It's all highly unsettling, and the most important things about the game -- its mood of fumbling desperation, its clapped-out London settings, its focus on exhaustion and disempowerment -- remain startlingly unchanged after the transition in platform and the stripping of the Wii U's clever propwork.
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is an extraordinary piece of work, with things to say about pacing, writing, world-building and the communication of emotion that feel profoundly valuable to the industry. Along with its peers in this curiously expanding genre of being-in-the-world simulators, it will undoubtedly feed more furious debate about what games should be and what playing them should involve, but its great achievement, for me at least, was to render any such question spectacularly irrelevant during the time that its experience lasted.
For sheer daft mayhem, Far Cry 4 is now the action game to beat.
Driveclub is a distinctly mixed experience; skeletal in some aspects, but breathtakingly complete in others. We'll check back around Christmas, by which time it may have grown into a different game altogether. Until then, approach with care.
Despite its brevity, the prologue to the hugely anticipated Metal Gear Solid V has superb stealth mechanics and stunning attention to detail -- but its pleasures come at a distinctly worrying price.
A prolonged development has not been kind to this reboot of the classic Thief series, making for a game stitched together from disparate parts of better contemporaries.
It is so rare to see a virtual world realised with such brio and charm that it’s hard to hold the game’s old-fashioned mechanics against it.