A bonkers survival sim where watching things fall apart is half the fun.

What elevates Outer Wilds is how it confronts this tension between practicality and contemplation. Your exploration rarely feels heroic. In fact, it is often melancholic. There are moments of shout-worthy victory, sure. But as you piece together the history of your little star system, it becomes clear that there are no easy answers.

Some of what’s wrong in Rage 2 feels like compromised implementation of fundamentally good ideas, but I think its fatal flaw is that it’s a game obsessed with feeling fun rather than trusting any of its ideas to be fun.

The result is a game that still feels like history, but only history as told through the shaded maps in a textbook.

It’s a wildly fun, dark, campy examination of the modern workplace as a well of suffering and pain, and as such, it’s just what I need here in April of 2019.

A puzzle platformer that smoothly finesses the line between feeling challenging and keeping me motivated.

And that’s Days Gone in a nutshell: a waste of time that doesn’t get you anything decent in return. I could have written everything here after a few hours of playing, but I kept thinking “There’s gotta be something around the corner to justify all this.” And so I’d play a few hours, and then a few more. Soon, a big plot turn was being communicated, and so I gave the game another chance. But that, like Deacon’s code, was just a long con. A game with a billion carrots on a stick, but no matter how many you eat, you’re still hungry, but at that point, the sunk cost of eating these damn carrots is so large you might as well keep eating. [20 Hour Impressions]

Falcon Age squanders its compelling narrative foundations with reductive gameplay and a dumb cute bird.

Ultimately The Occupation is a game that is too much concerned with hiding, when it should be focused on what can be revealed.

Yes, FromSoft could have shipped another game that more cleanly fits one of their successful molds, another Souls, another Bloodborne. Instead, they radically iterated and came away with something that feels genuinely new to play. Which is appropriate: Like one of their own protagonists, FromSoft faced a choice between sustaining the past and charging into the unknown, and they chose the latter. [Impressoins]

It’s a scary, sad, messed-up place. And I’m very grateful for the stay.

BioWare's take on Destiny doesn't have enough "BioWare" to make up for its countless missteps.

If you just look at what Sunless Skies is from one moment to the next, you’ll rarely see much happening. It might seem empty, inert, a game that leaves everything to the imagination. Then, you might realize, that’s the trick.

It’s a game that refuses to engage with itself mechanically, thematically, or narratively. As players, we’re left with two options: do the heavy lifting for a game that can’t and won’t, or once again embrace a hollow and half-hearted spectacle. Or we avoid it entirely, and let Far Cry 5’s nuclear winter linger a little longer in the hope that, when the skies clear, they’ll reveal a world that someone, somewhere, can bring themselves to care about.

Kingdom Hearts III is an absolute disaster. I loved every minute of it.

There is a distinctly nostalgic feeling to playing Wargroove. It reminds me of the Game Boy Advance, and my first brushes with Advance Wars, a series that made turn-based strategy both accessible and difficult.

For the first time in a long time, a survival horror game that actually makes you feel like you're barely surviving... Horror fans should be very excited—it’s excellent. [Quick Thoughts - 1/2 through game]

That, in the end, is Artifact in its iron heart: a machine for capturing metagames.

It's impossible to know if Smash Ultimate could ever serve everyone. But with this strategic mix of nostalgia and experimentation, it was able to do something I didn't expect: Bring me home.

There are a lot of games I’d call good but not interesting. I’d rather play the interesting ones. "Recommending" Call of Cthulhu a strange proposition. The kind of person who'll be interested knows it. Experiences like this call to you, as if beckoning from a forgotten city beneath the waves.

It has depth if you want to find it, but you can also mash away for hours and still do some pretty sweet combos. You could climb the ranked ladder, contesting the world’s best, or just wander the map of Libra of Soul, finding more fights and challenges. Soulcalibur VI is like fighting game comfort food for me, and really, I’m just happy to have a good one around again.

Its world is big and beautiful, and there’s something winning about its sometimes Coen-esque vision of Greece as a land of shady dealmakers, savvy and irritable shopkeeps, and garrulous streetside philosophers. But it’s busy and crowded with too many things I have to deal with, and not enough that I want to do. I miss the stargazing of Origins, or at least, inhabiting a game built by people who thought it might be nice to go stargazing.

The darkly humorous farming simulator is dead serious about questioning our relationship with labor and goals.

Closes the book on Lara's origin story, but whether players (or Lara herself) have learned anything is entirely debatable.

No matter how much Lara changes in the course of this adventure, she's still an instrument of hegemony. This world remains a constructed fantasy, one designed specifically for her...Tomb Raider is and will always be Lara Croft’s playground. And as uninteresting and fundamentally regressive as Lara’s tale is, that’s the only story that this franchise can tell.

Sure, there are obvious weaknesses to improve on, but importantly, I want to see what happens next with Peter and the people around him. There are some surprisingly bold storytelling decisions in Spider-Man, especially relative to what happens in this genre, and I'm invested in seeing the inevitable fallout. It helps, obviously, that Spider-Man was tremendously fun to play, too.

Donut County takes a whole bunch of simple things, and one central game mechanic (around… that hole) and spins an inventive, creative, satisfying game out of them. The result is a pleasure to play and a really admirable piece of game design.

Dragon Quest XI is an amazing monument to the fact that there is a new Dragon Quest game, but I don’t think it’s much more than that.

It’s a good racing game, but it’s a great game about being an F1 driver, and all the intangibles that they have to put on the balance sheet.

An interesting and atmospheric tactical spy game that never quite comes together.

We Happy Few doesn’t work because it doesn’t feel cohesive. It’s one game bolted onto the foundation of another, and it shows. The game world is massive because the developer doesn’t have the budget or resources to make good on the dense nature of BioShock’s detail-oriented environments. The side quests are generic, often lacking unique NPCs, because the work required to build, animate, and implement them would be too much. Even the glitches seem to fit this theme: a game bursting at the seams, unable to contain itself. We Happy Few's ambitions are large, but it's only that: ambition.

While there are a couple of places where it feels like the difficulty ramps up too quickly, or where major plots twists unfold with barely a moment to react or comment, my fundamental reaction to The Banner Saga 3 is one of vindication. It turns out this was a journey worth taking, and a world worth keeping in my heart for the last few years. In the end it has justified its stylistic and narrative choices, and surpassed the hopes I had for it back when I played the first part of the trilogy.

Even when the level design works, the shoddy platforming, combat, and bland world design drag down the long-in-development game.

Thanks to that pacing and emphasis on thinking your way through obstacles, it’s pretty much perfect on the Switch, for playing in bed or on the subway to work. Or anywhere, really, you find yourself wanting to enjoy some of the most relaxed Mario-style action Nintendo has available.

It is a fantastic addition to a game that already has a place in my all-time favorites list, and even if this is the very last we’ll see of Prey, or the big-budget immersive sim for awhile, I’m very glad Arkane has gone out on a bang.

The new game from the developers of ‘Life Is Strange’ writes checks for ambitions it can’t cash, but it’s worth the ride.

By the end, I was disgusted, angry, and exhausted. An uncommon set of emotions for a game you’d want to recommend to other people, even if they bounced off Life Is Strange.

It's an incredible amount of fun, so long as you're not looking for a great single player sports RPG.

Even if it did do a better job at telling the story it means to tell, the hidden costs that went into Detroit would hardly be worth it: workers in court suing over harassment, a company reportedly organized into an undisguised creative oligarchy, an entire regional block of game outlets who are too wary of legal action to mention any of this in their own release coverage of the game. All this to execute a tired concept, done far better service in recent years.

It’s such a bad fu.king video game, too. You spend 95% of Agony waiting for poorly designed AI enemies to walk past you, so you can sprint to the next area. It’s not scary, it’s not fun, it’s not interesting.

It has a lot to say about women, sexual violence, the power dynamics of sex between genders, and how society often views gay sex through the lens of straight men. Rather than coding its ideology in metaphor or subtext, it’s danced right in front of you. Agony knows exactly what it’s saying. Fortunately, you don’t have to listen.

If Yoku’s Island Express is not only a terrific Metroid-inspired pinball game but also a game about biting moral choices—shit, man. I didn't need another reason to keep playing, but there you go.

The real issue in State of Decay 2 is how little investment it manages to earn. In its function, it feels like a world founded on the idea that if you can just imbue it with enough randomness, enough player-independent activity and interaction, enough probabilistic cogs and gears to let random characters and random story beats to fit together, we can imbue that world with life as well. But rather than a world, we get an infinite nothing. And State of Decay 2 ends up feeling a lot like the zombies the populate it: All movement and raw appetite, with not even the faintest heartbeat to be heard.

It’s best moments are familiar because they are part of that sturdy, underlying Total War formula, but even here they quickly become repetitive. Yet when it attempts to do something new and to be something new, Thrones of Britannia seems to lack any kind of compelling original vision for what a Total War game can be.

A weight of expectation and obligation detracts from an otherwise great narrative adventure about colonialism and its politics.

The more I play BattleTech, the more violent it gets, and the more violent it gets, the more I love it.

Somehow, in a game about gods fighting other gods, God of War feels grounded. And because of some of the new directions it moves the series in, it has the room to explore this mythological family drama. By giving God of War small stake tension, the whole thing benefits.

New changes to the structure are welcomed, but 'Far Cry 5' has no confidence and no heart.

Again and again, Far Cry 5 served up its opposite: Moments that were incredibly loud, but increasingly timid. And because of that, Far Cry 5 itself will always be more of a curiosity than a destination.

It's a marginal improvement, but it's got one thing the original no longer does: lots of people playing it.

I survived Mars. My reward was a self-sustaining economic engine serving no end greater than its own perpetuation. It was dozens of millions of miles from Earth, and I felt like I’d gone nowhere.

Just as FTL got to the heart of space opera—the experimental ship, the camaraderie of a ragtag crew, the spiraling of crises—Subset Games has found the core of the mech fantasy with Into the Breach.

Moss is a terrific example of what happens when VR, as a medium, begins to find its own language of expression, both in art and design. It’s a game that, when asked for words to describe it, magic comes to mind.

Rise and Fall is aware that there is far more about the history of human civilization that a game of the same name could and perhaps should attempt to capture. But we already have a clean, simple story. Everything else can exist at the edges, included, but not so important that you can’t ignore it.

The narrative decision to limit A.R.I.D. isn’t the problem, it’s the repetitive framing.

But here’s the biggest goan-worthy element: along with all that 80s nostalgia is an unfortunate helping of stereotypes that seem like they're more about people than the tropes of retro pop-culture.

Any game that makes me want to face off against hours of challenging fights is something special.

Watching the creatures of Monster Hunter: World leap, and climb, and lunge isn’t like watching an enemy in a video game. It’s like being a kid and seeing a plane lift off the runway for the first time, or an elephant picking up speed, ears flapping, or a cruise ship coming too-quickly into harbor. This is the sort of scale where disaster seems imminent, always...In its very best moments, Monster Hunter World captures that feeling, and shifts it only a little, by testing whether you or the monster will be the disaster.

The new game from the creators of 'Gods Will Be Watching" has bold, refreshing ideas about future sex—but also a pitfall into transphobia.

Unfortunately, its good ideas are never given enough room to breathe.

Top to bottom, Sonic Forces didn’t click for me, and even now, I stand by that. I’ve never been convinced by Sega’s meandering attempts to convert Sonic into 3D, believing the Mario-esque Sonic Adventure to be the most successful attempt. Sonic Forces only underscored my original issues. Sure, some have been better than others— Lost World, Generations—but for a franchise about speed, it’s never been able to meaningfully capture that feeling for more than a few moments.

The combat isn't especially deep, but successfully getting through a challenging encounter is rewarding. The game's story has been hit-or-miss, but some of the hits have been dead on—I especially enjoy how they're playing out the ethnic and political divides among Greek, Egyptian, and Roman characters. And hey, I say this with some degree of trepidation, but so far the loot has been pretty fun to get. But my fear is that no one will see that Origins is actually a competent and enjoyable action RPG and instead bounce off of the aimless intro.

272 moons later, I've "beaten" Super Mario Odyssey, but it feels like I've only scratched the surface of Mario's latest, a breathlessly creative adventure equal parts surprising and bewildering—in a good way.

The series, rather than making large structural changes from game to game or adding many additional systems, finds more nuance and complexity in the encounter and level design that was created to hold a great deal of depth, and Etrian Odyssey V—which released this week—is particularly, even for the series, stripped to what it's always been and what it's always been good at.

The Evil Within was more tense than scary, dropping players into claustrophobic spaces where survival lived on a razor's edge, ammunition always at a minimum. The Evil Within 2 is exactly the opposite, with open spaces and an emphasis on exploration, experimentation, and ample time to hide, scheme, ambush. It's shockingly good.

The Evil Within 2 ultimately feels a lot like Friday the 13th Part 2. The original Friday the 13th might get all the credit for being the origin of a famous series (and having a fantastic cliffhanger), but it's just an okay movie. Part 2 is where the series found its footing, moving beyond an empty clone of a popular horror subgenre. The pieces were all there, but the deck needed to be reshuffled to made it click. The Evil Within 2 clicks.

I still want to explore that world, and maybe as I do more Adventures and Lost Sectors I'll be able to do so, but in its main campaign Destiny 2 is stubbornly, resolutely avoidant of its own themes and contradictions. It stirs from its complacency just a bit at the start, only to rock itself back to sleep listening to the percussive rhythms of combat.

Playing Absolver scratched an itch I didn't even know I had. It's similar enough to the things it takes inspiration from to make me comfortable, but different enough to keep me playing. Above all, it got me excited about the fighting game genre in a way I haven't been since the first time I played Super Smash Bros. or read about Thrill Kill. That alone is worth the price of admission.

I'm here to tell you Kingdom Battle is a hell of a game, a strategy RPG with more in common with Fire Emblem than XCOM, one that wraps a satisfying turn-based combat game—featuring surprising depth to its systems and mechanics—in the approachable accessibility that's come to define modern Nintendo games...I'm as shocked as you are, but more than 10 hours later, I can't put the game down.

The 'Madden NFL 18' Story Mode Is Better Than It Has Any Right To Be.

It's so much fun to encounter these new features, and see how seamlessly integrated they are with the old school style. This really does feel like an older Sonic game that's been given proper consideration, with thoughtful level design that encourages wild leaps of faith, and characteristic speed. And then many happy returns, with different characters, to plumb away at the game's secrets.

Tacoma isn't Gone Home, but that's an impossible ask. Tacoma is, however, a clever game with a thoughtful story to tell about life, people, and technology.

I guess the real lesson here is that you can have some fun by yourself in Miitopia, even with the loneliest system in existence. The New 2DS XL is fantastic, by the way. I'll have to actually go and get some street passes before I dip back into the game.

And in a world where boss battles are, with the exception of Souls-like games, seemingly falling out of vogue, Splatoon 2 makes an argument it's only because of lacking creativity. Each of the game's five worlds hides a wholly unique monstrosity, demanding players exploit the game's mechanics in a different way. Even if Nintendo hadn't asked me to keep quiet about the nature of the Splatoon 2's bosses (in the third world and beyond) I'd still be loathe to spoil the game's best surprises.

I get it. I'm not good at this. But when a game's first stages are so fiddly—its on-ramping of the player, if you will, is so steep—it becomes incredibly off-putting to anyone without the time to properly tackle it.

It's a game that makes the most of its conscious limitations, in other words—and while the enemies and bosses are all familiar, finding the most efficient ways to beat them means they're an entertainingly different kind of challenge here.

There's a lot, lot more to be said regarding the genuinely surprising depth of ARMS's core one-on-one (or hectic two-on-two) fighting mode—which is presented as a "Grand Prix" in single-player, a standard arcade-like run through opponents culminating in a slightly disappointing end boss, who serves to illustrate how the game's designers used up their creativity on the ten playable characters.

It's the perfect game to kind of zone out with (especially in the literal Zone challenges, which are abstract, light-shifting exercises in going fast and not hitting barriers), to enjoy the music and visuals and feel your way around the game, via time trial, or traditional race (full of deadly power-ups and just a taste of Mario Kart-style shenanigans), or any number of challenges in the solo modes.

But I think it's worth the investment. With Endless Space 2 I feel like a lot of the loose observations and conclusions I drew from Endless Legend are finally coalescing into knowledge, and Amplitude's strategic language is starting to sound like poetry.

Should we be so surprised that Rime feels lightweight, like a retread of medium-pertinent predecessors? Choose to stand in the shadows of colossi, after all, and your own definition will only ever appear dwindled.

Crisp and colorful with an energetic EDM soundtrack, Arkanoid vs. Space Invaders is a fizzy, addictive treat—like a bag of cola bottles but with slightly more nutritional value, and all for roughly the price of a London pint.

The Final Challengers, in so many ways, just feels undercooked. It doesn't move me like Super did, and that's not because of how old it is, or what I've played since— Super just did all of this slicker, sharper, and didn't stuff itself with pointless filler. And that's not my memories talking—I can turn it on, today, and even in 16-bits it purrs where The Final Challengers plods. Put this online and charge a tenner, it's a deal. But come on, Capcom—there's taking the piss with asking prices, and then there's this.

It rocks, so hard, so fast; so let it rumble and tumble you and your Switch for a while, until you're suitably sweated out.

As I play more and more—I'm about 20 hours in now—I've realized that there's a major Bioshock staple that isn't in Prey: memorable characters.

Don't sleep on this weird, dark little game. It's a very spooky, very worthwhile trip.

Tarsier’s new puzzler presents a powerful vision of terror in a very relatable environment.

I got what I wanted out of Dawn of War III. It pays the right amount of reverence to the source material and tells exactly the sort of story I like in 40K: important, but contextualized in the big, scary, slightly stupid universe Games Workshop has created for itself.

Wales Interactive’s latest is neither an interactive movie nor a video game, but as a curious experiment it shows potential.

I'm not basing my reaction off of nostalgia. The earlier titles had their flaws, but they were well-constructed. I would gladly give all of Yooka-Laylee's visual polish for level geometry that teased secrets, high peaks that demanded climbing, worlds that felt good to move through.

I'm usually beaming with pride when I've scaled the latest mountain FromSoftware has put in front of me, but by the end of The Ringed City, I was left empty, bored, and ready for change.

Thimbleweed Park's puzzles are just fine as they are...By which I mean they are enjoyably frustrating, comfortably confusing—echoes of the point-and-click past. Mercifully, they're articulated in such a fashion that, again, once you begin to acknowledge the mechanics made available to you, key amongst them character swapping on the fly, they begin to sing. And they really are like songs, after a fashion, constituents of an arrangement fractured by design, until such a time that a third party, the player, can piece them back together and drink in the singular melodies.

Bucket Detective isn't as abjectly disturbing as The Static Speaks My Name, but you don't exactly feel great while playing it, either. It's not a game about winning, it's about inhabiting someone's world. How you feel about your time in that world is up to you.

None of the five sports in Superstars is likely to keep you hooked for the long term—though, saying that, I got so obsessed with World Tour a couple of drizzly summer holidays ago that I was dreaming about teeing off with bob-ombs for golf balls—but, for your 20-minute time-killing needs, they're pretty perfect.

Even at this point, I can confidently say that Nier: Automata is the best Platinum game since Bayonetta 2, and that it progresses with such wonderfully rapid momentum that it's impossible to just pick up and play for an hour.

As a Tales fan burned by several years of repetition and "greatest hits," it's been a joy to see the series strike out into uncharted territory with Velvet and her band of anti-heroes.

If you're picking up Horizon Zero Dawn today, you're in for a treat. Some of the reviews might have skewed a little high, score wise, for my liking, but Guerrilla's open-worlder is one of 2017's finest games so far. There's been stiff competition, with more to come—but I feel this is one we'll see nudge into the upper parts of several publications' year-end best lists.

Night in the Woods is great at subverting power fantasies. There are moments where you have no choice but to screw up. You simply choose how you screw up because that's how unattended mental illness can be.