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.