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After all, every single task in the game carries on the series tradition of having patently ridiculous scenarios play out with absolute sincerity. Indeed, just about the only thing the game doesn’t make room for is cynicism.
Because we’re free to choose what to include or exclude from each memoir, we begin to see objects as Swann does: how they tell a story about a larger whole, as well as how they look best when captured on grainy video. Swann’s enthusiasm becomes infectious, as the act of playing the game becomes about finding the joy in the everyday.
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.
Negative emotions may not be so easily dispelled for us as they are with Cadence’s magical guitar, but music can help us to motivate ourselves, making this a feel-good game in more ways than one.
In an impressive feat of adapting an established format for a unique setting, The Stone of Madness is cleverly attuned to perseverance through incremental progress.
Eternal Strands does its best to make each of your return trips through its seven main maps as interesting as possible, slowly throwing in stronger enemies, changing up the epic monster encounters, and varying the extreme weather and time of day.
Origins presents an excellent technical and mechanical basis from which the Dynasty Warriors can rebuild, and hopefully return to form in the wake of later entries in the series, like Dynasty Warriors 8, having fallen so short.
It all, again, depends on who Indiana Jones is to you. Great Circle is a wonderful Indiana Jones game if your Indy is a man keeping history sacred while jet-setting to beautiful remote locales with God, or gods, on his side. If your man is one who’s frequently outnumbered, outgunned, and outmatched by forces natural and supernatural, where every encounter may end in failure, you might still have a good time, but by and large, you’re digging in the wrong place.
Indeed, a single level like the Mad Mall feels more inventive—between you having to scramble through a ball pit maze, race on a Segway-like device, and solve a shooting gallery puzzle—than the entirety of other platformers.
What might once have been intended as a rebuke to open-world excess is instead a cautionary tale, an argument for all the little carrot-on-a-stick elements that make a game like this feel like more what it is: a wasteland.
This atmospheric Metroidvania is mechanically, emotionally, and philosophically electrifying.
That’s something that the Prototype games got right 15 years ago, in the exact era of gaming Slitterhead shares most of its design ethos with. Even when Slitterhead gets to its wilder stretches, and time travel enters the mix, the fundamentals fail its ideas early and often, making the relatively reasonable length of the thing feel so much longer and more arduous as a result. Slitterhead would have felt lackluster on the PS3, but it feels downright draconian now.
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.
Beyond familiar echoes to Silent Hill, Killer 7 is the most obvious touchstone for the combat system and generally flamboyant aesthetic. But Sorry We’re Closed defies the purely imitative qualities of so much indie horror. For whatever mechanical shortcomings it may have, the game exhibits the most confident grasp of its own artistic sensibility this side of Paradise Killer.
Perhaps by its very nature as a sequel, Rise of the Golden Idol was never going to be the revelation that the original was. But by playing to the strengths of the first game’s concept through even more intricate puzzle design, it offers a worthy follow-up in a spirited new setting.
Jamboree may not be about to hit the tournament circuit, but its very recognition of demand for a Mario Party with game balance is encouraging. Its basic game rules preserve series norms in all their highs and lows, while its motion-based gimmick modes offer nostalgic throwbacks to the wrist-twisting game designs of the Wii. But it’s the overtures to a more tactile, grounded, skill-rewarding board game experience that indicate developer Nintendo Cube’s interest in a future, and not just a past, for the genre of party mayhem.
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.
It’s with all that in mind that it’s fairly easy to forgive just how little has been done to bring Shadows of the Damned up to code in 2024. Especially by contrast to the botched remaster of Suda51’s Lollipop Chainsaw, it’s almost a relief that the worst that can be said for this release is that it’s indistinguishable from the original, aside from a mild spitshine of the textures and it running at 4K60. Without trying to run an expensive graphical arms race, Shadows of the Damned is forced to stand on charm. Given just how many unique experiences exist outside the AAA bubble right now, the fact that Garcia Hotspur’s wild profane trash-sploitation adventure still does is a timely reminder of what can happen in the arena of AA games.
ReFantazio has a nearly hour-long, combat-free epilogue that jumps forward in time to demonstrate the consequences of the decisions you’ve made, and it’s not only as compelling as everything prior, but it’s perhaps the most political part of the whole campaign. Here, too, ReFantazio shows you what it values, which is both the big life-or-death boss battles that put your ideals to the test and the ripple effects of their consequences.