There's considerable joy to poking at the edges of its ingenious interlocking systems to see what happens.
The game reveals its brilliance by constantly and subtly reconfiguring the emotions behind erasure.
The most impressive thing about the game is still the strength and specificity of its vision.
Spelunky 2 remains staunchly committed to its immaculate core design.
Loop Hero functions as a statement of persistence in the face of the seemingly insurmountable.
Psychonauts 2 in particular is a game of surprising psychological insight, full of rich, flawed characters at the end of their ropes. If so much of this game is a reiteration of what worked about its predecessor, it functions as a reminder for just how much of the medium is still catching up to Psychonauts.
Details like the cause of the disease and how it spreads are unclear, though it doesn’t appear to be fatal. Much of the game involves simply existing in the midst of this incident, experiencing the story while trying to hold certain relationships together as things grow more grave. The slow progression of the disease lends itself to tear-jerking melodrama, but the characters’ horror is quiet and largely internal. Occasionally, they verbalize their fears, but mostly their memories just gradually and inevitably falls away, like leaves in autumn.
Where other isometric games of this sort heavily telegraph areas and objects that you should return to later, the levels here subtly fold in on themselves in ways that are both slyly hidden and obvious in hindsight. Tunic appears unassuming and even a little routine on the surface, but it constantly reveals how clever it is every time it encourages us to take a closer look.
That El Paso, Elsewhere works at all as a drama is a huge achievement. It tackles weighty topics with a maturity that’s rare in gaming, and which is all the more impressive given that it does so within the framework of a shooter that suggests a Halloween attraction as curated by John Woo. It’s emblematic of the game as a whole—a bizarre amalgamation of parts that shouldn’t work yet manages to form something cohesive, soulful, weird, and deeply personal.
Perhaps the greatest compliment that one can pay to A Highland Song is that—unlike any number of games that mark traversable areas in, say, white splotches or yellow paint—it doesn’t feel obviously designed. There are areas in the game that you’ll never reach on a single run, forcing you to make decisions if you want to make it to Uncle Hamish’s lighthouse on time. A Highland Song’s rendition of the Scottish Highlands scans more as a natural space than as a bespoke puzzle, a world instead of a playground. Here, the hills are alive.
Red Dead Redemption 2 never quite squares its themes with the need to give players an open-world cowboy fantasy. And outside cutscenes and conversation, most of those themes don't seem to exist.
It pushes back hard against the sort of easy dominance over people so common to city-building games.
Spider-Man's mechanics feel fluid and satisfying enough to keep players engaged throughout the entire campaign.
As much as this is a better, more confident game than Yakuza 6, the series still has plenty of room to grow.
The game is ambitious for its translation mechanics and its big-picture look at the evolution of culture through the ages.
The setting of the game is the familiar stuff of science fiction, but the lens through which it's viewed is not.
The game isn't really supposed to be about anything, yet in that ambiguity it captures the specific madness of our present.
There's something primal and thrilling to id Software's further embrace of video-gamey conventions.
The game offers a refreshing focus on its sense of place rather than ease of play.
After a while, the game inadvertently becomes about the cost and upkeep of civilization.