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An interactive movie that tells a memorable story of human choices.
Stray captures the essence of being a cat, while delivering a deeper journey through a dying cybercity.
An eerie journey back to the days when all games were a bit eerie anyway.
Those few quibbles aren't quite enough to sully Cosmonaut's otherwise thoughtful game, though, and it sank its talons in deep enough to keep me experimenting with "just one more" event into the wee hours. It's possible some may mislabel its careful pacing as slow, and others may think its prosaic presentation boring. For me, however - whilst it's not without its flaws - Eternal Threads presents its story, characters, and mechanical systems with care and precision, weaving together an entirely captivating experience.
And yet for all that there's a nagging sense of overfamiliarity, of running the same races in slightly more bloated cars in what's now a slightly more bloated game. F1 22 is a remarkably broad game too, it should be pointed out - one that can be enjoyed by the growing audience the sport now enjoys. It's a remarkably familiar one too, mind, that through no fault of its own never really feels like the measure of last year's model - a predicament the sport finds itself in now, as it struggles to match the fireworks and fury of the classic that was the 2021 season. In that way, perhaps F1 22 is a little too authentic for its own good.
That, above all, is the reason to play Milky Way Prince, and the reason why it exists. Games of this subject matter can at times feel like a kind of development-as-therapy, where the creator exorcises a daemon through the retelling of a personal trauma. That can be an almighty powerful experience; it can also, on occasion, feel a little crass. Milky Way Prince moves somewhere beyond that, to a place where it can resonate with, and ideally also challenge its audience. But subject matter aside, you should play this for the same reason you might watch the early, uneven short-features of great directors, or read the first scrappy, hundred-page novels of a favourite author: to experience a prodigal talent, just as they begin to discover what they can do.
I'll likely be playing Three Hopes for a long time to come - I've already begun my Black Eagles New Game+ run - and when I previously said this isn't just Dynasty Warriors with a Fire Emblem skin, I meant it. Three Hopes is genuinely impressive. It walks a fine line between freshness for existing fans and approachability for new players, and personally it's had me invested from the start. I'd love to see where Nintendo's musou spinoff concept goes next.
It's a small gripe, though. Please Fix The Road isn't really trying to taunt you, it's trying to teach you its mannerisms. It's arguably a meditation on humans and nature, destroying environments only to rebuild them in organic and inorganic ways. But mostly it's just a wholesome and gratifying puzzle game that's impossible to be frustrated with. Even the title is polite.
I could go on. Character outfits. Loadouts. A neat arcade mode. A room where you can wander among the unlocks. Brilliant audio which has clearly been recorded by the development team. Deathrun TV is a beautiful twin-stick made of lovely little pieces. And all the pieces matter. Eugene Jarvis would be proud, I think.
Neon White achieves everything it sets out to with remarkable success. Not only is it one of the most entertaining experiences I've played in years, but it also speaks to a highly specific audience many just don't anymore. It's for weirdos, misfits, and dorks. Neon White is one of the best games of the year, and it'd be a colossal mistake not to check it out.
It reminds me of a story about Ricky Jay, the great and much-missed close-up magician and historian of magic. After a particularly dazzling piece of card control performed for a New Yorker writer, he was asked if there was anyone left in the world who would still play cards with him.
If it hadn't have been for that thoroughly unjust Rewind right at the end of my playthrough, The Quarry - with its stunning visuals, wonderful voice work, fabulous score, and intriguing plot line - would have been one of my favourite games of the year thus far, and one of the best horror romps for some time. As it stands, though, it's hard to feel anything but disappointment for a game that took all my time and effort and just discarded them without warning. It's one thing to kill off a character; it's another to kill off a player's enthusiasm.
Mario Strikers returns with a stripped back entry for Switch that's ultimately less fun to tackle.
Though if you’ve any affection for the genre, or any love for the likes of Darius and Gradius, then there’s really no reason to wait until then. Drainus has a silly name and a few small frustrations, but that doesn’t stop it delivering the same heart-soaring spectacle and sharp, satisfying action that makes the greats soar. This might fall just short of being one of them, but it’s an exquisite shooter all the same.
Through its invasion mechanic, Sniper Elite 5 achieves the ultimate goal of any sniping game, to capture the tension and drama of Jude Law and Ed Harris squaring off in Enemy at the Gates. If, like me, you watched that film when you were too young to do so, and thought "I wish there was a game that let me do that", rather than the more balanced "wow, war is terrible," then Sniper Elite 5 is that game, just without the Russian setting or Rachel Weisz. Couple that with eight superbly flexible sandboxes and the most imaginative interactive representation of the second world war in at least a decade, and you've got yourself one of the most entertaining games of the year.
Soundfall plays like an extended pop album, each level a three minute burst of music that initially fizzes and delights. Yet playing on repeat proves shallow. The music is killer, but the gameplay is filler.
Salt and Sacrifice is a riff on what came before, but not an entirely successful one. A tense, fraught combat system with gallons of customisation options carries Ska Studios’ sequel, and boss fights are entertaining if overly tough at times, but the storytelling and narrative designs of Salt and Sanctuary can’t hold up their end of the bargain.
You know that moment in a good roguelite where you've overextended yourself, but you've also won riches that you don't want to lose before you can bank them? This is what Loot River is built for, ultimately: I race around the world, dashing from one tile to another, breaking off from a little continent, an archipelago of burning wood and then searching, searching for the level's exit as I eye my tiny health gauge with fear. A procedural dungeon-crawler where you can rescramble the once-scrambled levels? Gary Chang would be proud.
King Arthur: Knight's Tale is not without its charms, then, but it's not the once and future king you might have been waiting for. Maybe watch Fast and Furious instead.
There is real anguish and intimacy here, real experience, real softness, pensiveness, complexity of thought, from the deeply clever, immaculately balanced systems to its extraordinarily well-realised art, static drawings of those characters that each feel like a glossy, coffee table magazine cover of their own, such is the incredible texture, colour, posture, pain behind the eyes. Citizen Sleeper is speaking to you, but in this case I really recommend you simply listen - not least because there's depth to be found in your own silence, and because the things it does have to say are absolutely worth hearing.