The interplay of Dungeon Master and player is controlled chaos, thrilling in its unpredictability, while the outcome of Guild of Dungeoneering is a foregone conclusion: I will throw a neverending horde of adventurers at a dungeon until I complete it or get bored and wander away.

In the end, I was allowed to play Tormentum like I play all games that ask you to make moral choices. I skated through the game unlocking cages, freeing prisoners, and forgiving murderers with impunity. And I wasn’t punished for it even once.

Homesick isn’t a perfect game, but it succeeds in fostering a sense of curiosity that will carry you to the end, and its slow drip of sadness and wonder can be intoxicating.

In a detail that I can only laugh at, my most enjoyable time spent with Rise of Iron was in fact spent climbing a mountain.

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.

The Last Tinker doesn’t play poorly, just unremarkably. And for the type of game it aspires to be—one that sets itself the unenviable task of recapturing the spirit of a genre’s golden age—an experience that is ”just good enough” can feel a bit underwhelming.

Rogue paints the picture of an arbitrary war drawing arbitrary lines.

Grow Home had a simple purity to it—you were a robot, it could climb, and so it did, all the way up to space. Grow Up repeats this journey but steadily turns BUD into Inspector Gadget as you complete its trials.

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.

An exceptionally uncreative piece of schlock.

This is why Styx's greatest strength is in always providing another option when a passageway appears to be impenetrable.

Just the sheer amount of detail put into each aspect of world-building, from the designs of the planets to the religion of an alien species, is incredible.

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

A good game, like any good work of art, should make you wonder; it should give you a reason to care about what happens, just as it should give you reasons to enjoy what it asks you do. Aragami feels only half-invested in doing both of those things, so it does neither. By failing to follow through on its own best ideas, it leaves us with nothing but a shadow of the game that could have been.

In a game about big-picture, important ideas of societal problems, a lot of the choices feel not-so-important.

Volume’s strengths are primal but simple, at times feeling like a Crossy Road-style time-passer with a cyberpunk sheen. It tries but ultimately doesn’t say much of modern society or governments beyond the elementary. Indeed, it is the modern videogame incarnate, warts and all.

This is the experience of playing No Man’s Sky, a series of recurring structures that overlap and intersect, a surprisingly knowable collection of repeatable actions.

If the game has any message, it’s that the only thing more rewarding than admiring a lovely cathedral is watching it explode.

Ultimately, though, Near Death has nothing to say beyond the struggle to navigate the harshest environment on Earth.

And so it’s a strange mix. Lumino City is a real world filled with relationships as thin as its papercraft inhabitants. Whether intentional or not, it seems to be the focus, given that there’s not much in the way of “adventure” in this point-and-click adventure.

Between those shooting star moments, too much of Odyssey weakens under the pile. It’s many things at once with new ideas; this is the both the kindest and most damning thing to be said about it.

The most flattering description I can offer Mother Russia Bleeds is that of an enjoyably formulaic brawler, but the ferocity of its execution was refined enough to get lodged in my head. I can’t quite work it out: it exists like a ringing in my ears that has no obvious source. Or, rather, it’s a third-gen VHS copy of its influences, a quavery deja vu of a violent brawler both familiar and unsettling.

Unity’s metanarrative turns something specific into something simple, general, a clean way to experience a false history devoid of any attempt to explore what made the era so significant.

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.

So if you can be comfortable diving flag-first into a cartoon nerd empire built with ad hoc literary appropriation and Lovecraftian ice menaces, one that is completely sincere, you will be rewarded.

Pneuma is an absolutely unsuitable receptacle for questions of spirit or life.

I will likely return to Pavilion to get lost in its digital labyrinths, to discover how objects can be rearranged to play with the narrative of a faceless man in a suit. When I return to Pavilion’s twisty little passages in Chapter 2 next year, I hope recall that feeling of blissful disorientation I felt in the dizzying corridors of Borges’ prose.

By bridging the gap between our daily struggles and the daydreams that surround them, it suggests that the one space we truly own is our imagination. There is a certain beauty hidden in that sentiment; that it is the fantastic, the surreal, the strange, that might liberate us.