As a game, Wattam is a scatterbrained assembly of goofball logic and cumbersome mechanics. As an experience, it's an earnest expression of love, affinity, and forgiveness shared by all of its moving pieces. The product is a game that elicits joy without the videogame-y demand for precooked gratification. Wattam feels like a birthday party where all of your friends actually show up.
REROLL presents Katamari Damacy with all of the strange power and dazed prestige it originally showcased in 2004. This no-frills reissue is adapted from its 2018 trip to the Switch, favoring preservation over amplification, but such is the curse of being born perfect. Katamari Damacy is on another modern platform and all is right with the cosmos.
Valfaris is a collection of conventional run 'n gun elements amplified by one of the gnarliest and most committed heavy metal aesthetics ever pledged to pixels. Ideas that belong to Valfaris may not be as well tuned as the Greatest Hits it so liberally samples, but it's easy to overlook in light of the vibrant carnage. Valfaris, in the parlance of its god, shreds.
Untitled Goose Game is a body-swapping fantasy that transforms any would-be suburban miscreant into a waddling force of mischief and destruction. Instead of putting your finger in everyone's freshly baked pie, you menace around town and devastate an ordinary Saturday afternoon. Untitled Goose Game is philosophical exercise to determine if the conniving will of a large annoying bird is either innate programming from a bored deity or a product of our broken society.
Neo Cab's malevolent tech-noir is a vehicle for exploring, and ultimately surviving, the tenacity of its passengers and the ambivalence of its driver. As a narrative adventure Neo Cab is full of conflicted, enigmatic, and sophisticated characters all vying for validation in a tortured world. As an opaque lens on social responsibility and morality, it's as distressing as it is compulsive. Neo Cab's tech-addled dystopia functions a travelogue to the pain and purpose of being human.
Remake removes Final Fantasy VII from its agonizing stasis and animates its objectives with modern sophistication. In spite of its curtailed debut, Remake creates characters out of archetypes, finds class struggle amid its surging environmentalism, and generates dynamic fiction from a familiar narrative. By honoring moments held sacred and defying what may be expected, Remake stays true to the radical and dangerous ambition that defined Final Fantasy VII.
With Ichidant-R, M2 has rescued another Sega classic from international obscurity. As either a proto-WarioWare microgame collection or an academic dive into Japan's transitional arcade scene, Ichidant-R's ecstatic presence succeeds in delighting and illuminating its audience. It's another affirmation that M2's work on the Switch's SEGA AGES' line continues to be one of the most valuable projects in gaming.
Gravity Ghost imagines the maelstrom of adolescence further complicated by its protagonist's untimely death. As an elliptic platformer, it's concerned with reaching a neat-and-tidy series of goals. As a narrative experience, it's consumed by normalizing the despondency of its cast. Gravity Ghost's kinetic novelty may have ebbed since its 2015 debut, but its resolution, which seeks idyllic healing from an enormous tragedy, still creates a powerful statement.
Lucah: Born of a Dream is a neon crash of allusive storytelling, deliberate top-down combat, and distressed, manic ambience. Its indirect means of expression risks losing the player in its internal contradictions—it's hysterical and tender, it's demanding and soothing—but tenacious pandemonium is also its objective. Lucah: Born of a Dream seeks an audience that can relate to its world without needing to make explicit sense of its features.
Instead of modernizing 1999's Resident Evil 3, Capcom has remodeled 2019's remake of Resident Evil 2. Dazzling production and clever level design are still effective fuel for the survival horror engine, but this reliance on familiar techniques dissolves any expectation of novelty and ambition. In Resident Evil 3, Jill is less the subject of a despairing escape and more the product of a regulated, orderly departure.
Carrion excels at creating realistic tentacle locomotion in the shape of a bloodthirsty nightmare. It falls behind when it requests precision from a monster only capable of blunt violence. As mad science grants sentience to raw brutality, articulation must be sacrificed for overwhelming power. It leaves Carrion as a mesmerizing concept overcommitted to its code.
Catherine remains a talented caricature of a hysterical, impossible man's moral frailty and romantic insecurity. Characters and complications introduced by Full Body, however, lack the connective tissue and social maturity to support its expanded ambition. A (now optional!) tower-climbing puzzle game fused with a supernatural infidelity meditation, even in its spiraling convolution, still survives as a provocative oddity.
Blood & Truth is a savvy and seasoned virtual reality thriller confident in its suave posture and meticulous operation. It is simultaneously a bonkers riff on outrageous action cinema where it's just as easy imagine its main character as narrowly sentient tank treads with gun-hands born to decimate cloned hordes of bungling bald men. Blood & Truth works even as its internal truth is a grinning mystery.
Ritual of the Moon's takes five minutes from twenty-eight consecutive days to consider, measure, and test the variable nature of morality. It's a cycle of play that finds a rhythm with the player's social and behavioral conflict, and questions that seemed trapped in ethereal ambience reveal honest and unexpected conclusions. My own introspection and negligence, as it turns out, have a lot in common.
Everybody's Golf VR's devotion to (and immersion in) the ambience of golf transcends its simulation-oriented peers. As I swing a virtual club with one of my physical hands on a course populated by dinosaurs, instead of feeling lost in the abstract, I'm committed to refining and improving my shot. Everybody's Golf VR's affable pragmatism and judicious feedback grant access to a sport I had always considered too distant and aloof to negotiate.
Saints Row: The Third was a sacred moment in time where lunatics reimagined the animus of an open-world crime game. It enabled players to thunderously lead a prestigious gang of miscreants and also turn themselves into a toilet. Eight years later Saints Row: The Third's glut of Content is more difficult to digest, but its outrageous ambience is (mostly) still so sweet.
Shakedown: Hawaii energizes its open-world satire with the transparent and ruthless cynicism of modern commerce. Its antihero's flagrant and invincible dishonesty would go beyond parody if it weren't kept in check by the player's underhanded complicity. I want the money numbers to go higher, too. And I'll destroy or ruin anyone in Shakedown: Hawaii's lush pixel paradise to see it through.
Jupiter & Mars presents a sincere restoration of the radical environmentalism that permeated pop culture in the early 90's. Steering its pair of dolphins through a neon post-human wonderland measures against its persistent undercurrent of despair and culpability. Jupiter & Mars lets players smile at what's left while scowling at the wreckage we're doomed to leave behind.
Katana Zero's blade isn't sharp enough to cut through its self-indulgent idiosyncrasy. Inventive action sequences that neatly divide improvisation and orchestration and a novel time-rewinding mechanic both suffer under an overwrought style miserably impressed with its own posture. Katana Zero works best when it's not auditioning to change its title to Edge Lords.
God's Trigger's grindhouse kitsch is effective because you can believe it was made by deeply inspired people who barely knew what they were doing. Blundering adrenaline has an unconscious authenticity which, by its nature, translates to a gnarly player experience. Misadventure is technically still an adventure.