It's been a good few weeks for games on rails. Nintendo's Star Fox remake wisely kept the tightly scripted, action-packed levels from Star Fox 64 largely the same, and they're still fun to fly through nearly 20 years later. Denshattack!, a new game from Undercoders, similarly features levels packed with carefully orchestrated sequences to great effect. Except instead of flying through space as an unnervingly realistic anthropomorphic fox, you're flying - and flipping, and spinning, and grinding - through Japan while driving a blindingly fast train.

Calling Denshattack! a train game radically undersells what you actually do. Across a bright …

Read the full story at The Verge.

From its opening minutes, Moves of the Diamond Hand is upfront about what it offers: You're going to have a lot of strange conversations, and you're going to roll a lot of dice. Get on board with this proposition, and the reward is one of the most creative roleplaying games I've seen in years, even if its many mysteries won't be resolved until 2027.

Moves of the Diamond Hand is an Early Access videogame available on PC, macOS, and steamOS (including the Steam Deck, where I played it) from musician and game designer Cosmo D. The game looks and feels like a 2000s-era first-person RPG or immersive sim: environments are grimy, stark, and blocky …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Let's be real: There's no shortage of Zelda-style games to play right now. That's true even if you've exhausted all there is to see in Tears of the Kingdom or Echoes of Wisdom. Indie developers keep finding new ways to refresh the formula, whether it's fusing it with a Soulslike, making it cozier, or simply shrinking it down into something more manageable. Now we have Square Enix and The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales, a curiously named RPG that mixes the classic Zelda structure with something that resembles Final Fantasy. And it's a combination I can't seem to get enough of.

The Adventures of Elliot is the latest in Square Enix …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Echo Isle is heavily inspired by The Legend of Zelda, and it's not afraid to show it: The retro graphics bear a striking resemblance to Link's Awakening, the main character wears a blue tunic and wields a sword, and he navigates dungeons to collect items and keys to fight bosses and gather magical MacGuffins. But where Echo Isle shines is how it takes the best parts of a Zelda adventure and shrinks them down to their essence - I finished the game in a little more than an hour.

The game starts with the main character falling from the sky onto Echo Isle, an island protected by a magical lighthouse that has mysteriously gone dark. While you d …

Read the full story at The Verge.