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.
Complex systems are made simple, by committing their clutter to muscle memory, and play-good play, at any rate-requires that you, like Selene, ride its enigmatic loop.
Taro's approach is of a restless rarity; he swaps genres as though trying to scratch an itch.
In that image lies the appeal-and for some the off-putting twinge-of Oddworld: a bleak and black-hearted concoction, laced with snickering humour and shot through with hope.
The best time I had with the game was a ten-minute stretch that contained (a) no crashes or bugs, (b) the right level and world tier-essentially, a measure of enemy toughness-and (c) a harmony of tactics, sorcery, and gunfire.
If only Naka, staying true to form, had given the whole thing a dose of high speed; his work only holds together when it hurtles past our eyes, growing vivid with velocity.
It's difficult not to be bowled over as you watch a feline chef and his staff caper through a culinary ritual of song.
The puzzles compel, while the narrative stalls, and there is something worthy in that mismatch. I only wish that breakup at its core yielded something worth holding on to.
It's worth pointing out that few other studios have the confidence to take this approach to horror: not to jolt you with sudden frights or to ration your ammunition, but to probe and puncture your emotional ease by putting foulness in such close proximity to the childish.
Who would have thought that the solution to madness might be marriage?
Bloober Team has summoned a rich atmosphere, under all that writing, and one or two sequences offer glimpses of a purer game.
That's why, as much as Hitman III was a pleasure to play, it left me longing for the mood of the old games.
The scenes that have lodged most deeply in my memory are not those devoted to the chases, the shootouts, or the narrow squeaks, but those possessed of a quiet empathy.