Vane exists in an enormously stressed and jagged world of puzzle-platforming. Simply moving around feels rough and unfinished, and that's not always on purpose. If only Friend & Foe had more time to incubate its creation.
As a singular purchase, Flashpoint appears rather modest on the surface. But taken as a whole, it would be impossible for me to go back to a pre-Flashpoint campaign.
Beautiful 2D platformers are practically a meme when it comes to indie game development, but Gris still rises above its contemporaries. Artful in both its watercolor design and broad-strokes storytelling, Gris is a gentle reminder that good puzzle platformers can make you feel smart without smarting, and that being succinct is not a bad thing, especially in the current culture of exhausted replayability.
Tetris Effect is the most optimistic game of the year. Plus, nobody saw it coming. It shouldn't be possible to say this, but this is the best Tetris has been in decades.
Sir Hans Capon's DLC could've been chopped up and interwoven into the vanilla game's numerous subplots, but it was much more fun, this way, taking it in as a whole. It's a romantic comedy with a bloody start, but that's medieval Europe for you. I was only disappointed the DLC starts off with a mission structure that's a little too tried-and-true for Kingdom Come.
Original Sin 2 shakes your hand a little too hard when you first meet. It needs to relax until you get to know it better. It's endlessly surprising, with characters that lose their stiffness over time, in dialogues and battle logs that piece together a dangerous, thoughtful world. It's tough. But the reward is that you get tougher, too. It still needs to clean up some of its tactical sloppiness, though. Having a ton of options in battle is only good if its rules are fair and make sense.
Leaving my mark on the map, and contributing to the history and legacy of a town once long gone, From the Ashes adds a meaningful economic layer whose influence stretches across the entire map.
If you've played the first two, The Banner Saga 3 is impossible to ignore. In this final chapter, everything is broken and mended and broken again. I was never sure if there would be--or even could be--any kind of happily ever after to this massive mythology Stoic Studios has built.
This is a transhumanism story for the android set. I devoured every chapter of these artificial intelligences shedding their artifice. And I learned that being human is filled with daily acts of self-sacrifice.
Monitoring everything from your debits and credits to your hit points and heat levels, BattleTech is brutal, fragile, smart, and struggling a little under its own weight. It has more heart than you're expecting. Couldn't stop playing.
Dressed as a lion-wrapped Roman or a hawk-headed god of Egypt, season one takes Bayek above and beyond the events of Origins. Building up the Brotherhood in the Sinai Peninsula is solid and unsurprising, while becoming a god killer in eternity is surreal and unexpected. The season goes from monotonous to magnificent and back again in several imaginative leaps.
Kingdom Come is a walking simulator merged with an RPG that takes you down a Wikipedia black hole. Accepting its historicity and deciphering its cerebral game systems is like completing a religious rite.
Shadow of the Colossus is one for the books. Twelve years later, it's still a powerful, immutable, singular experience. A masterwork of the genre.
Origins was worth taking the year off. Egypt will be hard to top as a location. The series' dry, ironic, corporate sense of humor is still dull. But nobody can beat Assassin's Creed's architectural history lessons, even if you're still just stabbing folks and jumping out the window while you're sightseeing the entire timeline.
With a particle-heavy 8-bit paintbrush, Songbringer is a glam metal Zelda. Songbringer doesn't try to finish what Hyper Light Drifter started; Songbringer has heart of its own. It's easy to like but hard to love.
While groovy from its soundtrack to its illustrated style, Serial Cleaner's ‘70s ‘stache and sharply defined stealth-action is often tiring. I'd rather have somebody else clean this up.
Pyre teaches you to fight tirelessly for your freedom, but to question the definition of that freedom as well. I like the sports-combat a little more each time I play. And Pyre fetishizes the tools of the writer's trade, but more importantly focuses on the art and dialogue of good storytelling.
Psych Ward can feel small, but its intent is to draw you back in to the even smaller lives of the criminally insane. Likewise, you'll have to make small but important design shifts that require more attention than your regular prison wings. But if you build with purpose and intent, you just might be able to reform the toughest customers introduced to Prison Architect yet.
Jupiter's Forge is an intimidating economic battleground. That's entirely intentional. Don't come here waving your old strategies around; they won't gain much traction. Only veterans need apply to this meaty, punishing DLC.
The Long Journey Home is a roguelike sci-fi survival simulator fueled on hope and hopelessness. Bring them home, commander. But be ready to die a hundred deaths before that ever happens.