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

OmniBus would work better if it rolled with its own punches instead of creating a system that only exists to be fought with—the reward is smaller when randomness does so much of the grunt work. Just sit back and let the car drive you into the sun. Life just flies by so fast when you’re having fun.

Monochroma wants you to debate your every move, to drain you of color and splash you with hope when you play well. It’s often too quiet to know if you’re doing just that.

DreadOut revels in cliche, sometimes quite smartly.

It’s this tradition that gives us Dambuster’s lamentable Homefront: The Revolution, the sequel to THQ’s Homefront (2011) that neither critics nor players asked for.

And it wasn’t until later, when I settled down and reflected on the game, that I realized a potential purpose of such mundane tasks in Moebius: Empire Rising: Jane Jensen wants you to feel––not just see––the psychology of Malachi Rector, a man scarred by a family tragedy, and tormented with a genetic gift. If that is indeed the primary purpose, then I applaud Jensen.

In the end, it’s kitsch. It’s a Soviet-themed Lego set that renders a monumental socio-political phenomenon into little else but a toy. And an exceptionally boring one at that.

With more time to flesh out the world and, most importantly, a more creative progression of challenges to match your skill, this could have been a special game. Instead, just as its titular character is trapped in time by default, Shadwen is a stealth game forever trapped in a state of adolescence.

So much of Bound by Flame induces boredom or irritation that it seemed the best recourse to seek out a style of play that facilitated, if not outright enjoyment, at least an absence of hostility.

When I finished, I didn’t expect Daylight to stick with me as much as it did. The story did very little new; the levels weren’t novel; the ghosts were ones I’d seen before. But when I closed my eyes that night, all I could see was that Shadow at the end of the hallway, watching me.

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.

The game is best experienced as an occasional therapeutic exercise.

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.

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.

The game is aesthetically rich, but it lacks heart.

Slain! is a poser, well-dressed and intentioned but vacuous, contributing nothing to the scene. It has the spiked gauntlets, the long hair, the denim jacket; but the house lights are on and everything’s out of tune.

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

Attempting to bring your two arms together to ready a shot as your aggressor charges blindly toward you is beautifully simple and absurd. In any other shooting game, such an opponent would pose no threat whatsoever, but the balance between the ludicrous distance the sword-wielding apple-man has to travel in order to reach you and the exceptional difficulty of lining up a shot combine to create a fine piece of participatory humor.

Enter Skies is trying very hard to win the title of the weirdest RPG this year with Fearless Fantasy but its biggest mistake is in trying at all.

The developer put in details that make the game virtually impossible.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Lovely Weather is Animal Crossing without all the stuff.

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

Prominence isn’t so much a failure as it is a missed opportunity. With a narrative background about an oppressed people struggling to free themselves by pushing the limits of science and technology, the story is set up for success. But unfortunately, those possibilities are rarely explored in Prominence itself, making for a rather sterile narrative experience with sleek sci-fi surroundings.

Having laid the groundwork for interrogating this dynamic, however, Solstice tends more toward murder mystery dinner theater than fantasy film noir. A penchant for playful melodrama and comedic banter in many ways undercuts the tension established through the game’s mystery and its interactive methods for unraveling it.

Ace of Seafood is not a game about what it’s like to be a fish. But it does, in oddly literal ways, imagine what it would be like for a human to be a fish, albeit a marauding and cybernetic one. But perhaps that’s exactly the point.

A couple hours into Glitchspace, I hoped for a break in the progression and the chance to explore my newly acquired skills, but instead the complexity is continuously layered on top of itself until the game ends.

You’d hope that, once you’ve figured out Beglitched’s puzzle system it would start to gain momentum. In fact, what happens is it starts to feel a little repetitive.