As much as it tried my patience at times, I definitely enjoyed my time with Bendy and the Ink Machine. What seemed to start as a side project is on the way to becoming a full-blown franchise, and there's enough narrative juice here to sustain it for sure. A little more time in the oven for whatever comes next will go a long way, and with the backing of Rooster Teeth Games, perhaps that's exactly what will happen. There's a lot more here than cartoon demons popping out at you from behind corners to make you scream on your Twitch stream, and it's that ambition that makes Bendy a worthwhile game for horror junkies.
Omen of Sorrow is a solid game fueled by hardcore knowledge, a cool roster, and fascinating mechanics. I'm looking forward to seeing what's in store for its future.
What could possibly be more compelling than a heated, rank-determining battle via the Hello Kitty theme song, after all?
Déraciné is an intriguing PlayStation VR experience that definitely feels like a FromSoftware title. From its air of whimsical mystery to its hard reliance on theme rather than detail for its narrative delivery, well, I could make a Dark Souls joke here, but I figure that ship has sailed elsewhere. However, while Déraciné is worth playing and figuring out for yourself, it's hard to recommend with enthusiasm. While intriguing and mysterious, the storytelling does have fundamental issues that make the overall mystery feel unearned and the tension intangible. The player's “powers” are more scripted than play-oriented, and the play itself is bogged down in searching for objects and placing them where they need to go to move things forward. There are neat ideas here and plenty of VR-flavored awe to be had, but Déraciné won't be standing out like one may have hoped.
Death Mark is classic, Japanese, video game horror. It's essentially a collection of ghost stories, wrapped up in a mysterious package and enhanced with investigative gameplay and life or death moments that test your logic and ability to pay attention.
If I had to describe Haunted Dungeons: Hyakki Castle in one word, that word would be, “fumbly.” There's a lot of fumbling, mostly with the controls, some with the menus and UI, and some with getting around the maps with their samey walls and lack of landmarks. Real-time, horror-tinted dungeon crawling is a neat idea, and with the customization, skills, and cool monsters, there is fun to be had here. Multiple difficulty levels and post-game content also gives plenty of challenge for the genre hardcores. But this is a game that leaves me wanting more from it, but in a way that means the promise from the concept doesn't match the experience in my hands.
Ultimately Home Sweet Home is an intriguing horror experience with some neat ideas, but it doesn't seem to have the muscle to make those ideas work as well as they could. It's a short, concise experience, but it's often interrupted by frustrating trial and error challenges that interrupt the flow with frequent checkpoint loading and rewatching cutscenes. VR mode also feels half-baked, is uncomfortable to play at times, and makes those challenging moments even more cumbersome to deal with. While its atmosphere and especially sound design are high quality and quite effective at creeping you out, I more often found myself ripped back out of the experience, disappointed in the moment, and wanting more.
Warriors Orochi 4 is the latest in a long line of Musou brawlers, a new entry in its own sub-series that assumes your fandom already as a multi-series crossover. Despite its roots in historical fiction, Warriors Orochi 4 allows itself to dip into over the top, supernatural territory, using mythology as an excuse to put real-life generals and warlords into even more bizarre combat situations. Bringing the likes of Zeus and Ares into the mix only makes things more fantastical, and the combat mechanics are bumped up to scale. The ceiling on combat potential has been shattered here, and using the new tools at players' disposal can allow them to more or less combo indefinitely to their hearts' content. While the breezy, fast and simple style of Musou isn't for everybody, fans will undoubtedly have a blast pushing this one to its breaking point, should one even exist. Warriors Orochi 4 is an easy highlight in a series that has consistently improved (Dynasty Warriors 9 being an exception) over the past few years.
From the surprisingly varied and fun single player options to the customization suites that have come into their own and endless multiplayer, WWE 2K19 is a wrestling game that feels closer to how fans picture a "wrestling game" than the series has in several years. It isn't without its issues, but the efforts to keep this ship sailing are tangible here in ways I wasn't seeing in the recent past.
If you have the time and patience, Assassin's Creed: Odyssey is worth a look, if not for the meandering plot and lore, than for the history porn, the earnest humor, and the massive, mystery-filled world.
What you're really getting out of Disgaea is a lot of fact-paced, tactical gameplay, tons of grinding well beyond what you see in similar games, and quirky, off-kilter humor that will appeal to your inner irony goth. It's less remarkable now that anime is just a normal part of everyday geek culture now, but what you're looking at here is history, from when being weird was in the middle of starting to be cool, and Persona was still a grungy PS1 game nobody had heard of. Disgaea 1 Complete is a celebration of that legacy, of the game that put NIS on the map. Disgaea is so familiar to me that I'm not blown away by this release in particular, but I'm glad it exists, so that someone new can.
If you ever wondered what it would be like if Kazuma Kiryu gained like 200 lbs and fell into the Mad Max universe, well that's Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise summed up pretty neatly. On the other side of the coin, Fist of the North Star fans will have a blast tearing it up as Kenshiro, but those still hoping for a great video game adaptation of the classic manga may come away disappointed in that respect. Rather than adapting the story, Ryu ga Gotoku Studio puts its own spin on the IP, with an attempt to fit themes and characters into the irreverent Yakuza mold. It's somewhat awkward at first, as it struggles to introduce the characters and world in a compelling way, but once it leans on its strengths, it's easy to lose plenty of time with the various side activities and snappy combat. It's not quite Hokuto no Ken, but it's definitely Hokuto ga Gotoku.
All those years of effort paid off in the creation of an excellent entry in the metroidvania canon, and I hope it pays off in the form of a successful game as well. Timespinner exudes an aura of, "so much effort went into this, dang!" And making my way through it was a joy, both in terms of the look and feel of the world, the inherent appeal of filling in that map, and of course the smoothness and responsiveness of the combat.
Beyond those couple of snags, and really, those snags just remind us designing puzzles is a human effort, The Gardens Between stands out among its physics/puzzle/metaphor-driven peers. It's beautiful to look at and listen to, gratifying to solve (most of the time), and in the the end tells a simple story that's just bittersweet enough to sting your brain into thinking about your life a little.
That's about it, really! If you're looking for storytelling chops you won't find them here. Metal Max Xeno is all about angry and confused survivors screaming about dying, starving, or being horny, and how dope their tanks are, and how more bad guys need to die. It's refreshing in its earnest nature, and is actually more hopeful than nihilistic. But it is still on the simple and tropey side. Ultimately, this is a game about having a billion options dumped in front of you, and the joy of diving into that pile and making cool stuff out of it. There's lots of menu-fiddling, number-crunching, and ingredient-gathering, but at the end of that grind is comeuppance for evil, jerk murder-bots as your painstakingly-curated ordnance tears them to shreds, and it's hard to get more satisfying than that. Metal Max Xeno is a strange, janky, ugly mess of a game, but one I was glued to every minute of.
With environmental puzzle mysteries like Blind, one of the biggest hurdles is motivation. Sure, arbitrary puzzles rooms can be inherently fun, but if you're fighting an uphill battle, such as wrestling with not being able to see, there's a bit more needed to keep you going. Blind attempts this with a mystery narrative, along with giving you the stick to lean on, but the latter makes it all seem arbitrary, and the former isn't strong enough to make uncovering answers the true motivator. Blind banks a lot on, well, the blindness being the big draw, but I don't think using it as simply an extra hurdle on top of familiar puzzle-solving elements does much to elevate the experience as a whole.
Despite its problems, ends things on a high note that reminded me both why I loved the 2013 reintroduction so much and why Rise of the Tomb Raider left me wanting. It lies somewhere in-between, and I'm glad the Trinity story has concluded so we can move on to something new again.
Blade Strangers is fun for what it is, a smaller-scale fighting game with a bizarre set of crossover characters you would never expect to see in a Japanese-developed fighting game. Even the Japanese stuff that is involved is weird together, frankly. While it struggles with how simple it does or doesn't want to be, Blade Strangers has a cute vibe, an earnest sense of humor, and flashy enough gameplay that running through it with all the characters is definitely worth a few weekends in-between Evo training.
Between the fun new story, excellent new game mode, and the buckets of new loot and equipment, I can seeDestiny 2 fans having a lot less to complain about… for now.
I have my issues with Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age. It's a bit clunky when it tries to pretend it's cool like other video games. I wish I had vocations instead of skill points to play with, and it would be nice if I could get from point A to B a bit faster, or have more to do along the way. But at the same time, I found myself engrossed in the usual grind I've come to love over the years, the silly and fantastical creatures from my favorite artist, and the storytelling that met and even rattled my expectations. There's even a neat little crafting system I didn't have room to mention, secrets to find, and of course hours and hours of post-game content. If you want to go on an adventure, and I mean a real adventure that tugs on your heartstrings, makes you smile, and yells puns at you constantly, do not sleep on Dragon Quest XI.