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Far from the distilled purity of the sport it seeks to celebrate, PES 2016 comes across as an over-engineered appliance—an unfortunate reality, given the craftsmanship being smothered underneath as a result. For all of PES 2016's inching improvements in the way players interact on the field, the game seems more intent on bombarding you with the number of licensed leagues, kitschy diversions, and other doohickeys vaguely associated with soccer at its disposal.
Playing Albino Lullaby, you'll begin to feel like so many of the people you may have tried to convert into understanding the surrealist media the game so desperately wants to evoke; you'll raise an eyebrow, and think "that's it?"
It is, by turns, silly and brutal—evoking both hand-slams of irritation and chuckles of defeat. The unexpected handful of boss fights in particular have an entertainingly wobbly randomness to them, like a battle in inflatable sumo-suits that were filled to the seams with helium. But it's also hard to love a game that, in its final stages, asks for a precision that you have little control of. What is easy to love about Mushroom 11 is its odd nihilistic bent.
Controller in hand I can stand up to them with the courage and obstinance of a ten-year-old, drunk on the energy pouring into my consoles from I know not where. I'm pretty sure my kids will deal with it eventually, one way or another.
This Fatal Frame is hoisted by one specific element. This can feel truest during some truly arduous backtracking. Not the necessity to survival kind of backtracking, but the different characters literally retracing each other's steps from chapter to chapter kind of backtracking. Thankfully, the lynchpin for this game is a pretty decent lynchpin, so if you love ghosts and Instagram and don't mind redundancy, then Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water is the sixth scariest thing you can do with a camera.
Assassin's Creed: Syndicate lets you science the shit out of murder in a city where people are sciencing the shit out of everything. There's an undeniable appeal to that. But it's an appeal worth looking in the face.
Downwell may not have the lifespan of Spelunky or Nuclear Throne, games that have continued unfolding over years for their players. But it also doesn't appear to be aiming for such heights. Its focus is as straight and unyielding as the well down which it drops you. It is fun and addictive, but moreover it's adrenaline-pumping and shocking in its barbarity.
Jotun weaves a tale not about some battle between good or evil, nor does the game construct some "damn-the-gods" narrative about the triumph of the human over unfeeling deities. Instead, Jotun treats its subject with the reverence of a Norse Edda, turning the elements of an ancient poetic tradition into a digital myth.
Its charming, morally earnest rhetoric of Undertale conceals the coercive weaknesses of its systemic approach to those same moral issues. Its limited combat options and often obtuse puzzle solving, alongside the sheer endurance required to survive boss fights long enough to end them, add up to a system that doesn't point to any elaborate moral insight. It simply points to itself.
Armikrog squanders the real, doing nothing interesting with its sense of space and temptation to explore, because every new chamber seems identical to the last. In fact, if The Neverhood has a sequel, it may be 2003's Samorost, from Amanita Designs—a precious cosmos of tinkering little mysteries. By the time it's done, Armikrog feels more like The Neverhood's mulligan. As if this is the first one, the prototype, the do-over, with less to offer than familiarity, all of which leads to the more lavish incarnation made nearly two decades ago. And after that loses steam, and you want a bit of action in your life, then you make Skullmonkeys.
These are quibbles. Shadowrun Hong Kong's success boils down to a smart early decision to stay true to Hong Kong, and exaggerate the flaws of the city's bizarre governing philosophy to find a new, urgent relevance in the cyberpunk genre.
Yes, The Beginner's Guide occasionally fumbles its narrative, Wreden sometimes overacts, and the writing can be a little ham-fisted—but the game also provokes incisive, critical thought about the way we read and evaluate games, and does so not by laying out a definitive "message" to be delivered to players, but by prompting us, through play, with open-ended questions.
As I argued before, I think it's still likely that Nintendo will profit from the intellectual labor players invest in Maker, and that we'll see the fruits of the community's work in the next Mario game. That said, Nintendo isn't Facebook. Maybe it's better to think about it in terms of participation and collaboration than the work of the many in thrall to the few.
Every system locks us up. But sims like Prison Architect throw away the keys.
The Taken King shows Destiny is willing to reach for everything it might be, and it's hard not to look forward to what comes next.
By granting me what I thought I wanted—free reign to explore—Mad Max pushes its source material out of the fast and tantalizing drive of action movies and into the slow, repetitive plod of open-world action games. It delivers a vast, meticulously rendered desert with nothing special to see.
Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime may or may not be a great game to play on a date. (Is there even such a thing? Shouldn't there be?) It definitely isn't sexy, and it doesn't have anything to say at all about love as a thing you feel. It is a fantastic engine, however, to enact love as a thing that you do.
The game, like the best works of science fiction, understands that horror can come from discomfort inherent to the erasure of boundaries we assume exist. The unintelligible whispers of static and the shattered visuals of glitch provide only the most cursory glances at a machine world inaccessible to us.
If you were to play through Stasis without stopping to take in all the optional content, you would experience an aesthetically appealing, linear, cliche-ridden adventure -- you would feel cold and alone. But by placing your adventure in the context of all the other tragedies aboard the Groomlake, a kind of familial intimacy develops.
When Dropsy's quest becomes grander, based around a larger conspiracy, some of this charm wears off. As the game becomes more "normal," Dropsy's original challenge of endearing himself to those he repulses fades, and the puzzles start seeming a little tedious. So many are based around a difficult to manage day/night cycle, and many others around the talents of collectible animals. But before things escalate, when it's just the story of a clown without a circus, the sentiment warms you like a hug.