I had an absolute bloody blast with The Quarry, and I say this knowing that it won’t be for everyone. But if you like mystery, if you like running for your life, if you like holding your breath until the beast crawls after another victim...well, you’re in for a terrifying treat.
These are simple games by today’s standards, but really, I kind of think it’s what the industry needs—light-hearted, bright, satisfying, happy-go-lucky fun. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go 100% all the things.
Congrats to the Toronto team for creating such a fun experience, and I sincerely hope that we'll be getting additional Atlas adventures in the future.
While combat could still use some fine-tuning, Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a master class in turn-of-the-century-esque exploration awe, and I hope this serves as a springboard for Lara into the next generation of gaming technology.
When everything is clicking, Onrush feels amazing, but until your skill can catch up with the insanity that's happening on-screen, I can see this being a frustrating experience for less patient gamers.
For all intents and purposes, Mark Cerny's sequel is one of the most 'gamey' video games I've played in recent memory and stands as a reminder of what I still consider to be the Golden Years of this industry. You bought a disc, you popped it in, you pressed 'Power' and damn it, you had fun.
Ninja Theory, you moved me. Hellblade's gameplay is polished, the writing is fantastic, the acting is superb, and the ending managed to make me cry. But even then, all of this pales in comparison to everything this art piece truly represents.
What Remains of Edith Finch is filled with excellent writing, striking visuals, and a significant sense of place, of people, of life's ephemeral nature and our relationship to it. And I do hope you'll play. When you're done, and while we're privileged enough to still be here, we can talk about how strange, fleeting, and frustratingly beautiful existence really is. There will be cheese, there will be wine and there will be the unfathomable reality of our own bright-but-brief short stories.
It's only through a combination of rich, collaborative, and altogether interactive elements that something like this can be born, a piece of software that shirks tedious story and plodding industry conventions in favor of pummeling sound and pure, unadulterated gameplay. In that regard, Aaero is exclusively, utterly, and unapologetically 'video game'.
I imagine there will be people who won't find this kind of flavor appealing, who might consider the game to be dated and maybe even outright pandering, but I'm not one of them.
The implementation of realistic snake physics is commendable, and may even be what snagged Snake Pass a green light in the first place, but it's also what drags down what could have otherwise been a phenomenal platforming experience.
When it really comes down to it, Troll and I would have been a truly ambitious game for any studio, let alone one as humble as Spiral House. While the team's modest size is betrayed by the game's myriad technical issues, what they've attempted here is, quite honestly, laudable.