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 the end, Oxenfree is absolutely a game about teenage bullshit (forgive me for being a little disingenuous earlier). But it manages to revitalize that narrative by focusing on feeling more than substance; it glances at each character’s inner struggle rather than serving it up for a full meal.

Track Central gives into core of the Trials experience and allows us to relish in the waste of biomass. Sorry, riders: this is what you’re made for.

The number of “ah-ha!” moments offered by the game is significant.

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.

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.

Maybe the best way to play Samorost 3 is to play with it, to think of it as a bizarrely-shaped thing that prompts one to appreciate the ways oddities can spark and delight the imagination. At least that’s the way I’ll continue to play it, curiously wandering through alien environments, turning each sight and sound over and over in my head, very much like I once did with a strange piece of wood I encountered when I was young.

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.

It makes the best argument in favor of the 3DS's defining feature since Super Mario 3D World.

Despite the kinks, some of which may be ironed out in future installments, 1979 Revolution represents an unusual and largely successful mix of an adventure game and history lesson.

The Division is a game so eager to criminalize the poor, so eager to play into clichés of class war. Yet it staunchly refuses to take responsibility for its representations, for its politics. If we want that to change, we have to make it, and its creators, responsible.

Pushmo World is more of a great thing, and that’s hard to complain about. But as the Wii U increasingly looks like a poor child captured in some mysterious restraints, I fear shiny versions from the past won’t unlock these unfair shackles.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Nevertheless, these new elements have been seamlessly integrated into the recognizable LittleBigPlanet foundation, and as a consequence never feel like the source of drastic change. What they offer instead is rejuvenation: a jolt of exhilaration—of imagination—from a series whose novelty had perhaps begun to wane.

In the end, the game attempts to pull back the curtain with a certain amount of Scooby-Doo.

Many games, largely, want to create mayhem where messages may also occur, while protests, largely, want to create messages where mayhem may also occur. Anarcute wants an adorable inferno. The joke is that the destruction is big but the perps are cutie wuties. But I don’t know if I have the planet to play it on.

It is a throwback in many senses, not just to the history of its own series, but to images of war that came to us already cold, already distant.

Like The Walking Dead, Republique is now freed of needing to instruct the player of their goals and how to achieve them. It is, instead, refocusing its efforts, in wonderfully surprising ways.

There is a market for this kind of happy pain, this agonizing joy. I just hope Dakko Dakko’s rotating, riveting shooter finds the cat-crazy audience it deserves.

The translation from urn to game is nearly flawless.

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

Like Mass Effect, Dune, Foundation, and countless other sci-fi universes, it builds its extraterrestrial world from the ground up. Stellaris only borrows from all of their palettes to paint its own picture of the night sky—and a game about aliens feels all the less foreign as a result.

Out of all of the episodes, “No Going Back” is the most relentless.

The story can go any way imaginable—from everyone coming away completely unscathed to literally causing the apocalypse—more so than maybe anything else I’ve ever played.

Without the weight of tradition behind it, flattening out your finger hitting “Fight wisely” just feels like cow-clicking. Personally, I’d rather spend that time elsewhere.

Despite all of its cutesy posturing and promises, Unravel is still looking to fill some kind of void. And I’m not sure if that void is its shortcomings as a mood board, as a videogame, or a cloying digestible basket of “feels” for EA.

Numinous Games’ That Dragon, Cancer does not suffer from this problem; the pain feels real, the sadness is authentic. This is not surprising given that the game is undisguised autobiography: Ryan and Amy Green created it as a meditation on their family’s journey as their son Joel was treated for and eventually killed by brain cancer.

My problem with Mario Golf games, then, is really a kind of strength; the core game is so competent that a hitting a solid drive down the fairway feels sweet enough.

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

Episode 4 naturally acts as a lull, so it’s unnerving that for the most part, it does little to move the story forward besides a few character moments and one major life-changing and tense sequence.

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

Like Journey, Abzû is in some sense a game about archetypes and archetypicality, letting you dwell within and among them as though to remind you of their firm embeddedness at the foundation of other things. And yet, in a significant structural twist, it’s about recovering archetypes that no longer seem to have potency, rather than playing through an archetypal sequence—the Journey—that’s still going strong.

The creators of Pac-Man CE 2 had the difficult task of remixing a game that has already been expanded upon and reworked to the point of refinement, and they chose to pile on the complexity anyway. The result is a Frankenstein’s Pac-Man—a mess of features and modes that, despite all the power pellets and fruit and ghosts, still left me feeling hungry.

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

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.

Life Is Strange has a charm that is hard to resist.

Lord knows videogame characters could stand to be quieter, but Virginia can’t convey the necessary emotional depth to make its story stick. The ideas at play piqued my interest pre-release: two women of color as its leads, the promise of a new spin on enduring cop show tropes, surrealist touches. But Virginia is selling points all over, a mood board of ideas—some cool, some musty—that take the player’s interest as self-evident. Anyone who’s seen a movie before should probably just watch another.

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.

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

At its core, VA-11 Hall-A is the rare cyberpunk story that has heart, and even goes so far as to give its female characters agency in their own lives. It’s a story where we, the player, take the backseat, and soak it all in. Just like a good book.

A visual novel sipped through a Gilliam straw.

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.

Lisa has a way of allowing you to revel in a joyfulness of pain—a place and feeling where all the agony and loneliness becomes an idiotic caricature of life.

Furi is undoubtedly repetitive, but that doesn’t need to be a strike against it.

Today, of course, Destiny is a mess, but I sympathize with it.

If you are looking for a space to contemplate, a place to linger, a path to walk in patient consideration, you will find yourself at home in The Sailor’s Dream for quite some time. And in the moments when you are not playing, you will hear the voices within the labyrinth sing to you.

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.

Stubborn adherence to the modes of the past only goes so far. Third Eye Crime would be a better game for recognizing this.

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.

With Obduction, Cyan has created another game that’s an art of personal journaling. What you know, what you’ve gathered, will save you. The tools seem familiar but it is details that are your weapons. As the otherworldly overlaps the banal, you’re trapped in a labyrinth of places and things.

The game is a throwback to the old-style point-and-click adventure game, requiring you to solve puzzles with limited assets within a constantly shifting scaffold of constraints that limits what is and is not possible. For the most part, the game avoids the exasperating opacity that once plagued adventure games—flush the pickle down the toilet in order to get the car keys—but there is nevertheless little room for variation in how one solves the puzzles, and little room for choice within the story.

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.

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.

From this perspective, the Pokémon isn’t a creature of its own agency, but a mere extension of its trainer’s body and mind; a tool in a rat race, forever wrestling in the futile pursuit of human ambition. And when you look at it that way, all the thematic waffling starts to make a whole lot of sense.

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.

As with many Nintendo games of the last few years, its gameplay elements are immaculately designed but risk nothing.

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

The wonderful thing about Mayday! Deep Space is that true horror can really only exist in the mind of the player.

Far Cry Primal is basically everything I just described, without a whole lot of irony. Which is to say it often feels enormously, almost amazingly stupid.

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.

Each individual piece of the game has been crafted with the knowledge that, should the (imperfect) humans controlling the action play their part properly, the systems are in place to make every hunt look, sound, and feel hugely exciting.

Imagine a self-filling pinata. Imagine a hundred of them. Imagine them lumbering at you, wielding swords.

American Truck Simulator reflected the anxious reality, but also allowed me to appreciate the grandeur of it all. I can finally see what I presume most other Americans have always enjoyed: Endless waves of asphalt paved just for me, veining the contiguous southwest, begging to be casually traversed.

If you liked the previous Borderlands, you’ll love it.

But Hohokum ultimately pulls its punches. You can do whatever, if you want, but eventually you’ve got a puzzle to solve. Bad puzzles are easy to design; good puzzles (whether easy or hard) require logic, care, even a touch of the narrative Hohokum pointedly rejects. Good puzzles tell a story in their physical parts.

It confounds me with slips of the tongue and leaves me wondering if what I’ve seen are the hidden gems of something like an X-Files or Fringe—shows whose truly great episodes are not self-contained but instead have effects that permeate and bleed through.

The loopy dictator is only as loopy as the world that made him; his brand of insanity merely combats the surrounding insanity. Tropico is an open invitation to either revel in it or understand it.

Mind: Path to Thalamus is, at times, messy, but it’s a beautiful mess, one that still exhibits powerful moments of emotional impact that are so true to the game and the medium that it’s almost painful.

FRACT proves that it’s through your own creative input that you can continue to surprise yourself beyond those initial magical moments. It’s true that FRACT isn’t the most mind-bending puzzle game out there or the most powerful music production software on the market; its triumph is in forging a middle path.

Bigby Wolf is a surrogate parent for Fabletown, but the stakes are lowered.

Without that humor, the story would have no buoyancy. It would sink beneath its heaviness.

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.

Push Me Pull You proves that the “new arcade” of previous years is not dead; it’s been developing into something weirder, funnier, and brighter than we’d expected.

Hotline Miami 2 cares deeply for politics. It wants to make its brutality meaningful, to say something about media and culture and desensitization. But its sprawling narrative only shows that it has forgotten its own lessons: the way Hotline Miami plays, its spatial violence puzzle, is what Hotline Miami means.

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.

Don’t expect to find touchscreens, paper-thin televisions, or computers any smaller than a child here.

It's both love letter and time capsule, for fans and for the newly curious. In a few years, when it's faded almost completely from memory again, I look forward, not to playing it, but to finishing it, and remembering it fondly yet again.

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.

It also places that desire for discovery within another person’s mind, just like Conrad, and keeps its player, like Conrad’s reader, at a critical remove. It lets you see a bigger picture than the grid of hexagons it depicts; it lets you see the mindset that creates the grid, and what that way of thinking inevitably ends up doing.

I wish I Am Setsuna took me on another beautiful, multifaceted adventure like it wanted to, as the JRPGs that its creators admire once did. I wish the characters weren’t bland caricatures of familiar characters I’ve seen in the past. Instead, it feels like a cold attempt at harboring nostalgia, only managing to remind me of JRPGs of the golden age, and how so much better they were—and, critically, still are.

This is the National Pastime deconstructed. This is also Nintendo’s past commingling with its future: A perfect, tiny game, forced into this strange new shape and sold piecemeal.

Street Fighter V has traded a physical space for the intimacy of a digital one: an internet meeting with a mysterious stranger. When a match announces itself, loudly, it’s impossible to not get excited. And suddenly, you’re fighting: you, some anonymous other, and the small, limited locale in which you’ve agreed to meet.

Without such a narrative, Dying Light devolves into almost pure gore. It’s not that the game is inordinately bloody or hard to stomach; it’s that it presents itself like a sadistic RPG, where the main goal isn’t to find the aforementioned file for the GRE, but rather gain as much strength, agility, and weapon modifications as you can so that your zombie skirmishes become more and more ludicrous the deeper you get into the game.

I hated being talked to like a child when I was one, and as an adult my feelings haven’t changed. There is certainly room for pure, child-like play in videogames: Nintendo has built an empire on it, and there’s a similar giddiness in the work of Keita Takahashi and many of the best sandbox-style games. But telling the player over and over again that she is a baby is not the route toward this state of cerebral freedom.

But once the initial rush of simpler controls and more on-field action wears off—and it happens quickly—you’re left with an empty, meaningless celebration of the sport’s inclusiveness. FIFA World Cup Brazil is then, perhaps, perfectly representative of its real life counterpart. It has the potential to bring people together, but it’s also a lot of pomp and circumstance in the name of “unity” that masks the political and cultural tensions that come with the event.

“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.

What remains to be seen is whether there is such thing as a redemptive arc in Game of Thrones, or if feebly limping out of a string of unfair compromises is truly as “good” of an ending as Westeros has to offer.

For the most part, Ladykiller in a Bind dares to be unapologetically itself rather than a game made for any one set of people.

That said, while The Deadly Tower of Monsters might be silly and a little clunky, it’s hard not to root for something that lovingly apes (for lack of a better word) a bygone era so successfully.

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.

Remixes can be irreverent or sacrosanct, but more than anything else they must disrupt their original context. NES Remix 2 fails this test. It’s not a new way of experiencing old ideas; it’s a highlight reel. If NES Remix were a DJ, it wouldn’t be Danger Mouse tearing up The Grey Album—it would be that guy in your dorm who insisted on DJing at college parties but couldn’t bear to play a single song all the way through.

Kirby and the Rainbow Curse is still a thing of beauty, lovely to look at and challenging (but not punitive) in play. In places, you can even see the sculptor’s fingerprints, but you can’t leave any of your own.

Fantasy Life proposes that simple skills such as sewing and mining are worth devoting one’s existence to. But by hewing to the constraints of traditional RPG design, these are best enjoyed as means to other, more vicious ends: stitch up your cloak so as to take less damage from enemies; pound that iron into a stronger, mightier blade. You can play the game as a Tailor. But you’ll want to switch over to Mercenary soon enough.

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.