In the end, Gotham Knights is, like the studio’s earlier contribution to the saga, Batman: Arkham Origins, a decent game haunted by the notion of not being the main event.
Most video games that model themselves on H.R. Giger's biomechanical monstrosities are purely aesthetic. Scorn wears its influences not on its sleeves, but inside them; a mass of ooze and darkness and gnarly, desiccated things; a grimly singular puzzle, but perhaps one that didn't need the combat to deliver its horrors home.
They say you can't go home again, and there are few wells more daunting to return to than Monkey Island. But with Gilbert at the helm and Grossman by his side, Return to Monkey Island really is the full monkey.
In a medium preoccupied with guns and bombs and violent, power-fantasy notions of heroism, Gerda: A Flame in Winter treads a quieter path through its World War II setting, and is perhaps all the more powerful for it.
The Last of Us Part I is a beautiful thing to behold, honouring your recollection by surpassing it.
Sam Barlow's Immortality switches digital footage for celluloid film, and it's a better fit. His fixation with scrambled narratives has found its natural home, not in the realm of computers, those ghost-free machines, but here, on coils of vulnerable tape.
Indeed, there remains about Saints Row the air of a slightly desperate brainstorming session.
This is where Stray succeeds. It offers us delectable opportunities to act out the behaviour that so bewilders us, in very celebration of that bewilderment.
Far more damning is the fact that The Quarry, though happily thronged with beasts, is barren of scares.
Not that this is something that has to be endured. The underworld may be outglowed by the freaky fogs above, but so what?
There just isn’t enough juice in the combat, the cover shooting, or the endless hoovering of collectibles.
What saves Norco is that the visions on offer belong as much to the imagined as the troublingly real.
You can sense, in Weird West, a developer both returning to his obsessions and toiling on a fresh frontier.
And yet, despite its obvious muses, Tunic manages to rise above mere flattery, by paying deeper homage to the medium itself.
Most potent of all, there is a strain of urban fear running through its design—not of monsters but of the city itself as an isolating entity, rendering you unreachable.
Polyphony has delivered an airtight flight from the everyday, rich in escape yet rooted in anything but fantasy.
If only Dalcò, rather than honouring his heroine by smothering her search for truth in confounding gloom, had abided by her love of illumination.
There are no other dynamics quite like it in games; they acquaint us with an array of miseries and charge us money for the privilege.
With Horizon Forbidden West, Guerilla is armed with the grunt of the PlayStation 5, and we get not just a catalogue of alluring tones but a richer palette of ideas.
The coup of Sifu is that this process mirrors that of the hero; I was continually tempted to ditch my progress and start afresh, furnished with new knowledge at the expense of a little more life.