All of which leaves Dancing All Night as a rare mix: at once a good dancing game, a bad Persona game, and a Vita game.

Stubborn adherence to the modes of the past only goes so far. Third Eye Crime would be a better game for recognizing this.

The core of Splendor is a smart, accessible strategy experience, and you get a taste of that from the mobile game. But more than anything, Splendor just whetted my appetite for playing it with actual cards and tokens, which even it seems to acknowledge is the game’s ideal form.

With Obduction, Cyan has created another game that’s an art of personal journaling. What you know, what you’ve gathered, will save you. The tools seem familiar but it is details that are your weapons. As the otherworldly overlaps the banal, you’re trapped in a labyrinth of places and things.

The game is a throwback to the old-style point-and-click adventure game, requiring you to solve puzzles with limited assets within a constantly shifting scaffold of constraints that limits what is and is not possible. For the most part, the game avoids the exasperating opacity that once plagued adventure games—flush the pickle down the toilet in order to get the car keys—but there is nevertheless little room for variation in how one solves the puzzles, and little room for choice within the story.

Come October shall we look back and wonder where this potential went? Perhaps we shall ask ourselves what could have been done differently. Or, perhaps, Life is Strange will navigate these concerns, becoming the game we hoped it would be.

Yes, The Beginner’s Guide occasionally fumbles its narrative, Wreden sometimes overacts, and the writing can be a little ham-fisted—but the game also provokes incisive, critical thought about the way we read and evaluate games, and does so not by laying out a definitive “message” to be delivered to players, but by prompting us, through play, with open-ended questions.

From this perspective, the Pokémon isn’t a creature of its own agency, but a mere extension of its trainer’s body and mind; a tool in a rat race, forever wrestling in the futile pursuit of human ambition. And when you look at it that way, all the thematic waffling starts to make a whole lot of sense.

Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate lets you science the shit out of murder in a city where people are sciencing the shit out of everything. There's an undeniable appeal to that. But it’s an appeal worth looking in the face.

As with many Nintendo games of the last few years, its gameplay elements are immaculately designed but risk nothing.

It’s more of the same, just colder and thinner.

The wonderful thing about Mayday! Deep Space is that true horror can really only exist in the mind of the player.

Far Cry Primal is basically everything I just described, without a whole lot of irony. Which is to say it often feels enormously, almost amazingly stupid.

Rather than relying on the same emotional tricks, Schafer and Double Fine opted to tell a different kind of story; like Shay and Vella, they learned from those that came before without feeling compelled to follow in their predecessors’ exact footsteps. As a result, Broken Age is a resounding success; a charming, quietly subversive, and ultimately uplifting parable about finding beauty in the broken.

Each individual piece of the game has been crafted with the knowledge that, should the (imperfect) humans controlling the action play their part properly, the systems are in place to make every hunt look, sound, and feel hugely exciting.

Imagine a self-filling pinata. Imagine a hundred of them. Imagine them lumbering at you, wielding swords.

American Truck Simulator reflected the anxious reality, but also allowed me to appreciate the grandeur of it all. I can finally see what I presume most other Americans have always enjoyed: Endless waves of asphalt paved just for me, veining the contiguous southwest, begging to be casually traversed.

If you liked the previous Borderlands, you’ll love it.

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.

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.

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.

Mind: Path to Thalamus is, at times, messy, but it’s a beautiful mess, one that still exhibits powerful moments of emotional impact that are so true to the game and the medium that it’s almost painful.

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.

Bigby Wolf is a surrogate parent for Fabletown, but the stakes are lowered.

Without that humor, the story would have no buoyancy. It would sink beneath its heaviness.

Not a Hero’s ultimate statement is a brutally cynical one, but its political nihilism is always portrayed with such glee and good cheer that the unease is hard to feel until the game is shut down.

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.

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.