There’s no strong character to center it, no perspective to ground it, no consistent challenge to weight it. It’s an impressive novelty, but it fades fast.

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.

It has been suggested that Catalyst is a remake of Mirror’s Edge, or a reboot, but it is in reality a re-alignment of the first game with the recognizable features of a mainstream videogame, a reparation between the most original of its ideas and the most generic features of its medium.

In the end, the game attempts to pull back the curtain with a certain amount of Scooby-Doo.

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

The latest from Dejobaan therefore seems like a stepping stone, a strong premise and peaceful beginning with little longevity and little to do outside the foundation of the game. You have to wonder if there will be more to write in the future.

When the stakes are low, the incongruity between CounterSpy’s stealth and action components matters little, but at DEFCON 1, you’re looking at mutual assured destruction. It’s a bit ironic that a game about escalating international tensions stumbles when it comes to its own escalating action.

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.

It would be a kind of justice for The Order to have its assets stripped from its skeleton and put into service of a more deserving project.

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

OmniBus would work better if it rolled with its own punches instead of creating a system that only exists to be fought with—the reward is smaller when randomness does so much of the grunt work. Just sit back and let the car drive you into the sun. Life just flies by so fast when you’re having fun.

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.

Rainbow Six: Siege has the basic pieces in place to offer that experience but sabotages them by forcing the illusion to rub against the real world in ways the fantasy isn’t prepared to handle. More often than not, playing Siege, one doesn’t feel like a soldier. You feel like a player. And that’s precisely what this game doesn’t want.

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.

Fortunately, Soul Suspect’s fairly uninteresting play takes a backseat to a fast-moving plot that, as predictable as it often is, remains engaging from start to finish.

But, despite all its flaws, Bound is undoubtedly a celebration of the female form, both physically and spiritually. And, for that, it could be said to be a game better viewed as one to experience rather than to play, and the fact that it tries to encompass so many deep psychological metaphors in the videogame format is an ambition worth praising.

In its best moments, The Old City: Leviathan toggles seamlessly between enchanting dreams and dark realities, tragic memories and tragic futures, and deeply touching realizations on what is actually happening. But they’re all never really meant for the player; they’re meant for the protagonist.

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.

It’s true that Dream can be beautiful and fun at times, but its structure too often holds it back from being something great.

Stomaching the jump scares and heavily recycled horror imagery will earn you a handful of mesmerizing vistas, but Layers of Fear fails to challenge or transform its central trope.

Playing Tomodachi Life is no different than life in its purest sense, but it makes one wonder: who’s playing you? Should we care?

Having laid the groundwork for interrogating this dynamic, however, Solstice tends more toward murder mystery dinner theater than fantasy film noir. A penchant for playful melodrama and comedic banter in many ways undercuts the tension established through the game’s mystery and its interactive methods for unraveling it.

Without such a narrative, Dying Light devolves into almost pure gore. It’s not that the game is inordinately bloody or hard to stomach; it’s that it presents itself like a sadistic RPG, where the main goal isn’t to find the aforementioned file for the GRE, but rather gain as much strength, agility, and weapon modifications as you can so that your zombie skirmishes become more and more ludicrous the deeper you get into the game.

But Type-0 shows that Final Fantasy, despite its best efforts, probably doesn’t know how to grow up in the way it wants to—that it can only grasp at greater dramatic impact even as its battle systems are further refined, its attempts to dig something out of the ancient muck of a subject as heavy as war itself constantly curtailed by concessions to the iconography of its past.

That said, while The Deadly Tower of Monsters might be silly and a little clunky, it’s hard not to root for something that lovingly apes (for lack of a better word) a bygone era so successfully.

If the games hope to be considered worthy additions to the phenomenon, they'll need to take advantage of that vast world, and all its opportunities for original storytelling. While also remembering that we’d like to see a bit more than the bottom of a Whitehill’s shoe.

Considered in this way, Pokémon looks kind of like a Le Corbusier chair: everything in its right place, nothing without purpose, all parts contributing toward a clear, singular end. Then again, also like a Le Corbusier chair, it's a lot more comfortable in theory than in practice.