The loopy dictator is only as loopy as the world that made him; his brand of insanity merely combats the surrounding insanity. Tropico is an open invitation to either revel in it or understand it.

Shadowrun Hong Kong’s success boils down to a smart early decision to stay true to Hong Kong, and exaggerate the flaws of the city’s bizarre governing philosophy to find a new, urgent relevance in the cyberpunk genre.

Hotline Miami 2 cares deeply for politics. It wants to make its brutality meaningful, to say something about media and culture and desensitization. But its sprawling narrative only shows that it has forgotten its own lessons: the way Hotline Miami plays, its spatial violence puzzle, is what Hotline Miami means.

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

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.

Overall my Monument Valley experience was full of charm, perfect for a single marathon playthrough, or short stabs.

The suburbanization, the cartoonish aesthetic, and the “one more turn” addictiveness are still recognizable parts of the core experience people keep coming back for. It is still a full, massive, joyous videogame, even if I have to squint to find the joy beneath mere wit—but the two extremes are now growing wider and wider apart. How long before the fabric of the game snaps under the strain?

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.

Jotun turns the elements of an ancient poetic tradition into a digital myth.

At its heart, Road to Gehenna carries forward both the original game’s thoughtful examination of how we interact with the world and its engaging brainteasers. But it is saved from becoming more of the same by examining how we interact with the world now, and how that world’s end might be understood.

The four games included are great fun, but to enjoy them, you need to play a fifth game—being a likable human being. If you don’t get that part right, everyone will go do something else.

You might laugh as the cartoon blob tumbles into the vat of purple acid, but your time will come too.

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.

It is a throwback in many senses, not just to the history of its own series, but to images of war that came to us already cold, already distant.

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.

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.

A throwback to the twitch platformers of old.

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.

Despite the kinks, some of which may be ironed out in future installments, 1979 Revolution represents an unusual and largely successful mix of an adventure game and history lesson.

MLB 15: The Show is remarkable in that it adheres to a method of gameplay that's absent in most sports games. By privileging patience, attention to detail, and creating a system that rewards minor adjustments to the way we play (not unlike strategy adjustments in the real life MLB), MLB 15: The Show remains one of the only sports games on the market that not only has a distinctive and engaging look and feel, but also pushes an admirable ideology that, however subtly, explores how we engage with sports and videogames.

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.

FRACT proves that it’s through your own creative input that you can continue to surprise yourself beyond those initial magical moments. It’s true that FRACT isn’t the most mind-bending puzzle game out there or the most powerful music production software on the market; its triumph is in forging a middle path.

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.

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.

It’s a beautiful, beguiling place to spend some time, absolutely worth it while you’re there, but sooner rather than later you’ll yearn to shed its shackles, to get off the beaten path.

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.

By placing your adventure in the context of all the other tragedies aboard the Groomlake, a kind of familial intimacy develops.

In Super Time Force, the failures live on, but not as condemnations of my lack of skill. My sloppiness as a player is not useless. Seeing them all hopping around on the screen simultaneously, I realize: there can be grace in failure.