Kritiqal's Reviews
ClusterTruck is perhaps a more fitting name than does the game itself any good.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Near Death consistently hits the highs of the best survivalist fiction, so engrossing as to cause me to turn up the heat in my own home out of fear. But it is a story we have heard before. There is little to take away from Near Death that has not been played out in other works, and it made me long for the stories of survival that position life as not an individual pursuit but a collective triumph.
I like so much of what Mutant is attempting to do. Dux and Bormin are delightful, adding stealth gameplay onto a tactics game is clever and works well before becoming played out, and there are so few tactics games to speak of that even one which is otherwise derivative provided a welcome excursion for a few hours. It's so frustrating that everything begins to fall apart right as the game comes into its own.
Had Signs of the Sojourner allowed the player to fail without having the door slammed in their face, it would be easier to forgive some of the flatness present in its card system or the brevity of its script. But by framing conversations as games to be won without anticipating how often they’d be lost, huge chunks of the game become sequences of frustrating nonsequiturs.
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.
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.
Games like Orwell recklessly attempt to work backward from the lies used to justify surveillance, rather than recognizing that we have to fight the concept itself. It is a game decades too late to matter and does more to legitimize its target than it does to take them down.
Corruption 2029 feels like a straight to VHS sequel. Zoomed out it looks like what you’d expect the studio to do next, albeit with a different theme and fewer talking ducks. But there is no soul, no justification for the game’s existence, and numerous moments where it feels actively inferior to a game that came out two years ago.
Beyond Eyes is fragmented, half-hearted, and dull, and I doubt I would have cared enough to write this much if it wasn’t also irresponsible with its subject matter. I do believe Tiger & Squid had good intentions, and Beyond Eyes is far from paving any roads to hell. I just wish they had spent as much time considering Beyond Eyes’ framing device and mechanics as they did editing its trailer.
Ether One has built a world so close to our own, but given it a purpose and a life that makes every scrap of paper and ordinary item feel meaningful.
I said at the end of my act one write-up that I could see Broken Age being the game that defines Double Fine. I still think that to be true, but unfortunately, it isn't as glamorous an image as I had first imagined it to be.