David Will
Doesn't set its sights much higher than just bringing Tex Murphy back for one last nostalgia trip, but remarkably successful at achieving that goal.
Good for a quick laugh, but not much more than that. If you value an evening's entertainment over having a significant chunk of your spare time eaten up, Jazzpunk is for you.
Leaves a lot to be desired, particularly in the gameplay department, but offers plenty of richly-detailed exploration and story for those prepared to do some serious digging.
A somewhat anaemic dungeon-crawling first-person shooter with intense core combat that never evolves (and little else worth praising).
Sublevel Zero breathes new life into the 6DOF genre, but does it with the unfortunate side-effect of crippling insubstantiality. Good for a taste of claustrophobic zero-gravity combat, but without the depth or breadth to follow through.
A stealth game built to satisfy the central tenets of the genre in the most discrete, distilled, trimmed-down way possible. Certainly well-crafted, but simply not that engaging.
If you’re in the mood for some light, undemanding puzzle solving soaked in a delicately-constructed atmosphere, The Guest can provide, but sadly it takes a lot more than that to create a rounded, satisfactory experience.
One of the better games currently inhabiting the discarded skin of the roguelike. Doesn't do anything particularly mind-blowing, but it's definitely fun while it lasts.
Dangerous Golf shoots low, and lands lower still, but taken as a stress-relief toy with oodles of jaw-slackening domestic demolition, it’s not a half-bad effort. Save it for a lazy Sunday.
Tokyo 42 offers a stylish, polished, well-presented open world that's unfortunately just not an awful lot of fun to do anything in. A few nice touches put a spark in its heart, but they can't light up the overall experience.
Greedy Guns is a relatively humdrum and uninspired - if perfectly functional - Metroidvania-style adventure that makes an admirable effort to spruce itself up with light shoot 'em up elements.
It's either going through an identity crisis or in dire need of a chest with a boomerang in it, but for what it's worth, Toren is a strange and beautiful little adventure. Give it a look, but don't expect anything special.
Diluvion is a submarine adventure with lofty goals that largely falls short. Still quite a serviceable experience, but ultimately a rough and insubstantial one.
For all its insights and challenging moral dilemmas, Always Sometimes Monsters is a frustrating, confusing, sometimes agonizingly tedious jumble that's just a little bit too pleased with itself. It's a fascinating game to observe, but enjoyable? No, I think not.
A tedious, albeit relaxing open-world scavenge-em-up with seemingly no ambitions besides being bigger, less original, and less focused than the game that preceded it.
Barely notable enough to be worth mentioning, but a fun little outing nonetheless. I'd call it 'cheap and cheerful', but there's plenty more 'cheerful' out there for equivalent levels of 'cheap'.
Hatoful Boyfriend is exactly what it professes to be, and little more than that. The reality of a pigeon dating sim is infinitely less entertaining than the idea, but it nevertheless has its moments.
At its best, Styx: Master of Shadows is a half-decent stealth game with barely a fresh idea in its head. At its worst, it's a soggy pile of frustration, clumsiness, and save-scumming. Guess which end of the spectrum it tends towards.
A Saints Row game with no ambition, no plot, no variety, and no way of raising the bar. Solid and good for a chuckle or two, but ultimately an empty experience.
Unambitious game with sloppy design gets given a second chance for some reason, turns out to be even more mediocre in retrospect. More news at eleven.