Polygon's Reviews
Brynn's tale is told mostly in flashback, for obvious reasons, and as I watched it play out, I could make some limited decisions by putting the cursor on one of the eyeball icons on the screen and blinking to make my selection. Once the interactive portion of a moment is over, a metronome begins to tick back and forth at the bottom of the screen, even if characters are still talking. You can stay in that moment as long as you'd like ... as long you can keep yourself from blinking. Blink, and you're removed from the memory and sent someplace else.
Anyone that's played New Horizons will be familiar with the sorts of errands necessary to complete the spirits' tasks. Much of the time, the spirits have lost things that the player needs to find around the island. There's a lot of fishing, harvesting resources, and collecting items. These tasks can be finished within a half an hour or so most of the time, especially if I just have to do something like find a recipe book that's been stashed in a pile of leaves, but sometimes a task can require me to log in across multiple days. Say, for instance, I need to bring salt to the spirit baker on the island. That can only be purchased through Cozy Grove's shopkeeper, and I'll have to wait if it's not there on the day I need it.
This isn't a game you'll return to over and over, due to the heavy emphasis on a linear story with large-scale set-pieces hinting at the much bigger war around you. But it's absolutely worth playing through at least once, or playing again if you haven't touched it since its original release.
We need a break from this divorce game
Rise’s gameplay variety and mobility — all fueled by that little Wirebug — make it a must-try game for Monster Hunter skeptics and hardcore fans alike.
Mundaun still delivers eight to 10 well-paced hours of slow-burning horror. There are no endless exposition dumps or scary monsters jumping into frame. The story is just interesting, competently paced, and set on a believable and beautiful stage. Turns out, that’s all a game needs to be a good play on a dark weekend night.
You'll also be earning gear as your hero fights to survive, and juggling your loadout is a constant, unending job. Learning about each magical effect takes experimentation, since Loop Hero explains very little. What will this ring with those stats do when paired with this shield? What even is "vampirism," and could it be good in this context? You have to try different things and find out what works, much like parenting. Using trial and error to learn and figure things out is a great way to explore the world with your children, and it's almost a mandatory skill to perfect your run in Loop Hero.
Gnosia manages to capture that in single-player format, while creating a story and universe you care about enough to really learn and understand. I know everyone’s tells, but I also know what they like and dislike, what they struggle with and what they seek. Gnosia’s both an impostor game and a visual novel, and the mix results in something else entirely new. Whether you enjoy new forms of storytelling or just want the friendly deception without the social anxiety, it’s well worth experiencing.
Or you can remove the stress altogether and play on the lowest difficulty setting, which eliminates the stamina meter, allowing the player to zoom up the side of each environment and focus on enjoying the view and the experience. You do have to play the climbs in each environment in order of difficulty to unlock them in the scored modes where you unlock new gear. But every single climb is available to try on the casual setting from the jump, a welcome feature for anyone who just wants to be a virtual tourist on these mountains and structures.
It reminds me of a relationship I had, one that I thought I would never see myself out of. It's these memories of mine that give Maquette's narrative that emotional weight, even when the writing is clumsy or stilted. When I look back at that relationship, it's only just a speck in my 32 years of life, something that hardly gets a thought. It's hard to imagine that there was a time when it was so much bigger, where I lived in a fantasy world of my own creation - but I did. And Maquette has the right beats, and recursions, to bring up that feeling in me, that conflicting sense of scale.
Valheim's world is low-poly for the most part, but features enhanced lighting and water refraction effects that create a beautiful blend of the early 2000s and modern graphics. Oceans and rivers look lovely, while even the dreariest of environments somehow stand out. Particle effects bloom and blossom in snowy locales, with dense fog sometimes permeating endless meadows of yellowing grass. It made me stop and appreciate the environmental design and procedurally generated scenery. This approach also allows for those even with fairly low-end machines to run the game.
I'm even more baffled by the enemies for which I don't even get the correct tools to fight. Bravely Default 2 makes it easy to find all enemy weaknesses when I use a turn to inspect them, but some enemies are weak to energy types that I didn't gain access to for a whole two chapters after I first encountered their symbol. The peak of this frustration was when I fought a boss with a beefy minion that was vulnerable only to electricity and light, and completely invulnerable to all physical attacks. I had one character who could cast electrical attacks, and I still had yet to see light energy.
NoNo one asked for the Pong Cinematic Universe, but the PC game qomp is here to provide it anyway. It may be one of my favorite games of the year so far.
Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury is a fantastic double feature
Little Nightmares 2 is a horrifying journey that occasionally loses its way
Persona 5 Strikers is the best version of a high school reunion
The Medium starts off personal and poignant, but ends in cliché
IO Interactive delivers a terrific, thrilling finale for its trilogy
Shadowlands doesn’t do everything perfectly. The questing experience doesn’t feel as fluid in as previous expansions, and the quests aren’t as diverse. And it’s still too early to see how good the endgame content and updates will be. But even with the limited time I’m willing to put into Shadowlands, I’ll actually be able to play that endgame content as it comes out. And as my real life just gets more complicated the older I get, I couldn’t ask for a better shift in philosophy from my favorite MMO.
Cyberpunk 2077 is dad rock, not new wave