Editor's note: This is an update to our original review of the PC version of Republique, which did not include Episodes 4 and 5 at the time. The review has been expanded to include specifics for the completed, PS4 version.

It begins with a plea for help. A close up on a teenage girl's panicked face, clandestinely whispering about being "erased." Her name is Hope. You don't know why she's called you. You can't quite tell where she is. But you know she's frightened, and everything is horribly wrong. We know this not because some omniscient narrator fills us in on the world in Republique's opening scene but in the same way you get all your information in Republique, a way that few games offer: you observe. You explore.The truth about Hope's new surroundings is out there, on the walls, in the newspapers, on the voicemails scattered around the game. A foreboding "headmaster" sees all, assuring an unseen populace that all is still right with the world--except clearly it isn't.

You're surrounded by guards, people are blathering on about manifestos, the dangers of information, and about the poisonous influence of a dead rebel named Daniel Zager, who sets the tone at the game's outset with a single quote: "I used to be angry at my government because I thought they weren't listening. Now I'm angry because I know they are." We are in a world of lavish accommodations, a place that more resembles Xavier's School for the Gifted than any sort of prison, and yet all the other telltale signs of a stone cold prison are inescapable, and in full view.

And so begins Republique, with a sense of supreme disquiet, and a constant, ongoing bewilderment. It's that bewilderment that drives the game onward and what keeps players guessing episode after episode through a mystery that's all too reticent to hand out the easy answers.

The dystopian nightmare is a compelling veneer for a rather simple stealth game when it comes down to brass tacks, though. Once you break Hope out of her initial confinement cell, your task is simply to keep her out of the hands of the Prizrak, the private security stooges milling about, keeping Pre-Cals—that is, the children of Republique—in their place, locked up, and under control. You do this by hijacking the thousands of surveillance devices scattered around the place, Watch Dogs style, and guide Hope from hiding place to hiding place, just beyond the sight of the Prizrak, hacking every piece of electronics you can find, occasionally managing to improve your door access in the process. Republique's lineage shows here. Developer Camouflaj has a few Metal Gear Solid veterans working under its roof, and that game's stealth pedigree shows in the patrol patterns, Hope's hiding spots, and the more advanced reactions when the Prizrak spot Hope and give chase.

The difference is that Hope doesn't have Snake's arsenal—or anything much at all really. Hope can pick up pepper spray, tasers, and a landmine that puts Prizrak to sleep. She can even pickpocket from the Prisrak if she's clever. But for every item Hope picks up to just barely fend off being caught, the Prizrak get taser-proof armor and nerve gas. It's in character for the game at least, since Hope is definitely shown to be a naïve character who wouldn't know anything about the subtle arts of murder and persuasion. But it means often feeling like Hope is hideously outnumbered and outgunned.

Or at least it would if getting caught meant death, or punishment, or higher security. Instead, losing means getting marched hands-up to the nearest confinement cell (which are, essentially, the game's save rooms), waiting for the guard to leave so you can bust Hope out. For a place that seemingly wants Hope dead, and has no problem with putting the boots to anyone who disobeys, they seem to handle Hope the way you would a bratty 4 year old, and it works every time. It doesn't make sneaking any less fun, and arguably, the infinite retries are often a blessing, considering the amount of backtracking you already have to do, but it does mess with the game's immersion.

The game's interface has been heavily redesigned to take full advantage of the DualShock4.

Indeed, breaking the hypnotic, curious spell the game can cast when its doling out more of the mystery is its biggest problem. Ironically, the Playstation 4 version's greatest technical success lends a hand to its greatest failure. The mobile and PC ports strictly kept the player as an omniscient voyeur, whose all-seeing eye jumped around the facility, whose touch/cursor led Hope every step of the way to freedom. For PS4, the game's interface has been heavily redesigned to take full advantage of the DualShock4, with camera jumps now context sensitive, with buttons assigned to elements in the environment, Mark of Kri-style.

This also allows the player full control over Hope using the left analog stick instead of just pointing her to the next location. On the positive side, except for an occasional stickiness when leaving cover, Hope's movements are appropriately responsive and simple to latch onto, making stealth all the more intuitive. The problem is the dissonance that comes with now being in full control over someone who still consistently asks for your assistance during gameplay--it essentially robs her of hard-won agency in the process.

The hits to immersion don't stop there. When jumping from camera to camera, you have the ability to read detailed files on each of the guards, which would be a nifty touch, one that pays off in spades in the third episode, if not for the fact that most of the guards' files have a giant "Kickstarter backer" stamp under their country's flag, and often references their gamer identities. Early on, you start getting additional assistance from another Prizrak guard who calls and offers advice and information in emojis and a robotic voice. He's a strong character, whose role in the facility gets pieced together bit by bit, and who just so happens to have floppy disks referencing fellow indie developers and Playstation exclusives scattered all around the place as collectables. The game certainly has supporters in high places who deserve their tips of the hat, but placing those smirking nods so shortly after Hope sees her first dead body, or after watching Republique's media branch destroy a man's reputation feels wholly out of place.

It's only a stumbling block considering how great of a job the game does in world-building for such extended periods of time. For most of Republique, our eyes and ears are just as innocent as Hope's, and every new room is ripe with opportunities to learn something new, to fit a new piece of the puzzle on what we know about the Headmaster's plans and ambitions, the rampant, terrifying censorship and moralizing, the journalism-turned-propaganda-machine the failed, hostile attempts by Republique brass to engage the leaders of the free world. The stellar voice cast keeps us engaged from minute one, with every hackable device giving us brief, audio-only glimpses of the outside world and Republique's black-hat inner workings.

Where Republique's gameplay is satisfyingly simple, the plot driving it on is anything but.

At the center of it all, literally, and metaphorically, there's just Hope: a frightened girl who just wants to see the world outside Republique, not realizing just what kind of world she's trying to work her way back into. She definitely finds out through the course of Republique's five episodes. It's worrisome stuff that threatens to absolutely ruin a girl who we're already forced to tread lightly with in the early going. One of the few moral choices in the game involves that very idea, of how much Hope can bear. Though Episode 4 is a disappointing regression to point-and-click adventure game ideas that have long been rendered obsolete, the answers are abundant, frightening, and more than a little on the ambitious side when the game comes to its climax. Its pedigree as the offspring of Metal Gear Solid veterans is never so pronounced as it is when Republique crescendos, and it more than outshines the relative coyness of the first three episodes. Where Republique's gameplay is satisfyingly simple, the plot driving it on is anything but.

Needless to say, despite its mobile game roots, the world of Republique is meant to immerse, to beckon the player's curiosity, and to involve them enough in the city-state's ins and outs enough to get Hope out of danger. In transitioning to consoles, the game remains largely successful at that.

It's easier to weave a good tale when given an abundance of time and space to flesh it out. The narrower your constraints, the harder it is to successfully tell a story, and the more glaring every single seam and flaw will be. In that sense the deck is stacked against Moon Hunters from the start; it has a lot of ambition in terms of the story it wants to tell, but with so little space to tell it, the game's weaknesses become difficult to overlook.

Billed as a "myth-weaving RPG," it can be a little tricky to wrap your head around what Moon Hunters actually is. Most of your time will be spent hopping from point to point on the world map, clearing areas of enemies and encountering random events on your quest to foil the Sun Cult and return the absent Moon goddess to the sky. You'll do this again and again, playthrough after playthrough, until you figure out what you need for a better ending and, perhaps, get lucky enough to pull it off.

Each playable character has two distinct attacks and one evasive ability, with the exception of the unlockable Songstress who weaves together musical combos instead. Skill upgrades can be purchased through merchants scattered generously around the world, and at the end of each in-game day characters can pick an action to complete at camp that will give the party a stat boost. Occasionally you interact with random NPCs and complete minor events, and the choices made during those encounters will affect your personality. That in turn affects how that character is remembered within the greater context of the game's mythology, which is represented through epilogues and unlockable constellations.

Playthroughs are short, events are randomized, and there's a good chance that many of the possible story beats encountered during your first couple runs won't make a lot of sense (or be particularly useful) until you've done a couple more. If you don't happen to meet a girl who mentions a cat that can teach people to talk to animals, then when you find a shady-looking cat hanging out somewhere you may have no idea that it has any function beyond that of any other animal. It's seemingly one more loose puzzle piece in a random pile of loose puzzle pieces.

Such a design decision lies at the heart of why Moon Hunters left me so dissatisfied: it felt like I was always missing something, that I would never truly succeed until I had played enough to have an encyclopedic knowledge of exactly what to do if I encountered random event X, Y, or Z on a run. Even when it seemed as though I was putting the puzzle together, acquiring one condition that could satisfy another, it was often a matter of luck to actually find what I needed, with a very limited time-frame in which to find it.

It didn't help that the whole time I played I was butting up against a lot of bugs and rough edges, and although none interfered with my progress, that didn't make them any less irritating. There are cutscenes which build a unique atmosphere courtesy of their subtle animation, soft music and dreamy narration, only to end so abruptly that I thought I'd accidentally skipped ahead. I ran into a mouse at one point that just said "squ" and vanished. No capital letters, no punctuation. Just "squ". Another bug discovered on my travels was when playing as Shaman. I was essentially able to double-up on his shape-shifting form and run at full speed without penalty because the buff kept getting stuck when it should have run out.

It goes on like this, one little thing piling on top of another little thing and blotting out a lot of the charm Moon Hunters might otherwise have.

Then there's the volcanic bull mini-boss, who had a curious habit of charging at me once before politely standing in place while I chipped its health down to nothing. An area that generated an impassable barrier between me and the exit. A bit of dialogue where my character portrait appeared on both side of the screen. When I played with a friend (the multiplayer feature is, to be fair, still in beta) the upgrades he saw equipped and the upgrades I saw equipped on both characters were different. Worse, the endings we saw were completely different, too--the history he was given for his character had only a few sections in common with the history that I was given for his character. It goes on like this, one little thing piling on top of another little thing and blotting out a lot of the charm the game might otherwise have.

A much larger issue is how much weight is placed on the story, and how little that sometimes matters. During most playthroughs, the leader of the Sun Cult will come to the player character early on and tell them that he intends to kill them. Sure enough, if given the opportunity he will attack, and if the player loses the fight then that's that. They'll watch their character collapse, and then read about what they did with the rest of their life.

Maybe this cultist has a really generous definition of what killing is. Maybe it was a metaphorical kind of killing. Either way, when someone swears to kill my character and succeeds but I'm still treated to a little write-up about how she later moved in with someone she flirted with once, it becomes a lot harder to invest myself in the story again, and again, and again. Playing Moon Hunters successfully depends on you doing this.

With all that said, there are two truly unimpeachable things that Moon Hunters has in its favour: its art and its music. Every character portrait is rendered in an utterly beautiful watercolor style. Every design, every detail, every color palette works together in such a way that it makes me want to frame and mount as many of them as I can fit on my walls. The soundtrack, meanwhile, sets the tone of the game perfectly. It meanders between haunting and enchanting, and does a great deal to cement the often otherworldly situations that Moon Hunters presents. I could absolutely still recommend it to fans of games with a unique aesthetic, even if I would hesitate before suggesting it to someone with a less specific interest.

Moon Hunters doesn't give you the time to truly nestle into its world in one sitting, relying instead on the idea that they'll keep coming back to uncover more and more with each successive playthrough. I wish I could say that at some point it all started to come together for me, but it didn't. It never felt like I was getting enough out of those playthroughs to make them truly worthwhile. I was searching for more, I wanted more, but even overlooking its technical flaws, Moon Hunters couldn't meet me halfway.

Murdering gangs of Gorons on the bus might not be what you'd expect to do on a Sunday, but Nintendo's next major 3DS game lets you do just that. The 2014 Wii U release, Hyrule Warriors, took the Dynasty Warriors template and smeared fairy juice over it, demanding you listen and toot on ocarinas while you waded through--literally--thousands of enemies in each level. Hyrule Warriors Legends condenses that onto the portable dual-screens of the 3DS, and in some respects the transition to handheld makes it play better than the original.

One of the drawbacks of Hyrule Warriors was play fatigue, with each level demanding repeated stabs of the slice button for upwards of thirty minutes. The option to close the 3DS's clamshell, to pause the game and reopen it again whenever your murderous tendencies rise to the surface, allows this feast of brutality to be enjoyed in bite-sized pieces. And it suits the game; being able to liberate a fort here, a base there, take on a boss for a bit before shutting the clamshell and going to climb a mountain (or whatever it is people do in their spare time) is transformative to the experience.

The baseline game which this is built from presents a cheerful carousel of fine fan service.

Elementally, this is the same game as the Wii U edition. Everything from the original is here, including all of the DLC bundled in. The extras are a great little touch, adding the option to change characters while you play, as well as a Wind Waker setting and characters to go with that. There's also a new star, Linkle, who is essentially a female Link, and carries her own side-story and path to become a hero.

Cynics will say it's merely a few sundry bonuses added to an old game, that nothing is fundamentally altered by their inclusion. That's true to a point, but the new characters do add some strategic variance to gameplay, and the option to transfer your characters to the Wii U version is a nice touch. Also the baseline game which this is built from, lest we forget, presents a cheerful carousel of fine fan service. It's the characters, the locales, the tinkling of a jingle you've known for 30 years that resonates here, and it's all done with a knowledge and reverence for Zelda's lineage that you can't help but admire.

There are some welcome changes nevertheless, with a new focus on objective-led missions. Gone is the primitive goal to wipe the map of all adversaries, as was the case in the Dynasty Warriors series that this Nintendo spin-off was built upon. More than ever, Link and co's adventure focuses on an ever-changing array of smaller tasks. Take this fort, stop this enemy, protect this person, feed this flying whale.

It makes for a much more appealing game in the long term, compared to Warriors' non-objective-based approach, and it means you must pay close attention to what's going on at any given time in order to avoid failing miserably. Battlefield management is a key factor, and you'll have to be juggling different fronts, watching out for different forces and making sure both your home base and other main characters aren't at risk of being taken over or defeated. If they are, that's an instant fail.

While the first few levels ease you in nicely, it can soon become overwhelming for the less experienced. Failure will frustrate often and suddenly if your focus strays. (Word of advice, if a character says your home base is about to fall, don't assume you have any time to spare). This mild element of strategy, which has been present throughout the Warriors series, has become far more pronounced in Hyrule Warriors Legends. You are forced to understand your surroundings, to become fluent with the ebb and flow of enemy spawns, and to pay attention to the points of interest on your map. It's nothing particularly deep or taxing once you're used to it, but there is an initial rush to the proceedings.

It's hardly perfect, however. Hyrule Warriors Legends isn't free from criticisms made of its forbearers, insofar as it's absurdly repetitive. Wading through hundreds of enemies in a single level might sound like the ultimate power trip fantasy, but in reality it soon becomes pedestrian, to the extent that the next deployment of minions evokes a distinct feeling of irritation.

Hyrule Warriors Legends isn't free from criticisms made of its forbearers, insofar as it's absurdly repetitive.

There are also moments where the game seems unwilling to play fair. When, for example, an AI teammate flees battle because your silver-bullet maneuver against a boss doesn't pay off, thus triggering a mission failure notice. This is fundamentally irritating, but even more so after 30 minutes of busywork slashing through hordes of foes. It's not uncommon either. It will likely happen to you.

Then there's the lock-on functionality, the boon of any such game wherein you're wading through enemies by the ton. It allows you to pick out the important, powerful baddies in a crowd so that you can focus your attack on them. Except of course when the game chooses not to, for reasons unexplained, and instead targets the wrong enemy. Sometimes Hyrule Warriors Legends' lock-on likes to play jazz with the rules; sometimes it will lock onto your intended target and switch that at the last moment. Targeting is key to success, and the distrust it builds between yourself and the game can be devastating.

Legends' optional stereoscopy, meanwhile, at times dropped the frame rate by half. Sometimes more so, depending on how busy the action became. This isn't a dealbreaker, partly because this feature is exclusive to the New 3DS models, and primarily because it's so hard to care about 3D effects. For those who still do, switching on this visual effect will disrupt the flow of the action, and it's hard to think of many 3DS games that require a constant frame rate as much as Hyrule Warriors Legends.

Assessed solely as a Zelda game, Hyrule Warriors probably isn't good enough to lure in non-Dynasty Warriors fans, but it is passable enough to offer Musou lovers something different to play between their usual battles for dynastic superiority. Stereoscopy notwithstanding, it's technically impressive. And while age-old criticisms of Warriors' repetitiveness still applies, that burden is eased somewhat thanks to the option to play this handheld edition in bursts. Now nearly twenty years since the birth of the Warriors series, here we have a convincing argument that this franchise is best suited to handhelds.