Polygon's Reviews
Stray Gods is ambitious in its goals, and while the road Summerfall and co. take to reach them is rough and uneven, I won’t be forgetting Grace’s tale anytime soon. It’s a clever format, and the unfulfilled potential makes me excited for future attempts to meld games and theater.
While the finale of the game may not capitalize entirely on the promise of its early hours, My Friendly Neighborhood is, on a whole, one of the satisfying new horror experiences in a year that’s had no shortage of terrific horror games to choose from. If you’re looking for a fun and unsettling survival-horror title that’s light on gore and heavy on spine-tingling thrills, I wholeheartedly recommend giving My Friendly Neighborhood a spin.
What remains to be seen is how the game’s meaningful choices will affect the story in later episodes. The plot of Episode 1: “Archer’s Paradox” doesn’t stray far from typical Expanse fare, but a revelation in a later episode seems poised to explore more of the show’s deeper themes of exploitation, injustice, and inequality.
I would have loved more Venba, with its vibrant sound, touching story, and mouthwatering food, and yet, I still feel like Visai Games has told a complete, focused story.
The Banished Vault is, if anything, a master class in the economy and cruelty of space survival where every movement matters. It is wholeheartedly uncompromising in bending the player to its will and vision, and it is right to do so. I realize that the intangible, interstitial faith holding my exiles together has become fused with my own confidence in what I’m doing; I don’t care about parsing the minutiae of their civilization as much I care about having the chutzpah and half-assed math to pull us through.
A seasonal live-service roadmap promises a time-based endgame mode, variant exosuits, and a Monster Hunter collaboration in the near future, which, as a player now caught in the game’s talons, is an exciting prospect. Exoprimal is rough around the edges, but hopefully, by the time these updates arrive, it will have found the nostalgic audience its compelling experimental narrative sorely deserves, rather than going the way of the dinosaurs.
I’m over the post-apocalypse, and it’s going to take one hell of a game to get me interested in such a bleak setting for the foreseeable future. Remnant 2 is not that game.
Pikmin 4 is a game for those who want to take small things too seriously.
Viewfinder is puzzle game heaven. You’ll never look at a Polaroid the same way again, if you’ve ever looked at a Polaroid at all.
Xenonauts 2 is not a revolutionary release. It’s a conservative modernizing of an old-school tactical predecessor. It sits comfortably in that weird little niche of a sequel to a love letter of a ’90s classic. The improved variety and demanding scenarios may not push the envelope much further than where it was in 2014, but it was already in a great spot to begin with.
In the end, I loved the idea of Oxenfree 2 more than the game itself. It’s a game that has the right pieces, but falls short of putting them together in a way that lives up to the innovative, classic experience of the original game. A more compelling story is frustratingly hidden within the game’s branching narrative system, and it’s a shame that some people will miss it.
Only the first volume of the game has been released on Steam so far, so the mystery is still unsolved. Yet it’s already skyrocketed to the top of my personal list of favorite games of the year due to the depth of its characters and the twisty, sometimes even supernatural, turns of its murder mystery.
I’m thrilled that the remaster has given Ghost Trick a new lease on life. But Sissel spends the whole game making sure that nothing falls through the cracks — and that just doesn’t square with his game’s now lonely survival.
At its core, Fight Forever is a love letter to the golden generation of pro wrestling video games. It is not perfect, and on the content side, it’s slightly dated — but most of my complaints wash away every time I pick up the controller and start a new match. The nostalgia and finesse of those old glory years emanates from so many angles that it’s hard to nitpick the places that fall short. AEW: Fight Forever is at once a faithful homage, and a promising signifier of the future.
What makes Dave the Diver work so well is wanting to see what comes next. In another game that just tacked on mechanics and plot devices with no plan, it could feel like the padding around a threadbare premise. But Dave’s kitchen sink approach somehow feels like a perfectly logical, if absurd, escalation — like a Tim Robinson sketch in game form. It’s a teetering pile of mechanics and minigames that never gets around to collapsing because the balancing act is just too much fun.
Even with its rough edges, Battlebit Remastered is doing an amazing job of recapturing the feel of Battlefield’s good old days. A lot has changed since 2010, and you might not be able to get the old Battlefield squad to come out of retirement — but if you’re looking to try, Battlebit Remastered might be your best shot.
Where Dark Descent pushes beyond XCOM is in mission selection. The campaign is somewhat linear, but it achieves an open-world feel by allowing you to uncover new areas of the world map - various settlements and installations on the planet Lethe, which is undergoing a global crisis. While it's required that you complete the main story objectives in each sector, you can also return to each one to scrounge up missing items and complete sub-tasks at a later time. Dark Descent's structure even allows you to evacuate mid-mission, preserving the mental and physical health of your squad members after it all goes sideways. I've had extreme moments of highs and lows, as I've evacuated multiple times when pursuing certain objectives, salvaging what I could and placing my squad in the med-bay before re-deploying with new roster members. Do this too often, and the alien threat will intensify over time. This creates an illusion of a persistent environment, one that's evolving of its own autonomy.
Final Fantasy 16 is incredible when it doesn’t try to say anything meaningful
These moments rival those of the best stealth games, when the slightest noise can mean revealing your position to much more powerful foes. Frictional has made a name for itself by creating these moments out of elegant yet terrifying systems. The Bunker’s standout achievement, then, is creating a nonlinear sandbox where you’re constantly learning from your own bad habits. I’ve never been so conscious of how much noise everything makes around me in a digital space, cautiously entering rooms to avoid kicking an empty wine bottle or activating the flashlight intermittently when I knew the monster was near. As McKee described, it’s your mundane actions, in conjunction with the crude and hostile setting, that create a solid ceiling of sound — one that only grows thicker the longer you inhabit the bunker.
These small but persistent issues aren’t deal breakers, but they cut the tension. Homebody didn’t terrify me to my core, but I still found myself compelled to uncover its secrets, and it only takes a few hours to complete. The plot leaves key points up for interpretation, and as such, this is the sort of game that I’ll be digesting for quite some time. It’s not the same brand of horror as jump scares or gory deaths, but it’s unnerving all the same.