From the moment you turn on Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and are informed that the game “plays you as much as you play it,” it’s evident that you’re in for something quite different. Indeed, this is not the Silent Hill you may have come to expect. The fog, rust, and awkward combat of the past have been replaced by snow, ice, and lots of terrified running. Developer Climax Studios has reinvented the aging franchise for the better by removing the tedium, as well as going back to the basics of strong, psychological storytelling and an intense, chilling atmosphere. Regardless of how you feel about previous Silent Hill games, Shattered Memories is a fresh and welcome new beginning that’s good for a scare.

When loving father Harry Mason loses control of his car on the icy streets of a town called Silent Hill and crashes, everything begins to unravel for him. Awaking in the snow, Harry is horrified to discover that he can’t find his 7-year-old daughter, Cheryl, and sets off into the darkness to find her armed with little more than a flashlight. As he traverses the dangerously snowed-in town, Harry meets and interacts with several of its residents, from a local cop to an overly familiar party girl, struggling to come to grips with the fragments of memory the accident left him with, as well as his constantly shifting reality.

There’s a dark side to Silent Hill, and every so often, the world freezes over before your eyes as supernatural glaciers rise from the earth to consume almost everything. Trapped within the mazes of ice formed in these frozen nightmares, Harry must run, jump, climb, and crawl his way out as he is stalked relentlessly by the pale-skinned, shrieking ghouls that emerge to hunt. They are many and cannot be harmed, so Harry has no choice but to run for his life as these hideous monsters give chase. Each nightmare is its own self-contained maze of twists and turns, but without any sort of useful map to guide you to freedom, you need quick thinking, a strong sense of direction, and a little bit of luck to find the way out. If the monsters succeed in bringing you down, you’re returned to the beginning of the maze to try again, but while they can sometimes take several tries, these mazes are rarely frustrating.

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Once this intense and action-packed role-playing game pulls you into its orbit, you won’t want to escape.

Mass Effect 2 takes the bleak vacuum of space and flushes it with color–the light of stars and galaxies, the red and violet swirls of far-off nebulas, and the glimpses of comets as they burn through the void. You’ll catch your first glimpse of this in the game’s intense and much-improved art design, but that dance of light and shadows is also an apt metaphor for bleak undercurrents in the story, as well as the moral quandaries and past indiscretions that haunt the main characters. More so than its predecessor, Mass Effect 2 possesses an identity, and most of the obvious changes and improvements over the original are beholden to the shift in tone. The shooting is more immediate and satisfying, which keeps the pace moving and intensifies the violence of each encounter. Rich characterizations invite you to look more closely at each crew member’s personal stake in the sprawling galactic backdrop. Even the relatively predictable space opera that is the main plot has sinister moments, and you sense the characters struggling with that heavy burden. Mass Effect 2 is incredibly enjoyable, but it’s more than just fun: It’s a stellar package with a fierce spirit that makes it engrossing and unforgettable.

Mass Effect 2 begins with dire events that foreshadow the game’s darker tone–an attack that leaves the SSV Normandy in pieces and the fate of series protagonist Shepard temporarily unclear. Never fear: Shepard returns thanks to the efforts of the controversial pro-human organization called Cerberus and under the watchful eye of its chain-smoking overseer, The Illusive Man. Entire human colonies are disappearing without a trace, and Cerberus needs you–as Shepard–to investigate and confront the vicious forces behind the mystery. Whether you make your contempt for Cerberus’ questionable methods clear or espouse the organization’s manipulations, you owe The Illusive Man your life. Like it or loathe it, he casts his shadow on every action you take.

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Zooming around with your jetpack can be a lot of fun, but routine shooter action and long flightless sections keep Dark Void from flying high.

The idea of a personal, rocket-powered flight device has captured man’s imagination for decades, yet the reality of such a device remains depressingly distant. This disparity between dream and reality mirrors the experience of playing Dark Void. There are moments when jetpack flight is joyous, freewheeling fun, such as when you’re pulling off daring acrobatic maneuvers, dogfighting with UFOs, and boldly zooming around enclosed areas. It gives you a thrilling taste of the speedy promise of a jetpack-powered world, yet this fantasy is too often brought down to earth by the rest of Dark Void’s gameplay. The third-person shooter sections are competent but mundane, and there are long sections when fully powered flight isn’t possible. Furthermore, the campaign is only about eight hours long, and there are no multiplayer modes to bolster replayability. While there is certainly high-flying fun to be had, the lackluster action hinders Dark Void’s lofty ambitions.

Unfortunately, the first few hours of the game don’t do much to get your hopes up. After a perfunctory and pointless prologue, you begin the game proper on your own two feet. Dark Void has a sticky cover system, and much of the on-foot shooter action relies on moving from cover to cover. Some of these sections have vertical areas where taking cover means leaning over the edge of a platform or hanging below one and aiming upward. It’s a novel twist, and it shakes up your spatial awareness in a way you’ll appreciate once you take to the skies. Shooting mechanics are competent, and you can upgrade your run-of-the-mill weapons to make them fairly fun to shoot. Enemies are very resilient to your weapon fire, though a few shots to the head will yield a satisfying explosion, and taking cover is often prudent. However, you can kill most of your enemies with one punch, which makes sitting behind cover and firing feel slow and ineffective. Dark Void counters this by throwing more enemies at you, and at the end of skirmishes, you generally feel a mild sense of satisfaction. Yet the freedom and speed of jetpack flight is an ever-present prospect, casting its shadow over the third-person shooter sections and making them feel a bit like extra padding.

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