For the record, I did see Fantastic Four: First Steps today, and it was magnificent. Full review coming, probably tomorrow.

I finished Crypt Custodian yesterday, hitting 100% after about fifteen hours of play, although there’s a boss rush mode I’ll need to dip into if I want to get all the trophies, and I’m probably not going to. It’s one of the nicer surprises of the year, because I basically just grabbed it for free from Game Pass based on the image you see up there.

It’s a Metroidvania. You play a cat. You’re dead and a ghost. You’re prevented from entering paradise by a really bossy dead frog (that’s not a joke) and you spend the entire game cleaning up trash with your broom and whacking monsters with it. In classic Metroidvania fashion, you unlock a bunch of abilities over the course of the game that let you go back and get into areas you couldn’t reach before, and while I have no intention of spoiling the ending, it revolves around making 10 friends so that you can invade Paradise and visit your still-living loved ones, and the ending will make you cry a little bit.

I play these games for the exploration, right? This is the map:

Or, if you prefer a slightly more abstract, right-click-for-much-larger version, you can have this one:

Don’t worry about the Chinese, the words don’t matter. The point is the map is ridiculously large, and the different areas are wildly different, some with environmental challenges (one area reverses its polarity every time you dash, making walls and floors either appear or reappear along with roughly half of the enemies at any time) and some that just look cool. There’s rainy forests and castles and tombs and enormous retail backrooms and an amusement park. You can teleport to save spots at any time and there’s no penalty for dying, and you can even unlock a power-up late in the game that prevents missed jumps from hurting you, so there’s a strong incentive to just pick a direction and go. Your power-ups can be equipped using little upgrade spheres that can be found or purchased, so there’s an element of switching back and forth between them depending on what you need to do– I found myself with an exploration build and a boss fight build after a while, for example– although by the end of the game you can find enough of the spheres that you can equip nearly everything you need, and you might be able to buy as many spheres as you want; the one vendor doesn’t seem to run out of them.

So, yeah. Games like this are why Game Pass is worth the money; this game is delightful and everyone should play it, whether they have to pay for it or not, but if you can get it for free then you really have no excuse. Give it a shot.