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.
It experiments with all the weakest parts of the series and ties them together with a new, tedious progression system.
Its repetitive tasks are like the usual arbitrary gates to reach a cutscene in a mediocre video game.
Worse than the sheer tedium of shooting is the effect it has on the game's atmosphere.
Playing Pathologic 2 feels like suffering, and it's meant to be that way.
It fits together disparate genres so perfectly that you wonder how nobody thought to combine them sooner.
The setting of the game is the familiar stuff of science fiction, but the lens through which it's viewed is not.