Hellpoint

The answer is not handed to you: the story comes through environmental clues, hidden messages and strange encounters, and it goes places you will not see coming. The setting mixes abandoned high-tech corridors with cosmic horror, and the soundtrack does real work keeping the dread up. If you like piecing a mystery together at your own pace, this is your kind of crime scene.

Irid Novo orbits a black hole in real time, and where it is in that orbit changes what happens on the station. Bosses appear at certain times, horde assaults kick off, and enemy stats and positions shift. A clock in the corner of your screen tracks it, and learning to read it is part of the game. It turns planning into a decision: rush that door now, or wait for the station to swing around and see what the darkness coughs up. Few games make the sky itself a gameplay system, and it gives every return trip a chance to feel different.

Dozens of melee and ranged weapons, plus armor pieces to match your build. Every weapon has its own special abilities that unlock the more you fight with it, so the sword you have been swinging for ten hours quietly knows tricks your newer rifle does not. Ranged options add variety without replacing the melee core: timing, stamina and positioning still decide most fights. Whether you want a heavy slab of metal or a pulse-style rifle, there is a loadout that fits how you like to play, and leveling a favorite weapon feels like a small story of its own.

This is a souls-like in the full sense: methodical fights, stamina to manage, enemy patterns to learn, and bosses that take more than one attempt. Death sends you back to a checkpoint, and progress only counts once you have earned it. The station is one big interconnected map, and exploring any corner in any order is the point; it is packed with branching paths, hidden passages and secrets within secrets, more of them than most games in the genre bother with. Fair warning, said with affection: it can be a bit rough around the edges at times, but the exploration depth makes up for it.

The entire campaign can be played in co-op, start to finish, without interruption. A friend can press start and join your session locally in split screen, or you can call for help online. Loot is shared, and the second local player's progress is saved properly rather than watered down, so nobody's evening is wasted. Fighting a horde assault or a boss is a different experience when someone is watching your back, and getting through a brutal stretch together on one couch is exactly what this mode is built for.