The Wind Waker-inspired island world of Rime is a beautiful puzzle worth solving
NieR: Automata is a great, teetering game tilting from possible profundity to surreal spectacle on a delightful lurch.
For such a smart game, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided sure is dumb
Abzû immerses you in a beautiful ocean and lets nature run its course
Adr1ft trembles on the line between poetry and tedium
Make no mistake: The game is a bruising experience. It fully commits to sharing a hard, unsentimental exploration of what it means to watch your child suffer, and ultimately succumb to illness. That Dragon, Cancer is smart about presenting that tragedy through a series of stylistically disparate interactions to prevent itself from becoming dull or numbing.
Lego Dimensions is more satisfying for being a game my daughter and I can play together than anything the game itself does. She neither knows nor cares about half of the featured worlds, and that's just fine. You don't need to know the mythology behind Scooby-Doo to enjoy running through a level designed after the series.
More than the carefully constructed language or the fidelity to a story that doesn't need to be told, Mad Max is at its best when it offers some of that silence its hero swears to seek. It's when Chumbucket shuts up, when no deals need to be bartered, when you can just drive—just you belching out fire and black smoke across the highways, shiny and chrome.
Still, it's in the smallest moments where Pillars is most fascinating. Stories of dead gods resurrected, of divine plagues and magical obelisks jutting from the earth like broken bones, are the easy stories for fantasy games to tell. It's in the simple stories where they often falter. Pillars Of Eternity deserves credit not just for telling those stories but telling them well.