With a bigger budget - and grander ideas about humanity - maybe I Am Alive could have been more than an effective proof-of-concept.

Every summer, I ritualistically take a week or two to mod the shit out of this game, and then proceed not to play it at all.

Says it all really.

Benjamin's Flight feels completely lifeless.

Thomas Was Alone lacks a voice. A moment where it shouts instead of merely narrating.

Lands awkwardly between technical show-off and bloated shooting circus.

Drake's Deception's most striking moment comes late in the game when Nate, lost in the desert, begins to hallucinate and hears a recital of Elliot's Waste Land. Eventually, we stumble upon a well, and near it lies another collectible treasure that's neither here nor there.

It's the beautiful folly of these games ; an impossible city we keep crashing against.

Holds up surprisingly well on most levels.

Crysis is enamoured with its potential technicalities more than it is interested in being a creature of gameplay.

A sandbox island that doesn't work .

There is genuine wonder in seeing polygons grow before your eyes until you just get tired of it and fall through the sky.

A pathetic little game made by geeks.

Small dick energy.

Firewatch dares being about a catharsis that never comes. And that's exactly what breaks my heart about it.

Pew pew pew.

Any game using Clair de Lune in its promotional material is immediately suspect in my eyes.

Disappointing follow-up to the best Pokemon game of the DS era.

By the time NieR unveiled its textual adventure, I was already charmed by Yoko Taro's proposition and all that's left was the coup de grace.