Stray Souls is easily one of the worst horror games ever made. The fascistic interests of its director aside, this is a defective product duct taped into a barely coherent mess of prepurchased assets, algorithmically generated art, and bargain bin genre tropes...To play it is to cringe at a rare extremity of creative shamelessness. This stunning example of maladroit artistic negligence struggles to achieve the deeply grounded bar of “playable” yet has the insulting nerve to try and claim a desperate connection to Silent Hill. The temerity of this crime against spookiness is off the charts...How dare Stray Souls? How f.cking dare it?

I feel compelled to say again - this has pleasantly become one of my favorite Soulslikes.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder is like a rapid firework display of ideas that never stops dazzling, throwing curveball after curveball and never lingering on a single concept. There’s something to be said for gameplay that doesn’t outstay it’s welcome, but often is the case that Wonder’s twists and tricks barely make it through the threshold before they leave, never to return. I’m impressed by what Wonder does, amazed at its drug-like wackiness, and left with a longing for some of that stuff to stick around longer than it does...There are worse things to be than a great game that leaves a player yearning for more.

Spider-Man 2 continues the high level of slickly presented entertainment seen with Insomniac’s first jaunt to Manhattan. Playing as the Spider-Men is yet to be anything other than beautiful, both figuratively and literally. Great as it may be, it's held back by some dodgy writing that fumbles its payoffs and dips too often into waffle. Between those moments of deflation, however, there is a truly gorgeous and absorbing game packed with delightful action where simply moving feels good.

Sonic Superstars is the first decent mainline Sonic game since Sonic Forces (an objectively okay game as rated by civilized minds). A distilled descendent of the original lineage, Sonic Team’s rare display of restraint has resulted in a game that succeeds through the purity of its simplicity. However, the stark contrast of convoluted, tawdry boss fights offsets its positives significantly, contributing some truly offputting misery to an otherwise entertaining time...I’d love to see more of this if Sega could resist reinventing the wheel again next time.

There’s a truly great game desperately trying to emerge from Darktide. It just never quite gets its head above the water.

El Paso, Elsewhere does nothing new as a videogame - the whole point of it, in fact, is to do everything old. Despite revolving around the nucleus of a Max Payne homage and flatly refusing to flesh out the mechanics of a game from 2001, El Paso manages to transcend its skeletal concept thanks to an arresting presentation and brilliant story. Incredibly written with themes that speak to me on a deeply personal level, it compensates for its weaknesses as a game by simply being a brilliant piece of media.

In case you couldn’t tell, I f.cking love this game....Baldur’s Gate 3 is truly exemplary, one of the few videogames in history that wholly deserve the universal acclaim heaped so freely upon releases above a certain marketing budget. The choices offered to the player in terms of both crafting an adventurer and influencing the story do an incredible job of translating Dungeons & Dragons to a form of interactive software that surpasses the loftiest expectation. The script is incredible, the gameplay beneath it downright luxurious. There won't be another like this in a long, long time.

Mythforce is shallow and inauthentic, hiding its creative mundanity behind the insincere promise of retro silliness. This lack of artistic integrity is matched by a lack of quality control, awkwardly bolted together as it is with unrefined controls, dreadful performance, and archaic gameplay. At its very best, we have a boring and bland dungeon crawler of a distinctly unrewarding stripe, but it’s almost always far worse than that. Masters of the Universe was a show made as cheaply as possible, reusing the same backgrounds and animations about twenty times an episode. It was high fucking art compared to Mythforce.

The score I’m giving this game is highly conditional, relevant as it is to a particular niche of player. Those outside the niche won’t get it, and I’m not saying that to be smug - they’re right not to get it...Just this once though, I’m happy to be wrong.

I love Lies of P until I don’t, but those less adoring moments are always followed by something that ropes me right back in. A slickly directed, beautifully presented game that takes the absurd concept of marrying Bloodborne to Pinocchio and commits so earnestly that it transcends the silly and just plain works. Difficulty spikes and dodgy pacing undermine it at key points, and some systems aren’t as useful as they should be, but none of that takes away from the high quality and the amount of imagination poured into what could’ve been just another Soulslike...Even at its most exasperating, I wouldn’t let it lie.

If you’re the kind of person who thinks videogames peaked with Fallout 3's launch version and they’ve required neither evolution nor improvement since, this game is absolutely for you. If you believe Bethesda doesn’t need to exhibit growth as an artistic outlet and hasn’t had to change a thing about the way it’s made games since 2008, I can safely say you’ll adore Starfield because it’s all that a Bethesda game has always been... and literally nothing more...Starfield is a shallow ocean, hiding its lack of creative ambition behind the physical size of a universe that’s minuscule where it counts...In short, it's everything a fan of these games could love.

Immortals of Aveum is so derivative as to make me question the accuracy of the word “uninspired” - this game absolutely is inspired. It’s taken so much inspiration from so much existing media there’s not a single unique element. Less of a story and more the creative slag oozing from a smelter full of adventure tropes, its narrative is matched in banality only by its gameplay. A bog standard, repetitive shooter that offers nothing new and does none of the old stuff well enough to justify doing it.

My Friendly Neighborhood offers a unique execution of a conceit that’s otherwise become trite among horror games. Taking the “spooky kiddy thing” idea and pulling it onto a framework built from equal parts BioShock and Resident Evil smartly separates it from the ocean of similar concepts in the genre, even if none of its individual components are particularly original. It’s sadly let down from a lack of variety and consequently runs too long, unable to stay fresh or surprising enough to sustain its runtime. However, it’s a fun ride while it lasts, and it’s story is charming enough to be worth seeing through to the end.

Clash: Artifacts of Chaos is a truly beautiful production, far more so than one boasting a cast of animalistic amalgamates and sentient polyps ought to be.

It’s cheap from both a visual and combat standpoint, it’s unpleasant to control, and the incentives for enduring multiple “runs” are among the worst rewards and unlocks I’ve ever seen. All it accomplished was getting me to replay Shredder’s Revenge and Streets of Rage 4, two games that completely embarrass this sorry little thing...Damn fine soundtrack, though.

It’s Jurassic Earth Defense Overwatch War Z and it looks like it should be bad but it isn’t. I can’t be anything but impressed by that.

Aliens: Dark Descent is well designed and badly built. At once a brilliant collection of wonderfully presented ideas and a defective debacle, it could have genuinely been a Game of the Year contender were it not such a shambles. I love this game to the point of being enthralled. I’m angry at this game for costing me hours of progress. I adore what it so often is. I despise what it so often does...Eh, I guess these days that’s enough to qualify for a seven, right?

It’s one thing to rip another game off, but to only pretend to rip one off for attention while doing something so threadbare it doesn’t even clear the low bar of plagiarism truly is deceptive on a whole other level. The Last Hope: Dead Zone Survival is not a forgery of The Last of Us - it’s a forgery of a forgery, it’s something so completely fucking fraudulent that it sells the idea of a counterfeit and delivers instead a handful of minimally functional assets structured just barely enough to resemble half an hour of navigable gameplay.

Final Fantasy XVI is all over the place. It’s a game of incredible highs and distasteful lows, boasting such a narrative trainwreck of disarranged ideas it’s borderline incompatible with itself. Endeavoring to tackle themes of fascism and slavery would be laudable if the result wasn’t inelegant at best and offensive at worst. The frustrating, exhausting nature of XVI’s miserable narrative is countered by notably enjoyable combat, impressive setpieces, and truly stunning boss encounters. When it’s not boring, it’s exhilarating. When it’s not exhilarating, it’s insulting. When it’s not insulting, it’s delightful...I love Final Fantasy XVI when it’s Game of Thrones with Kaiju. Every attempt to be more than that makes me like it far, far less.

Street Fighter 6 has made me the happiest I’ve been with a game in quite some time. As somebody who always wanted to play fighting games but whose neurodivergence prevented them, the new Modern controls and consistent approachability is simply joyous. Brimming with personality, immensely gratifying, and packed with a shocking amount of content, I’m still rather shocked by exactly how hooked I’ve become. It’s just a shame Capcom’s insistence on pernicious monetization lets the welcoming effort down, because besides that I have no notes. Street Fighter 6 is the fighting game I needed.

Amnesia: The Bunker is a pleasant step up from its predecessor Rebirth, but it all too often falls into the problem many horror games have - resource management and monstrous harassment are balanced in such a way as to inspire annoyance more readily than fear. For much of its campaign, The Bunker is an absorbingly gloomy experience with a nice sense of rhythm to its progress and an effective illusion of dynamism in both its monster and environment. This is somewhat offset by enforced backtracking, a piddling inventory, and an embarrassingly rubbish flashlight. If it had expanded its promising ideas and balanced its threat-to-tedium ratio better, this could have been a fantastic experience. But, y’know, it didn’t do that...It still did well enough though, and for the average horror game these days, well enough is pretty good!

Daedalic had an opportunity to prove the cynics wrong when so many people wondered what the hell the point of a Gollum game would even be. Instead, they handled this with such utter clumsiness they likely ensured a game like it will never happen again.

Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun absolutely delivers on its promise of 40K-meets-Doom. Its guns are deliciously punchy, the chainsword is a consistent thrill to wield, and everything is presented with fantastic period graphics and a suitable riff-heavy soundtrack. The game’s overzealous commitment to one single note is a sadly undermining affair, eventually transforming an exciting experience into one that runs out of content long before it runs out of levels. Nevertheless, it’s fundamentally entertaining for as long as one remains invested, and I definitely had enough of that entertainment to feel like I got what I wanted out of it...Plus, y’know, it has an entire button dedicated to yelling at vile filth and heretics. That’s easily worth the cost of entry.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is indeed a game with two faces - one welcoming and the other viciously hostile. While it features a wealth of content, brilliant innovation, and genuine incentives to play with its toys, the spectre of its predecessor’s pernicious encroachment on fun is dispiriting in its ubiquity. The neat new tricks this sequel pulls simply aren’t enough to make Hyrule’s realm of brittle weapons, slippery surfaces, and tedious chores any more welcoming.

Redfall is a sorry skeleton of a game that meets the lowest bar possible to be considered a functional, sellable product, and it manages to bungle even that elementary task. At its very best, this embryonic embarrassment almost aspires to mediocrity, but such heady heights are too frequently beyond its reach. If it were interesting enough to inspire any emotion other than boredom, the humiliatingly cretinous enemy AI, recycled assets, lack of basic features, and laundry list of glitches would be laughable. The quality of this game, however, isn’t funny. It’s exasperating. Arkane Studios is so much better than this, and be it through a lack of time or a lack of money, they’ve made something a studio of such pedigree could rightly be ashamed of.

I don’t know if it’s a credit or an indictment that Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’s best stuff is entirely ancillary content that doesn’t represent its core gameplay. While all the lightsaber twirling and space magic is serviceable enough, it’s the side corn that appeals most, and it’s not even particularly rich corn. Simply kicking back with NPCs at the cantina, filling its aquarium and customizing its garden, was not only a relaxing break from the main game, it’s what I’d rather be playing. The general jankiness, technical setbacks, and consistently unfinished feeling doesn’t help anything, and I can’t say the huge amount of slow paced platforming is enough to coax one out of the comfort of the saloon either.

As a mindless distraction played while mentally checked out, Dead Island 2 has merit. It is enjoyable for good periods of time, and it’s done a solid job of refining the messy hack n’ slash of the original game while improving ranged combat alongside it. As fun as all the zombie slaying can be, however, an intense lack of variety coupled with dreary exploration is outright exhausting at times, and I wouldn’t blame any player for moving on long before finishing the story. It’s not a game that’s entertaining while it lasts - it’s entertaining while you last.