If you can get past some minor control issues, White Day: A Labyrinth Named School is a unique horror experience with great level design, a gripping story, and more ghosts than you can shake a purification stick at.
Walkerman is an impressive piece of writing in an original horror/fantasy setting, featuring monster hunting logic puzzles that are a riveting albeit disappointingly small part of the experience.
Killers and Thieves may be good in small doses, but the heists are boring and repetitive and the management component, though neat in theory, doesn't provide a lot to do.
Syberia 3 manages to squander all the series' charm with a low-stakes plot, clunky gameplay, and a number of distracting bugs. It is playable, but severely lacking in entertainment value.
The visuals may be nice, but the core experience is dull, streamlined, and hard to follow—if you can even get past the scores of crashes and glitches that make it a challenge just to start the game.
Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight borrows a lot of its elements from other game series, but does so in a manner that is still fun, effective, and sometimes quite beautiful.
Snipperclips provides seemingly endless fun due to its design ingenuity and replayability. It's a cute and charming "fun for the whole family" game that actually is fun for the whole family.
Alwa's Awakening makes a number of questionable choices with its slow gameplay mechanics, but the core experience provides fun and challenging platforming and magic abilities.
Circles offers little more than an hour of solid fun, but that hour is full of excellent, smooth gameplay.
She Remembered Caterpillars is a game of impeccable design and gorgeous art, with almost no missteps to speak of. With all the games to choose from these days, don't let this one slip by.
I cannot even begin to fathom the design philosophies that went into Woodle Tree 2: Worlds. From the bottom up, everything is a complete mess.
Repetitive level formatting is a curse many roguelites have to contend with to some degree, but it rarely strikes as soon as the one hour mark
In some ways, Lovely Planet Arcade is more of a puzzle game than an action shooter, in the strictest sense
Particularly smart games will normally reward you for exploring every nook and cranny, but here there's nothing to find
Once you do open up the puzzle routes, Zero Time Dilemma becomes a well-blended avalanche of slick cinematics and brain-teasing escapes for the next 20 hours
Those minor faults aside, Mecha Ritz: Steel Rondo is a wonderful little game. The pixel art is strong, wiry, and grainy. The FM Synth soundtrack creates an effect like watching an 80s action movie on a dusty VHS cassette. The cherry on top is fast-paced dodge-and-destroy gameplay against a rogues gallery of killer robots. Now, if only somebody could explain to me what’s up with all of the coffee references.
Mastering other games tends to be a matter of simple pattern recognition or savviness to the mechanics, but mastering Star Fox Zero is more like taming a wild animal: once you have it, you have it, and it's all a cruise from there