This take on classic turn-based RPGs struggles to give its fresh ideas room to breathe.
If you had asked me just two weeks ago to name the biggest storytelling sin a game could commit, I would have told you it was making players ask questions without giving them a reason to care about the answers. Ask me today and I'll tell you something different. Lost Sphear buried me under convoluted logic and explanations, lore and jargon, only to cast it aside with a shrug whenever the details were inconvenient to the action. It answered my questions, but in ways so fundamentally disconnected and absurd that I regretted even caring in the first place.
Toren shoots for the moon but lands nowhere special.
Moon Hunters has a good story to tell, but grinds it to dust in the process.
With or without friends, Metroid Prime: Federation Force is a slog
Sword Art Online is built on high-stakes drama and a compelling premise--Hollow Realization delivers on neither.
With core systems opaque and unnecessarily limited, all I ever felt equipped to do in Rain World was fail.
While Telltale's other recent games have very broad appeal, most of them are decidedly intended for a more mature audience. Minecraft: Story Mode feels like it's aiming lower… in more than one sense. It's incredibly easy to underestimate the complexity of material that younger audiences can handle, and it's something that happens constantly.
The true misery of Valkyria Revolution is how much of the series' roots show through, and how much Revolution itself doesn't know what to do with them.
Sunless Sea's contemplative pace and reams of text won't appeal to every player, but if you have a little patience, and an appreciation for atmospheric story telling, then it'll be hard to pass this one up.