It's a good package of entertaining games, and is presented beautifully, but it's also not essential.
Goichi Suda's love letter to Noir is so striking and vivid that it's a game I'll not soon forget. By turns shocking, darkly humorous, confounding, and always creative, this was Suda-san's first game as an independent game developer, and through it we see so much of what would become Suda's trademarks; that same transgressive attitude, the same love for classical film and literature genres, and that same intensity in his storytelling (that will ultimately get overlooked by most critics).
Mervils: A VR Adventure relies too heavily on a gimmick it doesn't even use properly, and that's the very definition of a limited experience.
If you can get a multiplayer game going there's a bit more strategy involved, I guess, but there isn't much of a community wrapped around this one, leaving Korix feeling like a game that had a good idea buried away in there, but fails to give people the VR strategy experience that they'll be looking for.
What Virry really is is a series of micro-documentaries that show you, close up and in VR, a range of different animals as they live in their natural environment. It's the closest you'll get to a zebra, let alone a lion, and while that's going on, a commentator will share some basic facts about the animal and the threats that it's facing.
There might not be much depth here over the long term, but for some short bursts of frenetic action, it absolutely has the lightgun genre nailed.
It's probably just as well Sony gave this thing away for free with PSPlus memberships. It's the only hope the game has of actually keeping an audience (because it's a multiplayer-only game, it needs a large and sustained community).
A Rose in the Twilight is, in its entirety, a metaphor for the rose itself; it's a truly beautiful masterpiece, but it's also a gothic kind of beauty, in that it's more than happy to stab you sharply, even as you appreciate everything about it. It's a ravishing, masterful work, that will be played by just a handful, but hopefully remembered for a long time to come.
I don't think I've ever played a more pointless game than R.B.I. Baseball 17. Yeah, sure, you can argue that it's cheaper than the MLB The Show games, but surely if you're enough of a fan of baseball to want to buy a video game take on the sport at all, you'd be willing to spend that extra money for a game that you will actually want to play, and a game that will actually do your favourite sport justice. I just don't see how anyone, anywhere, could possibly want what this one is offering.
If you're like me and do take game narratives seriously, then these two are right up there with the best in the industry, and sticking them together into a single package makes them completely essential.
I want to see more Siralim, but if there's to be a Siralim 3, I do want it to be something different this time.
For some reason Nintendo insists that Mario Sports games should be vapid experiences that insult the intelligence of the very young children that they seem to be pitched at.
Talisman is a classic board game, and deserves respect for that. It's also eminently playable to this day, and very easy to pick up and play; it's a genuinely good game for lazy Sundays with friends. But it's also not the perfect game, nor is this port the perfect port. And sadly that means that Talisman on PlayStation 4 won't win over a new generation of fans to the game.
What I got was a game filled with storytelling (I can't emphasise enough just how many cut scenes Toukiden 2 has), and with a huge shift to open world design. In fact, where the first Toukiden was very solidly in the Monster Hunter tradition, this one edges that much closer to a hybrid JRPG/ Monster Hunter experience, and I couldn't be happier about that. This is exactly what I want from a "Monster Hunter clone."
Between missions there's not much to do, other than drive around a spectacularly boring Bolivia looking for more icons to kick missions off. Bolivia's actually a beautiful country, and this game probably set tourism back for the country by a couple of decades.
I suspect I will always have time for a good, classical roguelike. They're becoming less frequent, and therefore I think we need stuff like Genso Wanderer to keep the tradition alive. It's not perfect, and it will frustrate many, but it's a quality, solid effort nonetheless.
With Voez, the choreography of the icons leaves you feeling like you're playing an instrument and are involved in the performance of the music itself, and that is incredibly immersive and engaging. As I said at the start; this is the Nintendo's secret weapon, because this is one very special game, and exclusive to the console (at least, in its microtransactions-free state), and it's absolutely essential.
It's a pity that Sony saw fit to release this in the same week it dropped Horizon on the world. Had it landed in a quieter part of the year, Malicious would have got a lot more notice from the media and the community. It deserves to be noticed too; it's not the greatest 'Monster Hunter' game out there, but it is gorgeous and has a lot of interesting, unique ideas going for it.
Thanks to a deep narrative, exquisite morality mechanics that make every decision equally weighty and meaningful, and sublime characters, inXile has given the game a genuine shot of living up to the legacy of one of the greatest games of all time.
What is important to any great visual novel is that it has great writing, and the Danganronpa games are by turns hilarious, reflective, intense and jovial, the characters are all unique and interesting, and the twists and turns are often startling. Visual novels just don't get better than these.