PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series XS, Xbox One; Red Thread Games; Spotlight by Quantic Dream Dustborn tries to be more than just another narrative travel game, but its half-baked focus on serious topics weighs down great dialogue and beautiful character writing The story begins on the road, miles out from a state border in an alternative US. The stakes are clear, even when nothing else is: Pax, the player character, is a Black woman in her 30s, who has just completed a heist with her friends. The border means freedom. The police car telling you to pull over means trouble. Pax and co are Anomals, people who wield manipulative vocal abilities called vox. Pax can bend people to her will by making them feel bad, using abilities named “trigger” or “cancel”. Her ex-partner, Noam, can soothe people with an ability known as “gaslighting”. Dustborn certainly isn’t subtle in what it’s trying to say. Soon you encounter people who get infected by weaponised disinformation. Continue reading...

This cutesy and surprisingly intuitive brain teaser pushes the idea of the sliding-block puzzle to the very limits For Jemma, her whole life feels like a puzzle. Left on a stranger’s doorstep as a baby, she has never felt as if she fitted in, and is desperate to see what the world looks like outside her small town, which nobody ever leaves. More pertinently, whenever she moves, the whole world moves along with her – like sliding tiles, like a series of conveyor belts. It really is a puzzle getting her from A to B. Each scene in Arranger: A Role Puzzling Adventure is its own sliding-block puzzle, where you must think two or three steps ahead to move Jemma and the objects around her in the right directions. Some things, such as rocks and robot birds covered in purple static, don’t move alongside her, but everything else does. So you have to transport swords towards monsters that stand in the way, keys towards doors, bananas towards shy orangutans. Unless her way is blocked, when Jemma hits the end of a vertical or horizontal row she rematerialises at the other end, adding another layer of spatial logic. Continue reading...

PlayStation 4/5, Xbox, PC; Hollow Ponds/Annapurna Interactive Filling a field guide is the simple goal of this endearingly strange game, in which you float on a giant bird, collect gently surreal sea life, and shave sheep You might expect from the name that this would be a game about herding sheep, but it is significantly weirder than that. There are sheep, but they are fluffy flying sheep that float around after you as you ride the back of a giant, colourful bird. Now and then you shear them for wool with which to knit new jumpers and hats with pompoms, making the sheep look like naked purple hover-sausages with eyes. But the bulk of your flock is actually made up of sky fish. Or are they fish? Some are sinuous like eels, others squawk like chickens, others are feathered whales. As mentioned, it’s quite weird. Your job in Flock is to fill out a field guide full of these wide-eyed flying fishlike creatures, spotting them in the wild and then identifying them from short, variably obvious written clues (“floppy proboscis”, “vertical stripes”, “often mistaken for a loud radish”). They all resemble sea life through a gently surreal pop-art filter, but they’re so well-drawn that I developed a sense for the differences between a Cosmet and a Bewl, Thrips and Rustics. Some camouflage themselves among weeds or leaves, some flee your approach, some just sit there basking on rocks and clucking at you. You find whistles that teach your bird a song, and then you can collect them Pied-Piper-style into a cloud of creatures that trails in your wake. Flock is out on Wednesday; £15.99 Continue reading...