By the time it’s done, Armikrog feels more like The Neverhood’s mulligan.

Many games, largely, want to create mayhem where messages may also occur, while protests, largely, want to create messages where mayhem may also occur. Anarcute wants an adorable inferno. The joke is that the destruction is big but the perps are cutie wuties. But I don’t know if I have the planet to play it on.

Prominence isn’t so much a failure as it is a missed opportunity. With a narrative background about an oppressed people struggling to free themselves by pushing the limits of science and technology, the story is set up for success. But unfortunately, those possibilities are rarely explored in Prominence itself, making for a rather sterile narrative experience with sleek sci-fi surroundings.

I hated being talked to like a child when I was one, and as an adult my feelings haven’t changed. There is certainly room for pure, child-like play in videogames: Nintendo has built an empire on it, and there’s a similar giddiness in the work of Keita Takahashi and many of the best sandbox-style games. But telling the player over and over again that she is a baby is not the route toward this state of cerebral freedom.

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.

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.

But once the initial rush of simpler controls and more on-field action wears off—and it happens quickly—you’re left with an empty, meaningless celebration of the sport’s inclusiveness. FIFA World Cup Brazil is then, perhaps, perfectly representative of its real life counterpart. It has the potential to bring people together, but it’s also a lot of pomp and circumstance in the name of “unity” that masks the political and cultural tensions that come with the event.

Its mechanics and narrative grew routine. I appreciated those aesthetics only from a distance it wouldn’t give me. It’s hard to criticize a game for being good-looking, but it’s hard not to when its ambitions so clearly lay beyond that.

Californium is only here to deliver the report: life is a pixel hunt, and there is no hint line.

Knee Deep is at best ankle-high. It’s shallow, and it constantly flops between making fun of gossip and a perpetuator of it.

A couple hours into Glitchspace, I hoped for a break in the progression and the chance to explore my newly acquired skills, but instead the complexity is continuously layered on top of itself until the game ends.

There’s no danger in Absolute Drift, just repetition. Every point is a slam dunk. Every swing a hole-in-one. Every meal is dessert, and I’m starting to miss broccoli.

Glorious though Anno 2205’s cityscapes may be, a game that justifies the banality of numerical mechanics through visual sensation alone is inevitably one that provokes the question of whether or not it needed to exist at all.

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.

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.

I wish I Am Setsuna took me on another beautiful, multifaceted adventure like it wanted to, as the JRPGs that its creators admire once did. I wish the characters weren’t bland caricatures of familiar characters I’ve seen in the past. Instead, it feels like a cold attempt at harboring nostalgia, only managing to remind me of JRPGs of the golden age, and how so much better they were—and, critically, still are.

Being a robot that can transform into different shapes and use cartoony weapons to blow up other robots is fun, and maybe story is unnecessary for this kind of play.

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.

Simulations can distort for good, and so help us resist, or ill, and obscure the forces that corral hearts and minds. Every system locks us up. But sims like Prison Architect throw away the keys.

“Why do the gods continue to shit on this house?” asks Sir Royland, shaking his fist up at the sky and its oily, vague shades of blue. It’s a question I’ve asked myself again and again throughout this series, and one Telltale has avoided answering far too many times.

Masquerada declines as the plot slows down. The herky-jerky pace gets more grating, the mania for proper nouns more distracting. What looked like a scrappy little underdog RPG turns out to be a collection of worn-out ideas.

By the game’s end, I found I didn’t care about any of the characters. Instead, I was fed up, hunting down the rest of the prismatic cores in order to reach the end. The game had done a full 180. It’s a major disappointment, given the promise ReCore shows at its beginning, when it’s just Joule and Mack.

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

A competently executed tactical RPG with a jejune script and stylized window dressing.

Enter Skies is trying very hard to win the title of the weirdest RPG this year with Fearless Fantasy but its biggest mistake is in trying at all.

Remixes can be irreverent or sacrosanct, but more than anything else they must disrupt their original context. NES Remix 2 fails this test. It’s not a new way of experiencing old ideas; it’s a highlight reel. If NES Remix were a DJ, it wouldn’t be Danger Mouse tearing up The Grey Album—it would be that guy in your dorm who insisted on DJing at college parties but couldn’t bear to play a single song all the way through.

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

NHL 15 is not very good. It’s not whole. But I keep playing, because it’s enough.