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.
LEGO City Undercover is a slap-happy LEGO GTA. This 2017 remaster of the 2014 Wii U exclusive now introduces the originally absent co-op play, while also jumping onto the Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. Easily my favorite LEGO game in years.
A buddy-cop duo, a gypsy-cursed clown, and a hopeful video game developer walk into a reboot of Maniac Mansion. Jokes ensue. Thimbleweed Park's sense of humor works best if you can easily laugh at easy laughs. It's a great throwback, but I don't expect today's adventure games to borrow much from this lovingly refurbished template. You don't have to be a Gen X'er to appreciate it, but it wouldn't hurt.
Torment looks like a future-fantasy Lord of the Rings, plays like a collection of extreme short fiction, and emerges as the most alien world I've discovered in decades. Be ready for the narrative equivalent of combat fatigue. But if you’re in the mood for a complex world operating under a complex moral system, then it’s worth examining Numenera's overriding question: "What does one life matter?"
Divide doesn’t excite, doesn’t surprise, doesn’t reach out, and doesn’t look in. It tests my patience, wastes your time, and can’t keep its eyes on the prize. The cool architecture is basically copy-pasted to death. And the gameplay, which is thankfully short on bullets, is still rehashed ad infinitum. It's a twin-stick shooter that removed the gunplay but replaced it with little more than checkpoints and crate scrounging. It often feels like there’s no end in sight.
Shen’s Last Gift should add Engineer Lily Shen as a permanent squad member, but the new robot soldiers aren’t bad. The mission running up The Lost Towers is a dangerous scenario at a breakneck pace, putting your soldiers in a whole lot of harm’s way, and putting your tactical faculties to the test.
Everybody's gone to some kind of rapture in Small Radios Big Televisions. It's a rapture devoid of physical labor or mental exertion, but one of technological transcendence. It's a game of sensible puzzles, though a few still stumped me. It's a game owning its simple art style, but assembles itself in broad strokes with bold geometry. And it's a game of meditative musicality, though willing to occasionally strip down my senses or hit rewind on my complacent ears. Small Radios Big Televisions is short, but it takes you deeper, once you stop working so hard for it.
How does Skyrim Special Edition fare in a post-Skyrim world? Conceptually: Not bad. Technically: It could use work. The game should've cleaned up some more of its long-standing "Bethesda jank." But the rugged plains, the jagged peaks, and the deep forests of Skyrim are still a sight to behold. These stories, and finding your place in them, is still worth the price of admission.
If you can take punishment as well as you can dish it out, then XCOM 2 strikes the right balance. Its tactics are hardlined, its urgency is persistent, and it will wear you down even as it builds you up. A beautiful, brutal beast of a tactics game. But do what you can to clean up these graphical and gameplay hitches, Firaxis; this game deserves it.
Nuka-World is a monument to the raider aesthetic, poor life decisions and sugary soda-induced diabetes. You'll need a higher-than-normal glitch tolerance. But if you’re willing to assume a raider's principles for good, then you’ll want the uncompromising, combat-heavy lifestyle that Nuka-World provides.
There’s a reason why Dear Esther spawned the “walking simulator” genre. It was the first, and is still one of the best, exploration games you can play. On your second playthrough, however, the directors commentary is why you're really here.
This is a game that will still be talked about five years from now—even 10 years from now. Inside was pretty much three hours of me shaking my head, clutching my chest, and realizing every few minutes that my mouth was hanging wide open. It’s an analog science-fiction thriller, and so good that it’s impossible to improve upon. It’ll get right inside you.
The moral of this story is: No man is an island—not even Sean Murray and his buggy mathematical superformula. No Man's Sky is an ironically small game, but it has a big, beating heart at its center, even when the procedural generation and the sometimes narrow-scoped world building tries to hide it.
Always fun to watch, sometimes tedious to play alone. Star Wars and LEGO solidify their meaningful relationship once again. The developers just need to address a terrible save-game system, and need to clean up some of the bugs forcing reloads. But the LEGO video game formula is still the LEGO video game formula. Just be prepared to still be left wondering "What do I do now?" from time to time.
A lot of things can behave badly in prison, and I'm not just talking about the prisoners. But Prison Architect told me an engrossing story—and taught me a thing or two—with its tutorial and design.
Mech Land Assault is not here to make friends. This piece of DLC is made up of some of the most fun—and some of the least fun—you’ll have in Just Cause 3. It’s harder to get your hands on a mech than it should be, but it’s a power trip every time you do.
Far Harbor sits somewhere between a San Francisco noir and a Stephen King thriller. There are things lurking in the fog that you've never seen before. And warring factions fight for both the fog's preservation and eradication. And see if you can stay on task long enough to find the missing girl, too. Far Harbor is a neat collection of short stories in the Fallout 4 novel.
The Banner Saga 2 is like moving through a still-life painting of swords and spears and ice and hunger. A few thoughtful gameplay tweaks make things a little bit better for players, and a whole lot worse for characters. Now I've got to see how this thing ends. Get here now, Banner Saga 3.