It’s a three-day weekend! It’s Labor Day on Monday. You’d totally forgotten, but don’t worry, we’ve got you. So, unless your free time will be spent with the awful obligations of hanging with friends and family, what games will you fill it all with? And don’t all say Star Wars Outlaws. Even if it’s true, just say something else to make it more exciting. “Ooh, thanks for asking Kotaku, I’m planning on digging out my boxed copy of Spycraft: The Great Game, and running it on a virtual machine.”
See, that’s perfect, and thanks so much for formatting your speech to match Kotaku’s italicized style-guide.
However, perhaps the sheer number of days and amount of gaming choice has caused you to become frozen in terror, the overwhelming nature of modern gaming more than your synapses are willing to withstand? It’s OK, relax, blink hard on the “Next” button and you’ll discover what we’re all planning on playing, and maybe it’ll inspire you and set you free.
Emio—The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club
Play it on: Switch
Current goal: Discover the truth about a chilling crime
I haven’t played either of the earlier Famicom Detective Club games, but the marketing around Emio — The Smiling Man was enough to seduce me into finally giving the series a shot with this, its first truly new entry in decades. Nintendo has smartly released a pretty substantial demo that allowed me to try out the first few chapters, and after playing them, I remain unsure about whether or not the game’s classic adventure-oriented visual novel gameplay is going to click with me. I did buy the full game, though, so clearly I’m intrigued enough to keep going and find out.
I’ve heard others complain that games like this can feel arbitrary, not requiring real thought, insight, or ingenuity to progress, but rather just encouraging you to cycle through menu options until you hit upon some trigger that moves things along. And I admit, I did experience a bit of that during the demo. At one point, for instance, I had to look at a woman’s face to trigger the next bit of interaction, which I didn’t feel I really had any way of knowing. But I’m not ready to criticize the game for moments like that just yet. This is a different type of gameplay than what I’m used to from the adventure games I grew up with, and I want to keep an open mind about what it’s doing.
Perhaps I’ll find that there’s something unique to this approach that’s worth appreciating, something that slows me down and pulls me deeper into the tale it’s telling. In any case, it’s nice to have a game I’m excited about not because it’s dangling rewards in front of me or offering me a chance to get more powerful as I go on an epic, action-packed quest, but because I think curling up with it in bed each night, just like I would with a good book, might be really cozy and enjoyable. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a murder to solve.—Carolyn Petit
Star Wars Outlaws
Play it on: PC, PS5, Xbox X/S
Current goal: Actually start playing
I’ve had a copy of Star Wars Outlaws since Tuesday. Also since Tuesday, I’ve taken on board an unfriendly little virus called covid, an unwanted piece of swag brought home from last week’s Gamescom in Germany. The two are not compatible. I have singularly complained in bed all my British mornings, moaned through my Kotaku shift, then gone back to full-time horizontal moaning and complaining until sleep. There’s no room for trying to coordinate my brain to both sit upright and manipulate a gamepad with all my energy consumed by moaning.
But today is the first day I’ve not felt like I’m currently being slow-motion run over by a leaking garbage truck, and instead merely suffer a monstrously heavy cold—as such I feel that before I return to moaning, I might be able to squeeze in a couple of hours of couch gaming. And then this weekend? Who knows?!
Although I confess there’s an equally high chance that I just go back to bed and play something unbelievably dumb on my tablet—perhaps a ghastly “free” hidden object game that wants me to pay money to find umbrellas—and return next week a moaning failure.—John Walker
Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League
Play it on: Xbox, PC
Current goal: Play more co-op with my wife
Suicide Squad isn’t likely to make it on anyone’s best games of 2024 list. It won’t be on mine. But while the game is flawed and repetitive, it can be fun to play with a friend. Or in this case, my wife. We recently finished Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands and were looking for our next big co-op game to play between Fortnite sessions. And we both realized that, hey, she never played Suicide Squad. And she loves Harley Quinn.
So she downloaded it and we tried playing. And uh…well, Suicide Squad is still a mess all these months later. It’s almost like the game doesn’t want you to play it with other people. But once we got into a match and started playing, it was fun to have her around. But it also highlighted that I don’t think Suicide Squad (and many other co-op-focused games) are actually better with people.
In fact, it’s kind of wild how easy it is to forget you’re even playing with another person in Suicide Squad. The action is too hectic and the combat too wild to really coordinate with one and other. Missions also happen so fast that sometimes it felt like I couldn’t get to her before she had finished the activity. Not a great experience. It makes me wonder if this game even needed to be a live service online thing…—Zack Zwiezen
Alien: Isolation
Play it on: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC
Current goal: Enjoy a good sequel to Alien
Last weekend I saw Alien: Romulus in theaters. I didn’t love it. Don’t get me wrong: there is a lot to love in Fede Álvarez’s entry in the iconic sci-fi series, but it quickly devolves into something much less interesting in its second half.
When I got home from the theater, I still had the itch for more in the universe. That’s how I found myself re-downloading 2014’s Alien: Isolation on my PS5, and subsequently playing through the horror game’s first three hours. This shouldn’t surprise anyone—the game is great—but it’s shocking how well it still holds up.
There are two factors that really make Alien: Isolation sing (or scream). The first is the atmosphere. The production design of the original Alien film is iconic for its retro-futurist vision of space, and Isolation recreates that to perfection. It makes the abandoned Sevastopol Station feel so scary to walk around that is’ like being on a movie set. Second is the horror. Isolation is a truly terrifying game that turns its titular monster into an absolute menace. The alien stalks you throughout your game, and while you’ll eventually gain some ways to combat the creature, you never feel truly safe.
The alien is a hunter and you are its prey. It constantly unsettles you, as it could pop up at any time. All of this, as well as a narrative that puts you in the shoes of Ripley’s daughter 15 years after the events of the original film, make Isolation a worthy sequel to one of the greatest sci-fi films of all time. I also did watch 2017’s Alien: Covenant again because I really could not get enough of Alien. Covenant rocks. Go watch it.—Willa Rowe
Sonic Adventure 2
Play it on: Dreamcast, GameCube, PS3, Xbox 360, Windows
Current goal: Become Shadow the Hedgehog
I am riding the high of the Sonic the Hedgehog 3 trailer right now, y’all. Shadow the Hedgehog is one of my favorite characters in video games after growing up with his games, and seeing him in the live-action universe, voiced by Keanu Reeves, and bodying Sonic and the crew: I’m hedgehog-pilled once more.
I’m in-between apartments right now and can’t pull out my old GameCube to play Sonic Heroes or the rightfully divisive Shadow the Hedgehog, but I can redownload Sonic Adventure 2 on Steam. Parts of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 are drawing heavily from Shadow’s Dreamcast debut, so it feels both topical and nostalgic to go back and play this game. You, too, can brush up on your Shadow history for $US9.99 on your personal computer. Join us. It’s the Year of Shadow, dammit.—Kenneth Shepard
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