The presentation of this game is what makes its gameplay feel so sharp, including the way it tells its story and characterizes the other Neons that compete with you and tease you shamelessly. Once you get the hang of Neon White’s fast-paced gameplay, it feels incredibly natural—as natural as the witty, sexy banter between the characters therein. It’s sweet as sin itself, and goes down just as easy.

Citizen Sleeper stands out as one of the best games of the year, with great writing that avoids easy outs.

There are likely dozens if not hundreds of games that came this close to greatness, and quite a few great ones that came just as close to irrelevance. Games journalists all have their lists of games that disappeared after an amazing E3 presentation or demo, or games that proved to be inexplicable disappointments on release. A lot of career developers end up working on an amazing project that never sees the light of day, and only exist on hard drives full of unused assets and documentation. What makes Abermore so unusual is that it so clearly embodies the intangible qualities that separate greatness from mediocrity. I can't recommend it, but it still has value as a collection of almost-beautiful fragments that, in a kinder world, might have been more.

The strangest curveballs make sense here, and these moments of utter plain future hellscape are punctuated by strange moments of beauty.

Importantly, picking a difficulty is not a binary and permanent choice. You can swap between these modes at any time, for any reason, within the same save. Nothing changes except how the game handles health and currency distribution. (You get plenty of coins. It’s fine.) When you finish a stage on the easier mode, the game doesn’t brand it with an “easy” tag, like a badge of shame that you need to overcome another time. You beat the level! Hooray! This is fantastic, because it means my daughter and I can make progress in different ways.

Maybe it’s not shocking that Tunic took me away from Elden Ring. One has you running around as a cute fox trying to save the world, even if you don’t know why. The other has you running around, potentially with a cute fox mask on, trying to save the world, even if you don’t know why. What they have in common is rewarding players for curiosity. Each game goes about it in a different way, but the conclusion is the same: the reward is worth the effort.

Twenty-five hours in, I still have no idea what I’ll see next. It's a testament to Elden Ring that I'm so excited at the possibilities that remain, but it's also a problem that after all this time, I feel like it needs to show me more than it has so far.

It’s an exhausting, often repetitive, experience just barely held up by a good story, incredible visuals, and competent game design that lifts the best bits from other video games made in the past 10 years...If you’re looking for a revolutionary experience that teaches you what open world games can be, Forbidden West isn’t it. But if you’re looking for a competent distraction that soothes and smooths the brain by repeating what open world games have been doing for years, Forbidden West does the job.

So far, it’s a game whose core element—exploration—is often engaging, but because much around it is boring, I need the exploration to be more engaging, and the game’s feature gating hinders that. Again, maybe that changes by the end. But it sounds like it’ll take a long time to get there. Supposedly that's a selling point.

I can’t help but feel that the Pearl and Diamond clans already have Jubilife Village’s “how do we coexist with Pokémon?” problem figured out and have for some time: respect their autonomy to be wild animals. The urge to catch them all and the question of “is catching them all really a good idea?” lives both in this game and in myself as a series fan. Game Freak’s answers haven't been great, but asking the question is at least a big step towards a more nuanced Pokémon world.

Halo Infinite didn’t really do it for me. The repetition of stakes and open world activities made the final 15 hours of gameplay something I was actively dreading. At the same time, the first 10 hours or so were exciting and engaging, and I imagine that someone not trying to power through the game in a week to make a review embargo deadline of Sunday night might have a better way of spacing things out. The open world sandbox is truly fun, especially once you have access to flying vehicles late in the game, but there’s only so many hijinks to get up to (at least until the co-op campaign releases). For a game about new possibilities, and titled Infinite, the game’s universe ends up feeling pretty constrained.

It was wise of EA to end the press event with Portal and specifically with throwback games, because that's exactly how Portal seemed to function for me and the people I was playing with: it was an escape from the mediocrity of Battlefield 2042 into the greatest moments of the series' past. Next to that, Battlefield 2042’s may never have stood a chance, but without Portal, I'm not sure Battlefield could survive its latest entry. As it is, both have a long way to go before either leads to a good Battlefield experience, much less a classic one.

So many video games frustratingly outstay their welcome, dragging out once-novel ideas in service of hitting an arbitrary amount of gameplay time, because the too-ravenous gaming audience frequently correlates game length with quality. It's refreshing, then, when a game is careful and deliberate about its ideas, and exits stage left when it's exhausted them, leaving you simultaneously desperate for more but buzzing over the limited time spent in that world.

For the most part it’s a game which understands its weaknesses (depth, polish, uniqueness) while being pretty good at foregrounding its strengths (variety, storytelling, visual splendor). It’s here to sell us that awkward smile, it’s Quill posing in front of a mirror in his corny leather jacket. Easy spectacle without too much crunchy, frustrating friction in the way.

Age of Empires IV is content being a familiar and affable RTS companion, but it's not a complacent one. It's not making the kind of flashy, noisy challenge to convention that Relic made with the Homeworld, Dawn of War, and Company of Heroes games. It very consciously returns to an old genre formula, but finds enough places to add new touches and twists that it feels less conservative than its forerunners did. Perhaps more importantly, this kind of RTS went from being the default to being a rarity, and in that context it's become easier to appreciate its craft and to concede that our parents and normie nemeses may have been onto something.

Metroid Dread sharply refines (but doesn't reinvent) Nintendo's 35-year-old ideas in a gorgeous and slick new package.

This experimentation, from place to place and zone to zone, is what Sable is about at its core: doing things and obtaining proof that you have taken their experience in; that you have contemplated them. In a world where games signal their value to you through in-game advertisements and a bombardment of prompts to keep playing, this laconic approach stands out starkly. But any game whose direct mission is to think about the world, and to think about it deeply, should probably have a special place in our heart.

It is undeniable that this is more dynamic and specific and operable than a Civ game, but in my time with the game I have remained unconvinced that this level of fiddly knob control gives me anything unique or better than the more abstracted or zoomed out systems of a Civ. My experience of Humankind was one of seeing occasional glimmers of something special while having to fight to keep a lot of numbers and pressures in my head at once. I know that there are strategy and 4x players for whom this is where the action is. Those players love the system mastery of it all, and it's clear that the developers’ desire here was to create an abundance of complex systems that interlock beautifully. I think they accomplished that, but for me there is a point where that reaches diminishing returns, and Humankind is over that line.

And it’s still such a cute, colourful, tiny hubris that they’ll sketch out for themselves. The sort that continues to demand just one more try, especially when the astronomical totals already appearing on the daily and weekly trial scoreboards mean there must be some new trick to learn. Mini Motorways is another miniature masterpiece that captivates and challenges in equal measure, a game made equally of tiny charms and tiny calamities.

If you want to play a stylish action RPG with a killer soundtrack, then NEO is a great game. But when its predecessor left such large shoes to fill, its lack of focus prevented NEO from being a truly legendary sequel.

I think some people might say that Orcs Must Die 3 is more of the same, and those people are right. But it is more of the same with a fine level of articulation and polish. It’s a well-oiled machine where every part of it works, ready to operate in perpetual motion seemingly infinitely. More of the same is not a negative here. It’s a blessing.

I finished Rift Apart a few days ago, but my saved game says I've played 98% of Rift Apart, with a few collectibles left to be swept up. You can bet your ass I'm gonna get that last 2%.

If the developers stick with it, I believe they can fill in that content in the spaces they’ve carved out for it. And hopefully they do, because I think they’ve really got something here. Insurmountable has a strong, foundational bedrock, and it already shows how even that, piled high enough, can amount to something quite striking.

I’m sure it isn’t deliberate, but it’s impossible to ignore the dichotomy between the joy of the early game versus the monotony of the latter. It’s the age old warning: learn to be better, lest you become one of us. The numbers mattered insofar as using them to create the best wine I could—abusing them left me fatigued, desensitized and alone. As an accidental commentary on the joyless existence of big business, it turns out Hundred Days has a good acidity.

As the credits rolled on Resident Evil Village, I was struck by just how much of the back quarter of the game felt like a desperate attempt to work Ethan Winters and his arc into the greater Resident Evil narrative. This, much more than its action emphasis, is what is frustrating about Village. For the second game in a row, Resident Evil has shown that it has outgrown its conventions, that it can create fresh horrors in new places. And still, everything must come crashing to a halt so that the curtain can be pulled back on the same threadbare wizard we've seen for 25 years.

The more pressing problem: the second zone isn't that interesting. But the shooting is good. Really good. I just don't know how long that'll last. [10-Hour Impressions]

And this is ultimately the root of the problem with Nier 1.22 — it's forcing us into an era where the remake is the definitive text, the canonical copy of a game that existed for over a decade that formed connections with players and shows us an entirely different world of game making. The original text has murdered the exported release and the revision has come to strangle the original text because the best-selling sequel demanded it. What we're left with is two nearly identical Niers each vying to be the true Nier. One must imagine Yoko Taro happy when he watches quietly as one snuffs the other.

’Trials of Fire’ blends a roguelike deckbuilder and tactical hex based combat with small maps that don’t feel cramped.

Future Aero Racing S Ultra is a fun, but unremarkable, homage to F-Zero. But why does it sound like that?

Like many of my favorite small strategy games, Dorfromantik activates what I think of as my meditative lizard brain, thanks to the tiny thrill of getting those hexes to fit together. It’s well-suited to casual engagement, and challenging enough for the score obsessed (myself included) to play it over and over.

There's a brand-new script, a new cast of voice actors, tweaked gameplay, and altered cutscenes...These are the kinds of changes you might see in a "remaster" 10 years later, not a port.

There’s handful of dazzling set pieces in the final third of Genesis Noir, none less so than the crescendo itself. I don’t think it's a spoiler to describe this as a dance across the cosmos, or that color does eventually explode into the game. Like the earlier duet, it offers another opportunity to wild out, to simply throw the cursor across the screen and see what emerges. It gets close to the loose-limbed and improvisatory nature of jazz—an opportunity to revel in the game’s singular and beautiful kind of cacophony. While an undeniable audio-visual marvel, the moment also transcends spectacle, hinting towards something profound about the act of creation, be that cosmic or indeed personal.

One of the most appealing things about Loop Hero is in the way it allows you to discover its parts. The game is as complex as you want it to be, and can become extremely complicated indeed as you gain more and more cards. Some of the interactions between cards can only be discovered by placing them in certain combinations, sometimes transforming them into entirely new tiles.

Perhaps the style made more sense when the game’s creative director Lemoore conceived Maquette back in the early 2010s, but the world is a different place now, and the game, despite its clear technical achievements, feels like a time capsule.

All told, that's the most exciting part about Bowser's Fury: it feels genuinely new. That's not always the case with a new game in a franchise as long-running as Mario, but Bowser's Fury proves there are still ways to make the act of making Mario jump feel exciting all over again. Onward.

Hitman 3 ultimately succeeds at delivering some of the things that I really enjoy about these games, but those highlights keep getting overshadowed by inflexible Mission Stories, or the way the main plot kept putting more constraints on the game's possibilities. Maybe I’ll enjoy everything so much more by the time I do each of these levels five or six times and the actual story is far back in my memory, buried by how many ways I can use grapes to decimate my enemies. But the entire time I was playing for this review, I kept scrolling back to the levels for Hitman and Hitman 2, thinking about simply going back and exploring those all over again, and I’m not sure that desire is going to go away.

What I will say is that the game’s uncompromising sensibility shines brightly at its conclusion. I won’t spoil the exact details but it’s a masterclass in unceremonious restraint which lands harder than any grandstanding finish. Unto The End understands that terrible things happen and the world often just keeps moving. This doesn’t necessarily undermine the tribulations of its bearded character—his body will carry the violence of this passage for a long time to come—nor does it diminish my own frustrations. After everything, I’m left with the sound of his heavy exhales in the fading light of this harsh and snowy setting; foregoing any kind of traditional pay-off feels like the perfect way to end this story, almost making the gruelling journey worth it.

The expanding aura of decency and compassion that follows in V's wake makes Cyberpunk an unexpectedly charming game in spite of its chauvinist streaks and retro-kitsch. In the face of the thoroughly amok-machinery of techno-corporatism that has destroyed society and ruthlessly crushes any challenges and dissent that it might face, Cyberpunk 2077 wants to believe in a hero, and the promise of a neon sunset.

But damn if this doesn't feel like Demon's Souls, an accomplishment in and of itself that feels like a magic trick. Part of what happens when you revisit an older game is having to confront the reality of the time it was developed in, realizing your imagination had been filling in serious nostalgia gaps. How you felt was informing your too-rosy remembrance of what it looked like. Here, Bluepoint tries to bridge that gap with an updated presentation that makes Demon's Souls truly feel like a 2020 game worthy of being a next-generation launch title. [Opening Hours impressions]

One of the highest compliments I can pay Bugsmax is that when the game warned me I'd hit a point of no return in the story and I'd no longer be able to complete any unfinished side quests, I panicked because I really wanted to finish them. Could I find a way to delay my review? Hmm. Sadly, my deadline for writing this piece, written in the midst of pandemic and election, meant that wasn't an option—I had to push forward. And so, reluctantly, I did.

It’s a game of iteration and variation, one so similar to its predecessors but so different in execution that it has made an old franchise feel new again.

Satisfying. It feels good to look at, it feels good to play, and it functions as a justification for Sony's experiments with DualSense. Whether those experiments pan out is somewhat out of Sony's hands, but Astro's Playroom offers a roadmap for how other developers could take advantage of it. If no one else does—well, at least we'll have Astro's Playroom. And Astro's Playroom is pretty damn good.

As fun as it is to be Miles, to be the geeky black superhero I have always wanted to exist, the game cannot reconcile the differences between its New York and the one I see outside my window. That failure would be understandable, but what is unforgivable is that it does not even make the attempt.

Legion was built according to the ever-ballooning scale of AAA games, and it suffers for it. The people who made it could never get the resources they needed to be pursue this ambitious experiment without also making it a blockbuster, 30+ hour long game. It could never wear its politics on its very fashionable sleeves, without also being tailored for style over substance. The frustrating truth is that given the context of its development and the case of its goals, Watch Dogs: Legion might be the very best it could be. But as even DedSec would tell us, revolutions don’t happen from the inside out.

All this is fun and compelling, but what makes the game more than a time waster is the lovely, sparse writing.

Genshin Impact feels like playing the future of games as the industry leans more into the games-as-a-service business model, monetizing big budget free-to-play games with battle passes and loot boxes. To put it another way: Genshin Impact is what happens when a company goes, "What if Breath of the Wild was Destiny?" It's disorienting at first and then quickly starts to make all the sense in the world. It's too soon to say what Genshin Impact's lasting impact on the industry will be, but given its immediate success, it's not hard to imagine a near future where many games look a lot like it.

It's a new take on old ideas, in a new era, for a new audience. It’s a strong beginning, but a beginning nonetheless.

3D All-Stars is a paradox: a collection of great games and a missed opportunity. These games deserved better, a respectful contextualization of their place in the history books. But ultimately, in my heart of hearts, I'm just happy to get a chance to declare this: Super Mario Sunshine was good.

Crusader Kings III is massively, powerfully alive. You can almost feel it pulsing when you play it. Often, deep into the third, fourth, fifth hour of play, I'd realize I wasn't so much playing it as watching it develop.

Unable to be more courageous, Tell Me Why can't muster the emotional depth to be truly great.

Flight Simulator presents itself as a work in progress. A lot depends on the nature of that remaining work. It’s a game whose potential is evident, but so are the hurdles to realizing all that potential.

Total War: Troy is a good example of a type of Total War game whose time, hopefully, is ending. It undercuts its strongest features with administrative bloat and repetitive action, forcing you into too many rote battles and campaigns rather than letting you focus on the truly epic clashes that characterize Total War games at their best. If Troy just removed the heavy ankle weights it fastens on the player, it might be a series highlight. As it is, it's an interesting and clever variation on a theme that has gotten a little tired. It succeeds in breathing some new life into it, but after Three Kingdoms’ reinvention, it feels like a surprisingly good encore at a show that’s gone on just a little too long.

Skater XL comes at skateboarding from the angle that it’s extremely important. It’s serious, and in cutting out the extraneous pieces and paring the mechanics down to the most basic elements of real skateboarding, they try to get the player to take it as seriously as they can. But in my heart of hearts, I think that a good skateboarding game should feel like skateboarding culture. It should be a little destructive. It should be goofy, and the things that seem so important to the culture should look absolutely goofy in 10 years. It’s as important as you make it, as Boulala says, and my ideal skateboarding game treats it as slightly less important. By treating it with less importance, we might get a bigger world of possible tricks and ways of playing with a skateboard. That game would be closer to what I love about skateboarding.

The end result is that you’re spending a lot of time in combat, and increasingly, I’m putting on a podcast and zoning out whenever that happens now. The Origami King even includes an option to spend money to have the game automatically move many of the enemies into the right spot, making even the most challenging fights trivial. The Origami King has so many options to help avoid combat, without being honest with itself and letting you skip it entirely.

Anger, like the biomass of Carrion, can only be steered. It can’t be controlled. Carrion lets me hold on to my anger and gives me the illusion of control of it. The dual sense of becoming that which is feared and riding rage make it the perfect game for the moment.

It’s a game where so many individual components feel really good, but it’s all dropped into outdated structure.

The Last of Us Part II feels complacent, yet also preoccupied with its predecessor. Every facet of the original game has been expanded and enlarged in the sequel, but not actually improved. It is as if its only inspiration is the original game, and the well of pop culture it was drawing from. There is practically nothing here we haven’t seen and done repeatedly throughout previous Naughty Dog games. It sets out to surpass its predecessor, but the only meaningful contrast between them is in its even more oppressive bleakness and violence. It digs two graves, fills them with blood, and then just fu.king wallows in them.

Prior to Wastelanders, Fallout 76 didn't have anything to say about that vision. If anything it fetishized it, just as it fetishized the worst fears of the Cold War world by having players play nuclear tag. Wastelanders brings the classic Fallout lesson to the hills and hollows of Appalachia: Global nuclear war didn’t end civilization and it didn’t stop the old fights. It only stripped away the pretense.

A police procedural version of XCOM with a good story, funny writing, and only bite-sized battles.

A nearly-great game that captures the best parts of Gears, but which is let down by its campaign structure.

A satisfying new chapter that develops the story of 'Control' but doesn't add much to the playground.

Most importantly, it's platform agnostic, meaning you can play with your friends even if none of you own the same console or a PC. As long as you can play the game, you can easily join a group of friends no matter what platform they're on.

In Final Fantasy VII Remake, everything looks like how I imagined it when I was a kid. This is not the Final Fantasy VII I remember, but the dream of a Final Fantasy VII. It’s a surreal, staggering, and loving tribute to a beloved role-playing game. The voice work, the music, the story, and the combat system are rebuilt from the ground up and brimming with detail.

It’s not bad enough to hate and not good enough to praise. That’s disappointing for two reasons. The remake of Resident Evil 2 was excellent, and the Mr. X encounters suggested that Capcom could update Resident Evil 3 and do something interesting and innovative with Nemesis. Instead, Capcom chose the most boring path possible.

It’s also a performance hog of a video game. My PC is quickly aging, but my GTX 1080 is usually able to brute force its way through a lot of things. Alyx, however, chewed away at my older CPU, despite the settings being at “low.” This didn’t prove bothersome for most of my time with Alyx—VR can get away with cutting corners on fidelity because of the way you interact with it—but there were a handful of sequences, especially towards the end when things ramp up, where my computer slowed to a crawl. It’s less fun to fight your way through a hallway of enemies when their animation is moving at half speed. Your mileage may vary...All the problems were worth it, though.

Doom Eternal is the platonic ideal of a Doom game. The combat, level design, and enemy encounters have never felt better. And it sure does have a story. Not just plot contrivances to get the player from point A to B, but elaborate lore with multiple cultures, planets, characters and sci-fi and fantasy tropes. Page after page of fucking lore that I puzzled over as I moved through the legion’s of hell, ripping the eyes out of cacodemons and decapitating the damned.

There's a simplicity to life on Ella that I cherish.

The moment you scratch beneath the surface, you find a fascinating world of surrealist art, copyright infringement, kids doing weird experiments, and so much more.

A bad remaster of a good game that recreates old mistakes while adding loads of new glitches.

A masterful and memorable tragedy about the magic and terror of the ordinary world.

It’s fun, and I liked it, but it’s disappointing to see Star Wars shrink its video game horizons as its film and television series widens the franchise’s scope. Fallen Order feels great in the context of what Star Wars games have become. Enjoying it feels like settling. For me, Star Wars was always about the video games. The movies were something my parents enjoyed, the books and comics something my friends told me about.

An approachable but rewardingly tough wargame gives a fresh take on familiar battles.

A thoughtful and gorgeous game of work and exploration, held back by lackluster action sequences.

A frustrating yet rewarding game of bad starts and good endings.

There are some beautiful, grotesque pixels in this game, and it's backed up by an equally fun ride.

A dynamic stealth-action approach to Ubisoft's template, with frustratingly ambivalent politics.

The racing portion Mario Kart Tour is bad, it’s Mario Kart with guard rails. Maps are pulled from the series greatest hits and races are limited to two laps. The finger controls work well. I placed my finger below the racer, holding before the starting gun to get a little boost, and drifting side to side to toss blue sparks and blast ahead of the rudimentary competition. But there is no sense of stakes or risk thanks to the guardrails on the levels. Mistakes didn’t send me careening into a field or off a cliff, but bounded me back on to the track.

In 2019, I don’t need any more revisionist celebrations of high difficulty and tight dodge timings. I don’t need games without room for silliness or self-expression. What I’ve needed more of, and what Code Vein is happy to give me, is more of that good jank, and permission to have my own fun with it.

Gearbox can patch out the screams of the bosses, but it can’t patch the heart back into Borderlands.

Goose Game takes the common video game fantasy of being someone else’s bad day and dresses it up with pastoral allure. I think you could probably cobble together a critique here: All the power fantasy with none of the consequences. But I think the more pertinent read is that Goose Game is an excellent example of how much incredible white space video games have yet to explore.

But Link’s Awakening remains a Game Boy game from 1993, and the fancy visuals don’t touch the core design, born from a specific time and place and different expectations. It remains that game, for better and worse, which means it’s a success. Link’s Awakening was special then and with the right expectations, remains special. Now, all we can do is hope Nintendo decides to give the rest of Zelda’s handheld adventures the same loving treatment.

Ever listened to an album and let your imagination wander? That's what Sayonara Wild Hearts is like...All I want to do, even as I write this, is play Sayonara Wild Hearts again, and I don’t ever play games again.

It is bright and energetic and filled with character, and those are the qualities you need to carry a curious, new generation of players into the fray long enough for them to find their footing in such a niche style of game. That DXM feels so distinct beyond that is just a bonus.

The way the Nightshade Paolumu toyed with me, trapping me when least expected it, is a far cry from the original Paolumu’s fight, and in my opinion is one of the more interesting fights in the game to date. It shows the game’s designers have a few tricks left, too.

Another terrific cover shooter, but sadly let down by the tired open world elements that are shoehorned into it.

Ancestors might not be for me, but there’s no doubt it has conviction. I can respect that.

A genuinely eerie and disorienting shooter that is sometimes overstuffed with ideas and gags.

It’s not that there are no original ideas in Astral Chain, no bright spots or brief respites from the boring loop. It’s that for nearly 30 hours, the ones that show up are either underdeveloped or else go uncultivated in favor of something fundamentally rehashed and reheated.

An uncomfortable and fascinating exploration of confession and forged intimacy.

Perhaps most impressively, the world of Remnant is genuinely mysterious. There’s a story playing out about the end of the world as we know it and a conflict between forces mundane and magical, but most of the details and lore of the world are buried in item descriptions and those items are scarce.

This procedural mystery about a 70s cult never feels connected to its story.

There’s a certain joy in enjoying both modes side by side, the tightness of the puzzle boxes next to the floatiness and abstraction of the 3D spaces, which evoke both the 3D platformers of the 32-and-64-bit era as well as much less cheery work, such as the haunting landscapes of Connor Sherlock and Kitty Horrorshow’s works.

While Dicey Dungeons isn’t my favorite in the genre, its approachability and aesthetic makes it stand out in the crowd. It’s the perfect ambassador for a genre I’ve been trying to get everyone I know to play. I only wish I could play it on my phone.

This shift away from the generational system of the Awakening and Fates, and towards a more robust take on character development that takes notes from influences as diverse as Final Fantasy Tactics and Princess Maker, should not be undersold. Stepping away from that design, instead of simply making it shine bright on the big screen thanks to the Switch, is fundamentally a risky move. But I also think it’s a smart one.

Youngblood is more like a spinoff than a sequel, even if it takes place after the events of the last two games. It has a different structure, tells a different kind of story, and barely worth playing if you're not playing with a friend. And it's packaged in a way that encourages that. It costs only $30, though a $40 deluxe edition allows you to share the game with a friend who doesn't own it...But really, it's all just an excuse to violently kill more Nazis, and I'm not too good to say that it's enough for me.

A moody and rewarding visual novel that is let down by some bad mystery plotting.

The core game is so much fun, but I would have rather spent $20 and had the game, its levels, and its characters open to me from the start.

The kind of story Sea of Solitude is trying to tell is deeply ambitious. It's the kind of game that might take an indie studio numerous attempts, even with the support of a giant like EA. Sea of Solitude may have drawbacks, but at the end of the day the game is still a stunning accomplishment. It's still a world I enjoyed spending time in.