Geoff Thew
Journey of a Roach is a bog-standard adventure game built around a single kind of nifty idea. It attempts to ape the style of games like Machinarium, but fails to emulate any of that title's wonderful charm or design sensibilities.
Knack is a new-age throwback to a time when you could get away with telling stupid, fun stories about mascots beating up goblins in a simple, three-button brawler. It's also a fine showcase for the PS4's horsepower that doesn't paint its world primarily in grey and brown.
Contrast is a mess. It's ugly, tiresome, insipid and occasionally insulting.
Gravity Badgers is a mess of a mobile game that has no business being on Steam. The art and music are piss-poor, the puzzle design — if you can even call it that — shows absolutely no thought and requires even less effort to solve and what little humor there is dries up almost immediately.
I adore Stick It to The Man, and if you enjoy the anarchic humor in Paper Mario and Psychonauts, I have a feeling you will too. It's a unique, funny, occasionally brilliant experience full of colorful characters and creative puzzles. If you like your entertainment quirky and featuring love-lorn balding yetis, pick this up. I can guarantee it'll stick with you.
Adventure games thrive on compelling stories and a solid sense of logic, and Violett has neither. More criminally, the logic underlying the game's systems seems to be broken, making it nearly unplayable.
If you're getting tired of swords and sorcery, or just looking for meaty tactical battles, few RPGs will satisfy you better.
Joking aside, there's a valuable comparison to be made between Broken Age and Broken Sword: The Serpent's Curse. Both are throwbacks to the golden age of point and click adventures made by creators who helped define that era.
Though I feel incapable of giving Blackguards the fair shake it would get with fresh eyes, that's ultimately nobody's fault but the developer's. Early access works for emergent play – games like Rust and Starbound where no play session is the same and every update changes the dynamics – but it's ill-suited to more linear, directed experiences.
Smoke and Mirrors is a solid continuation for The Wolf Among Us. A lot of seeds were planted in Faith, and while a few have borne fruit, most of this episode's running time is spent tending to them.
There's an audience for Strike Vector, but that audience needs a lot of patience and a high tolerance for failure. It wants to beat you into the ground, and makes no effort to hide that fact.
Not loving Jazzpunk is as difficult as classifying it. Few games are this confidently weird, and even fewer manage to pull off anything even resembling humour. If you're looking to laugh a lot, and maybe even think about stuff just a little bit, give it a play. If you're looking to be a jerk in a movie theatre from the comfort of your own home, the game will also cater to that need. It's weird that way, and apparently so are you.
Though it's got many of the building blocks for my ideal prison game (is that a weird thing to have?), 1954: Alcatraz is a disappointment. A few great ideas are drowned in a torrent of design flaws and technical problems.
A Crooked Mile marks a strong midpoint in Bigby Wolf's magical dead hooker mystery tour. The writing keeps you on your toes and manages to evoke some pathos, even without any big twists to prop it up.
Ether One might well represent the apex of its particular subgenre. It engages the player at every level they might want to engage it, and rewards them handsomely for plunging into its depths.
The most insidious thing about Moebius is that you don't know how wretched it truly is until the very end. Sure, it's tedious, stupid, ugly and glitchy, but you don't really grasp it until all of that culminates in the last act.
As adventure games go, The Tesla Effect is pretty average. The story and characters are quite entertaining, but the puzzles are mostly boring, and the gameplay visuals could use another coat of polish.
The crux of the problem with In Sheep's Clothing is that we're still not getting much in the way of payoff. A lot of questions are answered, sure, but the episode presents itself as one final buildup to the confrontation with The Crooked Man.
I don't regret playing Always Sometimes Monsters. It gave me a bit of perspective on what it's like to live without some of my privileges, and also gave me cause to think about who I am, what I value, and where my life has gone so far.
When Blizzard announced they were making a digital CCG, we all expected it to look and sound beautiful, and there was little doubt that it would be well-balanced, but I don't think anyone anticipated this level of sophistication and subtle brilliance. Its turn-based nature and straightforward mechanics make this one of the most immediately accessible competitive games ever devised, but at the same time its depth is positively cavernous.