Polygon's Reviews
The stakes are high in Blair Witch, as these woods aren’t known to take prisoners. But with two characters at the heart of this game, I only really care about one of them coming home alive.
Catherine: Full Body is still insightful, still troubling
An interactive horror game only works if it scares or surprises you, and Man of Medan does both.
Behold, one of 2019’s best and weirdest games
Astral Chain is the best new Nintendo franchise since Splatoon
Equal parts baffling, frustrating, and thrilling
The dreamlike way Erica flows from scene to scene is also both a strength and a weakness. There are no hiccups or stutters in the narrative, but it also hides the major turning points of the story, or at least the moments when my decisions really make a difference. It's going to be interesting to go back and try again, making different choices. The relatively short running time gives that option extra appeal, especially if you're surrounding yourself with new people who don't know what's going to happen.
It's crucial to slow down, take a breath, and watch everything, even when I want to rush through to find another clue. On the other hand, Telling Lies provides subtle reminders of the dangerous reality of rifling through stolen, encrypted files, and the level of secrecy required by that act. That tension helps the game crackle with life and urgency.
No Man’s Sky Beyond scrapes away the grind, finds the fu
Dicey Dungeons is the sort of game that looks inviting, then seems a little silly, and then gets lodged into my head like a song I keep humming. These basic ideas are being explored in many games right now, but Dicey Dungeons proves once again that execution, not originality, is often the most important thing.
I came to this game imagining it would be a clever take on the Turing Test, a scenario designed to see if a machine can pass for a human intelligence. Instead, I explored the possible outcomes of trying to treat mental health problems at scale.
Size and speed always carry the day, but Madden gives you new ways to use them
The Blackout Club is messy, buggy, weird, and I can’t stop playing it
Special items come rapidly, through many different means. I am gifted a boombox early in the game that I can turn on to force my enemies to groove to the tunes. Each item offers genuine strategic options while maintaining the general sense of goofiness and surprise.
The lack of map diversity doesn't take away from the visual splendor of the game, though. While much of Three Houses is seen from an overhead perspective, initiating combat zooms the camera in, showing off gorgeously animated soldiers in combat. During a particularly tense battle, Claude, the house leader of the Golden Deer, tosses an arrow into the sky before catching it and firing off a critical hit to take out a pesky enemy pegasus moving in on my healer. These flashy moments happen all the time and are unique to the two dozen classes in the game, so there's always some new animation to get pumped over.
Youngblood is a meat-and-potatoes first-person shooter where all the systems work well, the enemies provide a brutal challenge, and a friend can come along with you through the whole thing. It seems like it was designed as a relatively inexpensive crowd-pleaser of an FPS, and I will admit that I was very entertained.
Tetris Effect on PC takes a classic even closer to perfection
The end result is effective; Elsinore is like a beautiful little onion, and peeling away the layers over the course of a playthrough is sheer pleasure.
It takes a while for the ETRC’s five tons of thunder to get rolling
ActRaiser fans are likely hungry enough to want to at least try this — and the asking price doesn’t feel like robbery — but I left SolSeraph after only a few hours, upset at the missed opportunity.