No More Heroes III should be played, if for no other reason than it could have been made by nobody else.
There are, of course, multiple endings, and the minutes leading up to each resolution can be flavoured with violence and revelation, or laced with deceit. The question is: Do we care?
The sequel, by definition, cannot pack the same shock, but it arrives bearing new gifts.
If you squint, you could be playing Outriders—with less satisfying shooting, granted, but with a superior world grafted onto the action.
Art of Rally is that rarest of things: the video game as essay.
Burroughs and Holland do hit on a fine idea: that, if we could peer into the other lives sharing the pavement, like idle channel surfers, we would surely register a jarring shift of genres.
Its skyline is happy to quote at length from Blade Runner, but the poetry is in short supply.
The humour is thankfully intact, but the mysteries grow as ornate and heavily threaded as Sholmes’s overcoat.
It’s not quite that I had forgotten how good it was—more that I needed the intervening years to realise it.
We begin to see our hero’s life as a line—darting and looping instead of living.
Wings of Ruin may not make a hardened hunter of you, but nor does it want to. It would rather bring you along for its own wondrous ride.
Chicory: A Colorful Tale is bound to the template set forth by The Legend of Zelda, but, rather than offering reflexive glibness, or inking the affair with irony, its critique wraps warmly around its subject, like a scarf.
It’s to Flight School Studio’s credit that, though the clashes at the game’s core left me underwhelmed, the whole thing didn’t feel hollowed-out. This is down to Annika, who sits at its heart and drives it on.
If I didn’t feel the sugary twinge of sentiment in Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, it is down to its pastel starkness.
In vesting each weapon with the click and whir of a plaything, it gives you a way into the texture of its landscape, and before long you're swept up.
The fun of playing these games, especially these days, lies in the director, Ryuchi Nishizawa, whose approach to genre was one of precise and genial disregard.
If the DNA of Biomutant sparks a re-evolution of some of the genre's dull spots, perhaps we can forgive the dull spots present here.
The game isn't above jolting you with the odd jump scare, but it's far happier to politely trouble your sleep.
Though it comes with a crop of upgrades, and its graphics have been brushed to a smooth shine, what it offers, despite its title, is the joy of the old.
Reaching the credits, I sat back, exhausted and disappointed at where the series had ended up.