Half-Life 2 is, by definition, my favourite game- Insofar as I revisit it more frequently than literally any other. To this day, 14 years after I first got it, I will occasionally fire it up.

It's hard to put my finger on exactly why I feel this pull for HL2 specifically, but I can wager a guess: I think that this game is beautifully bite-sized in its pacing, meaning you can hop into any of its chapters and know that you have an absorbing gameplay challenge ahead of you. Every chapter has its own set of problems to face and its own vibe, and I've frequently found myself itching for a specific part and needing to replay it.

The difficulty curve is also remarkable: Rather than being a steady incline or decline, it has peaks and valleys that smoothly bring you back up to speed even if you've put it down a while.

And all of this is not even to mention the story! Sure, the Source Engine style walk-and-talk cutscenes are a bit of a pace-killer, but the world of this game can support it, collecting aspects of some of the biggest stories in science fiction into a cohesive thing, and supporting it with extremely solid, contrasting environmental designs, a sallow colour palette and an extremely dense atmosphere, owed to its sound design and music.

I don't know another game that I have so little bad to say about. It's a piece of history and, somehow, holds up nearly 20 years after its release.

Beeswing sketches the corners and boundaries of empathy from a string of memories. It's about a lot of things, and it is all of them effortlessly. Its art is warm and welcoming, its wit cold, drab, but real.

Also, when I was unable to find the final bullet-point on Beeswing's short but worthwhile list of people to see and things to do, I hit up the dev and he sent me a in-game screenshot postcard with the location written on it.

Thank you Jack! Also this game is wonderful.

The act of existing as a player character in this game is disquieting. The excellently constructed silent-film shader that swallows the entire world creates dark nooks and crannies that you shudder to consider the contents of. The tension can be cut with a knife, and when shit hits the fan, the very shape of the horror is difficult to parse.

The half-star was removed just due to the game being very slow and quiet when more horrific scenarios could have done it good. Still: Can't wait to see where the "Letters to a Friend" series goes from here.

A deeply affecting work of audiovisual art that washes over you and takes a part of you as tribute. The cynicism of its story manages to somehow not dismantle its emotional core, but strengthen it, showing the signs of a game that has been hurt by the world and screams that hurt, asking you to examine yourself in relation to it.

Nothing else looks, sounds, or feels like Dujanah. The half-star taken off my rating is owed to repeated issues with bugs during my more recent playthroughs - Maybe I will never get to play it in its purest form again. Maybe that's okay.

A delightful stealth game that spearheaded some major design-shifts in the genre so subtly that most people don't even seem to know who copied it, or that it exists. Further: The first stealth game I had fun with in my life! I loved the intricate little gears that turn inside both the moment-to-moment mechanical interaction with the playspace and the satirical plot and its characters.

My one gripe with it was the light amount of jank that rears its head every so often- I recall sometimes thinking I had saved my game only to find that something malfunctioned, making me lose progress. Of all the things to fuck up, you don't want it to be your save system!

All the same, this gets a big recommendation from me. It's got charm, and character, and a big exciting toolkit to use on its world, and it's highly affordable these days to boot.

I'm biased on this one- I translated it to English. But, yes, OFF is good: A triumph of boundary-breaking aesthetic and off-beat narrative depth. A trailblazer in a few respects too, taking up condemnations of game violence as early as 2008.

Its puzzles are lovely notebook-and-pen riddles, with some hard nuts to crack; where it falters is its combat, which is at worst tedious and at best negligible once you've reached a high enough level.

Even so, this is one of the RPG Maker game greats of its day, and is still worth revisiting now.

In 2013, before such a thing as "media literacy" was in my repertoire, I played Bioshock Infinite. I walked into the game being excited from all the pre-release trailers and teasers and behind-the-scenes peeks - and the sad, sad reality is that most of what I had seen was not the game that I or anyone got, but sawdust on the floor, scraped from the rough surface of the featureless wooden plank that is now left.

I slogged through Bioshock Infinite. For 30 hours. I had my golden guns, and my pre-order bonuses, and I died against a ghost a bunch, and when it was over I woke up and felt nothing. In a last spark, started up the DLC I had also pre-ordered, and eventually quit, and didn't touch it again for 8 years.

Now here I am. I played about a third of the game as a refresher and- Now it's worse! This game is the most harrowing, violent dissociative psychosis I have ever played (barring Postal 2), hollow and subtly reprehensible. It is deeply disquieting to be in the body that plays this thing and was actively detrimental to my mental health.

I gave a small mercy-star on top of my desired half-star rating just for the art direction and for the poor, unfortunate souls that must have killed their careers trying to save this cluster car crash of a game. Do NOT play it. It was never good, and has only gotten worse.