Paste Magazine
HomepagePaste Magazine's Reviews
I realize now that I wish that this game could make me feel like an outsider in a strange town: That feeling is America. And The Crew has none of the licentious anticipation for the fictional pile-up, nor any of the guilty pleasure of rubbernecking—American pastimes, both. The missions never just say "Get to Wyoming," and then let me plot my own foolhardy, American route there. They don't even let you look at the map. Just trust the waypoints and go.
While The Shivah also explores the reconciliation of faith and practicality, its corny climax can't match The Talos Principle's matter-of-fact ending, which argues that our chosen perspective will limit what we discover in one way or another. Thank God the puzzles are worth it.
[T]he best moments in Temple of Osiris are with friends; when a typical aha moment meets the domino effect of all your friends coming to the same realization you have, there's nothing quite like it. And if the package is a little slim, it's because it's been trimmed of most of its fat, never slowing down enough to let you idly wonder about what else you could be doing with your time. For that, my regular group of friends and I are grateful.
Elegy For A Dead World is a great provocation with some wonderful ideas behind it, but I'm not sure where the draw is after the first fifteen minutes. It is a game that could be wonderful with the inclusion of local or networked multiplayer (co-writing about these worlds would be magical) or a little more direction from the designers. That said, as it stands it is merely a set of good-to-great ideas that cohere in a form that failed to capture my imagination.
You can destroy your smile again with the game modes of old in a new graphical package. If you're looking for the next big, huge, mind-blowing iteration that jumps us forward fifty years in shape-on-shape violence, then it isn't here. I don't need to navigate a three dimensional pomegranate with my mine-laying drone in order to enjoy myself. In fact, it takes away from that enjoyment. You might feel differently.
Outside of the flying woes, Gat Out of Hell is content to let you be an all-powerful demigod or goddess. The game is just plain, hammy entertainment. It doesn't aspire to teach you a great moral lesson—outside of "don't fuck with Ouija boards," which is pretty sage advice—and it's not trying to wow you with 60 FPS photorealism. Gat out of Hell, like its predecessors, is that essential reminder we need from time to time that, yes, sometimes it's okay for videogames to be dumb fun and little else.
For a time, revisiting Resident Evil was good. And just as quickly as I was hooked in, I played P.T.
The quest to bind together stories of science and love isn't always an easy one to take on, but ultimately Gravity Ghost gets the job done. Drifting through space and learning the subtleties of planetary movement is fun and relaxing, and the story's charm works well enough to suggest larger meaning to a ghost's journey through the cosmos.
What matters most is not the story, but the telling—and that much, Grim Fandango has mastered. Thank goodness it's no longer unplayable.
The end result is something that feels like little more than the finished product of a well-oiled entertainment machine—a safe appeal to a mass audience. This is unfortunate since there is genuine joy to be had in simply navigating Techland's fictional city. If the same attention was paid to narrative development and visual design as has obviously gone into the player character's movement, Dying Light's world would be much more inviting.
The primary characters are more fleshed out now that the story is occupied with making us sympathetic to them rather than showing off Westeros and Essos. As a result, this is a game that now feels more confident and standalone than it did a couple of months ago, more of a work that justifies its own existence than it does a dull, flimsy tie-in being hawked by HBO for marketing purposes.
Attila is a solid, innovative entry in the series marred by some inexplicable performance issues. Assuming that the performance issues get worked out, Creative Assembly may have a keeper. As their recent history has shown, though, that's unfortunately far from a given.
So maybe life isn't strange, but at least the game tries.
This is a game and a concept that could benefit from a sequel. And if we're lucky, it'd give us an even deeper look at this gorgeous yet squalid Dickensian London.
What is [Apotheon's] song? One of delight and wonder, I would argue, an expression of unabashed love for myth. That it's possible to turn such love into an engrossing adventure that coalesces in a way so few games do reminds me of my own love for games and of their potential as a medium of beautiful expression. Apotheon, then, is the kind of videogame we need more of.
When the credits rolled I was relieved. The final part of Roundabout was agony, a funny game that had overstayed its welcome and told all its jokes four times over.
In this way, Kirby and the Rainbow Curse is the more realistic of the two games released last week. Though one stars a human being walking among recognizable landmarks, employing guns and knives and other things of our world, it is the little pink ball of clay and his merry band of floating spike balls and giant hands with mouths that recreates a more believable, tangible world.
Sunless Sea's contemplative pace and reams of text won't appeal to every player, but if you have a little patience, and an appreciation for atmospheric story telling, then it'll be hard to pass this one up.
The Deer God is, sadly, a mediocre game suffering from an identity crisis hiding inside of a grandiose shell.
There might be rough patches, but the friction falls away when I'm locked into the core of Ori and the Blind Forest. We here at Paste Games believe that Metroid is pretty much the best game to emulate. Unlike games with concrete missions or levels, a great Metroid-style game never gives the player a reason to stop. They pull us through on a steady current of gradually expansive play that makes us never want to put the controller down. Ori expertly nails that rhythm, timing out its revelations and offering enough unique ways to navigate its world to maximize the player's engagement.