Tomb Raider is ostensibly an action game, but it’s filled with an unusual amount of very specific horror imagery for an action game. It’s smart about how and when it uses these visual cues, and it’s clear that the developers understand how this kind of imagery affects us as gamers and people and even what such imagery represents within the greater context of the horror genre.

Oh, League of Legends, I wish I could quit you. After years of playing Riot’s immensely popular Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (an already abstruse genre commonly shortened to MOBA), I still find myself going back to the game time and again. Unlike the massive game worlds, random play experiences, or user-generated features that have traditionally kept my attention for so long, League of Legends has offered little variation in either maps or rules. Nearly four years after launch, the game has only four maps available to players, two of which I play almost exclusively. Its staying power is maintained not by expansive shifts in the core experience, but by minute updates and additions that ripple outward into hugely varied and surprisingly educational forms of play.

Within the title of Don’t Starve is its instructions and its goal. Don’t starve.

Simple enough instructions for a game, though the game has layers of familiar systems that make not starving a bit complicated.

As a remake, the 2013 release of Tomb Raider has truly remade an iconic image.  But by beating her down, has Crystal Dynamics successfully created a reasonable image of a survivor?

In this week’s episode, we look at the re-imagining of Lara Croft in this year’s Tomb Raider reboot.

A couple of weeks ago at the 2013 Game Developers Conference, EA showed off a 17-minute demo of the upcoming Battlefield 4. It’s unusual (but awesome) for such a substantial gameplay video to be released at the same time as a game’s official announcement, but this is also a unique situation. The demo wasn’t just showing off Battlefield 4, it was also showing off the Frostbite 3 game engine that runs Battlefield 4 and that will run most of EA’s major next-gen games. This demo was meant to show off the graphical future of all EA games.

With all that weight on its shoulders, I’m left wondering, though: “Why feature a first-person shooter?”