This atmospheric Metroidvania is mechanically, emotionally, and philosophically electrifying.
More than once, as I repeatedly threw myself against Kill Knight’s considerable challenges, I suddenly felt a tear running down my face and realized that I hadn’t blinked in what felt like an eternity. It was as though I had returned to my body from some unknowable elsewhere.
Your might proves substantial enough to bend even clichés to your will. When, during a cutscene, a monster in the background looks like it’s about to get the jump on Titus, one of your buddies casually blasts it from out of the frame. The bait and switch feels like a winking admission by Space Marine 2: This is an unabashedly over-the-top ride, but it won’t stoop to boring contrivance. Your strength is too profound, your time too important, to abide that.
Over the course of Bloodless, Tomoe leads dozens, if not hundreds, of challengers to flee from her in fear. Their apparent lack of conviction—their willingness to take flight rather than die fighting—suggests a commentary on violence that the game fails to flesh out. Tomoe’s exchanges with new and old acquaintances, which transpire in sluggish scenes filled with trite dialogue, are similarly devoid of depth, texture, and specificity. Bloodless clearly has something to say about the cataclysmic potential of power and the cycles of suffering it locks people into, but by making its world feel universal—like it could be anywhere—it ends up nowhere at all.
But while the game at times demands a level of execution that its design doesn’t always facilitate, its frustrations are fleeting. They resemble the towering skeleton that stomps through its world—revealing themselves in bursts but largely sticking to the darkness, denting but not fully cracking the beauty, coziness, and wondrous sense of atmosphere that surround them.
Aletheia also gradually attains a suite of powers that allow you to reach previously inaccessible areas, but backtracking grows tedious due to the barebones map and the limitations of fast travel. You can only teleport to and from a handful of locations, meaning that you often need to embark on odysseys to use warp spots to get elsewhere. This tedium leads the game’s Metroidvania elements to feel shoehorned in rather than integral to its design. Though it has the bones of a winning action platformer, Gestalt: Steam & Cinder contorts them in submission to generic norms and expectations. The adventure becomes a chore, the fire stamped out.
The game’s quirky sensibility lends amusing irony to its critique of modern industry’s environmental destruction. Where item descriptions in the Dark Souls series and its ilk flesh out the esoteric lore of their settings, here they offer a crab’s-eye view of life on the surface. “Residue of a painful venom lines the outside of this armor,” reads the blurb about the nozzle of a hot sauce bottle that Kril can equip as a shell. As Another Crab’s Treasure conjures a universe in which the vast horde of trash sunk carelessly into the sea might have its benefits, the game pokes countless holes in its fantasy, letting reality flood in: No amount of make-believe can render humankind’s impact on the Earth anything but poisonous.
The bundled games evoke the wonderful art styles and writing of their source material, but their gameplay isn't as consistently successful.
SteamWorld Quest, a card-based RPG, is an all-around pleasure: challenging but not too complicated, accessible but not too simple, fun at every point.
Katana ZERO, a time-warping samurai escapade, boasts stunning visuals, music, mechanics, and writing. It's one of 2019's best games thus far.
Skorecery has the potential to be a boisterous party game, but limited single-player options and an over-reliance on local multiplayer hold it back.
Darksiders: Warmastered Edition's new Switch release suffers from technical issues, but the action-adventure game at its core has held up.
Claybook offers an enjoyable, lighthearted atmosphere, but the game's environmental puzzles fail to stay interesting or satisfying for long.
The turn-based strategy-stealth hybrid is a rote slog that proves powerless against a foe stronger than both aliens and humans: itself.
Below Unexplored: Unlocked Edition's tricky surface lies a mesmerizing experience that manages to be frustrating, relaxing, and exciting, all at once.
The port of a 2014 tower defense to the Nintendo Switch offers lots of fun and replay value, but suffers from some outdated design choices.
Travis Strikes Again marks a glorious return for Suda51's No More Heroes series, melding myriad genres to create a totally wild arcade experience.