Best PS4 games

SEKIRO: SHADOWS DIE TWICE

Developer FromSoftware spent the last decade making games so absurdly difficult that its popularity is a bit difficult to explain. Demon’s Souls begat the Dark Souls trilogy, which spawned Bloodborne. Every game was a riff on a formula that brought the quirky Japanese developer closer to mainstream success.

Sekiro guide

In 2019, with Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, FromSoftware took a hard turn, replacing medieval European fantasy and Gothic horror with feudal Japanese fantasy.

It’s a riff on the formula that the studio created and popularized, but it’s also something new — a fast-paced, action-focused departure from its more deliberate and esoteric forebears. It eschews role-playing classes, so everyone plays as the same titular character. Skills for your constant blade replace the bloated menagerie of weapons and armor in previous titles.

Sekiro is FromSoftware’s sensibilities refined and focused. It’s as beautiful as it is brutal, and the sweetness of victory is still strong enough to make the frustration of frequent failure worthwhile. It is also unambiguous proof that FromSoftware isn’t a one-trick pony.

OUTER WILDS

Outer Wilds is a nonviolent first-person exploration game set in a solar system sprinkled with delightful mysteries. Its secrets are scattered among a whirling orrery of planets. Its many marvels are like disparate fragments, difficult to comprehend in the whole, but undoubtedly greater than the sum of their parts.

Outer Wilds guide and walkthrough

Outer Wilds’ narrative centers on an alien space explorer who sets out to solve the riddle of a lost civilization. The twist is that players have just 22 minutes to explore before the sun goes supernova, destroying everything. Then, the clock resets, and with each expedition, players search further and deeper, gradually piecing together a picture of a lost species that came before — one that held the secrets of the universe.

At its core, Outer Wilds is an adventure game, but it defies so simple a classification, mixing itself up with a powerful narrative, satisfying physical challenges, and fantastical meta-puzzles. It eschews cheap violence and sprawling systems such as upgrade trees and stats-based progress. It’s a genuine original.

SPELUNKY 2

Spelunky 2 isn’t a sequel — or, at least, I wouldn’t use that term. It’s something different, like so many modern games that blur the lines between remaster, reboot, remake, and reimagining. It warrants new words.

Spelunky 2’s early stages resemble the original Spelunky, just a little prettier. Imagine someone using tracing paper to re-create a favorite painting, adding their own flourishes and revisions. Once again, you begin in a cave full of spiders, skeletons, bats, and golden idols that egg you on to set to set off their lethal traps. Except now, things are ever so different.

Spelunky 2 beginner’s guide

Yellow lizards roll across the room like that big ball chasing Indy, and agitated moles cut through the ground like the graboids in Tremors. Step on a dirt surface containing a pack of moles, and the sharp-toothed critters pop up for a bite, turning the familiar terrain into something reminiscent of “the floor is lava,” with our hero leaping from one floating platform to another.

The opening stages (and, in time, the entire game) feel familiar but deadlier — like game director Derek Yu redesigned Spelunky specifically to punish those of us who’d grown complacent after eight years of speedruns, accustomed to shredding through them like Bill Murray skipping through the back half of Groundhog Day. Your muscle memory is weaponized against you.

Like its predecessor, Spelunky 2 operates like a miniature clockwork universe, with every creature, trap, and object serving a purpose, and every action on screen causing an appropriate reaction. For newcomers, it is daunting and difficult. This isn’t a game you beat on your first try. Or your hundredth.

RESIDENT EVIL 2

Resident Evil was born on the PlayStation, and Capcom’s latest entry in the venerable survival horror franchise is one part classic, one part modern horror-action video game.

Capcom has taken Resident Evil 7’s brilliant design decisions to heart in its remake of Resident Evil 2, which has not simply been polished with slick graphics for current-generation consoles, but has been completely remade inside and out.

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Resident Evil 2 remake walkthrough and guides

The developers of the Resident Evil 2 remake have carefully threaded a needle with their new version of a very old thing. Capcom infused modern mechanics into its groundbreaking sequel, while never abandoning what is truly great about the original Resident Evil 2.

13 SENTINELS: AEGIS RIM

Here is a video game about our memory and the fiction we consume, and how they intertwine. How our favorite movies, books, songs, and yes, games, influence our dreams and recollection. A game about how entertainment can be a distraction from the world outside our home and our bubble of a town. But also about how those same games and movies can train us how to engage with reality, providing safe spaces in which to learn. Our entertainment can enrich our lives and make us better friends and citizens, so long as we don’t mistake the world of fiction for our own deeply flawed reality in which change is hard-fought and rarely earned.

That’s precisely the conflict at the heart of 13 Sentinels. As the game hits its final act, the sci-fi tropes are revealed to be crutches for the characters themselves, not the narrative. To survive, they will need to take the good from those stories, learn from the bad, and chart a new path.

In the end, 13 Sentinels is audaciously optimistic. Despite all the conflicting messages of the stories we tell ourselves, it makes a precious case that we eventually can get on the same page and come together. We’ll need to put away our toys and do the work.

TETRIS EFFECT

What if Tetris, the classic 35-year-old puzzle game, could make you feel blissful? Tetris Effect, named for the phenomenon in which repetitive tasks infest our dreams and memories, takes the game’s original concepts and adds joy, connection, and audiovisual euphoria. It’s Tetris, but beautiful, and it’s made even better if you have PlayStation VR hardware.

Tetris Effect’s emotional trek weaves through a campaign known as the Journey, where games of Tetris are set against a variety of gorgeous backdrops, songs, and sound effects. The Journey ventures from the deep sea, where blue whales and schools of fish made of glittering particles orbit the Tetris play field, to deserts to deep space and beyond. The music throbs in time with the movement of play, with every twist or drop of a piece adding to the song.

Beyond the stylish Journey mode lies the Effect mode, a series of puzzle game types that vary from more traditional scoring modes to more experimental ones. The oddest is a series of elaborate rule-breaking gimmicks known as Mystery mode, during which the play field can flip upside down or puzzle pieces become comically gigantic.

Like other Tetris games, Tetris Effect is infinitely replayable, as you seek higher scores and better combos. But it’s also a great way to relax, setting aside the chase for better play to simply be in the moment.