The world of Fez is a brightly colored collection of floating islands, the primary sensibility being comic. In the town where your avatar Gomez lives, his neighbors largely deny the presence of a third dimension, living a life unaware of a world beyond home (the door is on the back of the 3D island.) There is a factory zone where little billboards in some sort of cube language are accompanied by portraits of Gomez’s Doughboy-like kinsmen. Little pixel frogs ribbit and little pixel gulls caw. The animals, little machines, and bouncy mushrooms are all animated with the kind of charm that rewards attention to small details.

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The game’s primary innovation in the interactive fiction space is crossing out and making inaccessible some of the “healthier” responses to stressors or anxieties of daily life. It communicates very effectively the cognitive dissonance mental illness sometimes creates, where you know it would be better to call and cancel plans but conflict avoidance results in you just lying in bed until you get the “dude wtf” text. It would be better to take a shower and make a meal that actually has some real nutrition, but drinking too much beer is a lot more accessible right now.

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NieR adventures with gameplay in shocking and delightful ways. Without giving anything away, it references the history of adventure games and horror in surprising, funny moments that take the gameplay off-model. The remake, Replicant, has taken the moment-to-moment action gameplay outside those setpieces and transformed it into a modern, high quality Stylish Action Game, similar to a Bayonetta or Devil May Cry, but with so many accessibility options to remove as much difficulty as you like. If you find yourself frustrated by the combat, NieR Replicant is incredibly accommodating in letting you focus on the story. I think more games should offer experiences like this one, which don’t change the core experience on-screen and instead offer options to make it easier to see it through.

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Fun MetroidVania style game! I really love the disc, the yo-yo, and some of the really wonderful pixel art. This game isn't afraid to be challenging, either, and I appreciated that throughout.

I think the postgame super tough stuff here lacks any real storytelling motivation to create that archeological joy I get out of a game like Fez or Outer Wilds or Tunic, and I also just don't really like the way the character movement feels. I just didn't find anything after my first credits hit especially satisfying. Glad other people do, though!

The animation on character movement is so fluid and expressive without requiring the outsized toon faces of something like Metal Slug. The backgrounds include empty streets, rainy rooftops, and grimy subway stations, giving the game a real backstreets, underground spirit. The soundtrack combines breakbeat and instrumental hip-hop better than almost any game since, a dealer’s choice of cool sonics that also lay a foundation for any number of melodic approaches on top, whether that’s needed to capture a runaway shinobi’s melancholy or to just launch into a perfect jungle breakdown. I couldn’t possibly tell you the story of Third Strike - Street Fighter lore is immensely detailed and requires playing hundreds of hours of mediocre single-player gameplay when it doesn’t also require reading addendum comics. But I can tell you this world feels a little dangerous, a little like the few heroes of its past that still walk its alleys get assailed by private detectives and snot-nosed kids with a mean right hook.

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What separates Mini Metro from other “perfect” video games in my mind is the fact that it so directly looks at a real world concept and adapts it into a compelling and legible game. For comparison, Tetris began as an imitation of a pentomino puzzle game – in a sense, that relates back to Tetris, but the game is also an imitation of other box filling games, not a real world phenomenon. It’s a signifier of a signifier, never quite reaching back to whatever the original meaning was. Shigeru Miyamoto came up with the concept of the Pikmin series because he’d gotten into the habit of gardening and liked imagining a little world in his garden – but the experience of commanding Pikmin as a small military and using them to perform a long-term scavenger hunt has almost nothing to do with gardening.

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Celeste is maybe most iconic for its creator, Maddy Thorson, using the game to come out and transition, to mild outrage from anti-woke chuds and celebration among queer gamers desperate for icons in a dude-heavy landscape. It is not the first queer game by a trans developer, nor is it the most outwardly queer game. However, prior landmark queer games are largely dialogue-heavy adventure games or visual novels, or the comedy short-form experiments of developers like Robert Yang or Nina Freeman. Celeste takes advantage of a gap in the market – a game aimed directly at the heart of the speedrunning hardcore gamer community. Anyone who’s ever watched Games Done Quick knows just how overwhelmingly queer the speedrunner demographic seems to be – Celeste manages to combine queer aesthetics with a gameplay-first design, executing a precise shot at a previously unfulfilled niche. It’s become a landmark “most important” game for that reason – thankfully, it’s a great example of where “most important” and “most fun” meet.

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Describing the process of pitching Pentiment to the executives at Obsidian Entertainment, Fallout: New Vegas director Josh Sawyer stated, “I never would have proposed Pentiment if it weren’t for Game Pass,” the Xbox subscription service which offers a Netflix-like model for playing new games. Indie game development creates brilliant games, but Pentiment is the sort of achievement that can only be made with the decades of expertise leveraged by its development team and the resources afforded by studio development. One look at its art in motion reveals the nature of this staggering accomplishment – they have married the medieval art of liturgical Dutch masters with a game Sawyer described in the linked interview above as “Night in the Woods meets The Name of the Rose.” The presentation of this game is clever and full of the kind of ideas smaller teams cut for scope.

Full Pentiment review here.

There's so much that's so admirable about this game as an RPG. I really, really enjoyed spending time in Infinite Wealth. I just wish the plot had been nearly as tight as most of the more recent RGG games and the villains had been given more care. There's a real aimlessness to the plot of this game that ends up prompting repetitive scenarios and a lack of momentum, and when the game does want to weigh harder on pathos, it ends up falling short because the plot just isn't all that exciting to invest in.

However, as a game about Kiryu and Ichiban, this game sings. Every scene about their storylines and emotional journeys is really rewarding. There are times in the Yakuza franchise where Kiryu's journey is sort of reactive rather than internal - this game really digs into the internal journey in a way that's consistently revealing new layers.

It's a little hard to imagine ever playing through the whole thing again, given its intense length and the fact that it maybe overstays its welcome anyway. But I also know I'm going to go back at the end of the year and hang out in Premium Adventure, see some of these sillier side stories through to the end.

Certainly got its hooks in me hardcore, but some ill-advised stealth and puzzle gameplay interrupts the game's best mechanic - deductive language decoding. I think it is a little embarrassing the number of people who have said "this so accurately captures what it feels like to learn a language!" when the game completely skips the task of having to learn syntax (until very near its conclusion for an optional ending) and you can trial and error your way through so many of these tests - and often may have to do so!

I also think the ending lets down any chance of really attaching to the narrative. I know the language itself has to stay fairly basic to function in the game's basic translation gameplay, but the narrative follows the thing I'm absolutely least curious about into its final hours.

Frustrating game! Really like the aesthetics, and the thing this game will be remembered for is a good gameplay mechanic. Wish it had more to recommend it and less getting in its own way.

Easily the best avatar play and shooting in a Bethesda RPG so far, I like a lot of the worldbuilding and resent so much of the quest design, character writing, and lack of procedural polish. If every planet is going to be procedurally generated, the dungeons also need to be generated using similar logic. If Bloodborne could create chalice dungeons in 2015, I shouldn't be playing the exact same Abandoned Research Tower on several different planets.

I'm all for smartly reusing content and building to small scale - I'm a Like a Dragon fan. But it really cheapens having been through a thirty minute dungeon to find it again and run the dupe in three minutes flat.

Expansions can help this game by giving you more meaningful things to do - the biggest problem this game has is that the core gameplay is fun, but the things it asks you to do vary from so-so to quite weak.