3 Video Games You May Have Missed in March

New York Times

28-03-2025

At least one end-of-year awards contender was released in March, when a studio that focuses on cooperative video games brought Split Fiction to the masses. Our critic called it 'a manic mash-up of science fiction and fantasy' with 'many spectacles that make you pick your eyes up off the floor.'
Those looking for single-player experiences could turn to Assassin's Creed Shadows, which follows two stories of vengeance in a vibrant feudal Japan; the cozy game Wanderstop, where a former warrior manages a tea cafe in a meditation on burnout; and Atomfall, which spins an alternative history around the worst nuclear event in British annals.
Here are three other games you may have missed this month:
Karma: The Dark World
The brilliant Karma: The Dark World is one of the most aggressively disturbing horror games released in some time. When the investigator Daniel McGovern wakes to an empty hospital room, his left arm is grossly black and bionic. After removing three tubes, he sees ebony ooze burbling out and screams, a little too emotional to be a government sleuth.
This weirdly unpopulated hospital is only the beginning. Through extremely dim, maddening office mazes, it's discovered that McGovern's mission is to find and interrogate Sean Mehndez, a family man addled by constant work for the autocratic Leviathan corporation. He's also accused of robbery.
Throughout 12 hours of gameplay, Karma's creators have taken many inspirations — including BioShock and 'Severance' — to the next level with creepily surreal and bizarrely utopian set pieces. Here, the looping terror of Guillermo del Toro's and Hideo Kojima's P.T., a playable teaser for an unreleased horror game, is made far more frightening.
On one of McGovern's trips through the loop of rooms, mannequins of the Mehndez family sit around a TV that shows stock footage of unsettling threshers on farmland. On the following trip, answered phones spew puzzling words. And during the next, corpses are hanging on hooks, heads rolling off their bodies if you dare approach.
Witnessing these things from a first-person point of view, I felt somewhat insane myself. I had to stop to clear my head several times, especially after visiting an office with a foreboding Christmas tree made of old computer monitors, a metaphor for Leviathan's religious zealotry. Signs that were hung as brutal reminders read 'OBEY.' Static Dobermans held obscure clues on paper.
The company's workers, who sometimes have computer monitors as heads, are woeful, depressed and mentally drained from the steely autocracy for which they toil. They work themselves to the bone. When McGovern runs from a skeletal monster into a narrow, claustrophobic hallway with locked doors, the bony hands emitting from the goon's chest aren't as oppressive as the overall atmosphere. The beast is almost overkill.
The real horrors here are the effects of the company's edicts, and the blue pills it purveys that play games with the mind but keep workers plodding through. It's even more affecting than the excellent Mouthwashing.
Midway through, I stopped again because one of these dizzying rooms induced nausea. But I kept returning to investigate this potent mix of speculative and realist fiction, learning how democracy died, somehow feeling brainwashed as well.
Expelled!
Woe to the pupil who fakes an illness to get out of class at Miss Mulligatawney's School for Promising Girls. Should she be sent to the infirmary, she just might have to swallow a generous dose of cod liver oil to appease the suspicious spirit of the school nurse. And just how does that taste? 'Like a group of sardines died together in a tin, a hundred years ago, and this was all that they left behind.'
Over the course of her very bad day, Verity Amersham, the heroine of Expelled!, will have to brave all manner of indignities beyond cod liver oil to avoid being kicked out of school. Her fate hangs in the balance because an injured classmate has claimed Verity pushed her out of an upper-story window.
To clear her name and uncover the facts and the whys of the incident, Verity will have to use what little time she has before the end of the day to chat with the school's students, teachers and staff members to gain the leverage she needs to vanquish her rivals and burnish her social standing.
Expelled! feels like a visual novel crossed with a roguelite game. Players are incentivized to relive Verity's school day several times because information gleaned in one playthrough carries over to the next, opening up new lines for investigation. The writing — a model of economy — is deliciously funny, and the graphic novel visuals are fetching. Expelled! mounts a magnificent charm offensive.
Centum
Creativity may often be perceived as something light and freeing, but creativity can also be a prison. It's a dilemma that the adventure game Centum works to explore.
Taking place within the warped and disintegrating world of an abandoned video game, Centum opens in a stone prison cell. You can poke and prod at various objects, even sketch a grim companion onto the wall, but you cannot escape. Not until you step back a level, to the game's metatextual computer interface, and launch a hacked version of that same scenario. This lets you break free of the prison and into all sorts of new, strange, gorgeously illustrated environs.
Centum uses its layers of abstract visuals and narrative to wrestle with the challenges and responsibilities of creating art. What if the thing you built in an attempt to reach others winds up hurting them instead? What if you inadvertently pack your trauma and your wounds into your work, leaving them as traps for an unsuspecting audience?
These questions manifest in a fractured and mystifying world of puzzles and one-off retro computer games that recall the early decades of indie game development. An OutRun-like game lets you race to flee a suffocating city; a top-down pixel art maze reflects the dead ends of the creator's depressed mind.
Little makes sense at first glance, but the discordant pieces of Centum's narrative leave a successful impression of the pain and frustration inherent to all acts of creation.