Nier Automata is cruel to its characters. An action role-playing game from Square Enix, very few games have made me react as strongly to the story as Automata. While Yoko Taro's games have always been disturbingly provocative as they dig at deep existential questions, the optional sidequests from the Machine Village exemplify what makes Automata so compelling and heart-wrenching.

How do you follow the biggest role-playing game of all time? How do you look at Final Fantasy VII and make something even better? If you're Square in the 1990s, the answer is simple: You break everything.

Bloodborne's chalice dungeons offer hundreds of thousands of possible crypts to explore. Dedicated players have found lost enemies and keep looking for more. Thanks to dataminers searching the game's files, a new group of dungeons have been found containing developer test areas and unused bosses.

It's that strange part of the year where no one's really sure what day it is and everyone's getting fat off Christmas leftovers and gifted chocolates. In case you're one of those people rolling around in a chocolate-flavoured haze: it is Friday today, and yes, the long weekend starts tomorrow. What will you be playing before we say goodbye to 2017?

In a world where Japanese publishers have finally started to embrace global simultaneous releases, and there's no longer much stress over whether we'll see niche role-playing games come to the West, one series remains woefully behind: Trails, also known as Kiseki, also known as the best JRPG series out there.

There are some good games in January's PlayStation Plus lineup. In addition to some solid PS4 games with Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Telltale's Batman, the PS3 gets The Book of Unwritten Tales 2, and the Vita gets Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness. As always, these games are only "free" if you have an active PlayStation Plus subscription.

In late 2013, veteran Bungie composer Marty O'Donnell finished Music of the Spheres, an eight-part musical work designed to be released alongside Destiny. It never came out. But today, thanks to an anonymous leaker, the elusive work is finally on the internet -- at least until the copyright strikes hit.

If you're a PS4 owner, you may turn on your console today and find a surprise home-page advertisement for Destiny 2, a video game in which players travel through space, battling against adversaries like the Fallen, the Cabal, and the Eververse.

Often, video games are about making decisions, and you won't always make the right one. Sometimes, there is no right answer. Sometimes, you've got to live with what you did.

Earlier last week, Atlus announced a remake of its cult-classic puzzle game Catherine. It was an exciting moment for fans of the stylish adult thriller. But amid the list of new features, there was one bullet point that meant the world to a small section of the community: the competitive Catherine crowd.

From Tales to Dragon Quest to a brand flippin' new Persona, this has been a stellar year for Japanese role-playing games. We've come a long way from the dark days of, like, 2012.

Another year, another crop of video game paintings doing their best to class up the place.

Seven and a half years ago, one of the most acclaimed pro wrestlers of all time, Chris Benoit, murdered his wife and his seven-year-old son. He then killed himself. Today, some gamers want to play as Chris Benoit in a wrestling video game and keep trying to make that happen. The company behind the game doesn't want them to.

In 2012, as work on Mass Effect 3 came to a close, a small group of top BioWare employees huddled to talk about the next entry in their epic sci-fi franchise. Their goal, they decided, was to make a game about exploration -- one that would dig into the untapped potential of the first three games. Instead of visiting just a few planets, they said, what if you could explore hundreds?

First, there were snakes on a plane. Then, we had sharks in tornadoes. Now, there is a darker and more prevalent combination of pests and unlikely places they exist: cockroaches in your PS4.

The debut trailer for Catherine Full Body, the PS4 and PS Vita Catherine remake, is causing controversy for its portrayal of the game's third romance option.

In the five years since we last saw a mainline Soulcalibur title released, no competitor has really stepped up to fill the game's specific niche. Focused on armour and weapons, the Soulcalibur games have always had a unique combat range, pacing, and impact speed built around various weapon styles.

I played Soulcalibur VI for around an hour at a press event last week and, while the demo was very limited, there was enough to show that the fundamentals of the series are not being radically changed. This is Soulcalibur as you know it, with some of its systems simplified, and a couple of new features to help turn the tide in a particularly one-sided match.

Yakuza 0 is one of 2017's sleeper hits, a prequel to the popular crime drama that brought it to a wider audience. While most of the game is about criminal intrigue and martial arts brawls, a surprisingly robust club management mini-game is one of its most entertaining activities.