Its limited combat options and often obtuse puzzle solving, alongside the sheer endurance required to survive boss fights long enough to end them, add up to a system that doesn't point to any elaborate moral insight. It simply points to itself.

Despite all odds, it seems Stardew Valley is a different game than the one it mimics. And a pretty fun, different game at that.

More isn’t bad just for its faults and repetitions. It’s worse than that: Bloodborne was pure—and The Old Hunters dilutes it.

Arkham Knight is distressingly inorganic. Continuing the predictable trend the franchise, the game learns the wrong lessons from its predecessors.

PES 2016 stumbles under the weight of all its divergent modes and duties

There’s no strong character to center it, no perspective to ground it, no consistent challenge to weight it. It’s an impressive novelty, but it fades fast.

Gears 4 takes only half measures. It discards a lighthearted adventure premise for another fate-of-humanity monster invasion. It gives up on the anti-militarist bent of its early fight against the COG for another plot about soldiers trying to save humanity.

Lara’s therapy was a failure. Rise of the Tomb Raider was not, but it did force me to reconcile the uncomfortable paradox of the titular badass also being an emotional wreck.

However inflated its stakes, however serious or seriously unserious it may want to be taken, whatever its successes and failures as adventure, tragedy or tragicomedy, Far Cry 4’s primary storyline is itself incidental.

The fighting game here is fun and engaging, but its wrapper is so, so flawed.

Guilty Gear has always been (and still is) a pretty-looking, niche series. Xrd expounds upon that tendency, eschewing nostalgia in favor of profound iteration that will likely only register to the niche-loyal.

For being a cyberpunk ode to the potential promise of transhumanism, the missions around Mankind Divided‘s central narrative feel terribly familiar.

If you don’t have to turn down your TV volume from its usual spot I salute you.

It ought to remind us of what’s so good about the maximalism of other JRPGs.

Without any friction to the player’s actions, the game’s title becomes a suggestion rather than a command.

The game retains the Scooby-Doo vibe that was so charming about the original.

If you’re going to be damned for all eternity to fight for your afterlife, at least it’s with such a lovingly crafted homage to the shooters of yesteryear—and you don’t even need to worry about whether you’ve got the latest Soundblaster card this time around.

One of the virtues of a sandbox is that it doesn’t manipulate you. There’s no rulebook to follow or train tracks to stick to. Unlike other toys, it plays on the possibilities percolating around inside of the person sitting in it. The drawback is that every grain of sand looks like every other, and when the well of inspiration runs dry, so does the fun.

Simulations can distort for good, and so help us resist, or ill, and obscure the forces that corral hearts and minds. Every system locks us up. But sims like Prison Architect throw away the keys.

Considered in this way, Pokémon looks kind of like a Le Corbusier chair: everything in its right place, nothing without purpose, all parts contributing toward a clear, singular end. Then again, also like a Le Corbusier chair, it's a lot more comfortable in theory than in practice.

DSII remains a skilled, often clever impersonation of the game everyone wanted. But I can’t see the point of teasing out its journey with ever more kings, dragons, and Havels. The more DSII overlaps with its predecessors, the less reason there is to play it at all.

It’s sublime when a plan comes together, but squirming out of a nasty mess takes a higher degree of patience and pressurized innovation.

It’s the decisions that bind the experience; enabling The Banner Saga 2 to transcend its videogame construct. You’re left with an experience that feels not only alive, but alive with the complexities of the real world.

Sokobond is a challenging, quiet game. But it's also a fun game, as the post-level facts come out, telling you about the practical applications of these little elements you're pushing around.

For the moment, King’s Quest remains caught in a particularly strange-yet-familiar space, halfway hearkening back to an older era but seemingly aware that it was a time that needed improvement.

This hot mess is deliriously fun, a game from a simpler time that might find more contemporaries in New Arcade than in other neo-roguelikes.

Carter is most frustrating when it attempts to deviate from those systems as though this were, in some way, a refusal to become friends with the player, when really, it should be as welcoming as possible.

A lot of Wildstar’s content draws from all of the MMOs that have come before it, but this outlandish dedication to fun is its own. It’s unashamed to be a delightfully cheesy animated space adventure.