Little Nightmares II is a delightful follow-up to developer Tarsier's 2017 horror platformer, but it's sometimes weighed down by gameplay frustrations and inaccessibility.
Mundaun is a great horror adventure game in a gorgeous hand-drawn world.
Doom Eternal: The Ancient Gods Part 2 is a notable step up from the game's previous DLC.
It Takes Two is a fantastically creative co-op game that nails every new concept it introduces.
Before Your Eyes is a smart and moving first-person looker where your eyes are in control.
The Famicom Detective Club games show their age, but The Missing Heir still packs a twisty, Agatha Christie punch.
It almost feels like the ending gets further away the closer you get to it. Maybe that's fitting for a game about time travel. Scarlet Nexus' strange structure has somehow bent the laws governing time to its will.
The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles tells one slow, cohesive story that builds to a stellar payoff.
12 Minutes is a point-and-click adventure in a clockwork world that's as expertly crafted as a Swiss watch.
The Big Con is a unique take on video game nostalgia that takes players to the '90s, but not the video game '90s.
Rock opera and space opera meet for some artful escapism.
Solar Ash is an exhilarating action-adventure game with strong puzzles and flashy boss fights.
This is a small project, but it packs in its share of indelible images. Aperture Desk Job confirms that, even when working on a limited scale, Valve is still the best in the biz at plopping you down in the middle of a well-realized sci-fi world and conjuring up a host of imaginative sights before your wide, unblinking eyes.
Still, Who Pressed Mute On Uncle Marcus? is an enjoyable and sometimes funny yarn, with a strong script, solid performances, and an intriguing central mystery. It doesn't push the FMV genre forward in any meaningful ways like Sam Barlow's Her Story and Telling Lies did, and it could use a better log to keep track of which lines of questioning you've already pursued. But, it's an enjoyable genre exercise that takes a dull experience we're all familiar with after two years of a pandemic, and somehow makes it fun again.
Though this is the weakest map in the Hitman 3 lineup — excluding, maybe, the experimental train level, Carpathian Mountains — it’s still a Hitman level, i.e. pretty good. It doesn’t hit the standard IO Interactive has set for itself (and it will be a shame if this is the last map Hitman 3 gets), but that still makes it more interesting and worthy of exploration than the vast majority of video game levels I've played this year. IO is playing with interesting ideas, but this iteration just isn't there yet.
Immortality feels like a logical endpoint for the last seven years of Barlow's work. Though his cast has expanded to include a full Smash Bros. roster's worth of characters, and the script has expanded to include three full movies with contributions from several writers, it feels like he has ended up, basically, where he started. Like Her Story, Immortality is really about one woman. As in Her Story, she may not be who you think she is.
It's a shame that The Callisto Protocol is so uninteresting at its core. Though it looks gorgeous on the surface, a dozen hours of nothing special can have a clarifying effect.
Once you do find the paths you need to take, the story is over before it ever got going. The game's opening makes it feel like your character is embarking on a quest, but that journey ends after one stop. In that way, Season is structured like spring. You barely realize it's here before it's already gone.
Despite its flaws, Scars Above's engaging combat and expansive toolkit keep it interesting for its entire 10-hour campaign. Though its world is gray and the story leading you through its levels is a let down, the moment-to-moment gameplay makes the journey worth taking. This space adventure isn't the final frontier of third-person action games, but it manages to offer roughly the same thrills as a pretty good SyFy Original movie. It isn't the cutting edge, but it's sharp in its own right.
What I find most remarkable about Sea of Stars is that, despite not caring all that much about its characters, the gameplay was good enough that I was invested throughout. Managing the meters of each battle, and exploring the colorful landscapes and dungeons that connect them, is so entertaining that my quibbles about other aspects couldn't bring the experience down. The story isn't especially compelling, but it perfectly serves the purpose it needs to: getting you from the fun of A to the fun of B without any real hiccups in between. Howard Hawks once said that a movie needs "three good scenes and no bad ones" to be great. That's what Sea of Stars has going for it. Nothing that'll bother you too much, and plenty of good.