Jusant doesn't so much do away with the cliche of the video game vista as reorient it. Instead of giving you a stirring panorama to gaze upon, it fixes your view on the vertiginous mountain stretching above and below, your task being to guide a quiet, androgynous character across its rocks and ridge-splitting crevasses. Instead, it homes in on the challenge of navigating in the here and now, one dusty handhold and firmly lodged belay at a time. The magic of Jusant lies in its ingenious control scheme. Each outstretched hand is controlled by one of the shoulder buttons; hold and release the shoulder buttons in tandem and you start to build a thrilling sense of fluidity, scaling the cliff at a considerable rate of knots.

Despite the pandemic, it's been a pretty great year for video game hardware. Microsoft launched the Xbox Series X, a powerful obelisk packing a 12-teraflop GPU, and the smaller Series S, which can run games natively at 1440p resolution. Sony, meanwhile, released the PlayStation 5 and a cheaper Digital Edition that doesn't come with a disc drive. Both companies are struggling with stock shortages at the moment and a number of user-reported hardware issues. Still, it's a minor miracle that neither Sony nor Microsoft was forced to delay their next-gen launch.

While we wait to get our first official glimpse of the PlayStation 5, Sony is sharing the first details on the video game console's controller. The DualSense features a two-toned look with a white touchpad and subtle PlayStation blue light bar illuminating the sides. It also boasts white grips, with black shoulder buttons and thumbsticks. The DualSense will include many of the features of the DualShock controller used on the PlayStation 4 but will focus more on how games feel as you use the controller, said Hideaki Nishino, Sony's senior vice president of platform planning and management. Nishino said the controller will have haptic feedback to mimic "powerful sensations you'll feel when you play, such as the slow grittiness of driving a car through mud."

In the world of the magic, the climax of a trick -- aka the grand reveal -- is known as the "prestige." Today, Nintendo officially announced more details on its Switch console, including that modular controller, dubbed JoyCon. In a video that is aimed to mimic a magician pulling off tricks, the Switch's general producer Yoshiaki Koizumi demonstrated just how much the JoyCon can do. The controller seems to be able to do everything. It's got enough buttons to be a traditional console controller, but there's also an accelerometer and gyroscope so it can do the same motion/gesture controls like the Wii's controller. That's not all: the JoyCon also has motion-depth infrared camera that can scan the distance and shape of objects, and a built-in haptic feedback engine that Nintendo calls "HD Rumble."