Uncharted 4 offers nothing profound, assured in its own way that it has nothing to prove.

Playdead’s greatest feat in creating Inside was making it look like they never created it in the first place.

Bloodborne is built on this transcendent love. A love of the crumbling ruin, of the screeching banshee, of the shape in the shadows whose eyes catch the candlelight. A love of heaven-scratching spires, ever-descending staircases and fog-cloaked alleys. A love of all the magnificent horrors that have filled the minds of humans since they learned to light fires to stave off the dark.

No other developer has brought an open world to life the way CD Projekt Red has here.

Its limited combat options and often obtuse puzzle solving, alongside the sheer endurance required to survive boss fights long enough to end them, add up to a system that doesn't point to any elaborate moral insight. It simply points to itself.

Here, then, is another sign that Super Smash Bros. for Wii U is self-aware: It knows the difference between those who win and those who get in the winner’s way, and that one is no better or worse than the other.

Bayonetta 2 erects some of the most solid fighting mechanics and phantasmagorically gonzo visuals in gaming to date—certainly, something as compulsive and massive as this boosts the Wii U to the front of the pack—and through its formal choices communicates a singular, unfiltered vision of sexualization.

Stephen’s Sausage Roll is tough and tumbly, with a greater emphasis on one’s own form than any other puzzle game, which usually waiver the avatar as too grotesque of its gorgeous world.

From the room of VHS tapes, to the security footage, to the bat sanctuary, to the theremin performance, to the camera’s final, extended retreat up the rickety helix of a spiral staircase; Act IV confronts us with scenarios that test and limit our perception. Like Snow’s Wavelength, it gives us just enough to trick us into feeling like we’ve glimpsed something real.

Dark Souls III isn’t the kind of melancholy original that Demon’s Souls was, and it doesn’t pivot to another genre like Bloodborne turned toward horror. Instead it leans into the absurdity of bringing together every idea the series ever had and throws a pretty amazing going-away party for it.

Like Arcanum and Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines before it, Pillars of Eternity is a feat of world-building.

This is a strategy game, but not really by design. It is a very good representation of being a baseball manager; it just happens that being a baseball manager is a pretty good strategy game.

For a game that has zero puzzle elements Nuclear Throne sure feels like a seeing-eye puzzle.

Overall my Monument Valley experience was full of charm, perfect for a single marathon playthrough, or short stabs.

Inquisition feels slick but siloed. The story and exploration parts of the game are boxed separately, and the latter is full of prefab errands with few ties to the themes of the Dragon Age setting.

Despite all odds, it seems Stardew Valley is a different game than the one it mimics. And a pretty fun, different game at that.

After two weeks of playing (and watching) Mario Kart 8, I want to slo-mo everything now.

What Mario Maker is at heart: a mash-up machine.

Under these terms, XCOM 2 isn’t so much a game about liberating humanity from its extraterrestrial overlords, but a statement about the kinds of stories our games can tell and allow to be told, even when they aren’t especially valued for their narrative. It speaks to the sense that we might not just want stories in our games, but authored fields of narrative possibility.

Recursion through each of the game’s three paths from that originary fork forces you to rethink your place in its world and drives the game’s argument home: Fire Emblem Fates rejects fatalism beautifully.

The suburbanization, the cartoonish aesthetic, and the “one more turn” addictiveness are still recognizable parts of the core experience people keep coming back for. It is still a full, massive, joyous videogame, even if I have to squint to find the joy beneath mere wit—but the two extremes are now growing wider and wider apart. How long before the fabric of the game snaps under the strain?

Owlboy is itself as joyful and powerful an example of such art as I can recall. That it also happens to be an exceptionally well-crafted and tasteful videogame made by a very small group of people may not entirely be a coincidence.

More isn’t bad just for its faults and repetitions. It’s worse than that: Bloodborne was pure—and The Old Hunters dilutes it.

For all of the precise, rigid design of The Witness, playing in its world remains a human endeavor—one where the rocks aren’t always as solid as they look.

The fact that Rocketcat have so aptly nailed the ratio of bitter to sweet is an achievement unto itself: rarely does a game as punishing as Wayward Souls bear up so well under repeated playthroughs.

The game is not about death or life but about the soul leaving the body and heading someplace new. It’s about the brief moment it spends flying.

Arkham Knight is distressingly inorganic. Continuing the predictable trend the franchise, the game learns the wrong lessons from its predecessors.

PES 2016 stumbles under the weight of all its divergent modes and duties