Not your average Lovecraftian horror.
A good time, but perhaps not a great one.
It's good to see that whip crack again.
Like a good sandwich, Carimara is satisfying.
I still don't know what the f stands for.
LEGO Voyagers is no more than it needs to be.
Another step up for China-based soulslikes.
An unusually weak venture for Remedy
Midway through my fourth game of Civ 7, I forced myself to go to bed to squeeze in a minimally appropriate amount of sleep before work. When I woke up in the morning, my first thought was that I wanted to keep building my empire, and that's when I finally knew how I felt about the game. Sid Meier's Civilization 7 is streamlined, strange, and bound to be divisive. It's also, undeniably, Sid Meier's Civilization. As ever, the series stands apart.
A truly great blend, though, can appeal to more than just its target audience. If I can sit here after finishing the game and keep smiling when I think about Voss's eccentricities or the dumbstruck look on the faces of fascists taken by surprise, I'm pretty certain that most people can smile while playing it. The Indiana Jones franchise is blockbuster action tuned to its most gleefully magnificent possibilities, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle chases that goal like there's a rolling boulder behind it. With that energy, any minor faults are easy to forgive.
More than anything, Fear the Spotlight asserts a strong future for Cozy Game Pals, a studio that could accomplish a lot if it keeps iterating. It's also a nice foray into gaming for Blumhouse, and the willingness to invest in something of its nature proves that the company could have value in this space. While Fear the Spotlight isn't a definitive horror title, it's a largely charming experience that's better now than it was before.
Although Concord is solid and polished on a basic level, it's faced with an uphill battle that it already seems to be losing. A shotgun blast approach that attempts to hit the basic notes of every hero shooter prerogative makes it harder for it to do one thing in a truly fresh way, and the casual modes would be more exciting with bigger abilities and maps with more interesting pressure points. The game's systems click in Rivalry and get the job done across the other game modes, but Concord lacks the spark necessary to light much of a flame.
Kunitsu-Gami isn't going to be for everyone, and even for those who do find it alluring, its gameplay loop might eventually start to wear thin. But it's hard not to love something this creative, especially when its seemingly disparate gameplay elements are so deftly unified with a consistent and compelling style. There might be hundreds of fluid action games with more sophisticated combos and hundreds of strategy titles with deeper mechanics, but there's only one Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, and that makes it worth a lot more than many of those games will ever be.
Simple but great gimmicks can be hard to stretch into a complete game, and SCHiM definitely struggles a bit to cross the finish line. It does cross it, though, and the inconsistent results are nonetheless charming and occasionally inspired. SCHiM is a diamond in the rough that really deserves a polish, but even without it, the sparkle can still peek through.
Rumble Club feels like a natural evolution of streamer-oriented games, with quick matches, inoffensive styling, and no real skill requirement. Everything that makes it go down easy has the side effect of making it uninteresting, sadly, and its lack of distinct appeal is compounded by a number of sticking points that become apparent all too quickly. There's no reason that Rumble Club won't work within its intended context, but for anyone seeking it out with the expectation of a memorable experience, there are far better places to look.
To return to the start, there's still a lot to say about what this game is. It's equal parts literary and mathy. It's elusive but self-aware. It's romantic, in fits. It's something best played with pen and paper, even if it doesn't seem necessary for a while. It's a story told as fantasy, history, parable, and performance. It's Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. And it could very well be the best game that comes out this year.
Crow Country might not be a new genre-defining title, as its aspirations in both scares and scale are reasonably modest. It is, however, an excellent journey into a deftly rendered setting, and it's hard to find significant fault with its intimate understanding of what makes this sort of thing tick. Crow Country is an assured love letter to the original crop of classic survival horror titles, but what really matters is that it's a delightful new entry in its own right.
The list of problems with Arashi: Castles of Sin is long, but beneath them all there's a solid experience that can be genuinely fun to play. In a market with a surplus of better options, however, it's hard to say that Arashi's limitations are worth dealing with. Arashi: Castles of Sin - Final Cut is a frustrating package of a potentially good game, and by the time things come together in a way that's exciting enough to make its sins forgivable, the credits are already rolling.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is a staggering sensory experience, and the consistent beauty of its world goes hand-in-hand with an engaging story and meaningful progress for Ubisoft's approach to open-world game design. Its weakest points are the areas where it doesn't go back to the drawing board, although repetitive elements go down more easily as part of a package that stuns in so many ways. A flight to an alien moon might never be in the cards for most of Earth's inhabitants, but Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is, and it might just be the next best thing.
Assassin's Creed Nexus VR juggles a lot as a standard-bearer for AAA VR games, and the balancing act means that it's unlikely to be exactly what any given person wants it to be. As a loyal and reasonably robust translation of a popular series, however, it smoothly avoids any critical fumble. It's easy to recommend the game for Assassin's Creed fans, and it lays a solid foundation that makes a sequel seem like a tantalizing prospect. Reworked combat could go a long way in making Assassin's Creed Nexus VR better, but the joys of stealth and daredevil exploration are enough to grant the weak points some forgiveness.