Kritiqal's Reviews
Epistory recognizes that typing is no longer a novelty. Everyone will be coming to the game with their own typing quirks, and rather than try to strong-arm the player into finally using their pinkie, Epistory wants every player to enjoy typing on their own terms.
Pathologic 2 deconstructs the player/game dichotomy even as it celebrates how affecting that relationship can be. It is rich and dense and uncompromising. That it exists at all is an anomaly, but one I can only hope doesn’t stay that way.
Unbound Creations’ Headliner: Novinews is a hyper-compressed exploration of how society reflects the stories it tells, and what this means when the powerful hold all the pens.
Tokyo Dark is so bizarre and mangled that it is difficult to pin down where it falls off the rails. It can be both deftly thoughtful and entirely distasteful within the same scene, as if two different games were stapled together and forced to fight to the death.Tokyo Dark is so bizarre and mangled that it is difficult to pin down where it falls off the rails. It can be both deftly thoughtful and entirely distasteful within the same scene, as if two different games were stapled together and forced to fight to the death.
Where the Bees Make Honey does not go further than suggesting that maybe things were easier as kids, and that a call center is mentally harming us.
Hellblade enters not at the point of trauma but everything that comes after. The anguish, the self doubt, the violent attempts to feel anything at all, and finally, the recognition that this trauma is permanent.
My early generosity has been worn away by Subdivision’s relentlessly bland mission design. I am torn between my dislike of each mission’s flavorless grind and the small respite brought on by each taking less than 10-minutes to complete. It’s the video game campaign equivalent to a dinner of plain rice cakes: all fluff, no substance, but at least the exercise is over as quick as it began.
Prey hasn’t been able to pick and choose its points of inspiration. While the games it lifts from are mechanically engaging, their thematic tensions have not held up as well, leaving Prey an inconsistent jumble of competing philosophies and narrative styles as it tries to recontextualize plot points which in hindsight were not as clever as we made them out to be.
With Tacoma, it begins to feel like this optimism might be getting in the way of the message that actually needs to be heard. Unions and activists groups can change the world, it is not just a matter of working together that is needed for these systems to change. To borrow from father Marx, “there are no happy endings under capitalism.”
THOTH is neither bloated nor even comfortably full. It is an exercise in restraint in every possible way, from its visual design to its length of less than a movie, to its soundtrack which dips in and out as if just checking in on how you’re doing. What THOTH is not is hollow.
Part of me felt I should enjoy The Witness, that solving it would be its own reward, or that I could not truly say I disliked it until I had unraveled it thoroughly. These are all ridiculous justifications for playing a game I knew early on I disliked. It is such a strong compulsion within the videogame community to compel yourself forward with critically acclaimed games that even your own opinion stops mattering as much for whether you play a game or not. It isn’t about what you think, or what other people think, it’s what you think other people will think.
Gears 4’s achievements are in its intimacy and understanding of its history. Much of the game finds you in cramped, isolated corridors, fighting things you don’t understand for reasons you haven’t had time to process. It’s not a war so much as an attempt to crawl out of an abyss, alive for one more day. Gears has never felt as hopeless and frightening as Gears 4, nor has it ever recognized its characters’ mortality as effectively.
It sounds hyperbolic, but the amount of personality that has been stripped out of Live combined with the loss of developed multiplayer becomes increasingly depressing with each set. The crowds get bigger but the initial novelty fades and what remains is a stage full of people you don’t know. The crowd cheers and boos in time with your missed notes, oscillating back and forth as your vision blurs like some sort of rockstar purgatory where everyone comes prepared with “you suck” signs, just in case.
Rise never reconciles where the line between archeology and blatant theft actually lies. Between her many firefights, Lara spends most of her time picking through garbage, opening chests, and murdering endangered species, all in the name of exploration. But as is always the case with colonialism, what Lara is after is not really answers or the objects themselves, it’s money for a new gun upgrade and a bigger bag for furs.
I’m sure it is entirely possible to enjoy Lovers playing with just a casual gaming buddy, but there is a certain intimacy created while playing it that seems designed expressly with couples in mind. The ships are small and everyone has to play multiple roles to succeed, and while no character is better or worse than another I found that S. and I naturally settled into our preferred positions on the ship, which isn’t all that different from how I prefer to cook and she tends to do the laundry. Roles need to be filled and sometimes you have to play one that is less comfortable than you’d like, but at the end what’s important is that you are supporting each other. Lovers fosters this dynamic in a way that showcases how fulfilling it is when you allow someone else to support you, rather than try to pull yourself through all on your own.
ClusterTruck is perhaps a more fitting name than does the game itself any good.
Overcooked wants to show you the wacky fun of cooking with friends, but I should have guessed by the time it sent us to hell’s literal kitchen that we as a culture need to reassess exactly what that fun looks like.
A Normal Lost Phone requires you to dig deep into another person’s life, uncovering their deepest secrets and in some cases even impersonating them for the sake of progressing through the game. This is rote territory for adventure games, but to apply it to the life of a trans person – one who is clearly not ready to come out as trans and for whom it would be dangerous to do so – feels violating in a way snooping through emails in Deus Ex doesn’t.
Titanfall 2 is certainly explosive, and at times elegant, but it is primarily an exercise in player omnipotence and reverence. It’s really not about the pilots or titans, it’s about making you feel cool and never stopping to ask why.
Unravel may stumble on its way towards saying something meaningful, it never wavers on what it wants you to hear. That while the past is not a place to escape into, it is worth holding onto. Maybe only in bits and pieces, but held onto all the same.