In large part, the ultimate success of The Wolf Among Us rests on how well Telltale handles Episode 5.

The loopy dictator is only as loopy as the world that made him; his brand of insanity merely combats the surrounding insanity. Tropico is an open invitation to either revel in it or understand it.

It manages to provide an intimate journey for each player despite the breadth of human diversity.

The game is a sort of inverse of Grand Theft Auto 5: triumphant in ambition but faltering in execution. Nowhere is this more apparent than in those NPC bios, which can’t seem to decide if they’re funny or serious.

The developer put in details that make the game virtually impossible.

There is a market for this kind of happy pain, this agonizing joy. I just hope Dakko Dakko’s rotating, riveting shooter finds the cat-crazy audience it deserves.

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.

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

The best adventure games have an engaging story and interesting puzzles. Tesla Effect doesn't have either.

In Super Time Force, the failures live on, but not as condemnations of my lack of skill. My sloppiness as a player is not useless. Seeing them all hopping around on the screen simultaneously, I realize: there can be grace in failure.

I’m relieved to get to the end of it not because I’m looking forward to playing all of the bosses again in one try, but because it means that if I fail—if I die to a boss repeatedly and run out of lives—I don’t have to go back through the exact same level full of the tedious, non-threatening enemies again, and again, and again; I can just play the bosses, which is what this game should have been about from the beginning.

Transistor’s combat engages with the same dualism that informs the game’s central tension between coded performativity and human agency.

DreadOut revels in cliche, sometimes quite smartly.

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

The majority of Full Bore is a balancing act—charging blindly through the map may incite agoraphobia, while obsessing over a particular nook for too long yields claustrophobia. Getting lost in this game is equally fun and frustrating, in almost exactly even measure.

So much of Bound by Flame induces boredom or irritation that it seemed the best recourse to seek out a style of play that facilitated, if not outright enjoyment, at least an absence of hostility.

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.

Like The Walking Dead, Republique is now freed of needing to instruct the player of their goals and how to achieve them. It is, instead, refocusing its efforts, in wonderfully surprising ways.

The four games included are great fun, but to enjoy them, you need to play a fifth game—being a likable human being. If you don’t get that part right, everyone will go do something else.

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.

Attempting to bring your two arms together to ready a shot as your aggressor charges blindly toward you is beautifully simple and absurd. In any other shooting game, such an opponent would pose no threat whatsoever, but the balance between the ludicrous distance the sword-wielding apple-man has to travel in order to reach you and the exceptional difficulty of lining up a shot combine to create a fine piece of participatory humor.

Track Central gives into core of the Trials experience and allows us to relish in the waste of biomass. Sorry, riders: this is what you’re made for.

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

When I finished, I didn’t expect Daylight to stick with me as much as it did. The story did very little new; the levels weren’t novel; the ghosts were ones I’d seen before. But when I closed my eyes that night, all I could see was that Shadow at the end of the hallway, watching me.

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

Calculords doesn’t punish you for dicking around with the equations indefinitely. But, for the first time, I’m enjoying equations, and whoever is responsible for that has performed some degree of math magic.

This is the National Pastime deconstructed. This is also Nintendo’s past commingling with its future: A perfect, tiny game, forced into this strange new shape and sold piecemeal.

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.