It's hard to love a swamp. Mountains have majesty, deserts have mystery, but what do wetlands have? I imagine some Joe on the street would boil it down to something like "muck, malaria, and mosquitoes." Even so, Famia Mercius, an antiquarian who's a great admirer of the Elder Scrolls series' lizard-like Argonians, is trying to get me to love the surrounding marsh as she does. She slaps a gnat off her neck while in the middle of a giddy introduction, and her stone house suggests she retains some reservations about living like the locals.

I'm stepping through a portal on the heels of a young elf woman who looks roughly my own age, or at least as close as you get when you're dealing with a race that thinks of our pitiful lifespan like we think of dog years. But on the other side of the portal I face a woman racked with the lines and worries of a wasted life. I hear her despair at seeing my relatively young face. And yes, it's her: The trip through the portal felt like seconds for me, but she's been over here on the other side, trapped and wandering in the lovely ruin we'd come to study for more decades than I've even been alive. Elder Scrolls Online's Summerset expansion ($40 on Humble) is at its finest in quests like these; these little moments that feel more like "weird tales" from the pens of pulp greats like Robert E. Howard or H.P. Lovecraft than the pages of contemporary doorstop fantasies. The compact scripts allow glimpses into the daily life of imaginary worlds that you just don't get in the greater dramas about wrestling with gods and saving the world.

June is here at last, and with it comes a pretty strong month of game releases. Summer is usually the dead season when it comes to new video game releases, and this June is unseasonably strong. Switch owners will have a ton of new games and ports to choose from in June, continuing Nintendo's stellar release schedule into the summer. Here's the big list, with some highlights at the end: As you can see, if you're a Nintendo Switch gamer you're in luck this June. Alongside new releases, which I'll get to in a minute, you've got Wolfenstein II finally releasing on the Switch, as well as the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy.

The first chap I meet in the Summerset Isles is an elf with a Sean Penn face who gripes about how he's missing out on a wine tasting because some local Wood Elves "offed" the vintner, because of course. This, after all, is the closed beta for The Elder Scrolls Online's Summerset expansion ($40 on Amazon), which whisks us off to the ancestral homes of the High Elves, a magical land crammed with haughty wizards, Neuschwanstein-like villas, and flora that likely would have been at home in Eden. This dude just wants his wine, and I can appreciate that. ZeniMax Online's game may be crawling with elves and the occasional grumpy orc, but no other MMORPG feels quite so human. That's not to say that other MMOs like Final Fantasy XIV and Star Wars: The Old Republic don't spin a good yarn, but they're more concerned with high drama and the oh-so-important Fate of the World.