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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.
Playdead’s greatest feat in creating Inside was making it look like they never created it in the first place.
Comparison to The Witcher 3 would embarrass almost any RPG. It excels at everything most games suck at, from comic timing to narrative follow-through. It has the most expressive faces, the best drunken banter, the funniest throwaway gags, the most casual sex, and the deftest camera movements. But its best trick is to mold narrative from the materials that games have lately used as a sort of flavorless stuffing. In almost every side-quest and monster-hunting contract you undertake, there are telltale signs of someone at CD Projekt Red actually giving a s***.
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is a triumph.
As I became more familiar with its systems, as I began to master the repeating frames of its world, they began to fall away. Mastery brought with it an openness that was dizzying in its freedom. I had a ship I liked, enough units to get by, and an inventory that served my purpose. Unshackled from the grind, I suddenly realized I could wander.
Bayonetta 2 erects some of the most solid fighting mechanics and phantasmagorically gonzo visuals in gaming to date—certainly, something as compulsive and massive as this boosts the Wii U to the front of the pack—and through its formal choices communicates a singular, unfiltered vision of sexualization.
When you climb the craggy steps to fight Sword Master, you're maybe 15 minutes into the game, which is enough time to see that it is great.
Don’t let Quadrilateral Cowboy slip through your fingers
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.
Videogame reviews that fail at their description of the sublime often regress into a sort of buyer's guide. They tell you, in short, how far out of your way you should go for the game. But Samurai Gunn inspires just such a decree. If you don't have four controllers, a couch, and three friends yet, Samurai Gunn is a compelling case for making the investment.
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 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.
Like Journey, Abzû is in some sense a game about archetypes and archetypicality, letting you dwell within and among them as though to remind you of their firm embeddedness at the foundation of other things. And yet, in a significant structural twist, it's about recovering archetypes that no longer seem to have potency, rather than playing through an archetypal sequence—the Journey—that's still going strong.
The world of Samorost 3 is, quite plainly, unlike any other I’ve encountered.
Though Sunset delights in its complexity, it offers no answers to the friction that results from the intersection of its contrasts. The game consciously places itself at the liminal moment between two points: pure aesthetics and social commitment, wealth and poverty, night and day.
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.
Owlboy is a masterful tale of transcending disability
[T]here's still something powerful about DS2's dogged preservation of old forms
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.
I have played a lot of Destiny with friends and with randomly assigned partners, but it's sort of like being on a car ride together. Halo 5, on the other hand, is full of tense moments of planning and frustration and awe. The same multiplayer mode played in the same environment will never feel the same twice. Which begs the question: If a Halo Moment occurs and a friend isn't there to tell about it, did it happen?