![]() Roswell isn’t the peak of The New Colossus’ sharply observed satire, but it’s the start of a stretch that’s among the most satisfying in any game, taking players from New Mexico to Texas to Washington, D.C., in a breathless sequence of events where every hour is one of the biggest swings in video games. You see movie theaters advertising Nazi propaganda, Klansmen fumbling their way through German, and newspaper clippings noting how quickly and willingly Americans caved to fascism. In a game that mostly asks you to shoot Nazis, The New Colossus briefly makes you peacefully wander the bleakly vibrant streets of Roswell. After a lengthy, brutal preamble, you’re sent to Roswell, New Mexico, on the day of a parade celebrating America’s Nazi occupation. In The New Colossus, the resistance - which has been chased out of Berlin - comes to America with the goal of inciting revolution. Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus takes place in an alternate 1960s Earth where Nazi Germany has won World War II and achieved world domination. Roswell (Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus) The First Liberation is where Pyre becomes a different game entirely, one where losing is more interesting than winning, and winning more complicated than you imagined. ![]() Lose, and your opponents send someone home, and you must struggle onward indeterminately until another Liberation Rite occurs. Win, and your party grows smaller, and winning future games more difficult. ![]() So, after spending several hours befriending and traveling with a small party of exiles, you must choose one person to be liberated. The Liberation Rite will not free everyone on the winning team, just one. Win enough Rites, and you’ll earn a shot at the Liberation Rite - only when you get to it, you find out there’s a cruel twist. You’re told there’s a way out, that you and the exiles you’ve befriended can earn your way back into the Commonwealth by participating in the Rites: a ceremony best described as a magic basketball game. In Pyre, you play an exile from a fantasy realm known as the Commonwealth, forced to wander a largely barren and hostile purgatory completely severed from the life you knew. It signals that things are going to go to deeper, stranger places, and if you were willing to see the game through to its real ending, it leads to one of the most singular video game stories of the year. If that first fake-out ending - Route A, with its story of androids fighting machines on behalf of humanity (while grappling with the idea of humanity) - is an introduction to the ideas Nier plays with, the start of Route B is the beginning of their subversion. It puts you in control of this robot, assigning you a task that is clearly futile, and makes you do it anyway. The story continues, but it revisits the same events from a different perspective, one that begins with a small robot - one of the hundreds you’ve destroyed by this point - trying to bring its dead friend back to life. But playing through again isn’t quite what you do. “We highly recommend you play through again to witness the full Nier: Automata experience,” the message urged. Maybe the most unusual thing to happen in a video game in 2017 is the message from “Square Enix PR” that displayed the moment you reached the end of Nier: Automata. Big-budget video games are rarely subtle, but when you first leap from the pleasure and commerce of Jirga Para Lhao and plummet from its blue skies down to the polluted air of the slums keeping it afloat, subtle doesn’t seem nearly as effective. The world of Gravity Rush 2 is built primarily in a way that’s fun to explore with Kat’s powers, but it’s also built to say something. ![]() Much of the early part of the game takes you to Jirga Para Lhao, a vibrant city floating above the clouds, rich in culture and beautiful sights, but then you learn the secrets keeping it running: The greedy authoritarian aristocrats that reside in manors floating even higher in the sky, and the exploitation of the working class, living below cloud cover in the slums of Lei Elgona. It never stops being a thrill: mild panic as you reorient yourself, followed by the grace of free-falling, and concluding in clumsy, cartoonish crashes to the earth. As Kat, you play a girl with the power to control how gravity works for her: Hit a button, point in a direction, hit it again, and the direction is now “down,” and you’ll begin falling toward it. There’s one beautiful trick to Gravity Rush 2: Falling, and how good it feels. Falling Toward Lei Elgona (Gravity Rush 2)
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