I truly, truly hope Lost Records gets the patience it deserves. Again, its slower pace means it’ll inevitably fall out of favor with some folks. But, if you stick around, Tape 1 of Lost Records will do anything but disappoint you. If you’re willing to engage with it, it’ll reward you with compelling storytelling, layered characters, stellar environmental design, and an always-relevant reminder that there’s beauty in imperfection. [Highly Recommended]

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

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.

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.

Its budget-friendly price tag, paired with the wealth of content within the world of AI Limit, makes it a no-brainer for fans of this frantic type of combat experience. Even if you’ve never played a game like this before, this is the perfect stepping stone toward “getting gud”, even if the punishment isn’t as harsh as some other games. [Recommended]

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.

Still Wakes the Deep was one of my favorite games of 2024. This expansion is one I never thought we’d get. I’m very glad that it exists, as it has the same level of tension and terror as the base game does. But completely submerged and even more claustrophobic. If you were a fan of Still Wakes the Deep, you owe it to yourself to check this one out. It’s just as strange and interesting as the base game. All while finding new ways to scare you. [Highly Recommended]

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.

Give Afterlove EP some of your time. You won’t regret it in the slightest. It’s a beautiful journey, filled with emotional moments, and will stick around in the corners of my mind and psyche for years to come. I’ll gladly revisit it whenever I know I’ll need it because it’s one of those experiences that transcends a singular playthrough. [Highly Recommended]

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

If you jump into Atomfall, take it slow. There’s no reason to rush toward the ending here. Absorb the atmosphere, lose yourself in the ebb and flow of the game. Examine everything you possibly can, and just enjoy the ride. But as a word of advice, prepare yourself for frustrations along the way. If you think you’ve got what it takes, you’ll find a unique and intriguing world before you. But it’s not a world for everyone to enjoy. [Recommended]

Even with its issues, I can still happily recommend giving Rise of the Ronin a try. It’s an incredibly dense and exciting action game, with plenty of care put into every facet of it. Seeing as Koei Tecmo and Team Ninja have launched PC games with issues in the past and worked through them, I do not doubt that this will be the same way. It’s a shame that it didn’t launch in better condition. But, Rise of the Ronin resonated with me enough to help me look past some of these woes. [Recommended]

If Misc. A Tiny Tale can tighten up the controls via patches and maybe find a way to help with some of the more confusing portions of the level layout? I could easily see this becoming an indie classic. Some younger and/or less patient players may get fed up with the level layout, but as someone who wants to scour every inch of the map, I grew to appreciate it. Misc. A Tiny Tale is indeed a special game. Every square inch of this adventure is packed full of care and detail. Tinyware Games has created something incredibly special here, and players who can deal with some floaty controls are bound to find a new indie obsession to fall in love with. [Highly Recommended]

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.

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

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

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.

The Great War: Western Front is a small game about a big topic that uses clever abstractions to keep things simple to understand and quick to play. It achieves a lot with a couple good ideas, but as the game goes on and it attempts to show how the war evolved even as its stalemate persisted, it needs more ideas and better execution than it brings to the table. Implying more evolution and development than it truly depicts, The Great War: Western Front ends up being a pleasant and convenient wargame but falls short of being a great one.

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.

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]

Phantom Brigade shines with its unique, physics driven mech tactics, and exceptional build customization.

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

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

The Sinking City humanizes Lovecraft’s principal villains, turns them into people, and tells a better story because of it.

It’s not very often that a game can feel both old and new, like Ruffy and the Riverside does. It takes inspiration from our favorite childhood classics while modernizing them enough to make them exciting and accessible to players of all generations. No matter if you grew up with platforming icons like Banjo or Crash, or you’ve been out of the loop on platformers for a long time, let Ruffy be your reintroduction to why you love these types of games so much. From the moment I started until the moment I stopped, Ruffy had me smiling. It rekindled the joy of classic platformers from my youth and made me feel just like a kid again. Sometimes, that’s all you can hope for from a game like this. [Best In Its Class]

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.

Phantom Squad has been some of the most tense fun I’ve had in years. It brings its unique, tactical spirit to the limelight. If you’ve got a group of friends who are willing to deal with a steep learning curve and eager to give it a try, pick this one up. Ctrl Freak has struck gold with their first game, and I hope they continue adding content. It’s a game I’d love to keep picking up for the foreseeable future. [Highly Recommended]

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.