Well, six years later, someone has clearly opened their wallet. In other words, Mortal Shell 2 is mostly everything you want from a sequel: bigger, more content-rich, more practical, and more ambitious in every respect. The emphasis is mostly on the good, because with a bigger budget and bigger ambitions, Cold Symmetry managed to expand almost every good part of the original while also keeping a few problems that I had hoped they would leave behind in 2020.

Splatoon has already slowly turned into a series. Although the first one came out in 2015 for the Wii U, we've also received two sequels for the Switch in the meantime. And despite the series having story modes, most of the focus has always gone to online shooting in Turf War.

Horror has never been more culturally visible. In cinemas, the genre is no longer treated as a niche corner of the release calendar: horror films regularly become major commercial events, cross into prestige territory, and compete seriously during awards season. The success of Sinners, for example, helped demonstrate how a horror film could function simultaneously as a crowd-pleaser, a critical conversation piece, and an awards contender.

Help won't arrive in a few minutes or hours, but will take years, while the ship's hull is just a loose boundary separating you from the infinite void. Every good space horror is partially or completely based on this. In this case, Directive 8020 understands all of this well enough and builds its entire plot around that feeling.