Faced with a declaration as longing and impatient as "It's About Time," I can't help but think, Is it?
It was clearly forged from a love of Solitaire, and even its failures feel like restless, riffled expressions of that love.
In the earlier, sandy hours, that restlessness is a boon-the work of a developer surveying the drier sweeps of a genre and divining a bright pool of ideas.
Where the action comes alive is in the leaving behind of bodies altogether. Most missions involve breaking and entering, and the thrill lies in the absence of any breaking.
This is the crux of Yakuza: Like a Dragon. It is fascinated by the way that games lurk at the soft verges of life, vesting our days with dreams.
The developer, Insomniac Games, has a similar storytelling confidence to that of Naughty Dog-a natural cinematic ease, bolstered by money and technology, which gives equal weight to ground-level struggles as to those beyond the rooftops.
Sadly, that string of hours, spent clambering up towers and defogging the map, bounding across the fields in a hopeful, happy loop, was the last of the fun on offer.
Far more than the combat-whose charm ebbs away on a tide of repetition after the first few hours-the draw of The Falconeer is its suggestion that, while we may be shaped by our stories, they don't pin us down, that the mere act of living is to take flight from the past.
The developer, SIE Japan Studio, has forged a platformer from the same blend of delirium and precision that blows through Super Mario, and then filled it with fossils.
If you wish to see what your new console can do, this is the game to get; it provides the most whimper for your buck.
Where Sackboy: A big Adventure proves most winsome isn't in its play but in the surfeit of its surrounding glitter.
I would prescribe The Pathless to anyone feeling numbed and locked by our days of inanition; it's perfect if you feel your home becoming an isle on the edge of the world.
What I didn't expect from the new Call of Duty was downtime, and the suggestion, at least in the first half, that guns, while great for going in blazing, can provide just as potent a thrill when holstered.
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.
That's why, as much as Hitman III was a pleasure to play, it left me longing for the mood of the old games.
Bloober Team has summoned a rich atmosphere, under all that writing, and one or two sequences offer glimpses of a purer game.
Who would have thought that the solution to madness might be marriage?
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.
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 difficult not to be bowled over as you watch a feline chef and his staff caper through a culinary ritual of song.