Glorious though Anno 2205’s cityscapes may be, a game that justifies the banality of numerical mechanics through visual sensation alone is inevitably one that provokes the question of whether or not it needed to exist at all.

I’m a big Game of Thrones fan, but Telltale’s game series is, unfortunately, inessential material.

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

Without compelling characters or inventive story missions, all that’s left to keep the audience entertained is destruction, repeated ad nauseum. There’s value in the small-scale satisfaction each explosion creates, but an empty feeling lingers after every plume of smoke has cleared.

Battlefront offers everything my childhood experience of Star Wars did not. For all its polish, it brand-name polish, it lacks that creative energy found in building battles from faded toys and dumb ideas. Battlefront imposes limits and gates on an expansive universe, reigning in instead of expanding the possible ways to become part of that world. As such, the game remains mercenary in its goal of selling an experience solely on those feelings we have about that galaxy far, far away.

Like a city that leaves its streets to pedestrians, pushing highways underground and elevating trains overhead, the game seeks to avoid the anxious hustle of a traditional simulation by reducing clutter and keeping things at a more intimate, human level.

Bethesda’s team creates maps that are a joy to explore.

Lovely Weather is Animal Crossing without all the stuff.

What the game wants you to appreciate is how difficult it is be morally and cosmically right when no less than love itself is the alternative.

Despite relative improvements in presentation, WWE 2K16 ultimately makes a crucial mistake when it comes to understanding professional wrestling: the fiction is a lot more fun than the reality.

It’s the ludic equivalent of the James Bond series.

Yet in Need for Speed the handling, the fun, the art, all of this, they are so stacked under layer after layer of meaninglessness, multi-faceted surfaces that gesture at everything and deliver nothing. It was a good run, but as I came off the slope and headed into a tunnel bathed in tungsten glow the moment was lost.

This game is impossible to play without thinking, specifically, of the Australian horror film The Babadook.

Halo Moments are revelations of accidental mastery, happenstance perfection, the butterfly effect of a shock wave blooming out from the epicenter of a frag grenade. A grenade that only you could have thrown. It only matters that it happened, and that you and your friend, for a simultaneous second, remembered why it was you loved playing games in the first place.

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.

The titular vermin of Vermintide may come in a horde, but they’re all unique, in their weird, chittering way. It almost makes me feel bad about the carnage I’ve spent the last ten hours dealing out to them.

Most of the time it’s thrilling, but Nova-111 still wants to hold on to collectables, time trials, and block-pushing. Its clichéd “rescue the scientists” story aims high, at a Hitchhiker’s Guide sort of humor, but the “quirky” element feels forced—when lead scientist Dr. Science isn’t giving you tips, he’s telling you he really likes sandwiches and has unresolved issues with his mother.

“Kooky” is a good word for Albino Lullaby.

You might laugh as the cartoon blob tumbles into the vat of purple acid, but your time will come too.

Revives the visual style of a cartoon aimed at ten-year-olds.

Thankfully, the lynchpin for this game is a pretty decent lynchpin, so if you love ghosts and Instagram and don’t mind redundancy, then Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water is the sixth scariest thing you can do with a camera.

Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate lets you science the shit out of murder in a city where people are sciencing the shit out of everything. There's an undeniable appeal to that. But it’s an appeal worth looking in the face.

It is fun and addictive, but moreover it’s adrenaline-pumping and shocking in its barbarity.

Jotun turns the elements of an ancient poetic tradition into a digital myth.

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.

By the time it’s done, Armikrog feels more like The Neverhood’s mulligan.

Shadowrun Hong Kong’s success boils down to a smart early decision to stay true to Hong Kong, and exaggerate the flaws of the city’s bizarre governing philosophy to find a new, urgent relevance in the cyberpunk genre.

Yes, The Beginner’s Guide occasionally fumbles its narrative, Wreden sometimes overacts, and the writing can be a little ham-fisted—but the game also provokes incisive, critical thought about the way we read and evaluate games, and does so not by laying out a definitive “message” to be delivered to players, but by prompting us, through play, with open-ended questions.

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.

What Mario Maker is at heart: a mash-up machine.

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

It’s true that Dream can be beautiful and fun at times, but its structure too often holds it back from being something great.

All of which leaves Dancing All Night as a rare mix: at once a good dancing game, a bad Persona game, and a Vita game.

The Taken King shows Destiny is willing to reach for everything it might be, and it's hard not to look forward to what comes next.

It delivers a vast, meticulously rendered desert with nothing special to see.

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

As the title suggests, SOMA wears its sci-fi influences proudly on its sleeve.

By placing your adventure in the context of all the other tragedies aboard the Groomlake, a kind of familial intimacy develops.

Panoramical is Ramallo and Kanaga’s vision of what music can look like. It’s an interactive music visualizer and generator that’s content with illustrating the magic of musical arrangement, and on that front, it plays beautifully.

“Complicated” is not the same as “complex,” and nowhere does Rememoried fail to parse this distinction than in its unconventional ruleset.

As the game becomes more “normal,” Dropsy’s original challenge of endearing himself to those he repulses fades, and the puzzles start seeming a little tedious. So many are based around a difficult to manage day/night cycle, and many others around the talents of collectible animals. But before things escalate, when it’s just the story of a clown without a circus, the sentiment warms you like a hug.

You are not truly alone in Corpse of Discovery, but the videogame shows how loneliness is a question of degrees and shades, and not a simple binary. It is through this three-dimensional exploration of the pilgrim on a foreign world that the game shows its worth.

Volume’s strengths are primal but simple, at times feeling like a Crossy Road-style time-passer with a cyberpunk sheen. It tries but ultimately doesn’t say much of modern society or governments beyond the elementary. Indeed, it is the modern videogame incarnate, warts and all.

The Phantom Pain is different. It, like its predecessors, wants to remind the player that war is, indeed, hell. But, in giving over to structural bloat it obscures the tremendous promise established in its opening hours, trading the narrative power of violent anguish for a routine, Sisyphean take on torment.

It’s more of the same, just colder and thinner.

The game is best experienced as an occasional therapeutic exercise.

Submerged is skeletal and unoiled. It is damned by competence: a short story that checks the boxes, but in doing so leaves no mark.

Until Dawn is a game constructed by people who understand how to manipulate its players’ sense of control. It’s informed by a deep study of horror films and smart in its consideration of how to employ this understanding in an interactive medium. It only fails in its uncharacteristic acceptance of a few outmoded tropes.

If The Wire was a conversation with an audience about culture and society, The Detail seems content to converse only with other fans of the show; to speak in excited tones about their favorite parts.

It’s too bad that half the game—the half that tries so hard to be a game—makes you wish you could double jump with some rocket implants.

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.

There’s no danger in Absolute Drift, just repetition. Every point is a slam dunk. Every swing a hole-in-one. Every meal is dessert, and I’m starting to miss broccoli.

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.

A throwback to the twitch platformers of old.

It finds, despite everything, the light; it dwells there, and asks you to walk in it.

The game’s insistence on minimalism gives it an elegance but, conversely, it also gets in the way.

Come October shall we look back and wonder where this potential went? Perhaps we shall ask ourselves what could have been done differently. Or, perhaps, Life is Strange will navigate these concerns, becoming the game we hoped it would be.

Pneuma is an absolutely unsuitable receptacle for questions of spirit or life.

“Why do the gods continue to shit on this house?” asks Sir Royland, shaking his fist up at the sky and its oily, vague shades of blue. It’s a question I’ve asked myself again and again throughout this series, and one Telltale has avoided answering far too many times.

There’s a spirit of revolt in your work, a rhetoric of mortals killing the gods competing for control of The Magic Circle.

The interplay of Dungeon Master and player is controlled chaos, thrilling in its unpredictability, while the outcome of Guild of Dungeoneering is a foregone conclusion: I will throw a neverending horde of adventurers at a dungeon until I complete it or get bored and wander away.

At its heart, Road to Gehenna carries forward both the original game’s thoughtful examination of how we interact with the world and its engaging brainteasers. But it is saved from becoming more of the same by examining how we interact with the world now, and how that world’s end might be understood.

Knee Deep is at best ankle-high. It’s shallow, and it constantly flops between making fun of gossip and a perpetuator of it.

The core of Splendor is a smart, accessible strategy experience, and you get a taste of that from the mobile game. But more than anything, Splendor just whetted my appetite for playing it with actual cards and tokens, which even it seems to acknowledge is the game’s ideal form.

Sylvio succeeds at every single thing it wants to do. Games don’t do this kind of hermetic horror often, and Sylvio makes zero concessions. The car, the gun, the reel-to-reel, the black blobs: they’re all secondary to Juliette Waters and her journey through the abyss.

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

Homesick isn’t a perfect game, but it succeeds in fostering a sense of curiosity that will carry you to the end, and its slow drip of sadness and wonder can be intoxicating.

An exceptionally uncreative piece of schlock.

Hatred, as a piece of transgressive art, is a failure. It's dull, its violence crass and unconvincing, and its understanding of humanity shallow at best. But it's worth looking at, if only to understand why, and if only to interrogate what, if anything, could be gained from peering closely at something so horrible.

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.

No other developer has brought an open world to life the way CD Projekt Red has here.

By following the tangled paths of lineage, we’re left with tales too large to be understood in terms of the lone hero.

At the center of this weird story is some twisted, emotional truth from the hearts of two incredibly wounded characters.

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

An early experiment in a genre that has already seen some very sophisticated entries.

The twist at the end of “Chaos Theory” is nothing less than staggering in its audacity.

The reason why I’ve developed such an immense respect for Splatoon it is that it’s a huge risk that scarcely comes off as risky.

Not a Hero’s ultimate statement is a brutally cynical one, but its political nihilism is always portrayed with such glee and good cheer that the unease is hard to feel until the game is shut down.

But without the dexterity to give its gaming forebearers the same level of faithfulness, it ends up being hellacious for all the wrong reasons.

It’s still easier to construct narrative contingency than to make it meaningful.

The game hangs like a pendulum, waiting for the player’s hand to send it this way or that, to pass through the darkness of civil war, and cast their own meaning—like sunlight—upon the action.

What’s endearing about Chroma Squad is that it captures how silly it all was: an absurd, slapstick plot with actual, devastating conclusions if evil ever managed to succeed.

You can be bread. I can be bread. I can be destructive. I am destructive. I am bread.

Rather than relying on the same emotional tricks, Schafer and Double Fine opted to tell a different kind of story; like Shay and Vella, they learned from those that came before without feeling compelled to follow in their predecessors’ exact footsteps. As a result, Broken Age is a resounding success; a charming, quietly subversive, and ultimately uplifting parable about finding beauty in the broken.

It cares much more about sustaining self-irony than making a good-faith attempt at realism. In it we might see the specter of Ackerley’s self-ironizing narrator, obsessing over urine because he knows the limitations of his own perspective. Or we might see something else—because, like dogs themselves, the game begs for an interpretation even when it’s taking a shit.

None of this is anything like progress—Westerado isn’t exploring new frontiers when it comes to genre work—but the romance inherent to the game’s emphasis on freedom sometimes comes close to overpowering a bitter remembrance of the very real history it cribs from.

In a stone-cold RPG like Etrian Odyssey you want to minimize the crazy shit happening, but in a Mystery Dungeon you want to revel in it, like a surfer in search of the biggest wave. You would hope in spite of this the game would manage to branch off and do its own thing, but it doesn’t, unless that thing is needless complexity, endless grinding and conscripting dreary-eyed anime children on a plodding adventure.

Those hoping for 90° Kirby won’t get it in BoxBoy, but those looking for BoxBoy—puzzle-solving, muted box-making extraordinaire—need not look any further. Kirby is not up to this task. Unless, of course, Kirby eats BoxBoy and acquires his powers. Then Kirby might do just fine.

MLB 15: The Show is remarkable in that it adheres to a method of gameplay that's absent in most sports games. By privileging patience, attention to detail, and creating a system that rewards minor adjustments to the way we play (not unlike strategy adjustments in the real life MLB), MLB 15: The Show remains one of the only sports games on the market that not only has a distinctive and engaging look and feel, but also pushes an admirable ideology that, however subtly, explores how we engage with sports and videogames.

Titan Souls takes a motif in film that’s so played out as to be empty, and uses it to create joy, triumph, and meaning in a context where we’ve come to expect the absence of all three. It’s an argument for what games can do that other media can’t because of their interactive and iterative natures.

In spite of its problems, Three Fourths Home still showcases some pretty sharp dialogue and storytelling. And if nothing else, it will make you think twice about how you conduct yourself the next time you’re on the phone with your mom.

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

Like Arcanum and Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines before it, Pillars of Eternity is a feat of world-building.

If the games hope to be considered worthy additions to the phenomenon, they'll need to take advantage of that vast world, and all its opportunities for original storytelling. While also remembering that we’d like to see a bit more than the bottom of a Whitehill’s shoe.

We can see in its lack of substance a reflection of a disturbing social complacency when it comes to exploring complicated issues like police violence and systemic racism. We can also recognize what little faith it has in its players to wrestle with difficult concepts, to find something meaningful and troubling behind using a digital badge and police-issued firearm in equal measure to solve our crime problems.

Had the realization of that universe been more fully fleshed out—expansive and deep rather than restrictive and boardgame-like—Spaceships could have found success as a kind of post-human strategy game. Instead it feels lifeless. But not in the existential, gazing-into-the-void-of-space way. More in the way that an aging child realizes that her blanket is just a blanket, and promptly stops caring about it.

Mario Party 10 is the purest embodiment of an actual board game yet seen in the series.

Bloodborne is built on this transcendent love. A love of the crumbling ruin, of the screeching banshee, of the shape in the shadows whose eyes catch the candlelight. A love of heaven-scratching spires, ever-descending staircases and fog-cloaked alleys. A love of all the magnificent horrors that have filled the minds of humans since they learned to light fires to stave off the dark.