Enlarge / Purnima, the sniper you can recruit, is an assassin who refused to do a job for the evil Council because it involved a child murder. Now, as part of your team, she will kill a gazillion goons. Strange times. (credit: Harebrained Schemes / Paradox Interactive)

Lamplighters League is a modern XCOM -style turn-based strategy game with a Weird War-ish, Indiana Jones -like feel, a light stealth element, and it’s made by the folks who made Battletech and the Shadowrun Returns series. If you pay for Game Pass, or you see this game at any price that feels reasonable (including its debut $50), that should tell you enough about whether to try it. I think you should.

I wanted to get that out of the way because I have some nits to pick with Lamplighters League , some technical and some tactical. But I don’t want to lose sight of how excited I am to have a meaty new tactics game to sink into, especially one based on an original, if heavily referential, world. If you’re a fan of tile-based movements, two actions per turn, home bases full of upgrade potential, and engaging little interactions between your troops, you don’t get that many solid games like this per year, so take note of Lamplighters League . The number of years between XCOM titles is getting longer, not shorter—we need some reserves.

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The first Jagged Alliance game was published nine months after X-COM: UFO Defense , despite being developed at nearly the same time, in the same genre, with neither knowing about the other. X-COM took the throne as the progenitor of turn-based tactics games . Jagged Alliance sold okay and became a minor cult classic but is not mentioned in even a fraction of as many histories or ranked lists.

Jagged Alliance 2 was a richer, cruder, funnier, far better game. The sequel more fully meshed '80s action movie tropes and stereotypes with the peculiar fun of micromanaging a jungle gunfight, while also managing a cast of real characters. Like Soldier of Fortune magazine, or dozens of VHS box covers from the "Action" section, it's only realistic at a glance. As Darius Kazemi puts it in his wonderful book on the game : "No matter what a war-themed video game claims to do, it inevitably simulates the cultural fantasy of war and never war itself."

Like its predecessor, Jagged Alliance 2 had exponentially more developer cred than sales. It racked up editors' awards and high review scores, but its most notable nod was a nomination for " Best Game Nobody Played " in 1999. Nobody expected a true sequel 24 years later. But here we are, with a Jagged Alliance 3 that feels very direct in its sequel-dom.

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The studio behind Monument Valley , one of the best mobile games ever made , made a Netflix-required mobile game in 2022 that you almost certainly didn't play, let alone see. Desta: The Memories Between is now out on PC and Nintendo Switch , and I highly recommend you seek it out if you lean toward coming-of-age stories, turn-based strategy, dreamlike surreality, or nailing someone in the face with a perfectly angled ball.

Desta is a college-age British youth who's anxious about returning home to a widowed mother, friends left behind, memories of their late father, and a lot of unresolved feelings. You guide Desta through anxious dreams that are, very conveniently, expressed as grid-based, turn-by-turn dodgeball fights. Can you resolve the guilt of falling out of touch with your best friend from high school by pulling off the perfect bank shot off their dome, catching the ball on the rebound, then hitting them again? In Desta , you can, and I swear it works.

It helps that developer ustwo brings all its powers to bear on Desta 's dreamy visuals, evocative soundtrack, and wonderful spoken dialogue. You could ignore the narrative if you wanted to get straight to the increasingly complicated battlefields—the story bits are short and direct and easy to skip. But I'd bet that you'll get pulled in.