Kritiqal's Reviews
Games like Dropsy remind us of the power of small actions and simple pleasures. It reminds us that art doesn’t have to be challenging or complex to be meaningful, and that positive emotions are not as worthless as the world wants you to believe. It reminds us that it is OK to feel happy when things are going bad, and that there are still people who truly want to make the world a better place for everyone. It reminds us that it is easy to hate people and a lot harder to love them, and it does so with such earnestness that it is clear the game recognizes the difficulty of what it’s asking but believes it important enough to do so all the same. Dropsy is a game that is powerfully loving in a way most media only plays at, and I cannot overstate how rare and significant that is.
Killing Time at Lightspeed (2016) is ostensibly a game about social media, but in truth, it’s a game about losing touch with the people you care about.
In looking backward Four Sided Fantasy reconnects with gaming's most baseline experience of a person, a screen, and the space in between, but it is in moving forward, sometimes clumsily but with determination, that the game finds something new to say about it.
Absolute Drift may see drifting as an elevated form of racing, but there is a reason the sport has only ever garnered a niche audience.
Stikbold is the buddy-cop dodgeball epic I didn’t know I needed.
The first question with a sequel like Dimensions Evolved is not "what's changed" but "did they ruin it?"
Expand's greatest deception is in giving the impression that its stark black and white and red color palette and plain geometric characters were born out of an inability to do anything more.
Reigns posits a view of politics divorced from context or meaning, where the wants and needs of the public are both all that matters and entirely dismissible.
Tahira rehumanizes the tactics genre.
Planet of the Eyes, for as much as it mirror's Limbo's mechanics, is wholly antithetical to that game's hopelessness.
Metrico was always an enjoyable platformer hosted on an unfortunate platform, so even if it took two years and the rebuilding of half the game, it is a welcome sight to witness Metrico+ finally save the original game from itself.
A lousy conclusion can't do much to make a dinosaur in space anything less than cool.
Traverser tries to differentiate itself from the swathes of steampunk media being released, but ultimately its problems lie mostly in an inability to do so.
The game Submerged could have, and by all accounts wanted to be is still hidden here somewhere, but that hardly matters when it so fervently refuses to let you see it.
Fran Bow sends you down a rabbit hole to nowhere.
Octodad is the sort of game that is going to sell itself on absurdity alone. But by reducing it to just a joke, we miss what makes it so special
Ronin spends more time convincing you of what it's not than it does showing you why you should care about what it is.
Human Resource Machine's attempts at accessibility are lost as its aggressive cynicism refuses to offer any support.
Titan Souls is antagonistic and alienating, but if you are masochistic enough to put up with it, there's a smart and original game underneath.
Oceanhorn never escapes its identity as a Zelda impersonator, and an exceptionally dull and uninspired one at that.