The Curious Expedition is a disturbing portrait of the colonial mind
Like Journey, Abzû is in some sense a game about archetypes and archetypicality, letting you dwell within and among them as though to remind you of their firm embeddedness at the foundation of other things. And yet, in a significant structural twist, it's about recovering archetypes that no longer seem to have potency, rather than playing through an archetypal sequence—the Journey—that's still going strong.
It shapes and contours prehistory to fit every aspect of itself—which makes it much more than a reskinned Far Cry 4 (2014), even if it often feels like one.
This JRPG asks us to do nothing except buy into its synthetic religion of scale. You are big, Xenoblade Chronicles X. You are big because big is good. It's like stroking a dead Aibo—an Aibo that was never alive in the first place.
Assassin's Creed: Syndicate lets you science the shit out of murder in a city where people are sciencing the shit out of everything. There's an undeniable appeal to that. But it's an appeal worth looking in the face.
Cradle begins with amnesia and in its very form enacts recollection. It doesn't actually matter who you are. You're here to remember the fundamentals: you can see, you can learn, you can walk, you can breathe. It's too bad that half the game—the half that tries so hard to be a game—makes you wish you could double jump with some rocket implants.