Probably the quickest and most pleasant platinum trophy on the Playstation 4, Feather gives you the chance to soar like a bird. It’s a shame that it is held back by an empty world, a lack of interesting things to do beyond flight, and control glitches.
Average in every respect, and with little to reward or keep you playing, Immortal Realms Vampire Wars is a dull strategy sim, concealed behind an acceptable veneer. When the night is over and sunlight reveals its true form, it’s your will to play that’ll have dried to a husk.
13 Sentinels is the deepest of narrative experiments, with none of the form of a normal RPG, and a visceral and addictive strategic mech battler. It channels everything good about Japanese mech anime and games from the last 40 years into something beautiful, timeless and incredibly niche. A real contender for RPG of the year.
The nomadic lifestyle translates into an interesting take on the resource and management genre, that is more interesting for its ideas than its execution. However, those who fancy a more contemplative slow going game will find solid goal-oriented challenges in this journey back to the source.
An atmospheric adventure, The Coma 2 has enough puzzles and personality to keep horror fans going until Halloween. While it succeeds in gameplay, it’s story is pretty simple, and it gets repetitive by the end of it’s six hour campaign.
Ary and the Secret of Seasons is a basic my-first-adventure, that rarely lifts itself above mediocrity. Turns out having the power of seasons can’t stop the game being a disappointing rainy day in summer when you’d planned to go to the beach.
Windbound is a fun sailing game set in a world that’s different every time you play, but it’s a frustrating and punishing survival game at the same time. It’s highly likely to not be the game players expect it to be. Without any story or narrative to anchor it, the player is left adrift at sea without a raft.
Odd design choices and an unsatisfying yet incredibly demanding gameplay loop mar a game that boasts the cutest plant people in video games. A crafting and survival sim with added base-building, Drake Hollow is not compelling enough to justify the demands it makes on the player or the lack of reward even when you manage to do what it asks.
Pixels shouldn’t be this scary. Inmost is a short but very memorable metroidvania horror, full of cinematic lighting and intricate diorama-like levels. The visual storytelling is masterful, and it’s without doubt the most atmospheric 2D game since Hollow Knight. Grab some noise-cancelling headphones and turn off the lights, you’re in for a fright.
Solving puzzles while a disgruntled goblin is getting irate that you’re cheating because you’re taking off body parts, can be fun. Helheim Hassle certainly made me laugh quite a few times. But a repetitive gameplay loop, a tiresome numbers of puzzles, some frustrating controls, and a world that I felt no compulsion to explore or continue in, left me wanting a lot more than just a few lols.
With one foot in the classics, and one foot in the modern era, and a plethora of fun and witty puzzles, Willy Morgan and the Curse of Bone Town is worth your time. It’s just a shame it’s such a short amount of time.
Spitlings is a satisfying and solid puzzler, and provides plenty of challenge for those who enjoy a fun mechanic with plenty of wacky design. There are so many Spitlings to unlock, that anyone will find the game lasting them a fair amount of time.
With fights that boil down to a pointless tussle with both crabs ending up face to face with the weapons and claws almost completely unable to fit, or get any purchase, I can’t recommend Fight Club on its combat. It has no story whatsoever, lots of painful menus and the craziest floatiest physics controls. But it’s certainly a spectacle.
Ageless is a passable but uninspired platformer, that copies aspects from the best, only forgetting to copy the polished and fun gameplay. That is a tale as old as time.
Othercide does not skimp on the hours it will take to complete, and the interruption mechanics are rewarding, but without any characters, hook or impetus to work through the difficulty, it became little more than a sequence of creepy battles, that are going to be far too hard for most people to progress through.
Ghost of Tsushima is Sucker Punch’s masterpiece. With the depth of its combat, its incredible open-world design and its rich historical authenticity and cultural legacy, it’s a heady contender for the most incredible release of this console generation. It’s definitely the best samurai game ever made.
Radical Rabbit Stew does start to get a bit dull pretty fast. It seems there really is a limit to how long you can play a game where you fling rabbits around (who knew?) and it seems to be about two hours, when that trophy pops. It’s better than a mobile game, because it’s on console and you can use buttons, but please don’t go in expecting much more than that formula. Probably best played in a dozen bitesize sittings than one marathon.
Towaga Among Shadows is something of a case of missed potential. What story it has is obtuse and hidden away in lore that no one will bother using their shards for. There’s some beautiful animation and smoothly made gameplay. It’s by no means a badly made game. For a little while the two battle modes will seem fun and offer a bit of challenge. But give it a few hours, and the odd design choices, lack of variety and a story that has little to no impact, and those good mechanics crumble under the weight of things that just could have been done better. It becomes stale, and no amount of survival mode score-chasing will entice me back.
For an indie pixelart RPG, there’s a lot going on, and Crosscode is polished, ambitious and charming. Combat is a treat, although it can get very challenging with the tactical demands of some enemy types. The puzzles are up there with the classics of the genre, but there are so many of them that the temples can become a marathon slog, only to find an unbeatable boss that’s so hard it’s no longer fun.
Yes, Your Grace is a very different sort of game. It has a delightful premise, tasking you with the minutiae of running and managing a kingdom and a royal family. It keeps the mechanics of this simple, where they could so easily become unwieldy, but it lets the ramifications and narrative spin from your decisions in all sorts of interesting ways. However, it is also somewhat bleak in tone and unforgiving in its gameplay.