IO Interactive’s young-Bond origin trades Hitman’s sandboxes for something more linear and cinematic, and while I get it, I did miss the open-ended scheming. The opening sequence is a super satisfying and Patrick Gibson’s cocky not-yet-007 is great, but the pacing is very stop-start, forever pausing to hand control back to a cutscene. The set pieces are gloriously bombastic, but half the time the game seems to be playing itself. The most confident Bond game in decades, and great for what it is, I just wish it trusted me to drive it more.

ZA/UM’s follow-up to Disco Elysium is an espionage RPG built from the same mechanical bones: isometric, dialogue-heavy, sharp and surreally written. There are things to like here: the exert and ailment systems, and some dramatic encounters. The new setting of Portofiro is more populous than Revachol, but I suspect fewer of its faces will stay with me. Despite the name, it doesn’t fully commit to being a spy game; it’s Disco in a trenchcoat, and the shadow of everything that happened at ZA/UM never really lifts. The art and writing are legitimately good - from any other studio, unambiguously so - certainly Anton Vill’s artwork is extraordinary. Strip away the context and it’s an uncontroversially good game - I just can’t tell how much of the distance I feel is the game falling short, and how much is conflicted grief for what could have been.

June 9’s update will be the last content Destiny 2 ever receives, with Bloomberg reporting significant layoffs to follow as Bungie winds down the development team - and reportedly, most of the studio found out at the same time as the rest of us. No Destiny 3 is in the works, no successor project has been greenlit, and two already-announced expansions have been cancelled. Resources are being redirected to Marathon, which hasn’t found its footing since launch. Destiny 2 has had a rough few years, so none of this lands as a shock - but it stings all the same… end of an era.

Poncle takes the Vampire Survivors build fantasy and drops it into a first-person dungeon-crawling deckbuilder, and… it works really well! The one-more-run pull is intact, the synergies get proper silly, and the genre shift adds genuine decision-making rather than removing it. Easy recommendation.

Capcom’s long-awaited sci-fi action-adventure - announced in 2020, delayed indefinitely in 2023, finally here and better than expected. The primary draw is obviously the hacking-grid-while-in-combat mechanic: it sounds fiddly but works surprisingly well in practice, and the game layers in new ideas at a good clip. The dialogue is a bit on-the-nose and the story hits familiar beats, but it’s well-paced, short, and the collectables are genuinely fun to chase. After playing the demo I didn’t expect to get much more out of this, but really glad to’ve been proven wrong.

Sony Pictures has confirmed an R-rated animated adaptation of FromSoftware’s Bloodborne, with studio exec Sanford Panitch promising it’ll stay “very true” to the game’s gothic brutality. It’s co-produced by PlayStation Productions, Lyrical Animation, and YouTuber Seán “JackSepticEye” McLoughlin. Amazing we’re getting a film before 60fps, but we’ll take it!

Pearl Abyss’s MMO roots are all over this - the progression systems, the menu clunk, the forgettable story - but what that DNA also buys is a staggering amount of content with genuine variety. The world is massive and beautiful, clearly built on a love of BOTW and RDR2, though the “immersive” interactions don’t always land and the movement, even post-patch, still isn’t where it needs to be. I also wish they’d just given us a character creator. There’s a lot to improve, but somehow it doesn’t matter a whole lot: the world has that rare, old-fashioned wanderlust that keeps you riding toward the next horizon just to see what’s there.

Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel’s long-awaited tactics roguelite is here and it may very well prove to be their best work. It looks like a silly little cat game - and it is - but underneath is a staggeringly deep mix of Final Fantasy Tactics-style combat, roguelite progression, cat breeding genetics, life sim management and draft-based build crafting that just keeps opening up the further you go. Every run surfaces new synergies, new absurdity, new reasons to keep breeding nightmare cats. Wildly impressive, insanely moreish. It really feels like the culmination of what a couple of gamedesign nutters have been building towards.

Team Ninja’s return to the franchise is a confident evolution. The dual Samurai and Ninja style system adds real depth to an already unbelievably satisfying combat engine, and the ‘open field’ structure works far better IMO. It is, by a wide margin, the easiest Nioh - which is a little disappointing - but the trade-off is a different kind of fun: less punishing, more expressive, and very hard to put down.

An incremental game about growing berries and feeding them to a hole… and it’s far more compelling than that sounds. The loop is absurdly addictive, the presentation has just enough creep to keep you curious, and the whole thing is over in about 10 hours before it outstays its welcome. Great little game.