Gaming

Red Dead Redemption 2 is a profound, glorious downer. It is the rare blockbuster video game that seeks to move players not through empowering gameplay and jubilant heroics, but by relentlessly forcing them to confront decay and despair. Rockstar Games' new open-world western opus is exhaustively detailed and exhaustingly beautiful, a mammoth construction of which every nook and cranny has been polished to an unnerving shimmer.

The fourth installment of Treyarch's Black Ops series might be the first Call of Duty to forgo single-player. But after a spate of less-than-fully-satisfying entries, putting full efforts behind multiplayer has paid off: Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 finds the perfect middle ground between classic COD and the "jetpack" era, reviving the franchise's fun in many ways.