My Beauty Magazine

Once in a while, a renowned series from the past makes a welcome return after years in hiding. In their day, Syberia 1 and 2 were regarded as distinguished point-and-click adventure games that captured both mysticism and mystery, but 13 years later, most of that has been lost in Syberia 3. Although the threads that weave this series together return, its delivery is wholly underwhelming. Dialogue feels disconnected and the important moments lack impact, resulting in a story-centric game that rings hollow.

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From its opening moments, Little Nightmares' haunting aesthetic pulls you into its world of existential conundrums. It enthralls you with its eerie atmosphere and makes your heart pound with tense cat-and-mouse style chases. But the curtains close on this psychological puzzle-platformer far too soon, and for better or worse, it leaves you craving more.

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The New Frontier season of Telltale's The Walking Dead is wrapping up the way that it began, with more Garcia family strife than zombie action in the penultimate episode. Thicker Than Water plays up the soap-opera dynamics that have long been as big a part of the franchise as the brain-munching gore, making for a more satisfying episode than its snoozy predecessor. Fireworks explode in the relationship between leading man Javier Garcia and his brother David, who finally figures out that his estranged wife Kate might just have feelings for her brother-in-law.

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Bill Murray's character in Groundhog Day believed he was in hell, but let's admit it: There are worse possible time loops to get ensnared in than having to spend your days reporting on rodent shadows and courting 1990s Andie MacDowell. In fact, consider The Sexy Brutale: you could end up reliving a single day at a fancy, sprawling casino mansion where you're attempting to save the lives of nine guests who get slaughtered by the staff during an annual masquerade ball.

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Cosmic Star Heroine makes a great first impression. Its introductory hours are all synths and saxes, flashy sci-fi espionage, and daring escapades lit by suffusions of neon and moonlight. There's no mistaking it for some imported decades-old classic, but it still managed to give me flashbacks of loading up untranslated PC Engine games and gawking at the interstitial artwork.

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Previous entries in the Sniper Ghost Warrior series have been justifiably criticized for their stifling linearity. Missions would regularly guide you by the hand through one cramped corridor after another, with a succession of targets ripe for elimination along the way. It wasn't a formula conducive to the type of freedom and choice one might hope to find in a game focused on the act of long-distance sniping, and Polish developer CI Games has seen the error of its ways with the latest entry in the series.

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Dragon Quest Heroes II is a JRPG on fast forward. The gradual addition of new party members, the rollout of plot twists, and other typical genre roadmarkers come at you at a fast clip. If it normally takes 100 hours to amass a kill count of 10,000 enemies, this game lets you reach such milestones in less than 10. And, as one of the many spinoffs of the 20-year-old Dynasty Warriors series, it retains the best elements of the franchise's trademark combat, where you decimate armies with rudimentary, albeit flashy, combos.

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The minute What Remains of Edith Finch puts its titular protagonist face to face with its slapdash Frankenstein's monster of a house, it seems the game is gearing up for a horror story, closer to Resident Evil than Gone Home. That's actually close to the truth in one sequence, but What Remains of Edith Finch ultimately tells a subtle tale with far more pensive ideas. It plays off a heightened sense of impending mortality, but terror never truly takes a physical form. These are simply the facts, presented as only the victims and witnesses could deliver them.

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Video game mashups are nothing new, but Puyo Puyo Tetris is the most interesting one to come along in a while, bridging two puzzle series with distinct mechanics and rules. What you ultimately get are two great games and a surprisingly good mashup with numerous single- and multiplayer options at the ready. It's a robust package, and an excellent revival of two beloved yet stagnant series.

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Outlast 2's maniacal commitment to its core conceit is simultaneously its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Like the original--which helped popularize first-person survival horror when it launched in 2013--Outlast 2 casts you as a hapless everyman with zero fighting skills and no tools beyond a camcorder. Your only option when confronted with grotesque, bloodthirsty murderers is to run and hide.

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