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

Gears 4 takes only half measures. It discards a lighthearted adventure premise for another fate-of-humanity monster invasion. It gives up on the anti-militarist bent of its early fight against the COG for another plot about soldiers trying to save humanity.

Lara’s therapy was a failure. Rise of the Tomb Raider was not, but it did force me to reconcile the uncomfortable paradox of the titular badass also being an emotional wreck.

The Taken King shows Destiny is willing to reach for everything it might be, and it's hard not to look forward to what comes next.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

What begins as a weighty trudge through the festering underbelly of dark forests and abandoned keeps slowly evolves, growing lighter and more nuanced and intuitive.

Halo Moments are revelations of accidental mastery, happenstance perfection, the butterfly effect of a shock wave blooming out from the epicenter of a frag grenade. A grenade that only you could have thrown. It only matters that it happened, and that you and your friend, for a simultaneous second, remembered why it was you loved playing games in the first place.

It is a beautifully gothic dungeon-crawler with a wealth of clever mechanics, the most unique of which is that, as your adventurers delve deeper into Lovecraftian tunnels, coves, and ruins, they become stressed.

For being a cyberpunk ode to the potential promise of transhumanism, the missions around Mankind Divided‘s central narrative feel terribly familiar.

There’s something to be said for the sensation of Thumper’s mid-game, where survival is the goal, ignorant of whatever score comes along with it.

If you don’t have to turn down your TV volume from its usual spot I salute you.

Out of the void, Hyper Light Drifter meticulously crafts a post-apocalyptic samurai story, one that bends and folds the tenets of zen’s vivid ambience alongside the warrior path of bushido, something familiar yet fresh, quiet yet resonant.

It ought to remind us of what’s so good about the maximalism of other JRPGs.

As the title suggests, SOMA wears its sci-fi influences proudly on its sleeve.

Calculords doesn’t punish you for dicking around with the equations indefinitely. But, for the first time, I’m enjoying equations, and whoever is responsible for that has performed some degree of math magic.

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.

Without any friction to the player’s actions, the game’s title becomes a suggestion rather than a command.

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

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

If you’re going to be damned for all eternity to fight for your afterlife, at least it’s with such a lovingly crafted homage to the shooters of yesteryear—and you don’t even need to worry about whether you’ve got the latest Soundblaster card this time around.

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