Josh Wise


167 games reviewed
70.4 average score
70 median score
61.7% of games recommended
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Sep 8, 2021

At the end of The Artful Escape, all I could think of were the words he fired back at a heckler, angered by the electricity in the air: I don’t believe you.

Sep 8, 2021

True Colors is the best game in the series since Before the Storm, and it will satisfy your narrative craving for a time.

Sep 2, 2021

No More Heroes III should be played, if for no other reason than it could have been made by nobody else.

5 / 10 - 12 Minutes
Aug 30, 2021

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?

8 / 10 - Psychonauts 2
Aug 27, 2021

The sequel, by definition, cannot pack the same shock, but it arrives bearing new gifts.

Aug 23, 2021

If you squint, you could be playing Outriders—with less satisfying shooting, granted, but with a superior world grafted onto the action.

8 / 10 - art of rally
Aug 18, 2021

Art of Rally is that rarest of things: the video game as essay.

6 / 10 - Last Stop
Aug 11, 2021

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.

5 / 10 - The Ascent
Jul 31, 2021

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.

Jul 14, 2021

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.

Jul 3, 2021

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.

6 / 10 - Stonefly
Jun 24, 2021

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.

Jun 10, 2021

If I didn’t feel the sugary twinge of sentiment in Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, it is down to its pastel starkness.

Jun 8, 2021

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.

7 / 10 - BIOMUTANT
May 24, 2021

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.

8 / 10 - Mundaun
May 18, 2021

The game isn't above jolting you with the odd jump scare, but it's far happier to politely trouble your sleep.