The Magic Circle is a playable videogame about a broken videogame made by people who aren't good at making videogames. While you're busy sorting between layers of candid reality and marginal fiction, The Magic Circle swiftly installs an impressive degree of agency behind its narrative and mechanics. It's not exactly commentary or criticism, but a relatable demonstration of game development hell and, ironically, one that's fun to engage as an untethered party.
Most sports would probably be better if human participants were replaced with cars. While this thesis is typically reserved for late night conversations with close friends, Psyonix accepted it as a genuine assignment and produced Rocket League. It's soccer with cars—and the execution of this idea has no business being as good as the fantasy.
Onechanbara Z2: Chaos aims to be a garish, hyper-sensory accelerant of calculated brawling and provocative identity. It hits some of its marks—a generous frame-rate and a firm commitment to kitsch melodrama among them—but it's closer to the edges boredom and mediocrity. For a game meant to elicit a range of responses, all that it leaves the player is trite indifference.
As a successor to an admired name from a bygone era, Deception IV: The Nightmare Princess falls short of accrued expectations. As a means of introducing a different style of game to a different time and place, Deception IV is an exemplar of viable defiance against rote standards. Your position determines Deception IV's place—a setting made homelier through The Nightmare Princess' abundance of extra content—but it doesn't impede its lack of conformity. There's nothing like Deception IV, except, of course, decade-old Deception games.
As a commemoration of style and simplicity, Spectra speaks in the dearth of speedy arcade racers. Regrettably, Spectra's ambition, like its appeal, doesn't stretch beyond austere representation.
Traverser is keen to demonstrate that a submission to genre norms isn't an admission of exhausted objectives. Physics puzzles, light stealth, passable platforming, and a decent run of boss fights—it's all well covered ground, but Traverser's endearing characters and engaging fiction make it easy to pass through.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is an exhibition of lessons learned not only from CD Projeckt RED's past work, but also from a spectrum of open-world and role-playing contemporaries. It's expected for games of this nature to excel at taking your time away. What's most impressive about The Witcher 3 is that rarely seems to waste it.
The concept of The Escapists—make friends, make enemies, make crazy tools, and escape from prison through any applicable deviancy—is easy to fall in love with. Reality, positioning The Escapists as a beautiful machine undermined by the gears assigned to power it, is more cruel.
Sunset survives as the antithesis of contemporary narrative construction, but lacks the confidence and vitality to thrive inside of its admirable periphery. It's all support with little regard for structure.
Neon Struct conceals a modern society engulfed in menacing surveillance programs by drenching itself in the soothing aura of 1985's neon nightlife. It's an unexpected dichotomy—tranquility isn't the sort of evocation expected of extremely topical police-state paranoia—but one that Neon Struct dispenses with plausible seeds of insurrection. Colorful symmetry is the expected outcome, but Neon Struct surprises with plenty of shades of grey, too.
Among contemporary Ys releases and remakes—Seven, The Oath in Felghana, and Memories of Celceta—The Ark of Napishtim is more reliant on support provided by its adopted hardware. Unfortunately its tangled journey to the personal computer cost as many features as it gained, leaving The Ark of Napishtim as little more than a curious architect of the Ys games that followed.
Truth may be the driving force of any revenge tale, but whether Westerado's truth is fabricated, earned, implied, or rejected is left to the player. You can practically do whatever you want, and, rather than damn the consequences, Westerado makes it easier to embrace them.
The will to power seems incongruous with impulsive action, but it's through this passage of devilish irony that Crypt of the NecroDancer thrives. It's the acquired and applied knowledge of a roguelike against the demanding drive of a rhythm game, and yet Crypt of the NecroDancer escapes the gaze of a simple curiosity and leaps to an ideal hybrid of two disparate genres.
Can you be angry at a game that examines frustration? Slow Down, Bull explores the aggressive relationship between creative inhibition and self-expression—and completely stresses the player out in the process. That's (probably) the point, but Slow Down, Bull may be a little too sharp to handle without an informed sense of patience.
Combining the maddening and dedicated labyrinths of Etrian Odyssey with Mystery Dungeon's ode to indifferent but committed variability would seem to be the videogame equivalent of pushing an immovable object against an unstoppable force. It's an attractive paradox, and, rather than explode on contact, both series' unique strengths coalesce into a grueling exploration of applied skill and tough love.
With aggression as its invitation, Bloodborne invokes a calculated shift in Souls parlance. Its aim isn't necessarily a course correction, but rather a Y-axis slant into an alternative series of objectives. Sacrificed are a few degrees of personal customization, only to be replaced by a renewed sense of distress and wonder. Bloodborne's demanding novelty, even with its unrepentant focus, feels built to last.
Ori and the Blind Forest imparts a beautiful and intricate framework of the platforming and progression that came to define latter day Castlevania and Metroid titles, but it can't muster the same technical and design prowess to fuel its own ideas. This leaves Ori as an adequate model of its revered genre, just short of the execution and innovation that could have made it exemplary.
Peers in seemingly disparate genres have assumed mastery over impulsive tests of skill, the strategic obliteration of unreliable architecture, and a judicious regard for practical engineering, but none have been arranged together as uniform and effective as ScreamRide. For a game so persistently engrossed in outlandish destruction, its accompanying structure is surprisingly sound.
Sunless Sea stresses a fondness for resource management, vaguely turn-based combat, roguelike principles of calculated disposability, and basic role-playing. All of this builds to a confident level of intimidation – it can require an exceptional amount of time to procure the particular nature of Sunless Sea's identity and intentions – but not without a certain indelible magnetism. Making sense of Sunless Sea's complexity just seems to be one of its underlying challenges.
The impartial reality of childhood promises tragedy is treated with same innocence as prosperity. We're better equipped to learn from mistakes than act on advice, a phase of humanity Gravity Ghost both indulges and exposes to its own limitations. Expressed as a product, Gravity Ghost is an inventive platformer with a precarious and affecting narrative. Absorbed as an experience, Gravity Ghost makes a better case for the union of interactivity and storytelling.