The most impressive thing about the game is still the strength and specificity of its vision.
The world of the game may be small, but it brims with a weird sense of life.
The game reveals its brilliance by constantly and subtly reconfiguring the emotions behind erasure.
There's considerable joy to poking at the edges of its ingenious interlocking systems to see what happens.
For Cloudpunk, hardship is merely the wallpaper for a pretty yet thinly conceived gaming experience.
After a while, the game inadvertently becomes about the cost and upkeep of civilization.
The game offers a refreshing focus on its sense of place rather than ease of play.
There's something primal and thrilling to id Software's further embrace of video-gamey conventions.
The game is a charming concoction full of endearing characters and set to a wondrous soundtrack.
The game captures place and feeling through honing in on things that are singular, small, and warm.
Its point-and-click adventure elements eventually feel alternately rudimentary and more than a little tedious.
Kentucky Route Zero is about America in a way few games aspire to be and fewer still succeed at.
The game's themes feel like facile wallpaper over mechanics that feed into the ideas being critiqued.
Wattam communicates a poignant, refreshing, and all-too-necessary joy in the face of adversity.
Did you know that corporations are bad? That the drudgeries of adult life are soul-crushing?
The game is so zany and so mired in its traditional progression systems that it ceases to say anything of note.
The game offers one of the most fascinating, unique, and fulfilling portrayals of the human mind.
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.
One hopes Man of Medan will function similarly to a mediocre TV pilot for a series that only later finds its footing.
The game isn't really supposed to be about anything, yet in that ambiguity it captures the specific madness of our present.