The Quarry may have a fairly predictable plot, but the horror tale gets help up by its all-star cast of veteran actors and up-and-coming performers. They help imbue decisions with both a sense of meaning and weight, so that making a choice provides all the front-seat fun of your favorite horror flick. The game rewards clever reasoning and gathering information for satisfying gameplay, which is only occasionally hindered by bugs and a rushed final act.
Frightence has some good ideas behind it and builds a creepy ambience around its eerie apartment building, but technical, durational, and gameplay limitations plague it alongside a scarce amount of content.
The Forgotten City boasts a rich gameplay experience that lives up to the ingenuity of its clever premise. As a role-playing choice-based mystery, the game offers a compelling narrative with some engaging existential questions at its center. With four distinct endings, it gives players a decent enough amount of leeway for approaching moral quandaries. And as a way of both solving puzzles and fixing mistakes, the time travel mechanic is worth its weight in… some sort of precious transition metal.
With new stories, secrets, soundtracks, Sayori snacks, and so much more, Doki Doki Literature Club Plus proves the definitive way to experience an already great game.
Confession time, I've never fully played the original Final Fantasy VII. Yet Final Fantasy VII Remake kept me engaged through inventive combat, great world-building, and an approach to narrative that made me care about these characters that most players probably grew fond of over 20 years ago. Midgar is a delight to visit in all of its fully realized glory, with tons of areas to explore and even more things to do in it. In finding the balance between tradition and innovation, the game walks a delicate line. While it sometimes stumbles, it otherwise pulls it off elegantly.
Layers of Fear 2 provides an atmospheric horror story that uses scares to its advantage. Despite some buggy mechanics, the game contains beautiful and haunting visuals, varied gameplay, and satisfying plot elements incorporating classic films.
While it doesn't quite live up to the ridiculous levels of hype set out for it, “Kingdom Hearts 3” delivers satisfying resolutions to a long story. Most importantly, it's an incredibly fun game with a wide variety of activities to take part in and beautiful Disney worlds to explore.
Call of Cthulhu proves that Lovecraftian horror is still alive, as the role-playing game has players investigate mysterious events on their own terms through an interactive adventure. The story is creepy, unsettling, and fascinating to the point that it sucks you in and pulls you under. Despite some minor gameplay and design hiccups, Call of Cthulhu is an atmospheric mystery game worthy of H.P. Lovecraft himself.