Helldivers measures its brutal difficulty against a dehumanizing military and political complex that results in humor and violence, both about as subtle and hard-hitting as a freight train. Such is the price of liberty, paid in full with a pile of shell casings and the sickening splat of another expendable soldier.

What Sunset Overdrive was shooting for was punk. Where it landed was mallternative.

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.

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.

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.

Hitman GO is not a boardgame nor a particularly compelling facsimile of one, beyond the tokens and the boards. But the game succeeds for sticking to the aesthetics of its inspiration, and moving on as the game and platform demands.

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.”

Truth be told, though, Beyond Earth likely won’t have quite the staying power of either Alpha Centauri or Civilization V. Ultimately, Firaxis’s latest effort feels more like a sci-fi mod of Civilization V than a fully-formed project in its own right. But perhaps we should not be so quick to dismiss it, if not for play, then at least for thought.

It’s not so much “high art” as a blender full of Battle Royale, Law and Order, Hunger Games, Snatchers, Phoenix Wright, and Persona—a pageant to be seen and lightly interfaced with.

The game is a sort of inverse of Grand Theft Auto 5: triumphant in ambition but faltering in execution. Nowhere is this more apparent than in those NPC bios, which can’t seem to decide if they’re funny or serious.

None of this is anything like progress—Westerado isn’t exploring new frontiers when it comes to genre work—but the romance inherent to the game’s emphasis on freedom sometimes comes close to overpowering a bitter remembrance of the very real history it cribs from.

In the end, Oxenfree is absolutely a game about teenage bullshit (forgive me for being a little disingenuous earlier). But it manages to revitalize that narrative by focusing on feeling more than substance; it glances at each character’s inner struggle rather than serving it up for a full meal.

Track Central gives into core of the Trials experience and allows us to relish in the waste of biomass. Sorry, riders: this is what you’re made for.

The number of “ah-ha!” moments offered by the game is significant.

As the game becomes more “normal,” Dropsy’s original challenge of endearing himself to those he repulses fades, and the puzzles start seeming a little tedious. So many are based around a difficult to manage day/night cycle, and many others around the talents of collectible animals. But before things escalate, when it’s just the story of a clown without a circus, the sentiment warms you like a hug.

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.

Maybe the best way to play Samorost 3 is to play with it, to think of it as a bizarrely-shaped thing that prompts one to appreciate the ways oddities can spark and delight the imagination. At least that’s the way I’ll continue to play it, curiously wandering through alien environments, turning each sight and sound over and over in my head, very much like I once did with a strange piece of wood I encountered when I was young.

Those hoping for 90° Kirby won’t get it in BoxBoy, but those looking for BoxBoy—puzzle-solving, muted box-making extraordinaire—need not look any further. Kirby is not up to this task. Unless, of course, Kirby eats BoxBoy and acquires his powers. Then Kirby might do just fine.

It makes the best argument in favor of the 3DS's defining feature since Super Mario 3D World.

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.

The Division is a game so eager to criminalize the poor, so eager to play into clichés of class war. Yet it staunchly refuses to take responsibility for its representations, for its politics. If we want that to change, we have to make it, and its creators, responsible.

Pushmo World is more of a great thing, and that’s hard to complain about. But as the Wii U increasingly looks like a poor child captured in some mysterious restraints, I fear shiny versions from the past won’t unlock these unfair shackles.

There’s a spirit of revolt in your work, a rhetoric of mortals killing the gods competing for control of The Magic Circle.

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

The titular vermin of Vermintide may come in a horde, but they’re all unique, in their weird, chittering way. It almost makes me feel bad about the carnage I’ve spent the last ten hours dealing out to them.

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

Until Dawn is a game constructed by people who understand how to manipulate its players’ sense of control. It’s informed by a deep study of horror films and smart in its consideration of how to employ this understanding in an interactive medium. It only fails in its uncharacteristic acceptance of a few outmoded tropes.

Nevertheless, these new elements have been seamlessly integrated into the recognizable LittleBigPlanet foundation, and as a consequence never feel like the source of drastic change. What they offer instead is rejuvenation: a jolt of exhilaration—of imagination—from a series whose novelty had perhaps begun to wane.