Gaming/Game Reviews

We’re all just little guys riding on the back of titans. Truer than usual in Xenoblade Chronicles, Nintendo’s ongoing RPG saga in which the remnants of civilization live on the bodies of giant monsters. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 follows Noah and Mio, two teenagers caught between a war of magic users and robot masters. For a series that began as a “GameStop exclusive” in North America, it’s nestled in Nintendo’s uber-popular library of games, securing multiple spots in the Super Smash Bros. character roster and crashing Nintendo’s website when 3’s pre-orders opened. Pick up a big red sword when Xenoblade Chronicles 3 hits the Switch on July 29.

If you live for the moment when you first log on and have to reverse-engineer everyone’s posts to figure out what the hell happened, you’d probably love Sam Barlow’s games. The former Silent Hill developer has crafted a niche for himself in mystery games, like Her Story and Telling Lies, in which players must parse archival footage to reconstruct the truth. Barlow’s latest and most ambitious project is Immortality, in which you must uncover the truth behind missing actress Marissa Marcel, whose three films were never released. Co-written by Lost Highway’s Barry Gifford, Immortality promises to be an eerie Hollywoodland thriller when it comes to Xbox and PC July 26.

If you had that “destroying your family computer downloading files off emulation sites” phase, the name Live A Live may ring a bell. Released by Squaresoft on the Super Famicom in 1994, the idiosyncratic RPG never made it outside of Japan — until now. Spanning the dawn of civilization to our strange next chapter, Live A Live takes on eight different heroes throughout history. This new version features a remastered look and quality-of-life upgrades. From ninjas and cowboys to cavemen and robots, find out how all these lives connect when Live A Live makes time for the Nintendo Switch on July 22.