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In horror, we confront monsters, and survival is the only operational term. The resolving state is trauma rather than malaise. Forgiveness is a non sequitur. For a game whose design dwells so deeply and strikingly in darkness, it is unhappily ironic that the story prefers at the end to turn toward an illusory light.
Verge is too smart to be a nostalgia trip, but it also, ultimately, sticks to executing the familiar with style. If it didn't look so damn good, it'd be easy to say we've seen it all before.
Like Arcanum and Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines before it, Pillars of Eternity is a feat of world-building. Its supporting cast, led by the haunted Grieving Mother and the blowhard priest Durance, is one of the genre's strongest.
Telltale can and has done great things for the Game of Thrones fiction. But scope is what propelled this fictional world into the cultural phenomenon it it is today. If the games hope to be considered worthy additions to the phenomenon, they'll need to take advantage of that vast world, and all its opportunities for original storytelling. While also remembering that we'd like to see a bit more than the bottom of a Whitehill's shoe.
As far as Battlefield Hardline is concerned, the 1980s may as well have never ended.
Had the realization of that universe been more fully fleshed out—expansive and deep rather than restrictive and boardgame-like—Spaceships could have found success as a kind of post-human strategy game. Instead it feels lifeless. But not in the existential, gazing-into-the-void-of-space way. More in the way that an aging child realizes that her blanket is just a blanket, and promptly stops caring about it.
In this way, Mario Party 10 is the purest embodiment of an actual board game yet seen in the series. The effort may be lost on long-time fans who play a videogame version for a reason. But there is something to playing on a screen while still feeling the weight of a toy between your fingers. Maybe this is why my poor Monopoly Iron failed to move the hearts of many: It was lighter than all the rest. With computers the size of business cards and a world's information floating in something called the cloud, we crave tangible objects. Or maybe, taken over by the spirit of competitive bloodlust, it's just more fun to hurl Luigi across the room at your buddy for stealing all of your coins. Either way: Choose carefully. Mario Party just got real.
With this in mind, if Dark Souls is medieval gothic—its dichotomies of heaven and hell gestured at by pointed arches, supporting both a true spirituality and a belief in the divine—then Bloodborne is the epitome of gothic revival—where subjectivity replaces spirituality, and man strives to plumb the depths of human experience.
All of this will likely be tremendously appealing to a particular sort of player, and Aaru's Awakening clearly deserves a certain recognition for putting its own twist on the unforgiving 2D platformer. But if you are going to enter this world, know that the extrinsic rewards are few. The challenge is really all there is. The gods give only what they will, and are unconcerned with whether mortals find it sufficient.
Hotline Miami 2 force-feeds you sleaze
In the end, I was allowed to play Tormentum like I play all games that ask you to make moral choices. I skated through the game unlocking cages, freeing prisoners, and forgiving murderers with impunity. And I wasn't punished for it even once.
There's a great urge to celebrate what Type-0 is trying to do. There's a temptation to laud the concept of a series best known for simple fantasy making an effort to grapple with the seriousness of a topic of which it has skirted the significance for so long. But Type-0 shows that Final Fantasy, despite its best efforts, probably doesn't know how to grow up in the way it wants to—that it can only grasp at greater dramatic impact even as its battle systems are further refined, its attempts to dig something out of the ancient muck of a subject as heavy as war itself constantly curtailed by concessions to the iconography of its past.
A fun embarrassment
By showing how war games can make virtual fascists us of all, Helldivers takes its place as one of the sharpest critiques of videogame imperialism. Granted, it's not a particularly new observation, but the game delivers it with such bravado in both action and atmosphere that it warrants commendation. To enlist as a Helldiver for Super Earth admits culpability in a system that disguises tyranny as heroism. Helldivers measures its brutal difficulty against a dehumanizing military and political complex that results in humor and violence, both about as subtle and hard-hitting as a freight train. Such is the price of liberty, paid in full with a pile of shell casings and the sickening splat of another expendable soldier.
It's an old trick: as players, we grow experienced enough to master a toy to completion; this is the basis for videogames, and the basis for the nostalgia of early-era Nintendo. Incremental successes build slowly into one ultimate success. But Oblitus' ultimate success isn't the culmination of one playthrough; it's the culmination of several. Rarely does a game acknowledge the cycle of play, die, repeat, and finally, succeed. Oblitus instead not only acknowledges it but embraces it; draws a parallel between its protagonist and its player, their movements synchronized, following the same unknown task. Unearth the task; finish it. Parvus is set free. So is the player.
[S]adly despite its lofty aims The Deer God doesn't gel, doesn't coalesce in any holistic way. Its disparate parts don't align toward the same end: the karma system doesn't mean anything here , just like the pixel art doesn't mean anything, and the roguelike bits don't mean anything. They're tangential to theme and subtext and meaning. They're words that don't string together into a coherent sentence. This is not in itself damning, but The Deer God could've been more than dumb fun, and it wants to be more than dumb fun.
Kirby and the Rainbow Curse is still a thing of beauty, lovely to look at and challenging (but not punitive) in play. In places, you can even see the sculptor's fingerprints, but you can't leave any of your own.
Life Is Strange has a charm that is hard to resist. The dialogue never quite manages to achieve believability, but the game's top-notch art direction makes Arcadia Bay an interesting pocket universe to explore. The time reversal mechanic is also full of potential and neatly executed through the game's thoughtful UI.
These are the stories The Order: 1886 might have told, and the images that it still clings to. But in the end, the only tales it knows how to tell are those that end with the hammer cocked and a twitchy finger on the trigger.
Sunless Sea is ultimately a chronicle of tragedies. Success is dependent upon you building up achievements, stacking your legacy high enough that the next captain can set sail with a proper cannon and better rig, which is in turn entirely in service of exploring whatever remains in the vast darkness out East. As someone who played Skyrim and spent hours wandering every square inch of the underground kingdom in Blackreach, I found Sunless Sea's heady darkness appealing.