Today, Devil's Third is a fossil, its best ideas buried under layers of strata. And almost nobody has—or should have—the patience to dig them up.
Controlling Big Boss is so precise and supple, and the number of play choices so enormous, that failure can almost always be attributed to the player and the player alone. As a result, The Phantom Pain is a game where loss is often as empowering as victory is satisfying.
As a result, A Knight To Remember has little identity of its own. If the goal of this first chapter is to act as a bridge between old and new, and the later chapters offer more original themes, storytelling, and puzzles, then we might be looking at a lesser piece of a greater whole. There's reason to believe this might be the case, as the most interesting part of the story, the development of Gwendolyn, takes center stage by the end of the chapter. But right now, this new take on King's Quest is hoping that a fondness for the fairy tales of yesterday will hide that it has nothing new to offer. It doesn't, but at least it has time to find its purpose.
Batman: Arkham Knight works as a piece of summer blockbuster entertainment, even if it's not always pulling its weight as a game about being Batman.
Let us try to imagine a world where crowdfunding somehow still exists 20 years from now. Perhaps then, we will all be invited to pay for a return to the halcyon days of Broken Age. We would probably do it. There would certainly be precedent.
Kirby And The Rainbow Curse itself doesn't feel old at all, despite closely following in the footsteps of its decade-old progenitor. If anything, it feels like it belongs here right now. It's not taking us anywhere we haven't already been, or showing us a bold new future, and that's okay.
Never Alone is not just telling a story—it is connecting the player to a culture. To play it is to be transported to two places simultaneously. First, to the world of Nuna and Fox, and their epic journey through the blistering cold. And second, to the warmth of a fire, listening to an old man tell a story that is as old as the Earth, feeling it sink into you for the first time.
The Evil Within eventually gives Seb a reason to soldier on, far too late into the story. At that point, he's the only one it helps.
Between that and the sublime feel of its combat, it's difficult to see even a passing interest in one of Bayonetta 2's passions not turning into a memorable experience.
It's times like that one, when Murdered actually feels like it is thinking about what the player wants, that it's possible to enjoy the game's elusive premise and nonviolent eeriness. But most of the time, it's an unfocused experience that breaks its own rules and serves up the barest of challenges. It's much easier to accept that Murdered isn't really thinking about what it's doing at all.
So yes, Transistor is slow and annoyingly coy. You shouldn't have to play it twice to perceive all of its lovable quirks. Playing it twice, though, is still preferable to not playing it at all.
It is just a polished spy game that has something to say, but not too much and not for too long. It speaks well. But for those of us who spent years tuning ours ear to Metal Gear's strange language, this is the first small sign that it might soon be time to throw all that work away.
Park: The Stick of Truth is South Park. Even coming back to it after years of not watching the show, there was something for me here. That something was good comedy, which is rare in games or anywhere, and never gets old.
The completed Broken Age could well be an excellent game, and I'll be back when it's finished to review it in its entirety. But the better the game turns out to be, the more of a disservice it is to play the first act now. To play it now is to be a part of a process. To play it later is to, well, play it.