Gamers of the World

Zenless Zone Zero (ZZZ) is HoYoverse’s third game launch in four years. You’d think that HoYo’s formula would get stale with yet another free-to-play gacha RPG dropping just 15 months after the release of Honkai: Star Rail, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The developer has managed to create another familiar but distinct gameplay experience by once again learning from past missteps to deliver a game that is both iterative and innovative at the same time. The downside here, however, is that ZZZ puts several new and interesting elements together but forces you to spend the most time with the least interesting of the bunch.

Zenless Zone Zero has more style and aesthetic excellence than both Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, all in a much smaller package in terms of world size and scale of locations. At this point, Genshin Impact’s open-world has become almost too large and sprawling to facilitate a comfortable or compact mobile gaming experience, meaning it’s best experienced on PC or console. Meanwhile, Star Rail is the exact opposite because its turn-based combat and auto-battle features are a perfect fit for mobile devices. Zenless Zone Zero sits squarely in the middle of those two experiences by combining roguelike puzzle dungeons, fast-paced action combat, and chill life-sim activities into one varied gameplay loop.

The story also deviates from what we’ve come to expect from HoYoverse. The world-building is still strong, but it’s scaled back considerably. Instead of high-stakes conflicts with gods and higher powers, so far, Zenless Zone Zero has you follow the daily lives of two tech-genius siblings–Wise and Belle–as they find ways to make money legally and illegally. You get to pick which sibling you play as, but no matter who you go with, both remain in the story as characters who get regular dialogue. The main difference is that you choose what your protagonist says and control them while exploring the city of New Eridu.

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As the Switch moves into the twilight years of an especially lengthy lifespan, Nintendo has increasingly turned toward remasters of its back catalog to fill out the release calendar. This is the context for Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD, a remastered version of a relatively recent 2013 release on 3DS. The sequel is a game that served as a sharpened, refined take on the ideas presented by the first Luigi’s Mansion–and laid the groundwork for the even better Luigi’s Mansion 3–so having access to that piece of the series’ history untethered from the 3DS makes it feel that much more valuable. While the recency makes it feel less essential than some remasters of older classics like Metroid Prime or Super Mario RPG, it’s still just as fun to solve puzzles, schlurp ghosts into your jerry-rigged vacuum cleaner, and enjoy some gentle scares along the way.

The original Luigi’s Mansion was a cute diversion-verging-on-tech-demo that helped cement Luigi’s personality as Mario’s skittish and reluctantly heroic brother. Drafted against his will to catch a bunch of ghosts, it was a kid-friendly take on Resident Evil by way of Ghostbusters–even down to the tank controls, puzzles, and interconnected mansion setting. Luigi’s Mansion 2, by comparison, swaps out the single environment for a series of different buildings that all reside in one extremely haunted neighborhood called Evershade Valley. That gives the game a more disconnected, mission-based feeling than both its earlier and later entries, in exchange for environments that present very differently from each other and allow for the feeling of themed haunted houses: an ancient tomb, a creaky old snow lodge, and so on.

The mission structure focused on single goals that take around 15-20 minutes to complete seems primed for portable play on 3DS–the game’s original platform–and that gives Luigi’s Mansion 2 a particular rhythm. It’s easy to pick up and digest a stage or two at a time but harder to get lost in for long stretches of time without feeling like you’re going through the same steps over and over. A typical mission has you exploring a particular section of the building you’re investigating, usually needing to locate some MacGuffin to unlock a section, sucking up a few scattered ghosts, and taking part in at least one arena-style fight against several ghosts. Rinse, repeat.

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Though The Chinese Room has previously worked in the horror genre, I don’t think of the team as primarily a horror-centric development studio. Rather, I’ve long felt its name is synonymous with sadness. The throughline spanning games like Dear Esther, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, and even Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is a feeling of melancholy, longing, or even tragedy. Still Wakes The Deep continues this run of depressing games, which I mean as a compliment. By leaning into the studio’s forte, the game’s memorable horrors become more affecting hardships.

I’ve found it difficult to write about Still Wakes The Deep as I didn’t want to spoil its best aspect–the monster at the root of it all, which isn’t shown in any pre-launch materials. But then I discovered how the game has been advertised–“The Thing on an oil rig”–which seems to let me off the hook. As it turns out, that elevator pitch is exactly what this game is like. Blue-collar workers stranded with a creature of unknown origin is a classic horror premise–Alien’s “truckers in space” is essentially this, too. The Chinese Room pulls from these genre titans to tell a story of its own and places it all in an especially uncommon setting.

It’s Christmas 1975. Aboard an oil rig near Scotland, Caz McLeary evades the personal problems awaiting him back on the mainland by joining his buddy and several others toiling away at sea. The game’s early moments set the scene well, with large, intimidating human-made machinery creaking and bellowing amid a storm. Indoors, claustrophobic corridors are plastered in cautionary signage that reminds players of just how dangerous and oppressive an oil rig is–even without a monster showing up. Fulfilling any role in such an environment seems to merit copious hazard pay. As waves crash around the perimeter and rain-soaked ladders climb to platforms that feel more like thrill rides when you stand atop them, the game’s message seems clear: This place is not safe, and humanity doesn’t belong there.

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