Kill Screen

Videoball’s greatest strength is that it understands the value of isolated, localized competition.

Furi is undoubtedly repetitive, but that doesn’t need to be a strike against it. I could nod my head to its beat for a good while.

Despite having dozens of questions early on, by the end of the long twisted journey, I found everything to be resolved—or even left unresolved—in an extremely satisfying way.

At a basic aesthetic level, the game is also a treat. Each of the 42 maps were hand-drawn by the small team at Stellar Jockeys, and the work shows.

A radical city in a failed system

The game is meant to evoke that kind of wide-eyed wonder that the night sky holds, placing the player, at first, in an empty galaxy that holds such promise and excitement.

Playdead’s greatest feat in creating Inside was making it look like they never created it in the first place.

Look closer and the connections between "the daily grind" and this form of "play" multiply, spiral out, form fractals.

At its core, VA-11 Hall-A is the rare cyberpunk story that has heart, and even goes so far as to give its female characters agency in their own lives. It’s a story where we, the player, take the backseat, and soak it all in. Just like a good book.

Slain! reveals itself almost immediately as a demo tape with a splashy cover, a composition in progress that carries a spark of potential buried in the mix. It does not live up to the promise of its visuals, instead merely keeping pace with its influences white not daring any attempt to surpass them.

OmniBus would work better if it rolled with its own punches instead of creating a system that only exists to be fought with—the reward is smaller when randomness does so much of the grunt work. Just sit back and let the car drive you into the sun. Life just flies by so fast when you’re having fun.

The Total War formula mostly acts as a functional framework on which to construct the violent, mystical world of Game Workshop's Warhammer. This is the most dramatic departure Creative Assembly has taken from their typical playbook with the series, and it needed to be; a game about a warring fantasy kingdom must feel different than one about the rise of the Roman empire. For the most part, it does.

Everyone should be squirming to play Push Me Pull You

Above all, the problem with Homefront: The Revolution is that it, like so many others before it, presumes that whatever freedom is is obvious and transparent, and so can simply be acquired in a transaction like any other.

Shadwen is a stealth game forever trapped in a state of adolescence.

The 2016 DOOM's rebellion is smaller than its predecessor, but still impressive: it is unabashedly itself. It's a game with confidence in the worth of revisiting its history and an earnest belief that doing so can result in much more than an empty exercise in nostalgia.

A couple hours into Glitchspace, I hoped for a break in the progression and the chance to explore my newly acquired skills, but instead the complexity is continuously layered on top of itself until the game ends. And it ends with you literally walking back up to the title screen, ready to clock in for another shift. I think I’ll take my lunch break instead.

As strange as it sounds, Ace of Seafood, down in its depths, is really about how we see ourselves—as human after all.

Uncharted 4 never pretends to be anything other than the sum of its highly-polished parts. Its initial aim of interrogating the ability of adventure fiction to mature seems assured in the knowledge that it doesn't need to.

But what marks Fragments as distinct—as, partly, in poetry—is its reliance on metaphor: the constituent parts of these memories are the physical objects the player interacts with, but they come to stand in for the personal, emotional connotations that accrete upon all of our things.