It manages to provide an intimate journey for each player despite the breadth of human diversity.

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

Its view of America is simple, but simplicity keeps the game focused on survival in a wilderness that refuses to be tamed.

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.

Rainbow Six: Siege has the basic pieces in place to offer that experience but sabotages them by forcing the illusion to rub against the real world in ways the fantasy isn’t prepared to handle. More often than not, playing Siege, one doesn’t feel like a soldier. You feel like a player. And that’s precisely what this game doesn’t want.

It doesn’t exactly crack open the full literary potential of randomly-generated story beats, but it does use it to an enjoyable-enough cutesy effect, which is pages more than most flarfy corpses have ever achieved.

Stomaching the jump scares and heavily recycled horror imagery will earn you a handful of mesmerizing vistas, but Layers of Fear fails to challenge or transform its central trope.

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.

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.

The majority of Full Bore is a balancing act—charging blindly through the map may incite agoraphobia, while obsessing over a particular nook for too long yields claustrophobia. Getting lost in this game is equally fun and frustrating, in almost exactly even measure.

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.

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.

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.

In a detail that I can only laugh at, my most enjoyable time spent with Rise of Iron was in fact spent climbing a mountain.

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.

The Last Tinker doesn’t play poorly, just unremarkably. And for the type of game it aspires to be—one that sets itself the unenviable task of recapturing the spirit of a genre’s golden age—an experience that is ”just good enough” can feel a bit underwhelming.

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

Grow Home had a simple purity to it—you were a robot, it could climb, and so it did, all the way up to space. Grow Up repeats this journey but steadily turns BUD into Inspector Gadget as you complete its trials.

But, despite all its flaws, Bound is undoubtedly a celebration of the female form, both physically and spiritually. And, for that, it could be said to be a game better viewed as one to experience rather than to play, and the fact that it tries to encompass so many deep psychological metaphors in the videogame format is an ambition worth praising.

An exceptionally uncreative piece of schlock.

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

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.

Playing Tomodachi Life is no different than life in its purest sense, but it makes one wonder: who’s playing you? Should we care?

A good game, like any good work of art, should make you wonder; it should give you a reason to care about what happens, just as it should give you reasons to enjoy what it asks you do. Aragami feels only half-invested in doing both of those things, so it does neither. By failing to follow through on its own best ideas, it leaves us with nothing but a shadow of the game that could have been.

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

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.

This is the experience of playing No Man’s Sky, a series of recurring structures that overlap and intersect, a surprisingly knowable collection of repeatable actions.

If the game has any message, it’s that the only thing more rewarding than admiring a lovely cathedral is watching it explode.

Ultimately, though, Near Death has nothing to say beyond the struggle to navigate the harshest environment on Earth.

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.

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.

The most flattering description I can offer Mother Russia Bleeds is that of an enjoyably formulaic brawler, but the ferocity of its execution was refined enough to get lodged in my head. I can’t quite work it out: it exists like a ringing in my ears that has no obvious source. Or, rather, it’s a third-gen VHS copy of its influences, a quavery deja vu of a violent brawler both familiar and unsettling.

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.

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.

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.

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

I will likely return to Pavilion to get lost in its digital labyrinths, to discover how objects can be rearranged to play with the narrative of a faceless man in a suit. When I return to Pavilion’s twisty little passages in Chapter 2 next year, I hope recall that feeling of blissful disorientation I felt in the dizzying corridors of Borges’ prose.

By bridging the gap between our daily struggles and the daydreams that surround them, it suggests that the one space we truly own is our imagination. There is a certain beauty hidden in that sentiment; that it is the fantastic, the surreal, the strange, that might liberate us.

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.

It has been suggested that Catalyst is a remake of Mirror’s Edge, or a reboot, but it is in reality a re-alignment of the first game with the recognizable features of a mainstream videogame, a reparation between the most original of its ideas and the most generic features of its medium.

As a game, Star Fox Zero isn’t so much broken as deeply and disappointingly lacking in inspiration. Shiny but not smooth, it’s a game about a space-faring fox in a spaceship that turns into a chicken without any sense of joy, and that might be the biggest disappointment of all.

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

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.

In large part, the ultimate success of The Wolf Among Us rests on how well Telltale handles Episode 5.

At its best, Fragments of Him says, “No, you really don’t understand. Let me show you.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

Parallax has no plot. It has no character(s). We get no indication of where this Will Shortzean universe is or who made it or why we’re here. We get puzzles. And we do them because they are puzzles, and puzzles demand doing. Because level B-7 is after B-6 and you haven’t finished B-6 yet, have you? This type of circular motivation is where spectacle could save Parallax from itself. Any kind of motivation (even the kind you forget!) is better than knowing that there is no motivation.

The best adventure games have an engaging story and interesting puzzles. Tesla Effect doesn't have either.

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.

Mafia III is a game that’s held back by its conventional anchors. It wants to be game about the South but remains content to use its setting rarely as little more than a local color curiosity. It proposes a radical representation of race but falls prey to the conventional chores of open-world banality. Though it initially seems eager to “Tell about the South,” Mafia III does not have the patience or interest to do so. Its violence and exploitation-style racial politics, however, make the trip to New Bordeaux worth effort—as long as the person heading down South isn’t looking for anything more than a sightseeing tour.

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.

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.

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.

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

A competently executed tactical RPG with a jejune script and stylized window dressing.

Quantum Break, in enlarging their length and complexity, turns them into a crutch that’s forced to support a game that can’t consistently match their appeal.

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.

By day 100, you’re starting to lose sight of the goal. They gave you 180 days to finish out your tenure as chief; at first it sounded like a death sentence, now it’s more like a prison sentence.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Californium is only here to deliver the report: life is a pixel hunt, and there is no hint line.

“Kooky” is a good word for Albino Lullaby.

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

Masquerada declines as the plot slows down. The herky-jerky pace gets more grating, the mania for proper nouns more distracting. What looked like a scrappy little underdog RPG turns out to be a collection of worn-out ideas.

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.

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.

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.

All in all, the game feels like a tourist trap rather than a destination.

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.

The game does deliver scenes between levels that color some of your writers’ inner lives, but they are too minor to establish much empathy for, say, a writer disappearing by the regime’s hand in the post-game wrap up.

Atmospheric traumas might read as much like the privilege of a certain upbringing as the Matisse print hanging up in the protagonist’s childhood home. That said, Between Me And The Night never feels less than sincere and heartfelt while doing this. And if you can embrace its perspective, the game stands to offer a moving and smart depiction of navigating life through the scrim of an angst born in childhood.

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.

While Moon Hunters may not be the perfect game, it nobly aims for the stars, and for that alone it is memorable.

Its mechanics and narrative grew routine. I appreciated those aesthetics only from a distance it wouldn’t give me. It’s hard to criticize a game for being good-looking, but it’s hard not to when its ambitions so clearly lay beyond that.

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.

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

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

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.

In No Pineapple Left Behind, from Subaltern Games, you play as this peculiar principal. You have to juggle the responsibilities of supporting teachers, improving students’ grades, and managing a budget. This is quite a job, where accounting for every dollar of your daily spending allowance becomes crucial. It is much easier to resort to your magical power, which drains the humanity from kids, turning them into pineapples.

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.

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

In the annals of dungeoneering, Necropolis stands out for its lack of imagination.

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.

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.

By the game’s end, I found I didn’t care about any of the characters. Instead, I was fed up, hunting down the rest of the prismatic cores in order to reach the end. The game had done a full 180. It’s a major disappointment, given the promise ReCore shows at its beginning, when it’s just Joule and Mack.