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Solstice tends more toward murder mystery dinner theater than fantasy film noir. A penchant for playful melodrama and comedic banter in many ways undercuts the tension established through the game's mystery and its interactive methods for unraveling it.
Material and the diegetic real come into interesting conversations throughout Paper Jam, but that is the reach of the game's ambition. As with many Nintendo games of the last few years, its gameplay elements are immaculately designed but risk nothing.
There is no shooter quite as willing to prostrate itself before its audience as SUPERHOT while always reminding them that, no matter how tough the game may make them feel, that same sensation can be stolen from them in a heartbeat.
Driving is inefficient, extortionate, and most people are garbage at it, including myself. I couldn't comprehend why anyone would endorse the lie of the open road. American Truck Simulator reflected the anxious reality, but also allowed me to appreciate the grandeur of it all.
XCOM 2 isn't so much a game about liberating humanity from its extraterrestrial overlords, but a statement about the kinds of stories our games can tell and allow to be told, even when they aren't especially valued for their narrative.
As gaming's nostalgia shifts from 16-bit revival to a soft spot for PS1-era early 3D, Devil Daggers and similarly-minded titles like the upcoming STRAFE demonstrate that the current late-90s retro revival isn't simply devoted to looks alone, but the mechanics those games lived and died by. Sorath's self-developed engine truly shines in its dedication to maintaining a frenetic pace with unrelenting challenge.
Between Me And The Night never feels less than sincere and heartfelt while doing this. And if you can embrace its perspective, the game stands to offer a moving and smart depiction of navigating life through the scrim of an angst born in childhood.
It's a beautiful, beguiling place to spend some time, absolutely worth it while you're there, but sooner rather than later you'll yearn to shed its shackles, to get off the beaten path.
The Witness is, above all else, a designed space. And while all videogames are designed spaces in their own right, The Witness does away with the façade that it's anything but a designed space.
The Deadly Tower of Monsters revels in the schlock of B-movies
Despite all of its cutesy posturing and promises, Unravel is still looking to fill some kind of void. And I'm not sure if that void is its shortcomings as a mood board, as a videogame, or a cloying digestible basket of "feels" for EA.
There is some integrity in its detail, its precision, its distance. It manages to reach the epic mode, the grand narrative, to evoke a mythical journey now lost to us. But it also fails to escape the easy orientalism of that same myth, the simplicity of bloodless violence.
What surprised me was how much this simulation of the irascible human spirit reminded me of some of my favorite moments playing RPGs around the table with friends.
Unlike Papers, Please, where you are making serious decisions right in the face of desperate and sympathetic people, The Westport Independent is a little too distant and removed from the individual to resonate on an emotional level. The game does deliver scenes between levels that color some of your writers' inner lives, but they are too minor to establish much empathy for, say, a writer disappearing by the regime's hand in the post-game wrap up.
"Point, click, boom" in its most distilled form
To criticize Aviary Attorney, the more literal Phoenix Wright, means to launch off a criticism of Ace Attorney, as this game manages to weave around those trappings while stumbling into newer, comparable ones.
In the end, Oxenfree is absolutely a game about teenage bullshit (forgive me for being a little disingenuous earlier). But it manages to revitalize that narrative by focusing on feeling more than substance; it glances at each character's inner struggle rather than serving it up for a full meal.
Matches here feel legitimately sophisticated. Each encounter will likely only use a fraction of the gizmos or locations on offer, allowing for substantial variation and applied skill. A well-performed match feels like an authored military thriller, precise and cruel.
The emotional core of That Dragon, Cancer is real—so real, in fact, and so personal, that I ended up feeling like an outsider looking in. I pitied the Greens for having to endure this awful series of events, but I did not come away feeling connected to their experience, or enlightened by it. This was not because the game tried but failed to connect with me, but because it didn't.
This JRPG asks us to do nothing except buy into its synthetic religion of scale. You are big, Xenoblade Chronicles X. You are big because big is good. It's like stroking a dead Aibo—an Aibo that was never alive in the first place.