Maneater

Tripwire's self-styled "ShaRkPG" takes the open-world progression template and hands it to a shark: the player starts as a pup, eats to evolve, and grows across seven Gulf Coast regions from bayou shallows to open ocean. The framing does much of the personality work: the campaign is staged as a fictional shark-hunting reality show, with Chris Parnell narrating the carnage in the register of a snide nature documentary.

The trade-off is that the joke outlasts the loop. Critics landed mixed, a 68 Metascore and a "Fair" 71 on OpenCritic with barely half recommending it, and the recurring note is that eating, evolving and mashing an attack button thin out well before the credits. Players broadly agree, with stability complaints on top. At roughly seven hours and included on PS Plus Extra, it lands as a short novelty best taken in sittings, not as the action RPG its genre tag promises.