If you can master the foreign language of its combat, you’ll find Hyper Light Drifter screaming with life and unfamiliar menace, waiting for you to awaken its technological giants.

Most games don’t try to break you, don’t ask you to band together and conquer something that seems impossible. Still, Miyazaki says, Dark Souls is made to beaten: “When [we] set the difficulty level… our objective was to make the game possible to accomplish.” It takes time, and it takes effort, but no matter who you are, or how you want to play, Dark Souls wants to see you succeed.

What saves this radical concept from total disaster is the fact that the live-action segments are well-acted and tightly paced. They look and feel exactly like… well, like a mid-season replacement on the USA Network, if we’re being honest. But the action is just intriguing enough that you won’t mind being asked to watch a 20-minute cut scene before beginning the next level...Once you get over the novelty, Quantum Break shakes out as a mediocre shooter with a lavish budget. It will be remembered for blending game and live-action in a formula that actually kinda worked, not for its gameplay, which feels unambitious, half-baked.

Hitman, the franchise, has always been known for elaborate assassinations and long missions that flow beautifully from one moment to the next. And it’s wonderful to see the subtitle-free sequel keep to that tradition. This is only the first of several planned episodes, but one with an emotional rollercoaster with enough depth and challenge to last some time.

After spending a few hours with Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s The Division, one thing I can say with certainty is that it has a powerful sense of drama. For a game based largely around shooting bad guys online with friends, it has a remarkable sense of pacing and mood. It’s dynamic, in the musical sense: loud, tense gunfights, separated by periods of exploring a ruined New York City in overwhelming silence.

The Molasses Flood’s debut is a brilliant tone piece, drawing skillfully on an established well of symbolism and cultural preoccupations that rarely get showcased in games. The Flame in the Flood is a journey toward hope at the end of a long river, a journey worth taking.

Far Cry Primal is best played through subtraction. First thing, go into the options menu and turn off the mini-map. Takkar certainly doesn’t have a map, and using one is distraction that detracts from the beauty and horror of Oros. Ignore the extraneous missions, the ones that rely on formula and filler by, say, having you kill the same two warriors to save the same kidnapped Wenja. Seek out the upgrades you find most useful and skip the rest. Ignore the completion percentages. Take it slow.

Everybody—Nintendo, players—knows that this is a stopgap in a barren release schedule, but if you’re going to have a stopgap, you might as well give an excellent game the graphical overhaul it lost when Nintendo decided to skip over high-definition.

Prospekt doesn’t quite match the brilliance of the official games.

Unravel isn’t a bad videogame. It has some mild charm, and it’s one of the most visually stunning things I’ve seen in a long time. It’s just unremarkable. Which is a pity, because with the clear passion that went into its development, it’s easy to picture it being so much more.

The Witness is a sterile, lifeless videogame. It revels in the idea of knowledge, fascinated by how it’s earned and what it signifies. But it seems uninterested in players and their accomplishments, and with that lack of interest comes a lack of the human touch necessary to make sense of the knowledge it offers...The Witness is like the island on which it takes place: a machine, to the core. Anything within it that seems lifelike is superficial.

Firewatch may leave you before you’re ready to be done with it; like Gone Home, Oxenfree et cetera it’s a six-hour experience that you can easily start after lunch and finish before bed. But it’s an emotional gut-punch all the way through, for many reasons, and largely a pleasure to explore and find yourself lost in—mentally, if not geographically. This is your next must-play story, another voyage to a place games don’t often take us.

Frankly, I think I might hate The Witness. Even after hours of playtime, I don’t know enough to tell.

Darkest Dungeon is a mean, capricious game. Success is a gambler’s thrill, addictive and illicit. It comes rarely.

It bakes a string of unnerving themes into its gameplay that stand wholly apart from the bevy of shooters it’s competing with.

Besides its unique approach to game storyline delivery, which I think will be studied and copied in the future, Oxenfree shows some smart thinking about the relationship between games and players. It’s a unique mix that should make Night School’s future productions ones to watch, and this an auspicious debut.

Mark of the Ninja is easily one of the best Xbox Live Arcade games of the year. In a time when no one thought they wanted another stealth game, Klei Entertainment surprised everyone with a truly wonderful one.

Never feels challenging, so it lacks exhilarating highs.

It's better than almost anything else on the platform. But it's also a game produced by a Nintendo with its back against the wall, which seemed to want to get a side-scrolling Mario on shelves to sell 3DS hardware before the time was quite right.

I wish I could recommend Sleeping Dogs with no reservations. The story is excellent, the gameplay has flashes of brilliance and the mission structuring makes it rather addictive. It's hard to ignore all the little problems that keep presenting themselves, but not one of them is troublesome enough to make you stop playing.

It's done some brilliant things with its genre to create a brand new experience, but no game mode aside from team deathmatch is well-balanced or interesting, and there are precious few maps.

Deadlight isn't a poor game, just average. Mediocre. Inoffensive. If Deadlight developers Tequila Works developed another game with some more original ideas, I'd like to play it.

Spelunky is designed to be played repeatedly, a randomly generated battle of human versus machine. Its goal is to challenge the player in a way that is seemingly impossible, but ultimately surmountable given the proper amount of training and skill. I can't recall another game that achieves that delicate balance as well as Spelunky. Its randomly generated nature and ecosystem of interactive elements challenges your decision-making abilities in a way that's nothing short of awe-inspiring.

Gameloft's complete incapacity for gameplay innovation and penchant for annoying players into spamming their own Facebook accounts drags Asphalt 7 down, but I'd be lying if I said it's not the best arcade racer available for iPhone and iPad.

A novel and original concept, executed cleanly and with style - in short, the ideal to which videogames should aspire.

Playing Pocket Planes is like driving a car that steers itself. All I want is a wheel, NimbleBit. Give me just one tool that can be wielded in interesting ways to make an impact on the outcome of my play. I want the ability to play your game well, or play it badly. As it currently stands, the only choice you give me is to play Pocket Planes or not play it at all, and I'm going to take option B.

That's all Max Payne 3 is – a beautiful, playable action movie.

It was one of the best cooperative experiences I've ever had in a video game, and I don't even know who those people were. I've made my concerns about the storytelling in this game clear, but maybe that's not as big of an issue. I came away from Diablo III with a great story to tell, one of my own making.