Jake Hill
One can hope that future expansions are so creative, and continue to allow players to create their own world to fill with their own little slices of suburbia.
The Banner Saga 3 is a proud continuation of the games that came before it.
If you're looking for a challenging diversion, Enlightenment could be the absorbing game you need. If you're looking for something more relaxing or polished, you're more likely to encounter horror than wonder in the Ark.
The thing is, flying is hard. Getting serious air is a challenge, and when you hit the ground, the singing stops. But I didn’t want it too. I wanted to hear the beautiful improvised music. And so I wanted to fly. And therein lies the brilliance of The King’s Bird. Through its minimalist silhouettes, you get a cliched tale of oppression and freedom. The simple haunting music sets a tone. Platformers are one of the oldest genres of video games, and while this one controls differently, it is still a classical platformer at heart. But you want to hear the protagonist sing. You want to fly. She wants to fly. And in video games, there’s nothing more powerful than the moment that the player and the character’s desires become one.
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In the smaller moments, Kingmaker captures the tabletop experience better than any single player game I've ever played.
If you need to scratch that survivor game itch, 60 Parsecs will definitely do you good, but it's not going to blow any minds.
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As a one-time story experience, The Last Broadcast succeeds and then some.
Its gameplay is familiar and fun, but its world is like nothing you’ve ever seen. You have to work to see it all, and you’ll want to.
After discussing it for a few minutes, I feel like I want to thank you all for coming to my TED talk. That’s because it’s so impressionistic, existential, philosophical … all the things people invoke when they want to convince you that video games can be art. But Everything has a leg up on a lot of those art-installation-as-games. Everything is also a lot of fun!
I’m an easy mark for a new Civilization, but I have no fear in saying that Gathering Storm is one of the most creative and significant expansions a Civilization game has ever received.
Caveblazers is a sharply put together game. If I had received it as a birthday present for my Gameboy in the late 90s, I would have played it on every long car ride.
Despite being loads more forgiving than the first brutal installment, Sunless Skies is wicked hard.
There’s a lot to unpack there, right? But it’s about something fundamental to gaming. A transcendentally beautiful or superlatively fun game can overcome storytelling weaknesses.
For the real gamers out there, the ones who want to consider the whole history of the medium, this collection is a wonderful gift. To people looking for classic design, for inspiration, for history, there’s a lot to like here.
This is the exact lack of interaction that makes games bad. This is the recipe for failure, and in the future, it should be used as a road map of precisely what not to do in game design.
The slowness of the growth and the beauty of the end result, and the intervening moments, make Green Planet a wonderful game to unwind and relax. But the challenge means you’ll also be engaged. It would have been easy to add a few new projects to the research track and call it a day, but the terraforming is so integrated into the existing game, you’ll constantly find yourself marveling at the design.
For good and bad, Octopath Traveler evokes the games of the past, and for a lot of us, we miss the bad as much as we do the good.