The Contessa’s schemes have been thwarted, but not without consequence. And yet, we must press on in our plans to steal and secure the Clockwerk parts.

Our next target is in Canada, the infamous lumberjack Jean Bison. He’s in possession of a wealth of the parts, so it’s time to liberate him of their burden.

If you thought it couldn’t get worse than our heroes being caught and thrown into police custody, then you were wrong. The spoils of all our previous heists have been stolen, and now all of the clockwork parts are in possession of the final member of the Klaww Gang. And to top it off, poor Murray lost his van.

It can’t get any worse, can it? Can it?

It’s been several months since we last spent time with gaming’s most iconic assassin, Agent 47. But just because we took time away doesn’t mean IO Interactive has. They’ve been hard at work creating new content for the game, free for all players.

Shockingly, this includes a brand new map, which was just released. Welcome to Ambrose Island.

As far as missions go, this one wasn’t too difficult. There’s not much mechanically to discuss, but just the idea of having a new map in Hitman is significant enough to warrant marking the occasion.

I’ll have to look into the technical problems I encountered while playing to see if there’s something I can do to fix it. The last thing I want is to stop streaming Hitman, but I might have to if I can’t fix it.

Post-script: The fix was updating my goddamn Nvidia drivers. The auto-update wasn’t set up like I thought it was.

The gang is back together again after two of its member suffered brief incarceration under maximum security. And yet, we have unfinished business with the warden of that prison: The Contessa.

Turns out, she was one of our targets all along, possessing the Clockwerk Eyes. That means it’s time for a little payback.

This game in particular doesn’t get enough credit for the way it gradually escalates the stakes and danger of each episode. What started out as a break-in at a nightclub has escalated into a global conspiracy involving several interlinking crimes. There’s a clear method underlying them all, which wasn’t the case in the first game. Where the Fiendish Five were all separate people who did their own thing, the Klaww Gang is a much more organized, united front.

And as we continue, this will only grow even more true. The conversation between Jean Bison and Arpeggio we overhear lays a lot of significant groundwork for the reveals to come, but we’ll talk more about them when they arrive.

For now, we’re getting closer. Not much more left.

Last week, we played a game about moving through a heavenly space as quickly as possible, murdering all the demons we encounter along the way, catering to speedrunners looking to climb the leaderboards for the best possible times.

So now, it’s time for the complete opposite. Let’s enjoy a slower-paced, lo-fi experience about breaking down, and salvaging spaceships. This is Hardspace: Shipbreaker.

This game, at its core, is a celebration of manual labor and how joyous it can be in a vacuum. You might not think a manual labor job would make for compelling gameplay, but you would be wrong. There is a primitive joy in breaking down the individual components of each ship, watching it get reduced into parts for processing or resale. And as the player masters the discipline, teaching themselves how to expert and efficiently do the work, it feels good.

But more than that, the game is also about how the joy of these jobs can be sucked away by the oppressive systems that they exist under (read: capitalism). This is a world where legends of “labor unions” that existed hundreds of years ago are spoken in hushed tones, lest the company begin to crack down even further. As the player, we’re insulated from these forces, able to focus on the task at hand, but the characters in the plot are constantly brought low by circumstances outside of their control, which cause stress that bleeds into the work.

It’s an intensely empathetic experience unlike any I’ve played before, and I look forward to finishing it.

And how the worm turns. In this episode, we finally succeed in robbing Rajan of his remaining Clockwerk parts. Usually, that would be cause for celebration, but that simply won’t be in the cards for our heroes. Nay, what follows is one of the darkest chapters in the history of the Cooper Gang.

Can we pull through it, or will cruel fate have other plans?

Something unique to Sly compared to many other cute mascot platformers of the era, and eras past, is a willingness to put the main cast through pain. Video games often exist as a power fantasy, where the player is allowed to act in some way more capable than they are, or even could be, in reality. To facilitate that power fantasy, the protagonists we play are usually made to succeed at whatever goals they set out for themselves so that players can feel accomplished.

So seeing two of our three playable cast members getting incarcerated as a result of our heist was genuinely shocking at the time. It was the first time that our cast wasn’t able to get away. To top it off, the only one left is arguably the least confident in his own abilities, and it’s up to him to bust his friends out.

By playing around in this space, and doing something to shake up the usual formula, the game accomplishes quite a few important goals.

• It creates a gameplay scenario where we can’t rely on the full cast, which gives the subsequent chapter a unique texture before anything else in the series before or since.
  
• It shows that our characters aren’t invincible or omniscient despite how capable they are. They can be fooled or make mistakes, and those mistakes can have consequences.
  
• It raises the threat level of the Klaww Gang. Where the Cooper Gang was able to defeat the Fiendish Five decisively, the Klaww Gang is able to store a significant win in this chapter of the game.

And this won’t be the last time the series is willing to explore these darker colors. It adds a little more maturity that what you’d typically see from a cartoon mascot platformer.

I’m not a part of the speedrunning community. I don’t derive pleasure from playing the same game hundreds of times in order to optimize my play for the extra fraction of a second, hoping to improve my personal best or beat a friend’s time.

And yet, here I am playing Neon White, a speedrunning game that is, in the words of the developer, “for freaks”. I guess that makes me a freak because I’m all in.

I’m astounded by how this little indie title has been making huge waves in both game critic circles and my immediate friend groups. The most common factor in that has been the Friends Leaderboard. Everyone that I know who has gotten seriously into Neon White has a “villain” on their friends list that they consciously or subconsciously compete against for the best times. For me, that’s my friend OrangeCreamsicle.

Even if I don’t beat his times, which is often because they’ve posted some really strong ones, knowing that someone I personally talk to can get times in that range gives me the added confidence when going for Ace times that I can do it, that a human being can reasonably get that good.

It helps that the stages are also designed with the idea of getting played and replayed multiple times, often with multiple routes shortcuts baked in for players to discover after multiple runs. Though the game does call for some level of precision, I find that the barrier of every is lax enough where I can make a couple of small mistakes and often still hit an Ace time if I’ve got my route down perfectly. And should a run go pear-shapers, the quick restart key means I’m back and ready for another run with limited downtime between. If there was any amount of loading for that, then that fiction alone would be almost deal-breaking.

An all-round excellent game like this doesn’t come out too often, but when it does it is so sweet.

While we’ve got our hands on Clockwerk’s tail feathers, after breaking into the Parisian nightclub owned by Dimitri, most of the parts are still out there. Fortunately, we’re here to liberate them from the claws of the… Klaww Gang.

And of course, if we have a good time along the way, all the better.

It’s funny that the first Rajan episode contains one of my favorite segments of the game in the ballroom scene, because the following episode is easily one of my least favorite episodes.

Sure, in terms of raw gameplay it’s merely an extremely easy quick-time event, but the devil is in the details. The combination of the music and animation for Sly and Carmelita creates a suave atmosphere that adds to the fantasy of being this international raccoon-of-mystery. It feels cool to take part in that, matching our movements to the beat. Top it off with the fact that Carmelita has no idea she’s dancing with Sly Cooper, and it’s a recipe for an incredible sequence that lasts exactly as long as it needs to.

This is sadly not something I can say for the hub world of Episode 3. Out of all eight hubs, it’s easily the most frustrating to navigate since there are so few ways to scale up to the treetops and higher ground. It’s annoying to walk up to a location only to discover that we need to hop over to the other side of the map because we don’t have a foothold to scale up to a ledge just beyond our reach.

Thankfully, we’re nearly finished with our time here. Then, it’s on to the next heist.

Yet again, we walk the Path of Champions across the lands of Runeterra. And a new champion has answered the call.

The self-made leader of Bilgewater, Miss Fortune, allows us the use of her motley crew for this expedition. With her aid, we will show our opponents why the other pirate captains bend the knee.

Always feels good to walk back a campaign that looks to have gone completely south. That match against the rockbears was disastrous, and we won purely through a stroke of luck.

Although, once the time came to deal with Viktor himself, as the boss of the track, we completely crushed him despite starting with critically low life. A few more pot shots and we would have been toast.

It was a thrilling match!

In the PS2-era, mascot platformers were a dime a dozen, easily one of the most represented genres of the platform. As a result, each of them, even the big three of Jak, Ratchet, and Sly had to find ways to distinguish themselves from the rest of the pack after their first outings.

We saw Ratchet doubled-down on its third-person shooting, adding elements like strafing and character/weapon progression to refine the gunplay that was more of a secondary element of their original game. As for Sly Cooper, let us delve into the second entry to discover how our favorite raccoon thief set himself apart.

Since the protagonist and his friends are all master thieves, it made sense for Sucker Punch to double down on that aspect of the character when giving the series its own flair. All of the changes made to the formula in Band of Thieves help bring the game closer in line with that vision, turning each chapter of the game’s 8-chapter narrative into an Ocean’s Eleven-style heist movie, hybridized with a comic book.

When you explore a large open area, performing missions and tasks inside that world, you start to get familiar with it, learning how to best navigate it. It’s akin to “casing the joint” before we commit to the heist.

With Bentley and Murray in the field, we have the feeling of multiple talented outlaws, each with their own unique skills, coming together to perform jobs none of them could pull off on their own. We see them set up the heist by performing jobs to slowly whittle away at the security of the seemingly impregnable locales.

Giving us extra health allows us to enter combat and experience the consequences of getting detected without instantly killing us. We can either formulate an escape plan or take out the guards before they summon their friends.

It works well and gives the franchise a flavor completely unique to its own.

We’ve been enjoying our time with Master Duel, exploring some of the best its ranked format has to offer. But we’ve yet to explore any of the special events Konami has thrown in-game, each with its own themes and gimmicks.

We missed out on the N/R Festival, doing a strong impression of Magic: The Gathering’s Pauper format. And when this Limit 1 Festival came along, I knew I had to show it off. Where the N/R Festival was impersonating Pauper, this one is mimicking the Highlander/Singleton formats that are popular in Magic: The Gathering, like my beloved Commander.

Let’s see if the concept works as well here as it does in Magic.

In looking up possible decks to run for the festival, I came across an attempt to make a Commander-style format in Yu-Gi-Oh! called Hydralander, but it doesn’t seem to have been updated for at least half a year, so I assumed it died out some time ago.

And that’s a real shame because this festival shows off how much fun Yu-Gi-Oh can be in a singleton format. Without the ability to play three copies of a card, there’s more variance in what cards we see in each hand. As a result, the important part is both building a deck that contains multiple potential playlines and ways to reach them, and the ability to adapt to the situation left to them by their opening hand in combination with the board state.

Where most duels are decided in the first turn, these singleton matches result in games with tons of interplay between players. I’ve far more games that swing back in forth between myself and my opponent until one of us finally gains that edge we need to turn the tide permanently and win the game.

It’s a fun space that I wish Yu-Gi-Oh! occupied more often.