowing where to go is one of the worst feelings in a video game. So why am I tolerating it here? Honestly, I have no idea.

I tried a non-remastered version, but I didn’t get very far. I think it’s fine, but there’s no reason to play it at this point. You won’t miss anything by playing the remastered version, and the quality-of-life improvements and restored content are very nice.

Right, the elephant in the room. It’s a character created by white people. It’s a game created by white people. One of the two black characters is voiced by a white actor. The culture they depict is clearly not their own. Problematic? Of course! More than that? It’s not for me to judge, but personally, I didn’t find it egregious.

Doom: The Dark Ages is basically a fantasy game now. Starting with Doom (2016), this iteration of the series has been playing with the fantasy/sci-fi duality established by the original Doom (1993) and has gradually leaned more towards fantasy. In fact, I can’t help but think of it as a fast-paced, first-person spell-slinging game rather than a shooter. It still abbreviates to FPS :)

I also can’t help but think how this series in a conversation with Metroid Prime games. They start on different sides. The Prime games are open world, and the Doom games are linear. But they meet somewhere in the middle, where exploring the world is tremendously satisfying.

The fact that the latest games in both series have more story, cutscenes, and NPCs is also very funny.

Froggy Hates Snow has a very satisfying snow-clearing mechanic, and sometimes, that’s all you need.

I was somewhat disappointed with Keeper. It’s a neat looking puzzle game with a number of turns, so to speak, but ultimately, I didn’t care about its story. That story also felt stuck between being very vague (there isn’t a single word spoken throughout) and a fully-fledged one. Not bad, just not for me.