Happy Saturday eve! We’ve arrived at the end of another week as we race toward the finish line on 2025. Hopefully you have a nice healthy two days off of work and other responsibilities, because we have a trio of games for you to consider playing.
And if you’ve no time to spare this weekend, well, these games will still be waiting for you.
I really liked Goodnight Universe, the follow-up to one of my favorite games of all time, Before Your Eyes. It definitely didn’t hit as hard, but it’s still worth trying, and is something you can finish in a sitting or two. The game follows Isaac, a baby with apparent adult-level intelligence, realizing he has psychic powers that let him move stuff with his mind and hear the thoughts of his family members, and that put him in the middle of a much larger conspiracy. It’s about three hours long and makes use of Before Your Eyes’ signature eye-detecting tech to deliver something that still feels novel as it’s iterating on its predecessor’s ideas. If you haven’t already played Before Your Eyes, you should definitely take the 90 minutes to do so before jumping into this one, and if you loved that, you’ll probably at least like Goodnight Universe. — Kenneth Shepard
People of a certain age remember the first time they discovered the Windows XP Media Player visualizer. Your favorite song was given a pulsing form like it was about to explode from your computer. Lumines Arise, the latest entry in director Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s series uniquely remixing the falling blocks of Tetris, takes that approach. It’s both a sort of precursor and an analogue to the brilliant audio visual puzzle experience that was 2018’s Tetris Effect. One moment you’re linking blocks together to make them vanish and the next lizards are flicking their psychedelic tongues at you while you remember the neighbor’s dog who barked at you back when you were a child. Lumines Arise has become a nightly fixture for me this week and one I’m happy not to be putting down any time soon. — Ethan Gach
Play it on: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Windows PCs (Steam Deck: Unknown)
Current goal: Resist my friends’ efforts to stage an intervention
I know. Big surprise. The game I won’t shut up about is the game I’ll be spending my weekend playing. What can I say? Arc Raiders has grabbed me like few games have in recent years.
So much of it is because I love the gunplay. It’s my kind of methodical, slowburn-until-it’s-lightning-fast shooter experience.
But I really can’t get over the surprising, very natural, human reactions I continue to experience in this game and how they make me think about the very nature of an online game. Recently, while I was perusing the map to decide what I wanted to do at the start of a match, a random player walked into the room and I immediately raised my gun at them. Hopping on the mic, the player responded, “Whoa, hey, I’m just here to loot some stuff.”
Maybe it was the tone of his voice, but it was just such a natural reaction to my simple act of aiming a weapon that I keep thinking about it. How often in shooters is there an opportunity for a different outcome to unfold when one player aims a gun at another one? How often can we opt out of violence with one another, in a game about shooting no less?
Arc Raiders has prompted a conversation about PvP and toxicity that continues to evolve. But I think the more interesting conversation to have is not the one about whether or not PvP works or doesn’t work in Arc Raiders, but about what it is we want to be doing to one another in these games to begin with. So many of our big-budget games are simply about killing, and often killing each other.
I think above all, Arc Raiders is an excellent opportunity to start reconsidering whether they should be.
It’s also a ton of fun to get into a sniper battle. Both things can be right.
And that wraps our picks for the week. What are you playing?
