In the end, I was allowed to play Tormentum like I play all games that ask you to make moral choices. I skated through the game unlocking cages, freeing prisoners, and forgiving murderers with impunity. And I wasn’t punished for it even once.

But Type-0 shows that Final Fantasy, despite its best efforts, probably doesn’t know how to grow up in the way it wants to—that it can only grasp at greater dramatic impact even as its battle systems are further refined, its attempts to dig something out of the ancient muck of a subject as heavy as war itself constantly curtailed by concessions to the iconography of its past.

So if you can be comfortable diving flag-first into a cartoon nerd empire built with ad hoc literary appropriation and Lovecraftian ice menaces, one that is completely sincere, you will be rewarded.

Helldivers measures its brutal difficulty against a dehumanizing military and political complex that results in humor and violence, both about as subtle and hard-hitting as a freight train. Such is the price of liberty, paid in full with a pile of shell casings and the sickening splat of another expendable soldier.

Rarely does a game acknowledge the cycle of play, die, repeat, and finally, succeed. Oblitus instead not only acknowledges it but embraces it; draws a parallel between its protagonist and its player, their movements synchronized, following the same unknown task.

Its disparate parts don’t align toward the same end: the karma system doesn’t mean anything here , just like the pixel art doesn’t mean anything, and the roguelike bits don’t mean anything.

If this collection of friendly, yet faceless, alphabetized words can at some level help her learn an appreciation of language, imagination and technology, then maybe it’s just best to admit that the device in your hands really is a baby’s toy.

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.

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

It would be a kind of justice for The Order to have its assets stripped from its skeleton and put into service of a more deserving project.

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.

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.

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.

The translation from urn to game is nearly flawless.

Although it suffers from the dated standards of structure and action—acting more as an imitation of what we might remember of the SNES-era than a succession—Citizens of Earth flourishes when it embraces its own silliness.

Although it suffers from the dated standards of structure and action—acting more as an imitation of what we might remember of the SNES-era than a succession—Citizens of Earth flourishes when it embraces its own silliness.

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

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

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.

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.

It’s a well-read and high-reaching story and discourse on the nature of existence, but it’s not just in the backseat to a seemingly disparate puzzle game.

The latest from Dejobaan therefore seems like a stepping stone, a strong premise and peaceful beginning with little longevity and little to do outside the foundation of the game. You have to wonder if there will be more to write in the future.

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.

In its best moments, The Old City: Leviathan toggles seamlessly between enchanting dreams and dark realities, tragic memories and tragic futures, and deeply touching realizations on what is actually happening. But they’re all never really meant for the player; they’re meant for the protagonist.

The repetition of tasks, activities and missions is presented to the player as the lone way to achieve rewards, and yet within the constructed system of randomness and uncertainty that the game offers, these rewards are never certain. This is how it presents the enterprise of self-improvement as content in itself.

WWE 2k15 certainly propagates that fantasy, but along the way, it also stumbles into a repetitive pattern that, completely by accident, reveals a harsher and poignant truth about what professional wrestling, and being a sports entertainment performer, really is: it’s a job, just like any other job.

And so it’s a strange mix. Lumino City is a real world filled with relationships as thin as its papercraft inhabitants. Whether intentional or not, it seems to be the focus, given that there’s not much in the way of “adventure” in this point-and-click adventure.

Never Alone remains graceful. Its most depressing moment reminds us that if a small girl can survive the harshest of conditions and the meanest of fates, so can we. Life goes on; the spirits never leave us.

It’s clear it likes pinball as much as it likes role-playing games, because the whole game is one big love letter to both, the things mashed together into some odd blender without reason or deeper purpose.

Rogue paints the picture of an arbitrary war drawing arbitrary lines.

By the pound, what Captain Toad offers most is interactive charm.

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

In a game about big-picture, important ideas of societal problems, a lot of the choices feel not-so-important.

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.

11 bit Studios’ greatest success with This War of Mine, it turns out, is in creating a videogame that is profoundly unpleasant to experience.

Here, then, is another sign that Super Smash Bros. for Wii U is self-aware: It knows the difference between those who win and those who get in the winner’s way, and that one is no better or worse than the other.

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.

Inquisition feels slick but siloed. The story and exploration parts of the game are boxed separately, and the latter is full of prefab errands with few ties to the themes of the Dragon Age setting.

The inclusion of real clips from sideline interviews is a revelation.

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

Unity’s metanarrative turns something specific into something simple, general, a clean way to experience a false history devoid of any attempt to explore what made the era so significant.

There’s no way to take back what it has said in the past—its trivialization of history with Black Ops and shift toward jingoistic chest-thumping in Modern Warfare 2 and 3—but in Advanced Warfare’s recognition of death as a by-product of war there is a chance for a new way forward.

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.

Truth be told, though, Beyond Earth likely won’t have quite the staying power of either Alpha Centauri or Civilization V. Ultimately, Firaxis’s latest effort feels more like a sci-fi mod of Civilization V than a fully-formed project in its own right. But perhaps we should not be so quick to dismiss it, if not for play, then at least for thought.

Woah Dave! is the simplest game I’ve played in a long time. It’s also the most compulsively sinister. I want to play again right now. I’m going to stop writing this review so that I can play more.

What Sunset Overdrive was shooting for was punk. Where it landed was mallternative.

And so it makes sense that Helix’s triumph is also its downfall. All loops close the way they start.

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.

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.

This is why Styx's greatest strength is in always providing another option when a passageway appears to be impenetrable.

Bayonetta 2 erects some of the most solid fighting mechanics and phantasmagorically gonzo visuals in gaming to date—certainly, something as compulsive and massive as this boosts the Wii U to the front of the pack—and through its formal choices communicates a singular, unfiltered vision of sexualization.

This may seem superficial, but in a lot of important ways—its music, language, representation, and sense of joy—FIFA 15 is a more cosmopolitan and worldly sports game. We could use one.

The details of the visual and ludic design, then, do more than keep the terror fresh—they create within the player a demand for more.

The game is most frightening when it is you, the house, and whatever is in it. It feels a little like the game Gone Home’s opening hinted at, but actually inhabited by evil.

Is it worth replaying challenges you’ve already overcome until you beat so many at once, some arbitrary quota? Was I learning more by doing so, becoming a master of skill? Did I conquer, or was I conquered, playing enough to unlock the additional credits I needed to make it through alive?...Just a hundred more cubes, just one more.

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

These theoretical games are why it can feel like Shadow of Mordor is not “a good Lord of the Rings game” but simply a good game. But the truth is that it is a good game in spite of the fact that it has bones that threaten to burst from the fantasy skin laid overtop; that it is yearning to mutate out of this Lord of the Rings form and into something truly revolutionary.

NHL 15 is not very good. It’s not whole. But I keep playing, because it’s enough.

As an allegory of healing, Spirits of Spring takes on the difficult task of cleaning an open wound, and trusts that each player will be able to trace the edges on their own.

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.

Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS is all things. A videogame soundtrack for the ages. A digital hoarder’s dream. A virtual cock-fighting ring. A magnifying glass from space. A do-it-yourself 3D diorama kit. That it’s a fun game too is almost frosting at this point.

Just the sheer amount of detail put into each aspect of world-building, from the designs of the planets to the religion of an alien species, is incredible.

Not being able to connect with Baby, to think of her as more burden than child, soured me on Murasaki Baby. With poor touch controls, the designers have turned a small, cute game into a bit of a mess.

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

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

If you prefer plots that are weird to begin with and just get weirder, you will be extremely happy with Hatoful Boyfriend; if you don’t feel excited by every single Japanese pop culture trope re-enacted by pigeons, Hatoful Boyfriend might not be for you.

Owners of the first game might be chagrined to find out they could have waited two years to get all the content on one game card for a single price. But newcomers to this musical take on a venerable series will be pleased to get what they should have always had in the first place.

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

It’s not so much “high art” as a blender full of Battle Royale, Law and Order, Hunger Games, Snatchers, Phoenix Wright, and Persona—a pageant to be seen and lightly interfaced with.

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

Madden NFL 15 is a truly impressive football videogame, and probably the best I’ve ever played.

When the stakes are low, the incongruity between CounterSpy’s stealth and action components matters little, but at DEFCON 1, you’re looking at mutual assured destruction. It’s a bit ironic that a game about escalating international tensions stumbles when it comes to its own escalating action.

Perhaps with its ensuing acts A Maker’s Eden will find its. For now, it rests as something kind of cool, slightly interactive, and mostly, an unfinished journal.

The prospect of fresh exploration still holds a spell over me.

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.

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.

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.

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.

At times it seems like Only If might actively hate its audience, that it resents being played at all.

Unrest is a short, smart work. Most roleplaying games are about those in power, but Unrest is also about those who aren't.

Between those shooting star moments, too much of Odyssey weakens under the pile. It’s many things at once with new ideas; this is the both the kindest and most damning thing to be said about it.

It is flashy fun, a succinct use of the Vita’s abilities, but the game burns quick and leaves nothing to chew on afterwards, like an infographic that missed its own point.

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.

The game is not about death or life but about the soul leaving the body and heading someplace new. It’s about the brief moment it spends flying.

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.

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

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.

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.

Being a robot that can transform into different shapes and use cartoony weapons to blow up other robots is fun, and maybe story is unnecessary for this kind of play.

O’Reilly’s work dances around the intersection between the quiet, meditative moments of life and the broader technological world always encroaching on that serenity, but he’s never been afraid to throw out a curveball every once in awhile.

But somehow, the small scale trials found in the levels of 1001 Spikes bring me back. Grabbing the key and making it inches from the stage door before dying carries a similar weight, and makes realizing the far-fetched goal all the sweeter.

The cumulative effect is a game that is as bright, rich, and lovely as nostalgia would have us believe our favorite NES games always were.

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.

The game's environments have the appearance of a 3D sandbox but you quickly discover how linear they are. From time to time you'll find a dead-end path with a gameplay-irrelevant collectible doodad perched at the end of it, but the environments offer little of interest outside of the straight-line path to the next platforming segment.

The game exults in tomato-can headshots and arms blasted into gristle. Bits pop off bodies with enthusiasm, like giant fingers had flicked them at a wall. And as foes turn to wet paper, Blazkowicz remains a rock.

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.

Fortunately, Soul Suspect’s fairly uninteresting play takes a backseat to a fast-moving plot that, as predictable as it often is, remains engaging from start to finish.