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You are not truly alone in Corpse of Discovery, but the videogame shows how loneliness is a question of degrees and shades, and not a simple binary. It is through this three-dimensional exploration of the pilgrim on a foreign world that the game shows its worth.
Volume's strengths are primal but simple, at times feeling like a Crossy Road-style time-passer with a cyberpunk sheen. It tries but ultimately doesn't say much of modern society or governments beyond the elementary. Indeed, it is the modern videogame incarnate, warts and all.
I did finally find a helm for Eder down in Durgan's Battery, piecing it together over a multi-part quest until all its stats were in order. Seemed to fit him. But he barely got a chance to wear it before the game ended and the narrator began teasing White March—Part 2. I hope it's still there when I get back.
Submerged is skeletal and unoiled. It is damned by competence: a short story that checks the boxes, but in doing so leaves no mark. I fell asleep twice while playing it, shaken awake by Miku's worsening cough, just looking to fix up Taku and motorboat out as fast as possible. It's a game that has no ambition and says nothing, and through that, quietly stumbles, erodes, and disappears, leaving no impression, no haunting memories.
Until Dawn is a game constructed by people who understand how to manipulate its players' sense of control. It's informed by a deep study of horror films and smart in its consideration of how to employ this understanding in an interactive medium. It only fails in its uncharacteristic acceptance of a few outmoded tropes. In some ways that enhances Until Dawn as an attempt to properly translate its genre to a new form, while keeping its spirit intact. In others, it's a disappointingly familiar problem to find in a game with so many novel ideas.
Cradle begins with amnesia and in its very form enacts recollection. It doesn't actually matter who you are. You're here to remember the fundamentals: you can see, you can learn, you can walk, you can breathe. It's too bad that half the game—the half that tries so hard to be a game—makes you wish you could double jump with some rocket implants.
Let's be clear, I would not be playing this game if there was not the chance that I could not pilot a giant fighting robot. Spaceships are cool and all, but they don't have beam sabers.
For the moment, King's Quest remains caught in a particularly strange-yet-familiar space, halfway hearkening back to an older era but seemingly aware that it was a time that needed improvement.
There is a certain telos to the platformer, a process of movement bound up in a particular path to a determined destination through a specific set of obstacles. Similarly, iteration tends to be bound to sequence, starting with relative simplicity and slowly building complexity or variation through a regular series of modifications.
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is a triumph.
The environment Bits and Beasts have created feels dark and slimy, dank and frightening—a nice place to visit, but perhaps a touch too convincing in its dangers.
But there is one more episode left and the town of Arcadia Bay has yet to be saved. There is still time for Max's story to be subsumed by melodrama, for the game to simply spend the emotional currency it has worked hard to gather on a cliffhanger for the sake of having a cliffhanger. Come October shall we look back and wonder where this potential went? Perhaps we shall ask ourselves what could have been done differently. Or, perhaps, Life is Strange will navigate these concerns, becoming the game we hoped it would be.
But these moments are too few and too far between, in a brief but well-designed puzzle game that really just doesn't need them. There's a strong tradition of puzzle games enlivened by the voices that inhabit their world, but the more I look at Pneuma, the more I am forced to conclude that it would be better if it simply had the confidence to be silent.
The Starks are dead, both as a concept and a narrative arc. Throughout the early seasons and books, they served as the "good guys," allowing readers to pin their traditional fantasy hopes on a happy ending where everyone gets what they deserve. Their graphic and seemingly untimely deaths were a message from George R. R. Martin, spelled out in blood: this is not that kind of story. Either Telltale didn't get the message, or they're choosing to go over it again in case the mutilated corpses of everyone's favorite HBO actors didn't do the job.
The world of The Magic Circle is a jumbled mess of half-finished ideas, overblown ambitions, long boardroom meetings, and the conflict between whiteboard and what can really be done.
Playing Guild of Dungeoneering is probably better than playing Dungeons and Dragons by yourself, but I suspect that playing D&D with other people is better still. The interplay of Dungeon Master and player is controlled chaos, thrilling in its unpredictability, while the outcome of Guild of Dungeoneering is a foregone conclusion: I will throw a neverending horde of adventurers at a dungeon until I complete it or get bored and wander away.
But if you are only interested in the puzzles, then you will only enjoy half the game. At its heart, Road to Gehenna carries forward both the original game's thoughtful examination of how we interact with the world and its engaging brainteasers. But it is saved from becoming more of the same by examining how we interact with the world now, and how that world's end might be understood.
So, clad in his shiny new cyber-armor, Batman descends on his city and hops into his vehicle, and I'd like to believe that there's a substantive core underneath those mechanical interlocking plates. Arkham Knight, however, remains uninterested in this prospect, preferring to dwell on this new slate of tools rather than sharpening the dependable ones. Unfortunately, the game's fascination with his devices provides a reading of Batman as shallow and flashy as the sheen on all those wonderful toys.
True to this experience, Her Story finally operates with a sort of functional ambiguity under its veneer of objective presentation. The player is presented with a crime and a sole suspect. By the end, there is even a narrative of what exactly took place, but no archive is ever truly complete, and all the information is never really all the information. You will have questions at the end of Her Story. Making sure that they're the right ones may require figuring out exactly who is looking and how, though which camera and on which screen.
Correction: Due to an error, our score for this originally read "70." It has been updated.