Unrest is a short, smart work. Most roleplaying games are about those in power, but Unrest is also about those who aren't.

Is it worth replaying challenges you’ve already overcome until you beat so many at once, some arbitrary quota? Was I learning more by doing so, becoming a master of skill? Did I conquer, or was I conquered, playing enough to unlock the additional credits I needed to make it through alive?...Just a hundred more cubes, just one more.

“Complicated” is not the same as “complex,” and nowhere does Rememoried fail to parse this distinction than in its unconventional ruleset.

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

“Kooky” is a good word for Albino Lullaby.

The prospect of fresh exploration still holds a spell over me.

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.

Had the realization of that universe been more fully fleshed out—expansive and deep rather than restrictive and boardgame-like—Spaceships could have found success as a kind of post-human strategy game. Instead it feels lifeless. But not in the existential, gazing-into-the-void-of-space way. More in the way that an aging child realizes that her blanket is just a blanket, and promptly stops caring about it.

The repetition of tasks, activities and missions is presented to the player as the lone way to achieve rewards, and yet within the constructed system of randomness and uncertainty that the game offers, these rewards are never certain. This is how it presents the enterprise of self-improvement as content in itself.

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.

All in all, the game feels like a tourist trap rather than a destination.

As an allegory of healing, Spirits of Spring takes on the difficult task of cleaning an open wound, and trusts that each player will be able to trace the edges on their own.

The game does deliver scenes between levels that color some of your writers’ inner lives, but they are too minor to establish much empathy for, say, a writer disappearing by the regime’s hand in the post-game wrap up.

Atmospheric traumas might read as much like the privilege of a certain upbringing as the Matisse print hanging up in the protagonist’s childhood home. That said, Between Me And The Night never feels less than sincere and heartfelt while doing this. And if you can embrace its perspective, the game stands to offer a moving and smart depiction of navigating life through the scrim of an angst born in childhood.

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.

While Moon Hunters may not be the perfect game, it nobly aims for the stars, and for that alone it is memorable.

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.

WWE 2k15 certainly propagates that fantasy, but along the way, it also stumbles into a repetitive pattern that, completely by accident, reveals a harsher and poignant truth about what professional wrestling, and being a sports entertainment performer, really is: it’s a job, just like any other job.

You can be bread. I can be bread. I can be destructive. I am destructive. I am bread.

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

Sylvio succeeds at every single thing it wants to do. Games don’t do this kind of hermetic horror often, and Sylvio makes zero concessions. The car, the gun, the reel-to-reel, the black blobs: they’re all secondary to Juliette Waters and her journey through the abyss.

In No Pineapple Left Behind, from Subaltern Games, you play as this peculiar principal. You have to juggle the responsibilities of supporting teachers, improving students’ grades, and managing a budget. This is quite a job, where accounting for every dollar of your daily spending allowance becomes crucial. It is much easier to resort to your magical power, which drains the humanity from kids, turning them into pineapples.

The game's environments have the appearance of a 3D sandbox but you quickly discover how linear they are. From time to time you'll find a dead-end path with a gameplay-irrelevant collectible doodad perched at the end of it, but the environments offer little of interest outside of the straight-line path to the next platforming segment.

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

In the annals of dungeoneering, Necropolis stands out for its lack of imagination.

Its disparate parts don’t align toward the same end: the karma system doesn’t mean anything here , just like the pixel art doesn’t mean anything, and the roguelike bits don’t mean anything.

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.

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.