As a global pandemic upends our entire way of life, there is one thing we can rely on in this time of social distancing and general unease: video games.

Ori and the Will of the Wisps carries over the fine-tuned platforming of 2015’s Ori and the Blind Forest and expands on it by improving the combat and adding depth to the characters. Although Will of the Wisps appears to be a Metroidvania-type game, Moon Studios modeled the sequel after a different game altogether — The Legend of Zelda.

Playing the Final Fantasy VII Remake demo last week made me feel nostalgic for a good turn-based RPG. I dug around my enormous, embarrassingly large backlog and decided to give I Am Setsuna a whirl.

Butter Royale came out of a pun. “We were pitching games when it came up,” said Benjamin Chevalier, co-founder of Mighty Bear Games. “We were about to fly to San Francisco” and the ideas came gushing forth.

Square-Enix dropped the Final Fantasy VII Remake demo earlier this week, so naturally I dropped everything to give it a whirl. It is, of course, a recreation of the iconic beginning of the original title: Bombing Mission.

Hipster Whale knows how to refresh a classic formula. The team’s best-known work is Crossy Road, a new spin on Frogger. For the franchise follow-up, the team tackles another genre — the platformer.

The tumultuous relationship between film and video games has been a topic of interest to me of late (as you regular readers well know). Most “adaptations” focus on, well, story. The Witcher works because it focuses on the adventures of Geralt of Rivia, not on the mechanics of how he goes about slaying monsters.

With the Resident Evil 3 remake, Capcom updates a classic that was ahead of its time. It carries over concepts of the original, following Jill Valentine as she tries to escape Raccoon City.

You’d think that by now we’d be over the whole console war mentality.

Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition is a lot of things — experimental, literary, strange — and it may come across as boring to players unprepared for what it’s trying to achieve. On the surface, it looks like a point-and-click adventure game, one of those classic Sierra titles from a 1980s childhood.