This hot mess is deliriously fun, a game from a simpler time that might find more contemporaries in New Arcade than in other neo-roguelikes.

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.

For the moment, King’s Quest remains caught in a particularly strange-yet-familiar space, halfway hearkening back to an older era but seemingly aware that it was a time that needed improvement.

A throwback to the twitch platformers of old.

It finds, despite everything, the light; it dwells there, and asks you to walk in it.

The game’s insistence on minimalism gives it an elegance but, conversely, it also gets in the way.

Come October shall we look back and wonder where this potential went? Perhaps we shall ask ourselves what could have been done differently. Or, perhaps, Life is Strange will navigate these concerns, becoming the game we hoped it would be.

Pneuma is an absolutely unsuitable receptacle for questions of spirit or life.

“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.

There’s a spirit of revolt in your work, a rhetoric of mortals killing the gods competing for control of The Magic Circle.

The interplay of Dungeon Master and player is controlled chaos, thrilling in its unpredictability, while the outcome of Guild of Dungeoneering is a foregone conclusion: I will throw a neverending horde of adventurers at a dungeon until I complete it or get bored and wander away.

At its heart, Road to Gehenna carries forward both the original game’s thoughtful examination of how we interact with the world and its engaging brainteasers. But it is saved from becoming more of the same by examining how we interact with the world now, and how that world’s end might be understood.

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

The core of Splendor is a smart, accessible strategy experience, and you get a taste of that from the mobile game. But more than anything, Splendor just whetted my appetite for playing it with actual cards and tokens, which even it seems to acknowledge is the game’s ideal form.

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.

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

Homesick isn’t a perfect game, but it succeeds in fostering a sense of curiosity that will carry you to the end, and its slow drip of sadness and wonder can be intoxicating.

An exceptionally uncreative piece of schlock.

Hatred, as a piece of transgressive art, is a failure. It's dull, its violence crass and unconvincing, and its understanding of humanity shallow at best. But it's worth looking at, if only to understand why, and if only to interrogate what, if anything, could be gained from peering closely at something so horrible.

One of the virtues of a sandbox is that it doesn’t manipulate you. There’s no rulebook to follow or train tracks to stick to. Unlike other toys, it plays on the possibilities percolating around inside of the person sitting in it. The drawback is that every grain of sand looks like every other, and when the well of inspiration runs dry, so does the fun.

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

By following the tangled paths of lineage, we’re left with tales too large to be understood in terms of the lone hero.

At the center of this weird story is some twisted, emotional truth from the hearts of two incredibly wounded characters.

It’s sublime when a plan comes together, but squirming out of a nasty mess takes a higher degree of patience and pressurized innovation.

An early experiment in a genre that has already seen some very sophisticated entries.

The twist at the end of “Chaos Theory” is nothing less than staggering in its audacity.

The reason why I’ve developed such an immense respect for Splatoon it is that it’s a huge risk that scarcely comes off as risky.

Not a Hero’s ultimate statement is a brutally cynical one, but its political nihilism is always portrayed with such glee and good cheer that the unease is hard to feel until the game is shut down.