Steven Scaife
The world the game shares with its predecessors is detailed and bizarre in equal measure.
The game ultimately seems less interested in the process of how humanity breaks down than its grisly end results.
The game not only gets you to behave like a rampaging gorilla, it forces you to adapt like one.
The Occupation's fierce commitment to immersing the player in its credible world is also the game's undoing.
The game masterfully uses its microcosm of the internet circa 1999 to examine the way society functions when it's extremely online.
The game is ambitious for its translation mechanics and its big-picture look at the evolution of culture through the ages.
The game meets the baseline level of quality we might expect from a big-budgeted joint, yet it remains a tiresome, empty experience.
The setting of the game is the familiar stuff of science fiction, but the lens through which it's viewed is not.
It fits together disparate genres so perfectly that you wonder how nobody thought to combine them sooner.
Playing Pathologic 2 feels like suffering, and it's meant to be that way.
Worse than the sheer tedium of shooting is the effect it has on the game's atmosphere.
Its repetitive tasks are like the usual arbitrary gates to reach a cutscene in a mediocre video game.
It experiments with all the weakest parts of the series and ties them together with a new, tedious progression system.
The game isn't really supposed to be about anything, yet in that ambiguity it captures the specific madness of our present.
One hopes Man of Medan will function similarly to a mediocre TV pilot for a series that only later finds its footing.
Concrete Genie is visually striking and offers a chill artistic experience, but its rote combat and by-the-numbers narrative greatly bring it down as the game progresses.
The game offers one of the most fascinating, unique, and fulfilling portrayals of the human mind.
The game is so zany and so mired in its traditional progression systems that it ceases to say anything of note.
Did you know that corporations are bad? That the drudgeries of adult life are soul-crushing?
Wattam communicates a poignant, refreshing, and all-too-necessary joy in the face of adversity.