The long-awaited System Shock remake at last has a precise release date, but it's one that marks yet another delay. Publisher Prime Matter previously planned to release the game sometime this month. "We had hoped to bring the game to market by the end of March, but that turned out to be just beyond our reach; we are after all merely human (unlike Shodan!)," it said.

Now, the game is scheduled to hit Steam, GOG and the Epic Games Store on May 30th. It will cost $40. Early buyers will get a copy of System Shock 2: Enhanced Edition at no extra cost when Nightdive Studios' port of that game arrives.

However, there's more disappointing news for those who've been waiting for the System Shock remake to come to consoles. It will land on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S sometime after May. Prime Matter says it will reveal more details when they become available.

The remake of the 1994 first-person RPG has been a long time coming. Nightdive first announced it in 2015 and we got our first look at it the following year. In early 2021, the studio said System Shock would arrive that summer, which obviously didn't come to pass.

According to Prime Matter, the latest version will retain the gameplay of the influential original game while upgrading the visuals, audio, controls and interface. Nightdive is overhauling the hacking feature and introducing fresh enemies, while the revamped combat includes a dismemberment system. You can check out a slice of System Shock now, as there's a PC demo available.

Activision is attempting to quell anxious Call of Duty: Mobile fans after a legal filing last week suggested the studio is already planning the game's demise. In a tweet today, the Call of Duty: Mobile team said it planned to continue supporting game "for the long haul," calling it an important part of the franchise. 

The long-term future of Call of Duty: Mobile came into question on March 8th, as part of ongoing legal negotiations in the UK over Microsoft's proposal to purchase Activision-Blizzard for just under $69 billion. Microsoft has been repeatedly downplaying Activision's power in the video game industry in an attempt to thwart anti-trust concerns from the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, and the studio applied the same treatment to Activision-Blizzard mobile games in a legal filing last week. 

Specifically, Microsoft's response said, "CoD: Mobile is expected to be phased out over time (outside of China) with the launch of Warzone Mobile."

Warzone Mobile is scheduled to come out this year, bringing the Call of Duty battle royale experience to Android and iOS devices. Warzone Mobile represents Activision's attempt to unify the Call of Duty franchise, sharing technology, progression, socialization and payments among the annual mainline games, Warzone and Warzone Mobile. Meanwhile, Call of Duty: Mobile has its own battle pass and seasons.

The tweet from the Mobile team is intended to keep existing players invested. It doesn't delve into specifics about how long the game's lifespan will be, and it doesn't directly address Microsoft's suggestion that the game will eventually be shut down everywhere except China. But, it promises Call of Duty: Mobile will be sticking around for a while longer.

"We ... intend to continue supporting the game with a robust roadmap of fresh new CODM content, activities and updates for the long haul," the statement said.

The small development studio behind mobile standouts Alto’s Adventure and Alto’s Odyssey is teasing its next game. Laya’s Horizon will be a Netflix Games title from indie studio Snowman, known for the satisfyingly addictive gameplay of the Alto series.

The brief trailer showcases a game world on a seaside landscape. The scenery could easily be a lower-poly version of Breath of the Wild, as the camera pans back to reveal windmills, hot-air balloons and jagged cliffs. Ultimately, we glimpse a person in a cape or flying suit perched atop the landscape who we can only assume is the playable protagonist.

The trailer doesn’t reveal anything about Laya’s Horizon gameplay or its release date. However, a description reads, “A whole new world is just beyond the horizon…” In addition, a representative for Snowman told Engadget, “While we’re not quite ready to share details about the game yet, we can say that it’s an entirely new IP and something we’ve been working on for a long time.”

Netflix’s unconventional move into mobile gaming has spawned a quality library of over 40 Android and iOS games, none including ads or microtransactions. The games are all free to download and play for subscribers.

After a lengthy drought, Advance Wars-style strategy games are enjoying something of a resurgence. On April 21st, Nintendo will release Advance Wars 1+2 Re-Boot Camp, a remake of the two Game Boy Advance games that started the series. It turns out strategy fans can also look forward to a new Wargroove title, with publisher Chucklefish announcing a sequel to the Advance Wars-inspired game from 2019.

Wargroove 2 doesn’t have a release date yet, but when the game is ready, it will be available on Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam. This time around, Robotality, a studio best known for its work on 2019’s Pathway, is handling development duties. According to the Wargroove 2’s Steam page, the sequel will feature new factions and units for players to command, as well as three single-player campaigns to complete. Chucklefish is also promising a roguelike mode. Additionally, the game will ship with an enhanced level editor that will allow players to create their own maps, cutscenes and campaigns.

If you haven’t played the original game yet, Wargroove is currently 70 percent off on Steam. That’s the largest discount Chucklefish has ever offered on the game.

Sony has laid out more concerns about Microsoft's planned takeover of Activision Blizzard in its latest response to the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). Sony has opposed the deal from the start. Now, it's suggesting that Microsoft could (perhaps unintentionally) kneecap the performance and quality of Call of Duty on PlayStation, which might result in fans switching to Xbox. 

"Microsoft might release a PlayStation version of Call of Duty where bugs and errors emerge only on the game’s final level or after later updates," the letter (PDF) reads. "Even if such degradations could be swiftly detected, any remedy would likely come too late, by which time the gaming community would have lost confidence in PlayStation as a go-to venue to play Call of Duty. Indeed, as Modern Warfare II attests, Call of Duty is most often purchased in just the first few weeks of release. If it became known that the game’s performance on PlayStation was worse than on Xbox, Call of Duty gamers could decide to switch to Xbox, for fear of playing their favourite game at a second-class or less competitive venue."

Sony claims there wouldn't be a viable way for it or the CMA to assess how "Microsoft chooses to allocate its resources and the quality/quantity of engineers it devotes to the PlayStation version of Call of Duty to ensure that SIE would be treated fairly and equally." Degrading the quality of Call of Duty on PlayStation, intentionally or not, perhaps wouldn't be the wisest course of action, as The Verge points out. A buggy Call of Duty release on PlayStation would probably lead to a bigger backlash against Microsoft and Activision than Sony.

In any case, Microsoft noted in its latest response to the CMA (PDF) that it has offered to "provide Sony with parity on release date, content, features, upgrades, quality and playability with the Xbox platform." That is, if Sony accepts Microsoft's proposed 10-year agreement to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation. Microsoft would be willing to agree to a third-party assessor to oversee the platform parity.

Sony's letter reiterates its concern that Microsoft would make Call of Duty a Game Pass exclusive and away from PlayStation. Again, that's something Microsoft has refuted. “As we have said all along: it makes zero business sense to take Call of Duty off of PlayStation,” Microsoft Competition Law Group corporate vice president Rima Alaily recently told Axios.

It will be a while yet before we know for sure whether Microsoft will be allowed to buy Activision Blizzard. The CMA is set to make a final ruling on the deal by April 26th. It has millions of Microsoft and Activision documents, and thousands of emails from the public to take into account, according to Sony. The CMA raised concerns about the deal in February, suggesting it could "harm UK gamers" and lead to a "substantial lessening of competition in gaming consoles."

Other major regulators have yet to rubberstamp the takeover, including in the US, where the Federal Trade Commission has attempted to block it. However, reports suggest the European Union is set to give the merger the green light following news that Microsoft will bring Call of Duty and other games to Nintendo and GeForce Now platforms.

In case you're wondering, Microsoft's letter details how Activision would get Call of Duty games to run on Nintendo Switch, which is much less powerful than PlayStation and Xbox consoles. It would do so "by optimizing the display resolution, in-game texture resolution, reducing the rendering speed (i.e., frames per second) and simplifying advanced rendering techniques (e.g., raytracing, shadow, lighting and antialiasing techniques)." In other words, it'd make the game look and run worse than on other systems.

In the meantime, it seems Call of Duty fans have another bizarre crossover coming their way soon. A teaser posted on the series' Twitter account shows Shredder from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and a date of March 21st. 

The Microsoft-Activision Blizzard saga is still trundling on. As the companies try to push through Microsoft's proposed $68.7 billion takeover, some fascinating details are spilling out of documents that various parties are submitting to regulators. The latest is an intriguing update about the future of Call of Duty on mobile.

In a written response to the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which recently suggested that the planned merger could lead to a "substantial lessening of competition in gaming consoles," Microsoft says that "Call of Duty: Mobile is expected to be phased out over time (outside of China) with the launch of Warzone Mobile." The letter (PDF) notes that Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studios developed and owns the current game.

Warzone Mobile is slated for release later this year. As GamesRadar points out, Call of Duty: Mobile has its own distinct seasons and battle pass. Warzone Mobile will hook into the cross-progression system of the PC and console versions of the battle royale game. There won't be cross-play between Warzone Mobile and the other versions.

It makes sense for Activision to want to unify the Call of Duty ecosystem, but it's unclear exactly what phasing out CoD: Mobile will mean for players and all the stuff they unlock in that game. Engadget has contacted Activision Blizzard for comment.

The PlayStation VR2 delivers one of the best virtual reality experiences you can find—if you can stomach the $599 cost (on top of an already expensive console). That was the crux of our review a few weeks ago. But our impressions of the headset were also limited by the games we were able to preview. Since then, Sony has officially launched PS VR2 support for Gran Turismo 7, and Capcom has done the same for Resident Evil Village. Both are exclusive showpieces for the PlayStation VR2 (RE Village also has an unofficial PC VR mod), and exemplify everything Sony got right with this new hardware.

Now, I'm not much of a racing sim player, I'd much rather be zooming around Forza Horizon's open worlds, or revisiting the glory days of Ridge Racer Type 4 and Burnout Paradise. But with PS VR2 support, Gran Turismo 7 feels like a completely different game. In VR, you're right in the driver's seat — you can almost feel Polyphony Digital's obsessive attention to detail. The game also feels more exhilarating, as it delivers a far greater sense of speed (a consequence of having your entire field of vision consumed by the world of GT7).

PlayStation

I've always appreciated the Gran Turismo games from afar, but there was a stiffness to the actual racing experience that kept me away. GT7 doesn't fully fix that flaw, but it's less pronounced in virtual reality. The combination of the Dual Sense controller and the PS VR2's built-in haptics delivered a genuinely realistic driving experience, I could feel bumps in the road in my hands and occasional feedback from hitting walls or bumping into opponents. (I never said I was a great virtual driver.) I'm sure Gran Turismo obsessives would take away even more from the virtual reality experience, especially if they're using a decent steering wheel controller.

The more time I spent in GT7 VR, the more I appreciated the little details in the game, similar to my time with Flight Simulator VR. Instead of changing camera angles or hitting a button to scope out the competition, you simply look at your side and rear view mirrors. When you're changing gears, your in-game avatar correctly shifts between the steering wheel and shifter. I occasionally had to avert my eyes from the sun while rounding a corner, a testament to the bright 4K OLED display in the PSVR2.

At one point, I was blasting down a straightaway as the sun peeked through clouds behind me, its brightness perfectly reflected in my rear view mirrors. It cast realistic shadows throughout the world, and it was so bright I couldn't properly use that mirror – just like real life! While the game doesn't look perfect in VR — there are some noticeably low-res elements in some tracks, like guardrails, signage and audiences — it's good enough to make you feel like you're actually behind a turbo-charged monster.

There's no visible ray tracing while you're playing in virtual reality, but you still get an eye-full of that realistic lighting during replays, which are projected on the PS VR2's simulated 2D screen. You can also get an up-close look at the cars in your garage, which use ray tracing to deliver achingly perfect reflections and shadows. It's the closest you'll get without stepping into a luxury car dealer.

When it comes to Resident Evil Village, I expected Capcom to deliver a worthwhile VR experience after seeing what it did with RE7, one of the best titles on the original PS VR. Well, the company didn't disappoint. Thanks to the increased horsepower of the PlayStation 5, and the higher fidelity of the PS VR2, Resident Evil Village is transformed into a living nightmare in virtual reality. There should be a warning for people already skittish of survival horror games: Play at your own peril.

Just like with Gran Turismo 7, virtual reality lets you appreciate the work that went into Resident Evil Village in entirely new ways. Walking through the game's creepy Eastern European village is even more chilling when it fills your field of view. You can always look away from a 2D screen, in VR you're forced to confront the horrors in front of you. (Sometimes closing your eyes isn't enough, not when you can hear the werewolf-like creatures skittering around the cottage you're hiding in.)

Since it's a first-person game, Resident Evil Village acquits itself well to VR. Exploration is smooth and not nausea-inducing, thankfully. And fighting off the game's various baddies is all the more thrilling when you're realistically aiming guns and other weapons. And yes, Lady Dimitrescu, the tall vampire woman who launched a thousand memes on the internet, is indeed very tall and imposing in VR.

I didn't have time to play through all of Resident Evil Village in virtual reality, but my first few hours with the game left a striking impression. Perhaps the future of virtual reality depends more on games like this, which can be enjoyed both as traditional 2D titles and with immersive headsets. We looked to Half Life Alyx to prove flagship VR games were possible. But what if we just need to think about bringing VR into more flagship games?

The more time I spent with the PS VR2, the more frustrated I became with the state of the virtual reality industry. Everything I said in my review remains true: VR feels stagnant, and another expensive headset isn't going to fix that. Maybe it's okay if VR gaming never truly becomes mainstream, just like how not everyone plays racing games with steering wheels, or people can enjoy fighting games without expensive arcade sticks. Perhaps VR can just be another accessory — albeit one that takes a significant amount of development resources to support.

Gran Turismo 7 and Resident Evil Village both prove that the PlayStation VR2 is a gateway to truly immersive virtual reality gaming. But a part of me still dreams for PC compatibility. While it's understandable why Sony may want to lock down its hardware, it's sort of like forcing a lion to live in a small zoo. The PS VR2 can't truly roar until it taps into the wild world of PC VR, which offers more experimental games and far faster graphical hardware than the PS5. If Sony ever wants to return to its innovator roots, it needs to take more chances.

Nintendo has taken Wii U titles Mario Kart 8 and Splatoon offline indefinitely while it attempts to resolve security issues. "This network service is currently unavailable due to urgent maintenance required to fix a vulnerability related to online play," reads a message posted to Nintendo's website at 11:30PM ET on Thursday. "We do not yet have information on when network services can be restored. We apologize for any inconvenience caused."

As VGC notes, the vulnerability could be related to an exploit that allows an attacker to take control of a victim's system simply by way of being matched with them in an online multiplayer game. Dataminer OatmealDome suggested the issue is “almost certainly” due to ENLBufferPwn.

Mario Kart 7 on the 3DS was previously vulnerable to that exploit. Several Switch games apparently were too, including Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Nintendo Switch Sports and Splatoon 2 and 3. Nintendo has seemingly patched all of those titles to protect them against the exploit.

A video posted by YouTuber PabloMK7 in December shows ENLBufferPwn in action on Mario Kart 7. It's used to inject custom firmware onto the targeted console. PabloMK7 wrote on GitHub that "it would be theoretically possible" to steal an account or credit card information and to record a victim using the 3DS' mic and cameras.

With nearly 8.5 million copies sold, Mario Kart 8 was the biggest-selling game on the Wii U. The original Splatoon sold almost 5 million. Those who are still playing the games on the discontinued system might be disappointed that the online features are currently unavailable, but it seems Nintendo was left with little choice but to take them offline for now.

The issue emerged only a few weeks before Nintendo shuts down the Wii U and 3DS eShops. After March 27th, owners of the systems won't be able to make purchases on the digital storefronts, but they'll still be able to download titles they previously bought. Meanwhile, Nintendo just revealed the latest courses that are coming to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on Switch next week as part of the Booster Course Pass.

In recent years, we’ve seen an influx of self-proclaimed “cozy games,” video games explicitly designed to invoke good vibes. Being cozy, however, isn’t the same as being good. To help those who could use some help winding down, we’ve rounded up a selection of games that purposefully deemphasize fail states, violence, overwhelming grinds, intense competition and other aggressive urges, but aren’t overly cute for the sake of it or so stripped-down that they’re boring.

Stardew Valley

Apart from being one of our favorite couch co-op games, the farming life sim Stardew Valley is also notable for its relaxing qualities. It’s a game that’s willing to meet you at your pace: If you want to putter around your farm, casually chat up townsfolk, brew beer or fish for a few hours, you can. (On the flipside, if you want to turn your land into a model of ruthless efficiency as soon as possible, the experience will be more overwhelming, and the story will have a darker undercurrent.) It all starts a bit slow, but there’s no external force rushing you, and the game’s trajectory of progress always points upward. It’s an alternate little life, one that gives you the choice to take it easy.

Buy for: Switch, PS4, Xbox, PC
Length: 90 hours

Tetris Effect

Tetris Effect is, in essence, a prettier version of the falling-block puzzle game that has compelled the globe since the mid-’80s. Its spacey pop soundtrack and themed boards have an ethereal, almost spiritual quality, one that fits neatly with the trance-like condition Tetris can induce. (This helps explain where the title comes from.)

To be clear, Tetris is not the most relaxing game in the abstract. The way it makes you scramble to fix your past decisions is part of its magic, and several modes in Tetris Effect specifically thrive on stress. Others, however, are explicitly designed to tap into the game’s zen aspects. “Chill Marathon,” for one, simply resets your score upon failure instead of giving you a game over. And since Tetris itself comes as second-nature to an unusually large amount of people, we’ll make an exception for it here. It can be difficult, but even in failure, Tetris Effect induces a mind-freeing state like few games can.

Buy for: Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox, PC, Meta Quest

Dorfromantik

Dorfromantik is a puzzle game in which you lay down tiles to create an idyllic countryside. The tiles come in distinct types: forests, fields, rivers, railroads, little houses and so on. The idea is to chain similar pieces together, and the game will give you little “quests” to connect a certain number of matching tiles to grow your overall stack. Since you can only see a few tiles at once, exactly what your landscape looks like differs from game to game.

The need to keep gaining tiles creates a contingent sort of pressure, but even still, Dorfromantik is a game that encourages slowness. There’s no time limit, and no way to even really “win.” You’re led to consider each piece, look at the land and see how it all fits. When the tiles run out, you’ve usually created a beautiful little scene. And if you just want to build a landscape without any restrictions, there’s a separate mode for that.

Buy for: Switch, PC

A Short Hike

A Short Hike is a lovely little adventure game that is completely in tune with itself. You play as Claire, a young bird in a world of anthropomorphic animals, who is staying in a small yet bustling provincial park. Something is weighing on her, and she needs to make a phone call, but the only place with cellular reception is the top of the mountain at the park’s center. Your only real objective in the two-hour game is to get her there.

There is a conventional core to A Short Hike that involves doing light fetch quests for other park-goers and collecting golden feathers to climb higher and double-jump more. But most of these tasks are straightforward, and it quickly becomes apparent that you can (literally) soar around most of the park as you please, taking in the sights and interacting with the other park visitors as they go about their lives. Apart from simply feeling nice, this freedom ties beautifully into the game’s themes: That mountain is calling, but you don’t have to climb it right away. When you do, the world will still be there for you to explore.

Buy for: Switch, PS4, Xbox, PC
Length: 2 hours

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker is an adorable puzzle-platformer from Nintendo that has you navigate a series of contained, diorama-like levels, each with a gold star at its end. It’s technically a spin-off of the Super Mario games, but here, you can’t jump. Instead, you need to explore the game’s densely-packed spaces from new angles, shifting the camera to find hidden pathways and bonus treasures.

The whole thing is neither overlong nor super difficult, but it is determined, in that delightful Nintendo way, to constantly hit you with new ideas, each as playful and meticulous as the last. While it doesn’t reach the creative heights of the best Mario games — some of which were developed by the same team — it is similarly amiable and more easygoing.

Buy for: Switch
Length: 11 hours

Desert Golfing

Desert Golfing is exactly what its title says and nothing more. There is a ball, a hole, and some procedurally generated desert land in between. That’s it. No par, no club selection, no music, no items, no pause menu, no restarts, not even a physical avatar. Only dragging a cursor back to determine the next shot’s angle and power, and an attempt to get A to B. Once you do, a new hole appears, and you go on, infinitely. (The game technically has an “ending,” but may God have mercy on anyone who plays long enough to see it.)

Desert Golfing reads as overly simple on paper, and sure, it makes sense as a sneaky critique of time-sucking, player-debasing mobile games. Actually playing it, though, borders on meditative. The game’s radical minimalism makes everything and nothing matter all at once. There’s a shot counter at the top, but it’s functionally meaningless, merely signifying how long you’ve played. You may spend 60 shots on one hole, but there’s no invisible eye judging you. Instead, you’re allowed to focus entirely on the simple pleasure of arcing a ball through the air, seeing it kick up sand and eventually making it plonk in the hole. It’s about the act of play more than the rules of a game: golfing, not golf. And when something new does pop up — a well of water, a setting sun, a cactus — it feels momentous.

Buy for: PC, iOS, Android

The Ramp

Much like Desert Golfing, The Ramp is a successful experiment in minimalism. It’s a skateboarding game, but its approach is a far cry from the Tony Hawk series. It doesn’t burden you with high scores, skill points, objectives, camera adjustments or a HUD, and it respects you enough to unlock all of its courses and characters after a brief tutorial.

While it takes a moment to get the hang of its controls, The Ramp excels at conveying the joy of motion and momentum in vert skating, from launching at speed, to that brief moment of weightlessness in the sky, to the rush of gravity pulling you back down. There’s a handful of tricks to pull off, some chill music to help set the tone, and no real penalty for biffing it.

The Ramp doesn’t have much “depth” by conventional gaming standards; its developer describes it as a “digital toy,” which sounds about right. But what it does, it does well, and it’s uncompromising in its focus.

Buy for: Switch, PC

Euro Truck Simulator 2

Euro Truck Simulator 2 lets you drive a bunch of big trucks across a condensed version of Europe, delivering cargo and eventually growing your own trucking business. It’s a simulator, not a GTA game, so you’re expected to follow traffic laws, refuel your vehicle and complete your deliveries on time with as little damage as possible.

It doesn’t have the gentlest learning curve, and its management elements aren’t as interesting as the actual trucking. But Euro Truck Simulator2’s pleasures are similar to those of real-life driving: cruising down a long road, tapping your thumb to the radio, checking out the scenery, going where the route takes you. You’ll get there when you get there. As an aside: All of this is most fun with a wheel, but one isn’t required.

Buy for: PC
Length: 117 hours

Wide Ocean Big Jacket

There’s been no shortage of easy-to-play “walking simulators” in recent years, but Wide Ocean Big Jacket stands out among them for telling a particularly warm short story. It’s crudely animated and maybe an hour long, but it develops more identifiable and human characters in that time than most big-budget games do in 30 hours.

The story follows the camping trip of a young couple, Brad and Cloanne, their 13-year-old niece Mord and her friend Ben, and the subsequent lessons they learn about love and each other. It has the air of an indie comedy: a little quirky, funny but not mean-spirited, honest but not long-winded, and moving when it’s time to bring the story home. Its world isn’t ending, and there’s no combat. It’s a game about these characters in this specific moment, and it’s presented like a series of memories, something its bold colors amplify.

The game’s approach to interactivity plays a big role in selling all of this. Instead of merely controlling a specific character, you’re often in charge of the camera, a sort of director role that brings you closer to each scene but distances you, the player, from the action (or what qualifies as action in this case).

Buy for: Switch, PC
Length: 1 hour

Hidden Folks

Hidden Folks is like a digital take on those Where’s Waldo? puzzle books you might’ve had as a kid. It presents you with a series of living scenes, each brimming with detail and micro-narratives. You get a set of things to uncover, and once you find enough, you can move to the next stage. The monochrome art is hand-drawn, and all the sound effects derive from people’s voices. It’s cute, intimate and often funny.

Trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack may get frustrating if you’re in the wrong headspace, but this is a game that demands you slow down and be patient. There’s no rush; nobody on the screen is going anywhere.

Buy for: Switch, PC, iOS, Android
Length: 6 hours

PowerWash Simulator

You know those oddly satisfying YouTube videos of people deep-cleaning rugs, driveways, old electronics and the like? PowerWash Simulator is the video game version of those. You take on a range of power washing jobs around the town of “Muckingham,” slowly but steadily erasing the grime from various objects in each gig. There’s no time limit or score to meet, and each dirty thing has a corresponding progress bar to complete.

There’s more meat to PowerWash Simulator than you might expect: You can earn money to spend on upgraded power washing equipment, and there’s a narrative mode that goes places, literally and metaphorically. It probably doesn’t need to do quite as much as it does, but PowerWash Simulator’s pleasures are layered: the immediate satisfaction of making dirty things pristine, and the larger one of systematically “working” toward a job well done.

Buy for: Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox, PC
Length: 43 hours

Unpacking

Unpacking is a stripped-down puzzler about unpacking boxes. You methodically work your way through each collection of knick-knacks, placing them around different rooms in a sequence of homes. The game is nearly wordless, but it manages to tell a story almost entirely through its isometric environments: The boxes you unpack all belong to the same character, and each move takes place in a different year of their life. This, combined with the pixelated visuals, gives the game a vaguely wistful tone.

Unpacking is still a puzzle game, so it’ll make items glow red until you put them in a “correct” location. This feels like a misstep: If I want to leave my bookbag off to the side of my bed and just be done with things, why can’t I? Isn’t moving messy? Still, even if Unpacking is a bit too gamified, there’s a quiet catharsis to its fantasy of putting everything in its right place. If nothing else, it’s far less stressful than moving in real life.

Buy for: Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox, PC
Length: 4 hours

Please, Touch the Artwork

Please, Touch the Artwork is a set of three earnest puzzle games, each inspired by abstract art. The specifics of the games differ: One has you mechanically recreate Mondrian-style paintings, another turns Broadway Boogie Woogie into a little love story, and the third reframes New York City as a metaphor for adjusting to life in, well, a big new city. Only the first can get particularly difficult, but the game tells you right upfront that it’s made to be a low-stress experience, with no timers, and hints and redo buttons there if you need them.

What intrigues about Please, Touch the Artwork isn’t what it says about De Stijl and abstract art (as if such works could ever be “solved”). Rather, it’s what it conveys about the experience of taking in art itself, and how close it brings you to the lone developer (Thomas Waterzooi) behind the game. The whole project has an intensely personal feel, like peering into someone’s brain and seeing how this kind of art speaks to them. Some may see that as unbearably pretentious, but even on a mechanical level, Please, Touch the Artwork is welcoming, bold and sincere.

Buy for: Switch, PC, iOS, Android
Length: 4 hours

Zen Bound 2

Like most games on this list, Zen Bound 2 has a simple premise: You get a rope and a series of 3D sculptures, and your goal is to wrap the rope around each sculpture until it’s covered completely, coating it with paint in the process. The sculptures themselves can be more difficult than they first seem, however, with many hidden gaps and sharp angles.

Playing Zen Bound 2 demands slow contemplation, almost like meditating on the object you’re binding. This, in turn, may lead you to reflect on the physical nuances of the things you tie yourself to in real life. But even if that sounds pompous, just know that Zen Bound 2 offers a thoughtful way to zone out.

Buy for: Switch, PC
Length: 8 hours

Starting today, more people around the world will be able to access hundreds of games on Windows through Microsoft's subscription service. The company is expanding its PC Game Pass preview program to 40 more countries around the world, bringing its total number of territories to 86. Previously known as the Xbox Game Pass for PC, the service includes access to new Xbox Game Studios releases from day one, member-only benefits in Riot Games, an EA Play membership and titles by Bethesda, which officially became part of Xbox in 2021. 

Since this is a preview version of the service, interested users will have to install the Xbox Insider Hub app and sign up to join the Insider Program before they can start playing. They'll also get special pricing in the beginning — based on the official Game Pass website, membership costs $1 for the first month and then $10-a-month going forward. 

In addition to the games already available through the service, subscribers will be able to play more titles as Microsoft adds them. One upcoming game is Minecraft Legends, an action-strategy title by Mojang and Blackbird Interactive that will be released on April 18th. And on May 2nd, Arkane's open-world vampire shooter Redfall will also be making its way to PC Game Pass when it comes out for Xbox and Windows.

Here are the 40 new countries getting access to PC Game Pass today:

• Albania   

• Algeria 

• Bahrain

• Bolivia

• Bosnia and Herzegovina  

• Bulgaria  

• Costa Rica  

• Croatia   

• Cyprus  

• Ecuador 

• Egypt   

• El Salvador  

• Estonia   

• Georgia  

• Guatemala 

• Honduras  

• Iceland   

• Kuwait 

• Latvia   

• Libya 

• Liechtenstein  

• Lithuania   

• Luxembourg   

• Malta  

• Moldova   

• Montenegro   

• Morocco 

• Nicaragua 

• North Macedonia 

• Oman 

• Panama 

• Paraguay 

• Peru 

• Qatar 

• Romania   

• Serbia   

• Slovenia   

• Tunisia 

• Ukraine   

• Uruguay