Nintendo is a name associated with family fun, whether that’s gathering around the TV with Mario Kart or adventuring through the world of Hyrule. But in 2024 one game broke through that image to try something both harrowing and ambitious. Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club is a riveting story about the darkest of subjects, a serial killer. The game took its dark material seriously, weaving in dark themes like domestic abuse, suicide, and the cruelty of humanity. This was not your usual Nintendo fare.

That’s not to say it wasn’t great. Emio is in fact one of the best narrative adventure games released in years, treating its mature themes with care and thoughtfulness. It’s just that this boundary-pushing experience isn’t one you usually expect from Nintendo. But apparently, its developers didn’t have as much trouble getting it green-lit as you might think.

Whether Rockstar Games will hit its promised 2025 release date for Grand Theft Auto VI is still up in the air. History dictates that the storied developer won’t. Either way, gamers will be waiting at least most of the year before they play the next chapter in the crime saga. So what do they do in the meantime? Well for those on PC, the modding community has a pretty awesome way to take the edge off the 12 year-wait.

The Liberty City Restoration Project is a large-scale mod for 2013’s Grand Theft Auto V that allows players to take a one-way plane ticket to the five boroughs featured in 2008’s Grand Theft Auto IV. The mod is more than just a simple port of Rockstar’s approximation of New York City into a new engine. It is a six-year, collaborative effort to integrate a functioning, bustling Liberty City as players remember it into Grand Theft Auto V.