Kotaku's Weekend Guide: 6 Cool Games We're Excited To Get Back To

Play it on: PC

Goal: Ponder and pontificate

I fucking love Danganronpa creator Kazutaka Kodaka’s work.

The Danganronpa series is a foundational text for me, even as it has been turned into a distorted meme of itself in Too Online spaces. I’ve been keeping up with Kodaka’s projects since he left Spike Chunsoft, and while I enjoyed his team’s paranormal murder mystery Master Detective Archives: Rain Code and the cyberpunk anime Akudama Drive, I also started to get the unnerving sense that he might just have two ideas he likes to riff on, and that he’s maybe just been playing those hits ever since Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony’s meta commentary made a big stink about wanting to do something new. That feeling was only made more apparent when I played the demo of his upcoming game, The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy.

The tactical RPG shares an artist and composer with Danganronpa, and is somehow also about a bunch of kids getting trapped in a school and being threatened by a cartoon mascot. Though it’s not a murder mystery, it feels like a new Danganronpa game, just without all the lore necessary to prop up a death game. Despite its violent premise of imprisoned high school kids forced to fight in a war against alien invaders, it feels like comfort food from a team whose work I enjoy, even as it makes me wince when it leans into weird tropes I’m surprised that team hasn’t outgrown. I want to play at least a little bit more of the demo because its progress will carry over to the final game, but I’m mostly just curious to see if Kodaka has run out of ideas. — Kenneth Shepard

Play it on: PC

Goal: Get to the end

Ground Shatter’s medieval follow-up to its John Wick-infused Fights in Tight Spaces is Slay the Spire meets Into the Breach. In Knights in Tight Spaces you have traditional classes like knights, mages, and archers governed by decks of cards you build up over a run. Instead of worrying about maneuvering a lone character through impossible odds, you have a whole party this time around who are limited to using the cards that correspond to their skills. It’s the same, neat tactical idea of the original blown up with new options and challenges. I’m enjoying it so far, though there are definitely ways it feels a bit more cumbersome than the original. Medieval tactics is way more my style though. — Ethan Gach

Play it on: PC

Goal: Pull off some sick combos

Because of the reveal of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 earlier this week, I’ve had Tony Hawk and skateboarding on my brain. So I decided to check out a fan-created PC mod, THAWED, that updates Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland to make it playable on modern PCs and adds a ton of new features as well as support for old levels and modded skaters. And folks, I’m happy to report that once I got it working, I had a great time. I’ve played a lot of THUGPro, a different fan mod that aims to update THUG 2 with custom content, and I was still impressed by THAWED and its level of customization. If you are a THPS nerd, you’ll love this thing. You can change which skating physics to use. Prefer how THPS 1+2 felt, but like THUG2’s on-foot gameplay? You can tweak THAWED to get that exact experience. It’s very nice! It makes me really wish Activision would just re-release all the old games as one big collection separate from the remakes. But that’s unlikely to happen, so instead I’ll just keep playing THAWED this weekend. — Zack Zwiezen

Play it on: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC

Goal: Hit Hunter Rank 100.

I reviewed Monster Hunter Wilds and have already dumped 50 hours into the kill, loot, craft hamster wheel but I’m still going back for more. I can’t get enough of Capcom’s latest action-RPG. The moment-to-moment action remains as taut and satisfying as it was in hour one, and the company remains second to none when it comes to combat tuning and animation. There are not a lot of surprises here, but what’s under the hood is so strong it doesn’t really matter. I can’t wait to Platinum this thing on PlayStation. — Ethan Gach

Play it on: Switch Online

Goal: Get back in touch with my inner eight-year-old

When I was very young, I thought the original Donkey Kong arcade game was just about the best thing ever. Sure, at a certain point its four stages just looped endlessly, but its gameplay was so enjoyable and challenging and its characters so distinct and memorable that I was happy to pump quarter after quarter into it in pursuit of a high score. And hey, there was plenty of merchandise and even a Saturday morning cartoon to remind me of Mario and his simian nemesis when I wasn’t at the arcade. By the time 1994 rolled around, however, I’d mostly forgotten my youthful adoration of the game, having grown accustomed to much more sophisticated fare like Myst, Wing Commander, and Ultima Underworld. I didn’t think a throwback to the 1981 arcade game could knock my socks off, but it sure did.

See, in this Game Boy mega-update to the original, when you beat the fourth stage of the arcade game, your adventure is only just beginning, as Donkey Kong snatches Pauline again and leads you on an epic chase across dozens of clever puzzle-platforming stages. As I told Ethan when he asked me what makes the game so special, it feels like a glimpse into an alternate world of Mario platforming, because this isn’t quite the Mario we know from the SMB games. It’s one that feels as if he’s organically evolved from the stiff, hammer-wielding hero he was in the original Donkey Kong, though with his own new bag of tricks. It’s now been many, many years since I played this version of DK, long enough that I’ve mostly forgotten everything about it, so I’ll definitely be curling up with it on my Switch this weekend and giving it a chance to wow me all over again. — Carolyn Petit

Play it on: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC

Goal: Develop my skills as a budding filmmaker

God, the faces in this game. They’re so human, authentic, vulnerable, expressive. I just want to look at them, to see what they reveal and what they hide, just like the faces of real people do. I’m maybe three hours into the first part of Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, the new game from Life Is Strange creators Don’t Nod, and I’m captivated. It shares some of the DNA of the original LIS—this, too, is at times a wistful look at teen experience, in all its awkwardness and intensity—but there’s a wrinkle: you also see these characters in their 40s, in the present day, as they look back on a fateful ‘90s summer in their teen years. Being a ‘90s teen who’s now in my 40s myself, I’m intrigued to see just what the game does with the perspective this time jump gives its characters.

You play as Swann, an aspiring filmmaker (at least when she was a teen), and I love the way the game lets you capture footage with her camcorder and stitch it together into little montages. There’s an openhearted authenticity to it; it feels like Swann is just experimenting, pursuing her creative impulses wherever they take her without overthinking it or worrying too much about doing it “the right way,” which is precisely what I think teens should do as they grow into real artists. Also, the atmosphere is impeccable. I just want to bask in the vibes of this game. I still don’t know much about where the story is going, but I’ll certainly be completing the first part of Lost Records this weekend and finding out more about whatever happened that summer, all those years ago. — Carolyn Petit