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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

With Quadrilateral Cowboy, Chung eschews the filmic jump-cuts he experimented with in Thirty Flights of Loving. Still, the fragmented plot produces a similar result: as it happens, it already feels like a collection of memories.

From the room of VHS tapes, to the security footage, to the bat sanctuary, to the theremin performance, to the camera’s final, extended retreat up the rickety helix of a spiral staircase; Act IV confronts us with scenarios that test and limit our perception. Like Snow’s Wavelength, it gives us just enough to trick us into feeling like we’ve glimpsed something real.

Practice is for tryhards, and Videoball’s greatest strength is that it understands the value of isolated, localized competition.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Playdead’s greatest feat in creating Inside was making it look like they never created it in the first place.

By trying to optimize it, the brave/default system inadvertently lays bare the arbitrariness structuring the player’s relation to the game, the role one ostensibly plays becoming repeatable and, indeed, automatable in yet another striking parallel to the looming “new economy.”

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.

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.

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.

Warhammer’s world is sketched out by an ocean of rules, obsessed with the collision of fantasy with the specter of realism.

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.

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.

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.

It’s a game with confidence in the worth of revisiting its history and an earnest belief that doing so can result in much more than an empty exercise in nostalgia.

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.

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.

Uncharted 4 offers nothing profound, assured in its own way that it has nothing to prove.