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.

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

A visual novel sipped through a Gilliam straw.

In the end, Oxenfree is absolutely a game about teenage bullshit (forgive me for being a little disingenuous earlier). But it manages to revitalize that narrative by focusing on feeling more than substance; it glances at each character’s inner struggle rather than serving it up for a full meal.

Rainbow Six: Siege has the basic pieces in place to offer that experience but sabotages them by forcing the illusion to rub against the real world in ways the fantasy isn’t prepared to handle. More often than not, playing Siege, one doesn’t feel like a soldier. You feel like a player. And that’s precisely what this game doesn’t want.

Numinous Games’ That Dragon, Cancer does not suffer from this problem; the pain feels real, the sadness is authentic. This is not surprising given that the game is undisguised autobiography: Ryan and Amy Green created it as a meditation on their family’s journey as their son Joel was treated for and eventually killed by brain cancer.

It ought to remind us of what’s so good about the maximalism of other JRPGs.

But Heroes’s oddest design choice is surely its violation of a Zelda tradition since time immemorial (i.e. 1986): Link can’t jump.

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.

The game is aesthetically rich, but it lacks heart.

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.

I’m a big Game of Thrones fan, but Telltale’s game series is, unfortunately, inessential material.

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

Without compelling characters or inventive story missions, all that’s left to keep the audience entertained is destruction, repeated ad nauseum. There’s value in the small-scale satisfaction each explosion creates, but an empty feeling lingers after every plume of smoke has cleared.

Battlefront offers everything my childhood experience of Star Wars did not. For all its polish, it brand-name polish, it lacks that creative energy found in building battles from faded toys and dumb ideas. Battlefront imposes limits and gates on an expansive universe, reigning in instead of expanding the possible ways to become part of that world. As such, the game remains mercenary in its goal of selling an experience solely on those feelings we have about that galaxy far, far away.

Like a city that leaves its streets to pedestrians, pushing highways underground and elevating trains overhead, the game seeks to avoid the anxious hustle of a traditional simulation by reducing clutter and keeping things at a more intimate, human level.

Bethesda’s team creates maps that are a joy to explore.

Lovely Weather is Animal Crossing without all the stuff.

What the game wants you to appreciate is how difficult it is be morally and cosmically right when no less than love itself is the alternative.

Despite relative improvements in presentation, WWE 2K16 ultimately makes a crucial mistake when it comes to understanding professional wrestling: the fiction is a lot more fun than the reality.

It’s the ludic equivalent of the James Bond series.

Yet in Need for Speed the handling, the fun, the art, all of this, they are so stacked under layer after layer of meaninglessness, multi-faceted surfaces that gesture at everything and deliver nothing. It was a good run, but as I came off the slope and headed into a tunnel bathed in tungsten glow the moment was lost.

This game is impossible to play without thinking, specifically, of the Australian horror film The Babadook.

Halo Moments are revelations of accidental mastery, happenstance perfection, the butterfly effect of a shock wave blooming out from the epicenter of a frag grenade. A grenade that only you could have thrown. It only matters that it happened, and that you and your friend, for a simultaneous second, remembered why it was you loved playing games in the first place.

Lara’s therapy was a failure. Rise of the Tomb Raider was not, but it did force me to reconcile the uncomfortable paradox of the titular badass also being an emotional wreck.

The titular vermin of Vermintide may come in a horde, but they’re all unique, in their weird, chittering way. It almost makes me feel bad about the carnage I’ve spent the last ten hours dealing out to them.

Most of the time it’s thrilling, but Nova-111 still wants to hold on to collectables, time trials, and block-pushing. Its clichéd “rescue the scientists” story aims high, at a Hitchhiker’s Guide sort of humor, but the “quirky” element feels forced—when lead scientist Dr. Science isn’t giving you tips, he’s telling you he really likes sandwiches and has unresolved issues with his mother.

“Kooky” is a good word for Albino Lullaby.