we can talk in circles about the art that may have inspired fallow, we can waste time talking about the long lineage of story-driven rpgmaker games that led up to this behemoth; that won't stop fallow from haunting me.

it is infinitely more than another sob story or moody indie game. it is the metaphorical place where all of us who have been outcast from society reside, brought to physicality. stroll down the dusty hallways of the fallow residence and relive memories that are not yours - and yet they are ours.

when i hear the credits theme, "shame", i do not feel the grief i so often do for characters i've loved or fictional worlds i had to leave behind; i feel something watching me over my shoulder. a comforting kind of sadness that will cocoon me even as everything i loved crumbles away.

on the wall above my desk rests these words: "my sisters and i had a secret wish to die in a place that cared for us". i think i will remember them in those final moments.

The fact that so much of Metroid Prime's 20 year old design not only holds up, but enthralls, is testament to the depth of its exploration and world-building. But, as a remaster, the offering here is largely superficial. The graphics upgrade, impressive as it is, ends up calling attention to the other elements that were left untouched. The save system, restrictive puzzle design, and dated soundscape are all elements that would be fine for a straight remaster, but feel jarring next to the contemporary graphics.

The Norwood Suite brought me new discoveries with every room. With his free-to-play 2015 release, Off-Peak, NYC musician and developer Cosmo D brought his electric, off-the-cuff style of jazz to game space. That energy is focused and brought to life in new ways in The Norwood Suite, one of the best first-person experience games(walking sim, if you prefer) since 2015's The Beginner's Guide. Strictly speaking, you progress through the game by performing menial tasks for the clientele and staff at The Norwood Suite, a demented hotel tucked among the evergreens in the rural sprawl around NYC. But the game’s charm lies in the setting and characters, a storied hotel with intrigue, Dadaist absurdity, and architecture that gleefully folds in on itself. The story goes...places, but it's the music that will constantly nip at your heels (literally, the music always manifests in the world through speakers peppering the estate), guiding you from hall to hall in a world where internet modems have eyes, voices are interpreted as freeform instrumentals, and Red Bull has taken over the world. It's the best world to get lost in, where musical and visual discovery await at every turn.

Night in the Woods made me relive the worst years of my life and I loved it. I wasted two years at the University of Pittsburgh before the marijuana faded away and all I had to show for it was a streak of black outs and insurmountable student debt. Those hazy memories bias me to more closely relate to a protagonist as deeply flawed and, at times, unlikeable as Mae Borowski. But, even without history coloring my experience, the writing from Infinite Fall's Bethany Hockenberry and Scott Benson imbues its world with tremendous empathy and slice-of-life details rarely seen in video games. It deserves to stand alongside works from other media like Bojack Horseman, Scott Pilgrim, and Ghost World--places where the surreality of the world masks our deepest wants, hopes, and fears. Never before has a game so clearly spoken to me personally and spoken for me generationally.

I would not have thought to ask the question "what if A Short Hike were about a child running around pretending to be Link in Breath of the Wild?", but I'm sure glad the developers of Lil Gator Game did. An unbelievably charming small-scale open-world exploration game with BOTW-inspired traversal mechanics (climbing on any surface with an upgradeable stamina meter, a glider, a shield you can surf downhill on), writing that's genuinely endearing in its depiction of childhood and growing up without coming across as overly affected, and an open world that's just the right size and density for it to be fun to explore without much in the way of navigational aids. The only reason I didn't give this a perfect rating is that I occasionally wished for more mechanically involving quest design (they usually don't involve much more than talking to one character or easily collecting/smashing a nearby item) or more bespoke platforming or puzzle challenges to make full use of the traversal toolset, but those are ultimately fairly minor complaints given how delightfully compact an experience the rest of the game is.