Jedi: Fallen Order is a little rough around the edges. Gameplay gets janky in spots, its combat feels a little simplistic sometimes, and overall, the finished product feels like it was rushed. But it’s easy to overlook all that once you start playing. It’s one of the first games in a long, long, long time that feels successful at translating the magic and wonder of Star Wars to playable form. There’s no discounting its potency.—G.C.
Life Is Strange 2
I have two younger brothers. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how much of my identity has been shaped by that fact, by being someone who both directly and indirectly affected the kind of person someone else becomes. It’s not always a comfortable thought.
Life Is Strange 2 is a game about this discomfort. Two brothers are forced to go on the run after a run-in with a trigger-happy cop leaves their single father dead. The cop is dead, too—because the younger, nine-year-old brother, Daniel, has superpowers. And so begins their long, fraught journey to Mexico and safety.
Playing as teenaged Sean, you’re constantly asked to make choices about how to handle your mutual survival, and also Daniel’s perfectly normal brattiness. You also, sometimes, are asked to make decisions about Sean’s happiness: Will he stay up late to talk to a girl he’s interested in? Or stay vigilant over Daniel? Life Is Strange 2’s best, meanest trick is the way that it tells you, with a small, quiet symbol in the corner, whether a decision you make will affect Sean, Daniel, or the two of them together.
It’s the sort of immediate feedback on your actions that, however vague, you don’t ever get in real life. I like to think that it would help, that it would have made me more sure I was doing the right thing, or anticipate when I ought to brace for making what might have been the wrong one. Life Is Strange 2 brings you back to Earth and says: Not really. But you’re still brothers, and that’s what counts.—Josh Rivera, former GQ contributor
The Outer Worlds
