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.

Like The Walking Dead, Republique is now freed of needing to instruct the player of their goals and how to achieve them. It is, instead, refocusing its efforts, in wonderfully surprising ways.

There is a market for this kind of happy pain, this agonizing joy. I just hope Dakko Dakko’s rotating, riveting shooter finds the cat-crazy audience it deserves.

The translation from urn to game is nearly flawless.

It’s the ludic equivalent of the James Bond series.

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.

Out of all of the episodes, “No Going Back” is the most relentless.

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.

Without the weight of tradition behind it, flattening out your finger hitting “Fight wisely” just feels like cow-clicking. Personally, I’d rather spend that time elsewhere.

Despite all of its cutesy posturing and promises, Unravel is still looking to fill some kind of void. And I’m not sure if that void is its shortcomings as a mood board, as a videogame, or a cloying digestible basket of “feels” for EA.

Numinous Games’ That Dragon, Cancer does not suffer from this problem; the pain feels real, the sadness is authentic. This is not surprising given that the game is undisguised autobiography: Ryan and Amy Green created it as a meditation on their family’s journey as their son Joel was treated for and eventually killed by brain cancer.

My problem with Mario Golf games, then, is really a kind of strength; the core game is so competent that a hitting a solid drive down the fairway feels sweet enough.

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

Episode 4 naturally acts as a lull, so it’s unnerving that for the most part, it does little to move the story forward besides a few character moments and one major life-changing and tense sequence.

It’s still easier to construct narrative contingency than to make it meaningful.

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.

The creators of Pac-Man CE 2 had the difficult task of remixing a game that has already been expanded upon and reworked to the point of refinement, and they chose to pile on the complexity anyway. The result is a Frankenstein’s Pac-Man—a mess of features and modes that, despite all the power pellets and fruit and ghosts, still left me feeling hungry.

It finds, despite everything, the light; it dwells there, and asks you to walk in it.

In a stone-cold RPG like Etrian Odyssey you want to minimize the crazy shit happening, but in a Mystery Dungeon you want to revel in it, like a surfer in search of the biggest wave. You would hope in spite of this the game would manage to branch off and do its own thing, but it doesn’t, unless that thing is needless complexity, endless grinding and conscripting dreary-eyed anime children on a plodding adventure.

Life Is Strange has a charm that is hard to resist.

Lord knows videogame characters could stand to be quieter, but Virginia can’t convey the necessary emotional depth to make its story stick. The ideas at play piqued my interest pre-release: two women of color as its leads, the promise of a new spin on enduring cop show tropes, surrealist touches. But Virginia is selling points all over, a mood board of ideas—some cool, some musty—that take the player’s interest as self-evident. Anyone who’s seen a movie before should probably just watch another.

Like a city that leaves its streets to pedestrians, pushing highways underground and elevating trains overhead, the game seeks to avoid the anxious hustle of a traditional simulation by reducing clutter and keeping things at a more intimate, human level.

Revives the visual style of a cartoon aimed at ten-year-olds.

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.

A visual novel sipped through a Gilliam straw.

In spite of its problems, Three Fourths Home still showcases some pretty sharp dialogue and storytelling. And if nothing else, it will make you think twice about how you conduct yourself the next time you’re on the phone with your mom.

Lisa has a way of allowing you to revel in a joyfulness of pain—a place and feeling where all the agony and loneliness becomes an idiotic caricature of life.

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