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Kritiqal

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122 games reviewed
54.0 average score
50 median score
63.1% of games recommended

Kritiqal's Reviews

Apr 22, 2021

Tetris Effect exists as an inevitability. There must be a new Tetris game because Tetris Holding – current owners of the Tetris brand – have spent decades rewriting copyright law to prevent anyone else from so much as sneezing in the shape of a Tetrimino. The brand must continue, licenses must be dispersed, artists must be contracted to legitimize these DMCA takedowns.

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Unscored - Even the Ocean
Mar 4, 2021

Even the Ocean sits unfortunately between an early indie hit and a decade defining classic. It is the studio’s most technically accomplished game to date but lacks the emotional heft of its siblings; a delight in itself that falls shy of the incredibly high bar Analgesic have set for themselves. But as a transitional piece it is one of the best modern examples we have of thematic development across games, made more interesting through Anodyne 2's parallels.

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Jan 14, 2021

Video games about violence so often fail because they do not actually understand what they are doing. They can copy others, depict violence in shocking fidelity, and endlessly trawl the waters of individuals doing individually bad things, but they are culpable of so much violence themselves the shots will always miss. Lucah understands form is the message, that violence is messy and contradictory, and that games cannot simply adopt the language of film and literature and achieve the same ends. It is a game of relentless despair, and yet underneath it all its tenderness cannot but shine through.

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Unscored - Ghostrunner
Nov 22, 2020

Ghostrunner may as well have fallen backwards into cyberpunk for want of a theme. It can wrench nothing from this stone that has not already been ground up by other derivative works, and squanders its movement on inconsistent combat and weightless platforming.

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Unscored - Abzu
Aug 23, 2020

I’m not asking Abzu to just be Journey, but if it is already working from that point of reference it’s strange how little Abzu understands why Journey worked at all. If Journey was a ballet Abzu is a SeaWorld show. Flashy, controlled, at times inspiring, its artifice fully on display.

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Unscored - The Last Survey
Aug 16, 2020

The Last Survey is a two (arguably one) man play about justifications and the failure of modern liberalism to try to both hold on to capitalism and appear sympathetic to our concerns. It holds you in this limbo and dares you to justify your way out.

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Unscored - Tonight We Riot
Aug 11, 2020

This tension between Tonight We Riot’s political ambitions and the limited depth of its systems is a large part of why it feels paradoxically tame. It has taken the mechanics and structure of a traditional beat’em’up and attempted to map them to anti-capitalist revolution, but it hasn’t thoroughly interrogated how those existing mechanics are also a product of capitalism.

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Unscored - Mutazione
Aug 2, 2020

Mutazione imagines a beautiful and complex life founded on small, self-sustaining community and a respect for the natural world. It is charming and warm but also plain about the challenges of sustaining a community like this. It reckons with the contradictions of colonialist greed and asks if things couldn’t be rebuilt without hierarchies and violence.

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Jun 22, 2020

Games can often feel like some kind of sorcery, impossibly complex and created by people with inhuman ability. But they’re just people. Highly talented people, but still. Anodyne 2 is not sorcery, but it is a kind of magic, an ordinary magic that is all the more exceptional because of it.

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Jul 23, 2020

It was difficult to play Hyper Light Drifter and not feel a deep empathy for the drifter, also alone, also dying from an invisible disease. It’s an easy connection, but when the world is on fire all you can see are embers. Hyper Light Drifter doesn’t prescribe specifics so it’s easy to imprint meaning onto it. But it also resists glorifying those readings.

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Unscored - Crossing Souls
Jul 5, 2020

You could sketch Crossing Souls on a napkin, and it would probably be a smarter, more inclusive game. But I won’t ask you too. I’m off to cut down Young Sheldon and bury Crossing Souls next to him where the soil is dead.

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Unscored - Evan's Remains
Jun 11, 2020

I am not sure if Evan’s Remains entirely earns its thematic heft when so much of it is inscrutable, but that it is willing to end its plot in a moment of intense duress is daring enough to elevate its weaker moments. It's untidy, its themes barely cohesive. But if Evan's Remains was not so unusual, if it had simply doubled-down on puzzles and pretty screens, I do not think it would have left half the impression it did.

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May 16, 2020

Saving You From Yourself is just one story. In this one, it is possible to have a happy ending, for the experience of transitioning to be as friction-less as possible. But at every point it emphasizes how discrimination corrupts that process, making a moment of self-actualization a sequence of bureaucratic roadblocks. It was timely in 2018 and has only grown more significant in the time since release.

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Jun 14, 2017

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.

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Unscored - Type:Rider
Mar 25, 2014

Type:Rider is far from a perfect game, maybe not even a good one, but it is a unique and interesting endeavor to give a little background on a subject I’d never have bothered to look into otherwise.

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Jan 16, 2017

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.

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Unscored - Gears of War 4
Feb 8, 2018

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.

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Dec 18, 2016

Stikbold is the buddy-cop dodgeball epic I didn’t know I needed.

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Jan 1, 2014

Electronic Super Joy is Meat Boy gone clubbing.

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Unscored - Freedom Planet
May 9, 2015

I feel like the only one stuck on the outside looking in at all the fun others are having.

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