In just about any other game, even a single boss fight that displayed this level of carefully detailed lifelikeness would count as a major highlight. But in the context of Monster Hunter Wilds, the examples above can almost feel unremarkable, because—as in much of this series—the entire roster of creatures is suffused with the same level of care, detail, and life.
It’s easy to imagine another game in this same vein that sharpens things up slightly, maybe with a more urgent main story or a more engrossing setting. But as is, these minor shortcomings can’t dull the fundamental RPG hooks that make Avowed sing as well as it does.
More than its predecessor, Starward Vector is concerned with the relationship between the human soul (as one character warmly and plainly puts it) and its body, even and especially when that body doesn’t look or function how it’s expected to. More broadly, it’s about being a misfit in a world filled with other misfits and figuring out how to work together anyway.
This sequence is surprising, creative, and, most importantly, unambiguously hilarious. And someone on the Acquire development team clearly knew that they were on to something with it, as the game heroically stretches the joke out for about 10 minutes. It’s a shame, then, that the bit doesn’t last even longer. Certainly that would have given Brotherhood a chance to say something interesting about, well, brothership. It would’ve been funnier too.
The themes here are painted with a broad brush, but their refusal to get down to specifics doesn’t mean that they don’t still ring true. The game bittersweetly fixates on parenthood, as you watch Neva herself grow and outpace Alba as the seasons pass, and on the destruction of the natural world, which in turn makes it more hostile and violent. And then there’s the connective thread between the two—that even when it feels like everything is falling apart, because sometimes it literally is, the only thing you can do is keep moving.
Despite the spectacular presentation and thought-provoking story, though, there’s a nagging sense that Phoenix Springs is just a bit too vague. The game is drenched in interesting themes—the horror of immortality, the fragility of memory, the clashing of nature and technology—and yet it never seems willing to pin any of these ideas down with specifics.
You’ll occasionally come across signs bearing dreamlike musings: “the sea shells form a bridge between us,” “there is a dark shape on the horizon,” and so on. As you travel further, the wind changes direction and the evening sky shifts from orange to purple. Platforms get sparser and require leaps of faith or hope. And when you inevitably miss and Waldorf falls into the sea, he wakes up on an ice floe, surrounded by sleeping walruses, waiting to dream again. It’s the clearest example of UFO 50’s willingness to experiment paying off in something as fun to play as it is interesting conceptually, but in a crowded field, it’s far from the only one.
This continuity also deepens your connection to the world in interesting ways. Since every step Jemma takes affects everything around her, it means that she’s always moving other people in ways they find helpful or annoying. Sometimes she solves problems and other times she just breaks things. The resulting consistency and believability suggests an actual world with real problems that need solving, fulfilling the promise of Arranger’s subtitle by turning a smart, winsome puzzler into something that also feels like an adventure.
Like SteamWorld Heist, only more so, this is an eminently playable game—fun, well-paced, and finely tuned. It may be somewhat safe and at times predictable, but it avoids anything resembling a major misstep, making it an easy recommendation for fans of this genre of game.
There’s also the odd choice to render some solutions on the mystery board as cutscenes with NPCs acting out past events. These are usually a bit stiff and awkward, with characters rendered inexplicably in highlighter yellow. They seem like an effort to heighten the drama of the game’s most important moments. But in leaving less to the imagination, they instead have the opposite effect—shining too bright a light on a story that thrives in its moments of murky mystery.
The visuals are a standout in this regard too. For one, the graphic a friend makes in honor of a “date” you went on with a new classmate is so overblown (complete with doves) that it would look right at home memorializing someone’s tragically premature death. These jokes are funny, but they’re also emblematic of the way in which these kids—all of whom have their own deeply felt emotional baggage—ultimately lift each other up. It reflects a genuine and kind-hearted rejection of the kind of cynicism that’s far too often romanticized in other teen dramas.
Despite its litany of tricks, though, Animal Well is a relatively simple game at its core, with little in the way of an overarching mystery or narrative to push you along. And while the lack of long-term hooks sometimes makes the game feel a bit slight, the single-minded attention to the in-the-moment pleasure of the gameplay creates a focus that is meditative rather than expansive. Animal Well isn’t some grand adventure or sweeping artistic statement. It’s just a boatload of tiny interconnected puzzles, woven together to form an almost unimaginably intricate web.
Dragon’s Dogma 2 is such a profoundly strange and inventive game at so many turns that its occasional stumbles are largely forgivable. For one, there are a few too many side quests that leave you stuck in town, some of which lean on woefully underbaked stealth sequences. The technical performance is also far from perfect, with unsteady framerates and clear graphical errors popping up frequently. In total, though, these come across as the drawbacks of a game whose reach exceeds its grasp, which is better by far than a game with no reach at all.
The story might initially come off as a letdown too, with its pedestrian fantasy setting and mostly ordinary character arcs. But sometimes stories in games simply serve to set the mood, as a kind of backdrop against which you experience the main event—the play itself. Few complain, for instance, that Mario games aren’t surprising enough in their narratives. In much the same way, Unicorn Overlord’s predictable plot beats hang out in the background, unoppressive, so that you’re free to let the rush of its expertly crafted systems wash over you unimpeded.
But as engaging as Bahnsen Knights’s atmosphere may be, the process of navigating it isn’t as consistently engrossing. The similarities to Choose Your Own Adventure-style storytelling work both in the game’s favor and against it. On one hand, there’s freedom to how you approach many situations, and there’s some excitement to knowing that the game holds more mysteries than you’ll uncover on first playthrough. On the other, there are quite a few fail states that feel arbitrary or unfair, and reloading a dialogue sequence several times in quick succession only serves to break the mood that the game otherwise works so hard to maintain.
It would be easy, and in some ways fair, to complain that this remake is a slightly disappointing half-measure—just a bit of new paint applied to a game that’s almost 30 years old. In many ways, though, the light touch taken with this updated version just serves to showcase how vibrant the original Super Mario RPG has always been. And in a year that brought no shortage of sprawling RPG behemoths, from Starfield to Baldur’s Gate 3 to Octopath Traveler II, this one’s spryness and wit stand in sharp, refreshing contrast.
Hellboy Web of Wyrd's sharp art direction, warm voice performances, and goofy if basic combat struggle to shine through in a roguelike that is otherwise too messy in too many ways.
On the other hand, Lies of P’s refusal to dish out any significant discomfort lowers the stakes considerably, so that you’re never pushed to engage with the game’s mechanical limits. As a result, everything from its level layouts to its boss fights to its jump scares don’t get seared into your brain out of repetition or necessity. It’s why, unlike Dark Souls, Lies of P is so easy to stick with. But it’s also why, unlike Dark Souls, you might forget it in a year.
The result is an interesting and impressive game that ultimately feels more than a bit academic, where solving intricate puzzles to uncover the hidden inner workings of a strange world mostly feels like an interactive and particularly creative linguistic anthropology lesson. Which is to say, Chants of Sennaar ought to be an exciting game for fans of, well, linguistic anthropology. But if you aren’t one already, chances are that it isn’t likely to make a fan out of you.
En Garde is a tantalizing first outing from new studio Fireplace Games, thanks to its slick combat and wonderful sense of humor. It's in some ways so strong that it leaves you wondering what this team could do with more time and money behind them.