Killing for yourself is murder. Killing for your government is heroic. Killing for entertainment is harmless.

It's no secret nowadays that the US Government actively sponsors media that paint it and its military in a good light. Every new war and every fresh "international threat" is conveniently accompanied by a myriad of movies where American soldiers heroically save the day from whatever the political big bad is at that time.

That sponsorship also extends to videogames, and while its exact influence in this industry can never be measured, if we're talking about an excess of military shooters, the PS360 generation is the one that stands out the most. Call of Duty was at its peak, and military shooters trying to capitalize on that success were a dime a dozen. Not only were those games of, uh, varying quality, but many went so ham on the war propaganda military power fantasy, some made CoD look deeply nuanced in comparison.

(there's an argument to be made that even CoD degraded as that generation went on, but that's a story for other people to tell)

Which is why it's so shocking that this is the context in which Spec Ops: The Line came out. Spec Ops was a dead IP by then, a forgotten tactical shooter franchise that never saw much relevance, and it's said that 2K Games, looking for some way to make use of that property, basically gave carte blanche to Yager to just make whatever game they wanted under the Spec Ops name, provided it was a military shooter.

The folks in Yager, in turn, decided they didn't want to follow in the footsteps of the market leader, instead opting to make a game with a twisted storyline and an unreliable narrator, a game that was undoubtedly critical of its subject matter and its own industry. That is how Delta Squad, composed by Captain Walker and his squadmates Lugo and Adams, came to be.

Delta Squad enters Dubai with the mission of finding and rescuing survivors, and Walker takes it upon himself to find his old friend, Colonel Konrad, who became trapped in the city with his men during a previous rescue effort. As the trio moves through the ravaged Dubai, they are faced with threats they did not expect, and begin to question the purpose of their own mission.

Far from the average military shooter, which paints their protagonists as patriotic heroes, Spec Ops: The Line presents us with a very negative view of war, american interventionism, and even of its own game genre, and Walker's journey takes him to some extremely dark places. There are plenty of good dives into the game online, such as this one. From its visual design, to its themes, to its influences, there's a fascinating amount of stuff to discuss about the game, and that cemented its cult following.

The thing about being a cult classic, though, is that those mostly range from niche products to commercial bombs, and Spec Ops: The Line was unfortunately in the latter group. Despite its message, it looks and plays much like any other cover shooter out there, which made it a really hard sell to the average player, who either did play shooters but had bigger names to choose from, or didn't, and would only be interested if you spoiled the game a bit.

Regardless of its sales numbers, though, Spec Ops is, to me, an unforgettable experience. Its writing and imagery have stuck with me over the years, and, as unlikely as that is to happen, I really wish the game was remastered to have a fresh chance at being seen by more people. Pretty please, 2K Games?

Every now and then, when you think you've seen it all, there comes a game that completely blows your mind, and makes you think about just how great of a medium games are. On that note, say hi to Gorogoa.

The simplest way to describe it is that it is a puzzle game about manipulating image tiles, but that undersells its brilliance. Gorogoa features a young boy on a quest to stop a monstrous creature, and has you dismantling and putting back together hand drawn scenes he's in, creating and severing continuity between panels, as you shuffle them around trying to get him to his goal.

It's like nothing you ever played before: an incredibly surreal experience that mandates lateral thinking, but at the same time, feels approachable and intuitive -- the pieces fall into place naturally as you play, the game's beautifully hand-drawn visuals and easy to understand controls leading you through its scenes just as you lead the boy in his journey.

Combine that with the game being easily accessible, with it being available on PC as well as major mobile and console platforms, it makes me want to go around showing it to people. And not only people who like puzzle games, not only people who like video games in general, this is a game that deserves to be seen by everyone. It's just that good.

Home is a 2D sidescroller where you wake up in a house which is not your own and discover a dead body. Still a bit shaken, you then try to get home, and along the way, try to figure out what happened.

I'm just going to say it: if you wanna play this game, play Lone Survivor instead. LS was released months before Home and does the same thing Home does, except far, far better. Home is mechanically simple, and while it succeeds in building a creepy atmosphere, the narrative goes nowhere, and all that mood might as well have gone straight into the trash can.

I don't say this lightly: nothing happens over the course of the game. The game makes small suggestions about things having happened before the game starts, and it reacts to your choices somewhat, but never to a point where any of it is memorable or deeper than the average pick-your-own-adventure book.

The fact that the game closes by explicitly asking the player what they think happened and linking to a forum is, to me, the most insulting part. Stories that are successful in building this sort of ambiguity don't need to tell their beholders to speculate, because they'll do it on their own. If you have to ask that question, it's proof that your work is cheap.

As a side note, I don't really see what's beautifully realized about the game's visuals. I think the Steam description is too generous.

Another one of Amanita Design's point-'n-clicks, Botanicula certainly explains why the studio is named after a hallucinogenic mushroom. The game is set in a microscopic world, filled with whimsical creatures, but that is threatened by a foreign presence. It's all very surreal, and while I'm not sure how the competition looks like these days, at the time, I remember calling it the trippiest game you could buy on Steam.

Like Amanita's previous games, Botanicula is a competent point-'n-click adventure that's very charming and approachable, though I do feel that the fact that it's less grounded in reality (much less than Samorost and Machinarium, at least) makes some puzzles a bit too obtuse. Still, it's a fun game to play with someone that isn't too experienced with videogames.

Machinarium is a charming point-'n-click game about a little robot on a quest to save his robo-girlfriend. It's pretty neat: not only it has the high-quality visual design Amanita became famous for, but its simple inputs made it very approachable. These factors made it rise to prominence in a time when Steam wasn't so overcrowded and there weren't many point-'n-clicks of this caliber outside of flash games.

That said, the fact that it is approachable does not in any way mean it's easy. Machinarium is home to some fiendish puzzles, and I think the only reason I avoided a walkthrough back when I played it was because I was playing it with someone else -- which, by the way, is a fun way to experience it.

Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments is a 3D adventure game that follows the titular director in a series of cases across Britain. Each case has him travelling between locations, searching for clues, questioning people and making deductions in order to point out the culprit.

The game strikes a nice balance between linear storytelling and detective work: it forces the player to get every relevant clue and solving all puzzles before proceeding to the next parts of each case, while also allowing for them to take on some more open-ended tasks by making links between pieces of evidence on their own and arriving at the conclusion they want.

On that note, I particularly like how the developers mapped Sherlock's abilities to gameplay. There are two (admittedly underused) forms of detective mode, one centered around deductive reasoning and another, around his imagination. The player can also profile people by pointing out details on their person as the camera pans around them.

Last, but not least, there's a deduction screen that contains the information gathered until that point in the case. Here, the player is able to decide on what they think are relevant -- for instance, is the explanation offered by a certain suspect satisfactory, or are they lying to conceal their involvement? Is an event a coincidence or an important link? By making these choices, different conclusions start to form, with the player ultimately deciding on who to pin the blame on, and whether or not to turn them in. Your choices lead to a different ending to the case, but the game continues regardless of whether you were correct or not.

A friend described C&P to me as the archetypal 7/10 game, and having completed every case, I think I agree. It's not mindblowing, but is a pretty fun time, and while it's clunky, that clunkiness never becomes particularly bothersome. Heck, if a puzzle or minigame proves too annoying, and some of them will, you can even skip it with no penalty whatsoever. The game is pretty honest about its own level of polish.

So if you're looking for a detective thriller to spend a weekend on, check out the Frogwares take on Sherlock Holmes. They're a good rendition of the legendary detective, and are definitely worth your time.

Tokyo Jungle was a recommendation I picked up from the Games You Might Not Have Tried series from Extra Credits, way back when. In that series, it is explicitly stated that the games are not necessarily good, just interesting enough that you should try. I think that defines TJ rather well. It's a very neat idea that could probably be iterated upon, but the gameplay, as it is, is not that great. On the other hand, you get to play as a dinosaur in a pink dress and straw hat, so it's peak videogames.

The premise is simple enough: humanity has disappeared from the planet and animals have taken over the streets of Tokyo, and now fight every day for survival. In fact, Survival is the name of the game's main mode, in which you get to pick a species of animal and are tasked with staying alive for as long as you can, hunting for food and trying to win over the best mates, all while avoiding predators.

Yes, the game is about just that: you are an animal that needs to feed and procreate. You also get handed bonus objectives to complete as each species, which, if successfully fulfilled, unlock larger and/or stronger species to play as, as well as clothing and accessories that you can equip on the playable animals. This includes a dinosaur, and also a pink dress and a straw hat.

Animals come in two main types, Grazers and Predators, which determine the kind of food they have to eat. Curiously, though, they don't really alter gameplay all that much otherwise. In fact, my first criticism of the game is that most animals play the same. There are stat variations that define what you can do with that species, but a large part of the game is spent in combat, either hunting prey or running from predators, and combat mechanics are the same for every species: press square to attack, and once the indicator shows up, press R1 to do a finishing move.

Then there's the fact that the game is heavily biased towards Predators. Attackers are surprisingly hard to lose, often to a point of absurdity, with your pursuers running by packs of easier prey, completely uninterested. Besides, as a Grazer, you can get killed by surprisingly small animals. I was surprised when I managed to kill a pack of sheep as a Pomeranian, but then later, playing as a horse, I was slain by a pack of unprovoked house cats.

All that said, getting better animals with time makes progressing through the animal unlock tree all the more satisfying. It's the weird thing about the game: it starts out very frustrating, with you getting murdered by anything that looks at you funny. However, by fulfilling the objectives, you get to move up in the food chain, and in every new attempt, you are able to survive longer, and the map begins to open up. All the better, too, because to unlock further sections of the story, you'll need to move further and further away from the starting area every time.

Ah, yes, the story. There was a rather odd decision to lock the game's story mode behind Survival. It's counterproductive, even, because it teaches you mechanics in rather late chapters, by which time you'd probably have learned it by yourself in Survival so to be able to unlock said chapters. It feels like a bit of an afterthought.

Either way, the plot and backstory of the game are... I'm not going to spoil them, but they get really crazy, really fast. There are explanations to uncover for why humans disappeared, as well as why all these animals are around, and even, for why there are dinosaurs roaming around, dinosaurs which, mind you, are very playable and very, very fashionable.

That's the basic gist of Tokyo Jungle. I miss it. Not necessarily the game itself, but what it represented. It was a time when Sony was reinventing itself to try and stay competitive, and when it let its studios do their thing and come up with some really quirky games. "It wasn't a multi-million seller, but that was not the point" and all.

It is a repetitive game and has a lot of flaws, but it manages to keep you hooked. Distinct, not necessarily great, but you probably never played anything remotely like it, and you're unlikely to ever forget it. Also you get to play as a dinosaur donning a pink dress and straw hat, making it basically criminal that it never got ported to the PS4/5. I demand high-res textures and raytracing.

Mario is the one video game character that will outlive them all. He's one of the few 2D mascots that survived the transition to 3D unscathed -- possibly stronger -- and since his inception, every Nintendo console has brought with it a new spin on his franchise. The N64 had Mario 64, the GC had Sunshine, the Wii had Galaxy. The WiiU's offering was 3D World, an expansion on the 3D Land formula that proved successful on the 3DS and was thus improved and brought to the home console.

This formula hits a sweet spot for casual play that I really appreciate. When the series went fully tridimensional, it began to have stages that were far more complex and harder to navigate, which is not necessarily bad, but makes for a much different experience than the 2D counterparts, which were far more approachable games.

But then there's the issues with the 2D games, especially the more modern ones: New Super Mario Bros never quite caught me because stages almost always devolve into a rush for the flagpole, as there aren't as many ways to hide secrets in purely 2D sidescrolling stages. Super Mario World was, I think, the most successful game in this regard, but it was still limited.

3D World's stages are right in the middle of those two things. It being a 3D game, its stages open up, allowing for freer movement and for more nooks and crannies to hide secrets in. Still, every goal and challenge is clearly defined, and you're still moving from point A to point B. This makes for a game that is very easy to pick up, play a couple of stages and leave, and also makes for a more interesting co-op experience if you feel like playing the game like that.

Each level is only a few minutes long, but they deserve the time they get. There's an immense variety of stage designs here, from mechanics, to enemies, to setups. There's autoscroller stages, there’s stages that play with shadows, stages focused on one of the many power-ups or blocks, stages that are built very tall or very spread out, a myriad of devices you can control…

The design methodology behind Super Mario 3D World is brilliant, and there's a Game Maker's Toolkit video about it if you're interested. The basic gist is, the game has an enormous amount of stage mechanics, but each stage chooses to roll with only one or two. Each mechanic gets introduced by the level in a safe environment, then is presented in a situation that can cost you lives. This makes for stages that are entirely self-contained and require no prior knowledge other than the controls. It's another reason why the game feels so pick-up-and-play.

In each stage, you can pick between Mario, Luigi, Toad or Peach to play as, and they have the same bonuses they had waaaay back in Super Mario 2 (the western one). Luigi can jump higher, Toad runs faster, Peach can hover for a few seconds and Mario... He's Mario. You can safely play as any character, and trying each one out is part of the fun, but Peach is probably the best due to her extra precise jumps. When playing co-op, it's a good idea to let a less gaming-savvy guest play as her.

Super Mario 3D World is a fantastic take on the Mario series that is worth everybody's time. It's sad that it came out on the worst performing Nintendo console of all time, but hey, at least it got a new chance to shine on the Switch recently. I recommend picking it up over there if you have the chance.

Okay, hear me out here. What if... a social deduction game, but as a single-player RPG? To some, it must sound like complete lunacy. How can a genre of game that is fundamentally about its human aspect have that removed from it? Well, the folks at Petit Depotto took that idea and ran with it, and the result is, simply put, one of the best games I have ever played.

The starship D.Q.O. travels across the galaxy, its crew a mishmash of displaced people from different planets, all of them fleeing from an invisible, terrifying threat called Gnos. This alien presence of unknown origin aims to erase humanity from existence and, to achieve that goal, it infects those who come in contact with it, taking over their minds.

Indistinguishable from their peers, these infected, called the Gnosia, seek to deceive and eliminate their own kin, and by the time the story begins, have caused the fall of entire worlds. Within the D.Q.O., the crew's worst fear comes to pass: someone, or some people aboard have become Gnosia, and they must be unmasked before they can take over the ship.

Taking after social deduction games such as Werewolf, The Resistance, or the more recent Among Us, in Gnosia, a pool of players is split into different groups, each player's role known only to themselves, that must identify each other and defeat the opposing faction. These types of games are common at parties, and are very fun. If you have never played them before, though, don't worry, as the game will carefully walk you through the rules in the beginning loops.

Yes, loops. Gnosia takes place in a time loop that begins as the Gnosia infect a set number of crewmates and a contingency plan is put in place: on each day, the crew will vote to cryogenically freeze a person who they suspect is Gnosia, in the hopes that all of the enemies will be neutralized. So long as there's at least one Gnosia free, during the night, they'll erase one of the humans on the ship. Humans win if they can freeze every Gnosia, who in turn are victorious if they come to outnumber humans on the ship.

Like in Gnosia's inspirations, there are other character roles that are introduced as you progress, all of which change the way the game is played when they're present. What makes the game more fascinating, however, and what I think is Gnosia's greatest achievement, is how effectively they mapped the social deduction gameplay to an RPG system.

During each day in Gnosia, a debate takes place, which consists of five rounds during which you and the other characters can use different commands to steer the conversation. Don't let the initial simplicity fool you: while, at first, it's only possible to accuse or defend other characters, as the game progresses, the discussion becomes more and more complex.

Characters in Gnosia have six stats: Charisma, Intuition, Logic, Charm, Performance and Stealth, all of which allow the use of different commands and affect various aspects of gameplay. As the game progresses, both you and the NPCs increase their stats and, from them, gain access to a myriad of different commands that help steer the debate, commands that can enhance the effect of others' speech, outline logical conclusions, and put other characters in tight spots, among other things.

At the end of the debate, you and your fellow crewmates cast your votes on who to eliminate. Hopefully, you didn't talk too much so to become annoying nor too little so to become suspicious, and were able to guide the conversation to the direction you wanted. Should you avoid the fridge, during the night, you can interact with other characters and get to know them better.

These mechanics form the core loop of Gnosia, which is brilliant for many reasons. First, it's one of those "one more turn" types of games that are hard to put down. So many play sessions of mine were made a couple hours longer because I just felt for going for "one" more loop before stopping, which then became four or five. It might feel random at first, but once you get a hang of the debates, the game becomes hard to put down.

More than that, the stat system in itself is beautifully realized, both mechanically and as a storytelling device. Mechanically, when building your character, no stat is useless: while there are some parameters you might want to focus on depending on the build you like, all of them serve an important gameplay purpose and there isn't a single stat that feels safe to have low.

Stats are also a means of characterization. Much like yourself, each of the NPCs in the ship has a specific build. Some characters easily make themselves loved, while others will find themselves under crosshairs for minor missteps. Some rely on their perception to catch others lying, others use logic to tear a hole in their opponents arguments.

There are also preexisting relationships between NPCs -- and even between them and your own character -- that you'll uncover as you see more character events, but that can be perceived from how they act towards others during debates. Some characters have a predisposition to liking you, and might protect you even if it isn't in their best interest for the vote, while others are the opposite, and you will learn to fear them.

It's important to pay attention to these sorts of details because whenever a character happens to be Gnosia, their behaviour might change, and an attentive player can use this to their advantage and sniff them out. This is a game where mechanics and storytelling are deeply entwined, one feeding into the other,

The overarching narrative that surrounds the time loops is engaging and set up in a way that makes it very fun to uncover. You will laugh, you will cry, you will fall in love with many of the characters, and as the story comes to a close, you'll wish there was more to uncover. Just one more excuse to go looping again in this game of lies and deception.

From beginning to end, Gnosia was a delightful experience, one I will recommend wholeheartedly to others even if my track record of getting people to play quirky Japanese games is... less than positive. I wish I could erase it from my mind so I could do it all over again.

The Frozen Wilds is an expansion to Horizon: Zero Dawn that adds a new region to the map, where the Banuk, often cited throughout the game, live. It doesn't feel like an expansion, though-- like Rise of the Tomb Raider's Baba Yaga or Control's The Foundation, it gives me this feeling that it's a piece of the main story that hit the cutting room floor due to being complicated to develop and not essential.

Which is not a bad thing in itself -- a lot of people will jump and say that games nowadays cut content and sell it as DLC (which, in fairness, is true for some publishers), but cutting things is an normal part of game development. Basically every game in history has had stuff dropped from it, be it because it didn't fit, detracted from the pacing, or time constraints. And if I'm right, I'd risk saying Frozen Wilds was a mix of pacing and time.

The DLC opens up a new mountainous region to the north of the map, the area where the Banuk, a people mentioned many times over the main game, live. Aloy heads there in the hopes of finding out more about the mysterious ally she meets during the story, and ends up helping the Banuk defeat a mysterious threat that lurks in the mountains.

It tells a complete, self-contained story that is tangentially related to the main one, and there are slight changes to dialogue during main quests if you finish The Frozen Wilds first, which I feel was a nice touch. But it is still a side story, and you don't necessarily have to own it.

As for its overall quality, it's... more of Horizon, and it's not going to change your mind about the main game. Although, to be fair, Aloy's interactions with the Banuk did make me appreciate her even more as a protagonist. Her being an outcast, as well as being somewhat familiar with machines helps a lot with representing the audience's point of view.

There's also puzzles in the DLC! Not super complex ones, mind you, but they beat the completely braindead ones in the main game. It's almost like some higher-up was afraid some players wouldn't get it and completely dumbed down the main campaign levels, but let the level designer have their way on the DLC. Add that to the long list of AAA quirks you can observe in Horizon.

Let me start by saying that Horizon threads a very dangerous line -- it's a game that attempts to do the very tired open-world action game formula and still stand out. To me, it succeeded, thanks to its narrative, worldbuilding and inventive combat, but a lot of people are going to give up if they're not as tolerant with the hiccups, and I want to discuss those too. With those things in mind, let's talk about Horizon: Zero Dawn.

In the distant future, humanity exists as primitive tribes, fighting each day for survival among the overgrown ruins where our civilization once stood. In this world, animal-like machines roam, machines whose origin and workings are unknown, and that grow more and more aggressive each day. A girl is born to a tribe in the mountains, a tribe whose elders deem the baby a curse and have her be raised as an outcast. As she comes of age, she sets out to find her place in the world and discover the truth about her origins.

The game sets off to a fantastic start, with an opening that sets up a lot of mysteries to be unraveled later. How was Aloy born, and why was she cast out? What kind of society is this? Who is the man she's entrusted to, and why is he exiled as well? As we move on to a section that shows Aloy's childhood, we're thrown into a ruin of the old world and a record of the final days of its inhabitants. The questions keep piling up.

We're presented to the game's main mechanics as well as a bit more of Aloy and her adoptive father's characters, until a point where we reach a festival at a bustling village, and here it is evident how much production value goes into building this world. You get to see rituals, dances, shamans telling stories of their tribe -- the culture and people Aloy has been shut out of.

This is one of Horizon: Zero Dawn's positives: so many post-apocalyptic games fall into misanthropic tropes, where humanity is fundamentally rotten and its survivors devolve into warring gangs that know nothing other than sex, substance abuse and, in particular, violence. Any attempts at rebuilding society are presented as shallow, corrupt and/or ultimately doomed to fail.

Games like that are always hard to finish, because regardless of being right or wrong, they lack a world worth fighting for. Horizon, on the other hand, puts a lot of work in fleshing out its societies and their cultures. The festival at the beginning of the game is quite the experience, presenting a variety of characters and setting up several different potential plot threads.

But then comes a part where the game drops the ball for a bit. As the prologue ends, the story does a triple backflip and the game enters a bit of a slump. Maybe several sequences got cut and their plot points smushed into one, or maybe they wanted you to spend some time alone with the world at this point. Or both. Either way, I figure most people who turn out to dislike Horizon are going to drop it during this part, as it's when the game plays to its weaknesses the most by putting the spotlight on the generic parts of the experience.

By that time, Horizon has yet to show off most of its tricks, leaving you only with sidequests to do and collectibles to chase around for, with not many different enemies available or weapon types unlocked. At this point, you'd be excused for thinking Horizon doesn't have any interesting gameplay to speak of.

Since we're on this subject already, let's get it out of the way: the side content in Horizon is simply baffling, and there's a clear divide between the level of care given to the main campaign and to side missions, the writing and polish feeling very off in the latter case. This is actually the first game I've seen that basically admits lots of its quests are pure filler busywork, so much so that they get a separate category called "Errand" in the quest menu. They aren't even considered "side" quests.

There's also an obsession with creating setpieces that often backfires. If you happen to explore the world early on, you'll notice there are conspicuously large, empty areas at dead ends in various places of the map. In almost every instance, that area will be used for exactly one quest later on, and outside of that one quest, it's just pointless. A carefully crafted corner of the world with nothing and no one in it that only serves to remind you that this is not a world, this is a videogame.

But then there's the flipside, the quests that actually build on the world they're in. While the disparity in polish levels is still evident, these quests not only present more interesting storylines that often span multiple missions, but also include important characters and have tangible impacts on the world and its societies, even affecting the ending sections of the game.

It's no wonder that most of these good quests branch off from events and characters the main story, because that is where Horizon shines. Horizon's main campaign, apart from that bit I mentioned, is incredibly well-directed, meticulously unraveling its plot, leading you on until the very end of the game. Every quest area is filled with audio logs that slowly form a bigger picture of the civilization that came before yours, and how your civilization came to be.

The narrative explores themes of environmentalism and war, as well as the fragility of life. The opposition between nature and technology is a core component of Horizon's world design, and it's also ever present throughout Aloy's story. Speaking of Aloy, there's also her personal journey, someone cast out because of a tribe's tradition who then sets out to learn about her origins. She's pragmatic, easy to emphathize with, and a lovable character overall.

Even if you don't care about story at all, though, you might still like Horizon due to its combat, especially the enemy design, which is most inventive I've seen a game have in a while. While the game looks like it might be focused around melee, Horizon is for the most part a third-person shooter. You could theoretically poke enemy machines with your spear until they fall, but that's an easy way to get stomped on, and it's far more effective to use the myriad ranged weapons the game offers.

There's actually so many that it's hard to name them all by heart: you can tie down machines using ropes to make them collapse, set tripwires that explode or electrocute them, sling mines and bombs with different elemental effects, fire at least nine different types of arrows which different effects and/or damage types. It's a lot, and the game does a bit of Souls here by letting you find these weapons and figure out their effects by yourself.

Like with Souls games, everything hinges on how patient you are. If you're willing to spend time at the Hunting Grounds scattered across the map to learn the game's mechanics, there will come a time where everything will click. If you're not, well, the slump I mentioned just got worse, because enemies are getting harder as you move through the map and all you know how to do is chuck arrows at them until they die. This is another reason people might find Horizon boring.

The great payoff from understanding your own arsenal comes from the way enemies are designed. Apart from the human bandits and cultists you face, all enemies are animal-shaped robots of varying sizes whose armored bodies consist of many different parts -- sensors, batteries, fuel cells, fans, weaponry, etcetera.

The trick to Horizon's combat is scanning enemies with Aloy's Focus, learning about these parts and methodically targeting down each enemy's weaknesses. Batteries can be shocked into overload. Fans, exposed when temperature rises, are gaps in the armor. Gas chambers under pressure can be pierced and detonated. For some enemies, you can even use pressure blasts to rip their cannons apart, then pick them up and shoot back.

There are so many different ways in which machines can be taken down that encounters seldom feel alike. And mind you, it pays off to learn all of them: contrary to my initial expectations, Horizon's combat is surprisingly challenging. This is a game that expects you to know how to shoot, to know when to move, but also when to stand still, and even, in some cases, expect you to know to dodge into enemy attacks to get into a better position.

It's funny to even think about it now. As I played, I had a list of enemies in my head that I thought were broken, that I felt were basically unkillable without spamming health potions. That list proved to be entirely composed of skill issues, and dwindled as I got further into the game. The last enemy to be crossed out was the Rockbreaker, a robot that can dig into being invulnerable and then leap out straight into you, in an almost undodgeable fashion.

I thought that move was cheap, until an NPC in a quest told me that the Rockbreaker senses you from the vibrations of your steps, so if you stop moving, it cannot leap out at you because it doesn't know where you are. As I stared in disbelief, reflecting on my own stupidity, I could swear I heard the entire Horizon team laugh at me from somewhere.

And now, I laugh at it too, this moment becoming one of my fondest memories of the game. I loved Horizon: Zero Dawn. I think its gambit of trying to stand out in a saturated genre did pay out, and I earnestly recommend it. All of that said, I must reiterate: it is a gambit. Depending on how patient you are with learning games, and with how tired you are of the current state of the open-world genre, your mileage may vary a lot.

When I finished The Last of Us, I let out a deep sigh. A fantastic game, for sure, but one caught in the trappings of AAA games to the point of harming its own creative vision. I wished for a shorter, more focused game that played to TLoU’s strengths: its characters, the tense encounters with few but deadly zombies and its beautifully constructed world.

In Left Behind, I found that game.

A DLC eventually made into a standalone expansion, Left Behind takes place between chapters 8 and 9 of the main game, when Ellie scavenges the abandoned shopping mall for supplies. As she does so, she reminisces about the time when she was in military school, weeks before the main game began, and we get to see her last interactions with Riley, a character she mentions by name a few times over the course of the story.

It’s a short but sweet storyline that adds so much to what is already a fantastic character. Ellie is struggling to understand her own feelings as she lives through the awkward phase between childish innocence and adulthood, and mall reflects the clash between these two things at all times: stores selling dolls against beauty parlors filled with cosmetics. Children’s movie posters along images of mature, sexualized women. The Last of Us’s brilliant environment design, which already shone through the entirety of the main game, shines even brighter here.

Even if it didn’t, the pure, budding romance between Ellie and Riley might have carried the DLC by itself, as it is beautifully realized. These are two girls who have never known normal, who have been in this ruined world for their entire lives, yet, in opposition to the world outside, cling on to their hope. A seed that sprouts on the most barren of soils.

I wish more of this Ellie had carried on to the sequel, but unfortunately that didn’t happen. Oh well.

A ship sails from England to America. Under the starry sky, a couple stares out into the sea, the husband, an investor on the verge of financial collapse, and the wife, a former actress growing increasingly frustrated with her marriage. She beckons him over to the edge of the deck, and as he leans over the rail, she shoves him over the edge. With the ship mere hours away from its destination, the now-widow moves to avoid suspicion from her fellow passengers so she can start a new life on the new continent.

Overboard! is a murder mystery where you’re the one whodunnit. You play as Veronica Villinsey, a woman who, tired of her marriage to Malcolm Villinsey, decides to take “until death do us part” into her own hands. As you take control of her, in the morning after her deed, the ship is eight hours away from America, eight long hours during which you must evade any suspicion from the people in the ship. Things get more complicated as it becomes clear that her crime might not have gone entirely unnoticed.

The game plays out in visual novel style, your only inputs being moving to other areas of the ship via the map and interacting with select objects or talking to people in the room via text prompts. All of these actions shave precious minutes from the clock, and as the day progresses, other characters move around the ship tending to their own schedules, and your actions — or inactions — regarding certain topics decide what sort of ending Veronica gets. It’s not possible to see every event in one go, so you must plan your movements according to the desired outcomes.

Overboard is very short, and you’ll see the conclusion of Veronica’s journey — be it good or bad — in fifteen minutes or less. However, it’s very unlikely that you will achieve the best ending right off the bat, and the game nudges you in the way of exploring all the possibilities and aim for different events in further playthroughs.

I enjoy focused games that choose to do one thing very well, and Overboard has some genuinely good ideas to go with its witty writing. I like, for instance, how some dialogue options look innocuous but are straight-up traps. For instance, if you talk about your husband in the past tense, the listener might grow suspicious of you. You're also required to keep a consistent story about his disappearance throughout the day, with dialogue trees giving you plenty of space to contradict yourself.

In theory, there's a lot that can be done with the mechanics that Overboard offers. In practice, however, I found exploring different paths incredibly annoying. For one, the UI is really unhelpful, with the fast-forward and rewind functions being unusable, and this makes repeat playthroughs a bit of a chore. But more than that, the game seems to struggle with its own scope.

Creating a game where the player has a lot of freedom to make decisions is not easy, not is one where NPCs move around and can interact. The cost of developing those things grows exponentially as you add them -- a new decision changes the scenes that succede it, and a new character's schedule and behaviour affects all the others.

Overboard's developers were aware of that, and created a game with a limited cast and not that many different choices. It's a very reasonable idea development-wise, but it means that a lot of dialogue options are pointless and funnel you to the same outcomes, and some ideas a player might have that sound reasonable are simply not possible to execute.

Furthermore, even at the limited scope of interaction the game offers, it still drops the ball a surprising amount of times. The line between a solution to a problem that works and one that doesn't is arbitrary, and sometimes, inconsistent. An example of this is seen if you decide to do additional murders to cover your tracks, where you can get away even if you're seen carrying them out depending on unknown factors.

Overboard is a low-priced game that's clearly experimental, and also one of those rare games that have you play as the villain. If you're curious about it, try it. I certainly don't regret doing so. But I also think it's unlikely that I'll be revisiting or even remembering it any time soon.

Her Story is a masterpiece, a game that explored an uncommon, fascinating approach for video game storytelling. That's why I anxiously awaited the release of Telling Lies, the spiritual successor by Her Story's creator Sam Barlow. Telling Lies had a lot to live up to, and on its release, I pushed the backlog aside and dove in headfirst. And did I regret it.

If you played its predecessor, you pretty much know what to expect from Telling Lies, as it uses the exact same mechanical framework with only a few new interface quirks. If you haven't played HS -- well, play that instead, but -- this is how it goes: you, the player, are given access to a video database with over one hundred clips that happened over a given period of time.

The catch is that, to actually view any one video, you have to query the database with words that are said in the video, so you have to know what questions to ask before you can get any answers. Additionally, if your query happens to be too generic and results in more than five videos, it'll only show five, and only those that happened earlier in the chronology.

Instead of a murder interrogation like in Her Story, in Telling Lies, you find yourself perusing a database containing recordings of video calls between a man named David and several other individuals, from his family, to his friends, to his boss, and so on. As the game starts, you don't even know what you're supposed to be looking for in the footage.

It's the first of Telling Lies's mistakes: the game doesn't have any kind of hook to engage its player as it opens. Her Story began the game with an ominous "MURDER" query, which is bound to draw a player in not only by instigating a morbid curiosity, but also by beckoning them to don their detective hats and solve the mystery of whodunnit.

In contrast, Telling Lies opens with a rather empty "LOVE" query, which results in a set of disconnected videos that I guess are meant to introduce its main set of characters, but really only manages to instill confusion as to why these people spend so much of these videos without saying a word.

You see, Telling Lies’s pretense is that you’re supposed to be accessing a database containing recordings of video calls between David and the other characters. Except, each video isn’t the whole call, it's the audio and video feed from one side of the conversation, complete with awkward silence whenever the other side is speaking. You often won’t find both sides of a given conversation at the same time.

While, mechanically, this does create situations where you’re trying to catch on to keywords that the other side might be saying so you can search for them, it has the unfortunate consequence of having the recordings being silent at least half the time. With the lack of good you UI or a reliable fast forward feature, this is an annoying waste of time.

But if that was the full extent of Telling Lies’s issues, it would still have been a great game. Its greatest flaws lie in its storytelling, both in regards to the "story" and the "telling". It’s astounding how this is supposed to be the successor to a game that excelled in that area, and yet, it seems to wholly misunderstand what made its predecessor so great.

A key element of Her Story’s storytelling is how much of a complete mess it is. Yes, I know that sounds contradictory, but it’s actually the point: you’re listening to a woman retelling the circumstances around a crime she is being suspected of. We don't even know if she's mentally sound, and even if she is, she has every reason to lie. It’s the textbook example of an unreliable narrator.

Combine that with a confusing, completely unthinkable chain of events, and the more you dig into the game, the more questions you have. By the end, even after seeing every video there is, it’s still impossible to be sure of what’s true and what’s not. The last video on the chronology actually alludes to this fact, with the woman stating that “all we’ve been telling each other here are just stories“. This lingering uncertainty is a huge part of what made the original game so memorable.

Contrast with Telling Lies and, from the format alone, we already have a far different beast on our hands. This isn’t an interrogation, they’re conversations; not a retelling, but the facts unfolding as you go, and because of that, there is far less uncertainty to the events of the game.

The game is very much about David, a man who, through some questionable decisions, ends up in a very bad situation. I won't spoil anything as it’s sort of the point of the game to find out who David is and what happened to him, but I will say this: the story is as boring and predictable as it seems to be, and any twists you might want to happen are simply not coming — again, in stark contrast to its predecessor. If I was to be generous, I'd call this "cheap Hollywood drama".

It's even more disappointing when you take into account the outright deceitful pre-release material. When Telling Lies was announced, with a trailer showing recordings of multiple characters and suggesting multiple perspectives, I figured that was the direction it was going to go. Early reviews from the pre-release period seemed to indicate that as well, claiming that the game contained multiple perspectives about different story threads.

That's an interesting narrative framework that's been successfully used in many stories. Very famously, there is In a Grove, a short story, more known from its film adaptation Rashomon, that uses the perspectives of different characters to present contradictory accounts of the same incident. Since each of those characters presents a limited, sometimes deceitful or self-serving version of the facts, it's impossible to tell what the absolute truth from the accounts alone.

To my shock, in Telling Lies, this never happens, and all those reviews I saw turned out to be flat-out lies taken straight from PR releases. I thought I was crazy at first, having played the game on the weekend it released, but a few weeks later, the Steam rating dipped to a Mixed level, a lot of other people pointing out this exact contradiction.

The story in Telling Lies is simple and is told pretty straightforwardly by the videos. The additional characters are just window dressing to David's narrative, and present they present no conflicting or questionable accounts. This is the ultimate irony about the game: it's called Telling Lies, and yet, nobody actually lies in it.

So much for having high expectations placed upon you, and so much for thinking that a bigger budget means a higher quality. Telling Lies is a boorish attempt to build upon Her Story whose existence is hard to justify. It's a game I'm legitimately confused as to how it turned out this poorly.

As a side note: I get that it's meant to emphasize the voyeurism angle the storytelling is supposed to have, but god, was it infuriating to have to sit through minutes of people being awkwardly horny at each other. I hope to never go through such a thing again.