As for the MFN offices, they’re full of detailed memorabilia like posters, props, and episode scripts, to the point where simply taking it all in is perhaps the game’s main appeal. There’s a tangible love and care that has gone into making the game’s equivalent of Sesame Street studios feel plausible, as well as a clear delight in warping our memory of a show that opened up a world of imagination for generations of children into something darker.
Further glimpses into this breathtaking universe are often reward enough for exploring the game’s multitude of alternate paths, but even GRIME’s level design is surprising for featuring a world much larger and more complex than it appears as you discover involved platforming challenges and optional bosses. Though GRIME emerges into an almost comically overcrowded genre, its initial familiarity and rigidity belie a world of intricate and formidable imagination.
The Forgotten City certainly doesn’t need to answer the philosophical questions that it poses before it’s allowed to examine them in a narrative context, but the ludicrously tidy conclusions to the main story and most side quests feel like substitutes for any deep engagement. The game handily transcends its mod origins and tells an ambitious and thought-provoking story, but it eventually reaches a point where it doesn’t seem sure how to end.
While these limitations have the potential for forcing nail-biting compromises, the irritating micromanagement clashes with other elements that otherwise suggest a breezier game experience, like the rudimentary combat and the way the environment practically overflows with currency and crafting material. So much of The Wild at Heart elegantly sidesteps the usual pitfalls of a resource grind that it’s disheartening whenever it devolves into busywork.
Mundaun's greatest achievement is the Swiss Alps setting that's brought to life with tangible vigor.
Hitman 3, for better and worse, splits the difference between player freedom and focused storytelling.
Though you encounter familiar configurations of levers and passageways and other obstacles, the mansion’s rooms all feel distinct, subtly interconnected in a way you likely won’t even notice unless you hit the load screen and see that every puzzle is coherently plotted on a zoomed-out side view of the mysterious mansion. Creaks hums along smoothly and pleasantly without calling attention to itself, to its sporadic detriment but mainly to its strength.
The world of the game may be small, but it brims with a weird sense of life.
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 isn't really supposed to be about anything, yet in that ambiguity it captures the specific madness of our present.
The setting of the game is the familiar stuff of science fiction, but the lens through which it's viewed is not.
The game is ambitious for its translation mechanics and its big-picture look at the evolution of culture through the ages.
As much as this is a better, more confident game than Yakuza 6, the series still has plenty of room to grow.
Spider-Man's mechanics feel fluid and satisfying enough to keep players engaged throughout the entire campaign.
It pushes back hard against the sort of easy dominance over people so common to city-building games.
Red Dead Redemption 2 never quite squares its themes with the need to give players an open-world cowboy fantasy. And outside cutscenes and conversation, most of those themes don't seem to exist.
Perhaps the greatest compliment that one can pay to A Highland Song is that—unlike any number of games that mark traversable areas in, say, white splotches or yellow paint—it doesn’t feel obviously designed. There are areas in the game that you’ll never reach on a single run, forcing you to make decisions if you want to make it to Uncle Hamish’s lighthouse on time. A Highland Song’s rendition of the Scottish Highlands scans more as a natural space than as a bespoke puzzle, a world instead of a playground. Here, the hills are alive.
That El Paso, Elsewhere works at all as a drama is a huge achievement. It tackles weighty topics with a maturity that’s rare in gaming, and which is all the more impressive given that it does so within the framework of a shooter that suggests a Halloween attraction as curated by John Woo. It’s emblematic of the game as a whole—a bizarre amalgamation of parts that shouldn’t work yet manages to form something cohesive, soulful, weird, and deeply personal.