While it's a bit slow to start, frontloaded with tutorials and exposition, and generally muddled at the outset, Rage 2 shapes up into an incredibly fun time and a natural evolution of a franchise I was worried Id had written off as a dead end.
Saints Row The Third is the same riotous good time it's always been, except now you can take it anywhere. Some performance issues hold the experience back, but with any luck the instability will get patched out.
Endlessly stylish, emotionally gripping and deceptively addictive, VA-11 HALL-A is the pure essence of a visual novel: a digital page-turner filled with unforgettable characters and set in an infectious cyberpunk noir that will live in your head for weeks after you've put the game down.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice has FromSoftware's typical brutal difficulty, but honestly that's beside the point. What matters is the thoughtful, precision-based combat, smart use of stealth, and a skill tree that's trimmed of fat. This game shows what you can do with game design if you dispense with the extraneous and focus on strong core mechanics. It's a punishing, rewarding, and beautiful experience.
Windscape has its rough edges, but the scope, ambition and heart of this one-man passion project help it to punch above its weight class. If you want a Zelda or Skyrim-style game that's great for relaxing after a long day, Windscape fits the bill nicely.
Ape Out is that rare mix of great art, sound and game design. It's a short but addictive experience with challenging, satisfying gameplay and an audiovisual style that instantly grabs your senses and doesn't let go.
Utopia 9 has a lot of good ideas but for me at least they just didn't come together in the end, and the somewhat clumsy controls just exacerbated the situation.
Are you in the mood for an absurdist yet cheerful adventure-platformer about corporate sabotage? Pikuniku just might be your game.
Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics is an accessible turn-based strategy title on the PS4, but it lacks the polish, depth and variety needed to have real staying power.
Crashlands smooths the desperate edge off of open world survival crafting, and turns it into a laid-back experience that works best in short, pick-up-and-play sessions. That said I personally found the game's persistent random humor to be pretty irritating.
The conjuring house has confusing, repetitive level design and cringe-worthy voice acting, but the scares are hard-hitting and the gameplay is a constant risk balance of exploration and self-preservation. It's not a great horror game, but it does have some great moments that make its relatively brief campaign memorable.
Call of Cthulhu sadly doesn't live up to either its literary or pen-and-paper heritage. The setting, atmosphere and some of the voice acting are impressive, but the detective gameplay is shallow and fairly linear, and any other gameplay aspects feel buggy and tacked on.
Packed with clever story surprises and dynamic, richly-constructed gameplay, The Messenger is both a tribute to and affectionate pastiche of 8 and 16-bit game design, storytelling and nostalgia. It belongs in every Switch owner's eShop library.
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is the most unique co-op game I've ever played, but it's also a brilliant idea that is well executed, and it suits the Nintendo Switch particularly well.
Like Limbo, Inside is short, mechanically addictive and emotionally haunting. It's the perfect addition to the Switch's growing library of now-portable indie hits.
Songbringer's general aesthetic and sense of humor rubbed me the wrong way, but the procedurally generated worlds are actually a lot of fun to get lost in, and the art style and music, though occasionally harsh, have a lot of love and nuance put into them.
Battle Chasers: Nightware is pretty typical as far as turn based RPGs go, but its tight combat, beautiful production values and faithfulness to its source material make it worth checking out on Switch.
The Piano could be a decent noir mystery but for now it needs a lot of work. Clunky gameplay, numerous graphical bugs and extremely poor optimization are holding this game back from telling its intriguing tale of murder and madness.
Infernium is a survival horror game with a creeping, insidious kind of logic. It gives you very little to go on and punishes nearly every wrong turn you take. If you're a fan of old school survival horror you might get into this one, but most other players will probably just get frustrated with the repetition and trial and error.
Ash of Gods is a solid strategy RPG with impressive production values for its modest budget, but its story and lore and incredibly dense and could make it difficult to get into the game's visual novel elements if the plot and setting don't immediately grab you.