The end reality is that The Girl and the Robot is like what would happen if I tried to write a Shakespeare play. People would pick it immediately as a (deeply) inferior pastiche, because it might emulate the style of its inspiration, but it would be a faint imitation in every way that actually counted.

The only redeeming factor of Toby: The Secret Mine is that it’s not one of the many, so many, “roguelikes” or pseudo 8-bit platformers that are the norm these days from indie developers. It felt kind of refreshing to go back to 2014, even for a fleeting moment. The ideas in Toby are sound, the execution however is a lot to be desired.

Ghost Blade HD lovingly embraces the history of bullet hell shooters, providing classic substance with modern polish. Though these modern aesthetics proved vexing at times, it’s an experience worth seeing through.

Without involving the micromanagement of something like Transport Giant, it’s also a game that offers just enough complexity to offer players a management challenge, and a sense of rewarding satisfaction when they’ve built up a sustainable, large, city. The story mode itself is quite poor, but as with any good city builder, all the fun’s in the sandbox mode anyway, and unleashing both your inner creative and inner city planner at once.

The new game plays like a dream and is the same excellent, balanced, and replayable game and the horde mode shows that at least Nintendo is thinking, but calling the rest of the game a “sequel,” might be a bit of a push.

Cinderella Girls is a downright strange release and I worry that it will do more harm to whatever commercial potential Idolm@ster has in the English-speaking world than it will do good.

I can go on infinitely about how much I am enjoying Layton's Mystery Journey: Katrielle and the Millionaires' Conspiracy. The game present little truly new to the series' gameplay, but since it already shone in past titles that's a great thing. The characters are lovable, often with dry wit and secret pasts (or presents). Whimsy combines with reality, creating a fantastic believable world. The game promises at least dozens of hours of gameplay with limitless expansion potential, and I'm excited to see where it goes.

Transport Giant takes itself seriously. It’s enjoyable and rewarding, but as a serious simulation, rather than something fun to unwind with on the weekend after a long week’s work. It’s not a game for everyone by any means because of that, but it is the kind of game that will continue to reward you the more you put into it.

Fallen Legion shows all the potential in the world to become a great IP. The core ideas are strong, and the attempt to tell an interesting, deep story is admirable. Unfortunately this one doesn’t execute on its ideas as well as it should, and, critically, this lets down the game's themes, but it is on the cusp of being something special.

Levels+ is a completely forgettable game. It's got some gorgeous aesthetics, and functionally it's a refined, balanced, and perfectly competent Threes clone, but there is no longevity to the game whatsoever, and the lack of an online leaderboard for a game like this is downright amateur.

What this all amounts to is an expansion that doesn’t push Final Fantasy XIV in bold new directions because, quite frankly, it doesn’t need to. Stormblood takes everything that makes the game good and doubles down on it, expanding the world of Hydaelyn and filling it with more to see, do, and experience. Minor issues with its story and storytelling notwithstanding, this is everything I could want from a Final Fantasy XIV expansion.

Do this game again, but shift the focus so that everyone can enjoy it without relying on others being online, and then we'll talk.

Yonder is the nicest, and yet most deeply transgressive game we’ve seen in our little section of the art world, for quite some time, if not forever.

Like most movies of the thriller genre when you go and replay the game you will likely find things you missed and understand things a lot more but even if you play it only once it does a good job of explaining everything and has a very satisfying ending (regardless of which one you end up getting).

Flip Wars' problem is that it has no depth whatsoever. That silly, simple, chaotic, and utterly pointless button masher that you had a quick laugh at when you play it for the first time really is all that’s on offer.

Finnish studio Housemarque have produced in Nex Machina another game to sit alongside its well-received titles of Alienation and Resogun, and that showcases the serious pedigree it has built since their start in the early nineties with Stardust. It is a rush of colour that delivers a satisfying experience that’ll steal your calm and let you imagine a future where the robots don’t wipe us all out.

While it’s not to the standard of its rhythm games, Rayark did well with its first RPG. Implosion looks gorgeous and is a very slick production. You can tell that it’s a game that comes from a studio that has had minimal need to develop narratives previously, and on the Nintendo Switch, the game’s mobile roots hurt it, but then the Nintendo Switch is also a portable console, and as a game that’s best played in short bursts, it’s a good one to have sitting on the hard drive or memory card.

Shephy is mechanically sound and intrinsically fun, but it’s also a harrowing experience if you think about it hard enough. I can’t tell if Pawn intended the game to be darkly humorous or outright desolate, but either way the grim story both tempered my enjoyment and drove me to play more. It’s an emotion that I’ve rarely experienced from a game, and that itself lends Shephy merit beyond the extent that the randomisation within the game actually hurts it.

I like what The Golf Club 2 has to offer. It is a really solid representation of the sport both in terms of mechanics and the overall aesthetics. Because of the course editor, you have a plethora of options you can use to create the course of your dreams, or just play those made by other people. The possibilities are limitless. However, some technical issues still linger and the career mode could use some additional depth as The Golf Club takes some small steps in the right direction.

For a game that looked like another cute little timewaster, Koichi Ishii has outdone himself.

Final Fantasy XII’s willingness to be different and innovative has left it feeling every bit as modern and poignant now as any new JRPG on the market, and it remains my favourite game within a series that I hold very precious to me.

Damascus Gear is fun. It’s clean, well-playing fun. It could have been an awful lot more, and it’s a little frustrating that the game didn’t make better use of the opportunities that the setting provided it. It’s also not a game that you’ll remember a year down the track, let alone feel nostalgic for in a decade. But it’s, again, good clean fun, and if you’ve got a weekend to kill, this one will do it.

I’m still glad that we’ve got Castle of Shikigami on Steam; flawed as it is, it’s a fun, creative shoot ‘em up and an important part of the genre’s history. Here’s hoping that its two sequels are also in the pipeline, because by most accounts, they’re a huge improvement on the good groundwork set down by this game.

Ripstone took something great that it already had going with Pure Chess, and further enhanced everything that the game was already doing well. In terms of aesthetics, atmosphere, and play features, Chess Ultra is as good as I can conceive Chess actually getting. Bring on a better range of chess sets through DLC, and preferably a Hatsune Miku set among them, and I don’t think I’d ever actually put this down.

While I say that RPG Maker FES is more limited than its PC brethren, it still enables plenty of creativity.

I imagine the target audience is less the philosophical and the obsessive, but rather the more casual JRPG fan looking for a light way to spend their spare time. As with most Falcom games, the game feel is straightforward and kinetic, paired with a vanilla aesthetic that’s more inoffensive than groundbreaking. I can’t fault a game for not being ambitious enough when it’s following a tried and true formula and does it without any perceivable blemishes at all.

The real joy to be had with Poly Bridge is to do with getting away with the cheapest bridge one can get away with. Inevitably, this approach will lead to many a car spectacularly plunging to the depths (not to mention collapsed bridges). The contrast between the horrific events and the happy colourful graphics, mixed as they are with an easy going cheerful soundtrack, is the source of magic that is Poly Bridge. Truly one of the best gaming experiences on mobile.

What beggared my belief is the question of why this “buy once play forever” game utilises all the cheap and nasty tricks from the freemium books. I can only conclude there is a core design problem with Subdivision Infinity, perhaps to do with it originally being conceived as freemium but then turned into premium due to rival releases. Regardless, the end result is a very mechanical affair of short dog fighting followed by lots of tediousness for the sole sake of getting a slightly better ship with which to fight slightly superior enemies in the next round. In the year of our Goddess 2017, this - Subdivision Infinity - is simply not good enough.