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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Automatron pays off by taking advantage of Fallout 4's pulpy, ludicrous--yet still somehow slightly dry--sense of humor. Like any good sci-fi involving robots, it exposes people's humanity and inhumanity. And it adds new toys and settlement pieces to your toolbox. It's a well-rounded piece of DLC, and introduces you to the Mechanist, one of Fallout 4's more memorable villains.
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.
Tharsis, you hate me, but I like you. Your small and meticulous craftsmanship. Your board game sensibilities. Your dancefloor rhythms thumping out the soundtrack to my cyclical death. I couldn't stop myself from voyaging (and dying on the way) to Tharsis again and again.
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.
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.
Tearaway is something like seeing Where the Wild Things Are, hobbled together with Elmer's glue, cut along dotted lines with terrible little grade school scissors, and creased with papercraft folds. It's an adventure that's big on controls, a bit weak in dialogue, and best enjoyed in smaller, bite-sized sessions. Tearaway is unusual, in every sense of the word.
Just Cause 3 gets away with more stunts and high-flying hijinks that, let's be honest, even Hollywood can't get away with much anymore. Come for the explosions, but stay for the, well, stay for even more explosions.
Chimera Squad gives XCOM something it needed a lot more of: direction. The stakes are lower, but the execution is smoother.
The family that slays together, stays together. When it comes to striking a balance between raucous gameplay and dramatic discourse, Children of Morta is an absolute gem.
I can’t say enough good things about Rebel Galaxy Outlaw. It’s a sucker punch aimed at all the bloated, morbidly obese space sims out on the market today. Yes, there’s room for them, too. But Outlaw distills the ‘90s space-combat and trading sim into a great-looking, great-playing game for a new generation.
I haven't found a more binge-worthy single-player action game this year. Control is wonderfully built, smartly written, and already dying for its season pass content.
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.
If My Little Ponies trampled a bouncy house and shot it toward Saturn, then you'd have an idea of what Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime looks like. It'll be tough to make an FTL-like more adorable than this one. The frantic one- or two-player co-op is mandatory and makes for a not-so-lonely outer space.
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.