Seven games, finished twice each

A cruel opening that turns generous, if you let it

The first eight hours withhold the two systems that make this game interesting, and punish the exact instincts it later wants you to unlearn. From hour nine it becomes one of the most patiently designed action games of the last five years: every ambush has a tell you were shown twenty minutes earlier, and the second run makes that legible in a way the first cannot.

The final region reuses three arenas and pads the route with respawning patrols, which is where the second mark lands.

Ottilie Vance · both runs on the hardest available preset · retail copy

Brilliant for thirty hours, then it solves itself

Supply lines that cost political capital, and a diplomacy layer where every favour is remembered by the other side. The opening thirty hours are as good as the genre gets. The second run exposed the flaw: two opening sequences stabilise the treasury permanently, and after that nothing can undo them. Rafe played the second campaign deliberately badly and still could not lose by hour forty.

Accessibility

Full keyboard navigation, interface scaling to 200 per cent, colour-blind safe faction markers. Tooltip text cannot be scaled independently.

Rafe Adeyemi · highest difficulty, random events forced on · retail copy

The second run is a different, better game

The house is a loop with four shortcuts, and every shortcut is signposted by sound before you find it. Knowing where the monster will be does not reduce the tension, because the route is one you must take regardless. Only the third-act chase fails on a second pass: it cannot be failed, so it cannot be tense.

Ottilie Vance · second run with optional permadeath enabled · retail copy

A wet-weather model worth the whole career mode

Dry handling is unremarkable; the rain is extraordinary. Standing water gathers where it would actually gather, and the loss of grip arrives through the wheel rather than through an icon. Eleven laps of the same wet circuit produced eleven different laps. Career progression is a fixed ladder with sponsor objectives written by spreadsheet, and by hour fifty-eight we were skipping the dry rounds.

Hardware note

Tested with a wheel and a controller. The default controller deadzone is generous and worth reducing, or the rain model is much harder to feel.

Rafe Adeyemi · both runs with driving aids disabled · retail copy

A map that rewards being redrawn from memory

The best compliment we can pay this one is that Ottilie drew the map from memory before starting the second run and got it about eighty per cent right. That only happens when a world is built out of landmarks rather than corridors. Movement upgrades arrive in an order that re-frames places you have already been, and two of them retroactively explain a wall you resented for six hours.

The endgame asks for a collectible sweep that the map screen does not support well. It is the only stretch where the game felt like admin.

Accessibility

Remappable controls, an optional aim-assist for the grapple, and a setting that removes screen shake entirely. No option to slow the platforming windows, which will exclude some players from the final ascent.

Ottilie Vance · second run with no fast travel used · retail copy

The first city teaches you; the second city indicts you

This is the only entry in the archive with no second mark, and we spent a while checking whether that was our error rather than the game's merit. It is not. The simulation keeps producing consequences you did not plan for: a road widened in hour twenty starves a district in hour sixty, and the game lets that happen without a warning pop-up.

Rafe's second city was built specifically to avoid the mistakes of the first, and produced an entirely new set. That is the mark of a simulation with more depth than its tutorial suggests.

Rafe Adeyemi · second city on the hardest terrain preset · retail copy

Two of us finished it and disagreed about the ending

The only piece we have published with two closing sentences, because we could not reconcile them. The combat is unfashionably slow and, once the parry timing is internalised around hour fourteen, unusually satisfying. Both of us agree on that. Both of us also finished the second run in the same week and came away with opposite readings of the final act — Ottilie found it a deliberate refusal to resolve, Rafe found it unfinished.

We left both readings in rather than averaging them, and the postbag suggests readers preferred it that way.

Ottilie Vance and Rafe Adeyemi · separate second runs, hardest preset · retail copies