Polygon's Reviews
Outlast 2 made me feel terrible, but that's by design
What Remains of Edith Finch is beautiful and bittersweet
The first chapter's conflicts and outcomes may be conventional, but so were the the ones in the weird comic books my best friend's older brother stored in bread bags, which we'd read as fast as we could before he got home from football practice to terrify us. The feeling of wanting to read the next issue is just the same, too.
Little Nightmares' creepiness makes a lasting impression
Dawn of War 3 isn't evolutionary, but it is ferociously competent
Drawn to Death fails the fundamentals
Blackwood Crossing's truth is unforgettable and wrenching.
A new coat of paint can't fix Yooka-Laylee's old design problems
Thimbleweed Park is almost too successful channeling a different era of adventure games.
It successfully pushes this series to new heights of polish, allure and charm. It has a few blemishes, enough to distract a bit from the intriguing and weighty themes that the game wrestles with. But even through the rough patches, Persona 5 doesn't give up a drop of its colorful personality.
Time will tell if the changes to MLB the Show 17 establish a new foundation for what is enjoyed five years from now. In the present, though, it is still a richly illustrated, seductively appealing depiction of the National Pastime.
With core systems opaque and unnecessarily limited, all I ever felt equipped to do in Rain World was fail.
This is an exceptional piece of fantasy fiction, a metamorphosis machine, a toy, a game like no other. It's a work of deep imagination, humor and thoughtfulness. Everything held me captive for many hours, and will continue to do so. It's brave, bizarre, compelling and beautiful.
Andromeda succeeds, despite a host of problems
Wildlands wants to be both an ultraviolent cartoon and a grounded, ripped-from-the-headlines thriller. It can't do both, and it's much better at being silly and absurd. The mechanical experience of it is as freewheeling a sandbox as I've ever seen, but the frame, the tone and the script weigh it down like an anchor.
Aside from some issues with encounter balance and my yearnings for more detail, it's a beautiful, challenging game, content to be ambiguous, rich and confounding in ways that few other RPGs have ever pulled off.
If that's my biggest problem with it after clearing each of the game's five core endings, that should say everything. Nier: Automata is a game that's more than willing to make players feel small, both physically and conceptually. It wants to swallow them whole, and it succeeds. Nier demands patience with its antics — not to mention its definition of "ending" — but it's patience was rewarded.
Night in the Woods isn't perfect. I'm not perfect. You're not perfect. Life isn't perfect. But as the game itself tries to espouse, if you've got the patience, you may find that there is true beauty in that revelation.
I guess, in the end, it's not just that Breath of the Wild signals that Zelda has finally evolved and moved beyond the structure it's leaned on for so long. It's that the evolution in question has required Nintendo to finally treat its audience like intelligent people. That newfound respect has led to something big, and different, and exciting. But in an open world full of big changes, Breath of the Wild also almost always feels like a Zelda game — and establishes itself as the first current, vital-feeling Zelda in almost 20 years.
For Honor is worth the work you have to put into it