Another World is a cunning authorial work; one can assume that Lester, sitting at his sci-fi lab computer, preparing to plunge headfirst into another world, is a clear parallel to sole developer, Éric Chahi. That sly, carefree smirk on his face, brightened by the orange of his hair is all we need to understand the lack of consequence -- fitting, since the player is bound to die, over and over and over again.

A sort of precursor to the likes of Limbo (not to mention Oddworld and Uncharted and just about every 'cinematic'-esque title released in the past three decades), Another World seems almost determined to constantly kill the player at every interval, not maliciously but with a witty nudge-nudge as though Chahi were reveling in his cleverness. Often, games where the player can die inherently suggest a realisation of multiple universe theory; Another World plays out like a stitched-together account of Lester's numerous attempts across parallel worlds, fastened together by a self-aware charm that infers the protagonist himself acknowledges the inconsequentiality of death within this virtual realm. Limbo plays for shocks, but Chahi's cult classic plays for chuckles.

The game is always thinking two steps ahead of your next move; but it's always laughing with you, not at you. At its core, Another World presents a fundamental quest to get back home. Its ambiguous ending proves that, though such a goal isn't always attainable, a home can be wherever one finds comfort and friendship. The bulky confidant Lester meets along his journey is a voiceless outcast themself, and the two immediately empathize with each other without even having to speak.

Another World therefore presents a roadmap of the soul, complete with interchangeable waterways, daunting creatures, vast, arid, alien landscapes, and plenty of lasers. A mystifying environment, as much a threat as it is a vacation for our cool-headed Lester. Not to mention a vision of the future for games, a medium predicated on intense, elaborate escapism, where the limits to creative expression suddenly seem boundless.

Hypnospace Outlaw is certainly an impressive feat, as the devs at Tendershoot have crafted a massive, sincere ecosystem of faceless, voiceless personalities to peruse through page by page in an endless quest for impossible digital connection. Ultimately, however, the game feels more like an exercise in tedium, literal work to be done for the sake of it (and I'm not even getting paid for it!).

The player is an enforcer, who brings down the 8-bit hammer of law in an attempt to maintain order throughout this developing online civilization -- indeed, Hypnospace Outlaw is practically a western, with its liminal setting and underlying sorrow; and they play the role of a cop. Tendershoot are unfortunately not smart enough to ponder the player's judicious role as all-powerful governor, nor as that of a meager cog in the system.

It's Papers, Please without the heart, and barely the 'game;' Her Story without the intrigue; meets Myspace, and with the uninspired wit of Pony Island. Is the game mocking or embracing the naivety of the internet in its youth? It's difficult to tell, for Hypnospace Outlaw proves a satire that seems unsure of where exactly to wag its critical finger.

Guacamelee! 2 opens quietly. After a brief recap of the final events of its predecessor, we meet the settled luchador, Juan at home with his family, his physique stunted, silently glancing up at pictures of his old heroic self. His glory days seem behind him, but his rambunctious kids and caring wife offer a loving comfort; the game is immediately brazen in its depiction of the fabled 'happily-ever-after.'

Shortly after, the man is thrown back into another grand adventure to stop the universe from ripping apart at the seams. Guacamelee! 2 is basically creating a mirror effect with this clever introduction, reflecting back at 'gamer dads' and the like who look to games, and all media for a means of entertaining escape. The overall result is a stunningly-determined example of the power of videogames as a storytelling medium, with its unraveling plot sketched around the ludicrously well-designed levels and subtextually-inclined game design.

References to classic games abound, paying homage to the DrinkBox Studios developers' varying influences. Equal parts fighting game, 2D-puzzle platformer, brawler, and Metroidvania, the result is a one-of-a-kind and endlessly creative venture that deliberately recalls Street Fighter 2, Limbo, Bad Dudes, and others with joyful reverence.

But the game thankfully never takes itself too seriously, buoying every reference and conversation between NPCs with a goofy charm. Sure, the jokes feel a bit dated, but the light wit maintains the game's rhythm. And sure, its silly jab at live service games feels undermined by a DLC level being blocked off by a price tag. Nevertheless, the player is still getting more than enough bang for their standard buck; the game never stopped presenting new challenges and rewards throughout my 10+ hour playthrough, it is exquisite.

The unraveling difficulty is a marvel, as well as the intensely sophisticated level design. Metroidvanias often falter in their ambition since there are too many aspects to control, especially in regards to backtracking. Guacamelee! 2 is a feast for the eyes /and/ the mind, working forwards and backwards to form a fully-realised worldscape which reveals itself along a wonderfully-paced narrative arc. Chicken illuminatis, hellscapes frozen over, theatrical bosses, giant serpent heads, and talking shaman goats abound in a vacuum of imaginitive space. One really has to play it to believe it.

At its core, the game serves an ode to the videogame medium as an escapist dreamscape, where heroes thrive and silly villains tumble. Its multiple-universe plotting works in tandem with traditional platformer design, and creates a capsule where Life and death work in tandem -- a conceptual reality fundamentally literalized through thoughtful, vibrant design.

Most inspiring are moments where Guacamelee! 2 slows down to prompt self-reflection; hell, the villain even looks quite a bit like a bitter version of the protagonist. The Día de los muertos inspiration adds a somber energy to the calamitous situations, and through certain gameplay sequences, they provoke a blurring of the line separating the physical and the metaphysical.

The game does little that might be considered entirely "new," but its polish and ambition is often awe-inspiring. For as endlessly entertaining and properly challenging DrinkBox's game is, its cunning, humanistic facets elevate this Metroidvania above its like-minded contemporaries. Viva la old-school game design.

Despite the fact that its robotic puzzle game mechanics fundamentally work at odds with the Lifelike world design and organic pacing (not to mention the ludicrous final act), A Plague Tale is so refreshingly humanistic I can't help but laud it as an overall effort. Amicia and the misfits she picks up along her journey to revive her sickened brother, are underdeveloped to a fault; writer, Sebastien Renard too often confuses building empathy for his characters with building sympathy. Also, it can be difficult to determine if the game is supposed to be a proponent of violence or critical towards it (Amicia's religious ethics are clouded by a developmental numbing to cruelty, confusing the game's principles).

But the moments that truly shine arrive whenever these children are faced with immediate danger, and are prompted to consider the chaos of the world outside the walls of their home, as they stare death in the face again and again. "Do we have to walk over them?" the boy, Hugo asks when the siblings are forced to venture across a battlefield littered with countless dead soldiers, a thick sheet of white obscuring the landscape like an ambiguous moral fog of war. "Does it hurt them?"

Few titles are as considerate of death as Asobo Studio's game, proposing existential rumination as an intrinsic process of growing up. The children's illustrious home and family are stripped away, sending them into mid-14th century wild France, where they meet a couple of penniless thieves constantly on the run, a young alchemist whose father is stricken by plague, and the burly, vengeful son of a blacksmith.

These characters are simple archetypes; however, by deconstructing typical fantasy RPG tropes, A Plague Tale examines the imaginative significance of the genre and the medium as a whole. Amicia acts like an heroic adventurer when the gang discover a ruined castle, flushing out the black, carnivorous, diseased rats to make a home out of the looming structure.

In many ways, the plot presents a progressive portrayal of rebirth, often linking alchemy to the role of a phoenix rising from ash. "Be brave, you can do this," each sibling will often say to their self when separated.

One ingenious sequence catalogues the villains' sinister operations as the player sneaks through an extensive gauntlet as wee Hugo, on a quest to free his captured mother. When he enters the chapel, it feels enormous and oppressive, but the game maligns not Christianity as a whole, but the corrupt men manipulating its moralistic practices. Faith is the foundation upon which civilization is erected. A plague has no motive, only heinous men do. The plague has taken lives and turned men into desperate monsters, but the meek shall inherit this ill earth.

Arguably, the greatest horror works prefer to suggest rather than directly show. Little Nightmares can often be a mostly effective genre effort on the surface, for the way it suggests both creeping terrors and sly means of progression. Pianos dangle suspended by rope above miniature libraries; the sound of knives scraping against each other resounds from the kitchen a few rooms away; paltry childlike figures, similar to the protagonist, stand petrified within the sightline of an intimidating eye set in the wall of a prison.

These indications both instill an ambiguous dread within the miniscule player, as well as prime them to think quickly to outrun the danger. The game wastes no time with turorializing, prompting the inquisitive player to figure out the control scheme on their own, presenting an escalating array of maneuvers to enact through the early segment, simultaneously building atmosphere with macabre slow burn and preparing one's reflexes.

Quickly, however, the intrigue begins to lose steam. The immediate fail states often dissolve the tension during the game's most exciting moments, especially when the solutions to progress are sometimes a bit too unclear; and long loading times further plant a nail in the coffin. This points out a significant contradictory issue with most of these similarly cinematic, two-dimensional platformers starring children in oppressively bleak circumstances (post-Limbo sims, let's call them); an issue with a number of AAA prestige games, as well.

An attempt at offering both an accessible game and an experiential venture causes a swaying effect, not unlike the way in which the camera in Little Nightmares tilts back and forth like it were set aboard a massive ship at sea. Yes, the game creates a dreamscape out of dark shadows (and thus bright lights) and constant motion, not unlike a Lynch film, and preserves its location within the realm of the intangible.

But the traditional gameplay scenarios create a logic when there should be ceaseless surreality. The evocative monster designs and idiosyncratic spin on everyday settings sure look the part, but the menace is undermined by the rote gameplay scenarios, not strengthened. Perhaps worst of all, in its attempts at demonizing overconsumption, the creature designs inadvertently come off as fatphobic.

It's easy to fall for its occasional frightening tricks, like when long arms reach around corners like spider's legs at the player, or a chamber whelmed with shoes implies a long history of abuse. But most of the tension-building is centered around sneaking past unsuspecting mutant figures with little to no imagination in the actual doing (the kitchen sequence is a simple gauntlet based around avoiding eyesight; Ratatouille is more imaginatively intense).

Tarsier Studios' game looks the look but can't walk the walk -- save for a genuinely brilliant final act that subverts expectations with sparse, vacuous terror (the game is probably worth playing for this alone). In spite of its efforts, Little Nightmares just isn't nightmarish enough.

The problem with 'horror walking sims' usually lies in the inherent lack of urgency. Horror games often impel player apprehension thanks to health bars, AKA the notion of pain and death. In Devotion, the player walks from room to room, solving the occasional "puzzle," if such trivial symbolic obstacles can even be referred to as such, and looking at the various events that occur, over and over again, as the game constantly reminds them that they are supposed to be scared.

Red Candle Games offer nothing new, save for the Chinese familial setting, borrowing from the likes of P.T., Layers of Fear, and even their own prior release, Detention, which itself works essentially as a (mostly wonderful) riff on Silent Hill. What begins with an intriguing setup, regarding a family's stability coming undone, serving up a portrait of enduring patriarchal anxieties, gradually becomes a pretty insufferable excursion into backwards game design; a game so full of itself it seems to forget the player is even there.

What Remains of Edith Finch works so well because its skits function as subconscious pools, where identity is represented through genre and creativity. Devotion gets so boring and bored it starts flinging ideas at a wall, hoping everything just sticks without cohesion. And by the time a storybook transforms into a two-dimensional sidescroller, it's difficult to keep engaged with the preposterousness, especially as its ludicrous finale wraps up with a silly musical number, and a whole load of questions are swept under the rug for the sake of "ambiguity."

For as incredible a series the original Silent Hill trilogy remains, and as innovative P.T. is as a modern successor, recent imitators like Devotion prove that the influence is too often a vapid attempt at replication. The cultural significance of Devotion -- as a Chinese release, and a notably banned product -- is about the only unique and interesting aspect of this otherwise dull, Lifeless title (it's worth noting how the game follows successful people instead of working class). Another example to demonstrate how jumpscares and surrealistic moments simply cannot make up for a lack of engaging design.

A step up from its woefully disappointing predecessor, in spite of the fact that it revels in its more action-oriented series past, Resident Evil: Village is a ludicrous romp that is all location, location, location. Capcom achieve a wondrous sense of scope and setting with their RE Engine, and the various environs are brimming with detail and subsequently Life -- or rather, lives lost.

Empty castles dominated by monstrous women; a neighborhood flooded with bile water; a lonely house on the hill which evokes desolation and hauntings; a massive underground factory where science fiction meets mythological horror. It's the settings that most speak for where the game fails to engage, as indicated by the banal nothingness of Ethan's character. A man so bland and archetypal the artists didn't bother to draw his face.

Chris Redfield returns in full haggard, post-Last of Us form, the persistent scowl on his face a symbol of his stale morbidity. Thankfully, Village takes the time to laugh and indulge in its carnivalesque display of old-world meets new-world cataclysm, which sets it apart from most modern FPS games. However often it tries to feign "classic RE" game design, this is above all else a point and shoot adventure, complete with a bevy of mindless boss fights and frustratingly unclear quicktime events, where the separation between player and character is widened to the point that one ought to just set their controller down for a while.

Indeed, much potential to add some innovation is overlooked, particularly during a venture into the basement of that pre-mentioned house on the hill, a sequence which recalls a number of cheap, amateur Steam horror titles but with the look and feel of P.T. sans the adept craft. While the gameplay lacks the distinct charm of the game's early predecessors, the cast of freaks serving as our primary antagonists add plenty of personality with their distinct voices and characters.

Dimitrescu lives up to the hype, but as an NPC she fails to serve a proper threat like Nemesis in the original RE3. Her castle is large and largely empty, and Capcom never fulfill the potential of what its enormity might contain. For RE8 is a linear affair through and through, even while occasionally pulling a Dark Souls number and opening doors that relievingly lead back to previous entrances.

The autosave system makes the typewriter all but a purposeless motif, and enemies look more threatening than they ever appear. The series that forged the eternal "survival horror" moniker has grown up and blown its creative fuse. Village feels more like a new Call of Duty title than a horror game, preferring constant explosive setpieces to considerate pacing and mood-building.

But in this case, that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Village remains an engaging, surprising experience throughout, though a hollow one devoid of pathos. Ethan is an everyman turned action hero, silly one-liners and all, thanks to an experimental procedure that essentially killed him in the last game. Indeed, Village's greatest twist is that the player is no longer fighting zombies, they ARE the zombie. How fitting a representation for a series so far gone from its original premise. Village provides the camp but lacks the game design which has always proven the series to be far smarter than it seems. Indulge in the mindlessness and you might leave content enough.

EUREKA!

The moment the player spots their character-protagonist, Chell through the first portals they encounter in the game, the existential ramifications buoying Portal's scientific pursuit are made abundantly clear. The sanitized white walls pervading throughout the unnervingly empty chambers of Aperture Science are canvases for placing doors to different dimensions, which all throughout the player literally plunges through and rapidly ejects from -- "Speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out."

Indeed, there is a psychosexual fervor underlying Portal's series of tests, especially thanks to the presence of a robotic feminine voice, GLaDOS, a being so unique as to impart menace and comedic relief simultaneously; sex appeal and threat. When Chell finally confronts her face to face, she has the look of a lonely prisoner, abandoned by the people who created her. The truth is far more sinister, but relatively in line with the game's humanistic expression of her endless quest for satisfaction. Human folly forged this AI-turned oppressive monster, a supercomputer designed to escalate technological progress at any cost.

The vacant observation rooms and rusted red industrial sites beyond the sterile chambers emphasize the significance of wordless storytelling and worldbuilding -- in games, in general -- particularly when a peek behind the curtain suddenly morphs this ambiguous puzzle game into an imminent sci-fi thriller with a shocking, manic revelation. Portal mistrusts humanity's seemingly innate inclination to follow orders from the voices of higher powers. A classist deconstruction, a one-of-a-kind overturning of traditional FPS game design, a cunning blend of action, mystery, puzzle, and comedy that straddles the line dividing genre; Portal is a timeless exhibition of the relevance of the entire medium. As cunning and morbid as it is hysterical and eternally iconic.

EUREKA!

The primary theme carried throughout Layers of Fear is that of disconnect. Between body and mind, husband and wife, reality and fiction, player and protagonist. Perception is made a finnicky apparatus, and the first person perpective allows a surrealistic fever dream to unfold through creative abstraction, as a simple house is transformed into an ever-shifting labyrinth, and doors open like windows into haunted memory.

"ABANDON HOPE WHILE YOU CAN" reads a scrawled inscription above one of these doors, recalling the gates of Hell as inscribed by Dante in his Inferno. The punishment fits the crime. This is a subconscious hellscape ordained by the artist, where paintings bleed into distorted, malformed faces, indicating a rotten, cyclical history of shattered virtue. Flesh becomes digital ink, a portrait to wander through and spoil. And as Bloober Team surely know, "A fear of blood tends to create a fear for the flesh."

While Silent Hill, and yes P.T., dabble in the psychosexual ramifications of devils being dealt with, Layers of Fear is purely experiential. No guns or enemies here, only a haunted hayride filled with surprises in the form of a threatening household. Like Danny is assured in The Shining, "It's just like pictures in a book."

These layers of fear reside within the doors of perception. A piano wrapped in chains stomps down an extended hallway under the harsh cast of a single flame. A record slowed and played backwards in the center of a bedroom liquefies the environs in real time. Conversations are retained, attached to particular objects, but only singular voices, like a lost connection.

It may be easy to dismiss Layers of Fear as a glorified, fruitless rollercoaster; but there is an engaging web of insight to unearth from its meandering structure. The game suffers from a bevy of lame, rote jumpscares, prompted on behalf of the player's kept attention, especially after the halfway point when the events begin to lose their luster.

But the central gameplay gimmick -- turning around and finding the setting changed or objects moved -- nonetheless works to posit the notion of its perusal of the player-protagonist's fundamental lack of contact, and to beathe a perturbed Life into these digital 3D portraits. To look is to witness, and the game is cunning in the way it demands the player's determination to proceed in spite of the dreadful circumstances and images.

Perhaps no other game so deliberately confronts the "video games as art" discussion; at least, none other is as confident a venture. You step inside this moving painting, but contact is purely artificial, as though to touch the crafted environs would be to muddy them. The disconnect is as deliberate as a museum sign hung reading, "DO NOT TOUCH THE ARTWORK." Empathy can be derived by the strokes of a master artist, but the emotions conjured through artwork provide an inherently personal experience to the beholder (as the developers put it at the menu screen, "This may be our game, but it is your journey").

Art therefore can often be a cry for help, an SOS signal lost in the void desperate for an observer to understand. Fitting then that our disabled drunkard of a protagonist ambles along as though the household were a rollicking ship at sea, further suggested by the endless storm outside pattering against the windowpanes.

Above all, Bloober Team's game is a work of patient, somber beauty. Furniture begins to float as a piano plays on its own, like the bevy of chairs and dressers were dancing to an ode to lonely reverie. Curtains waft and tumble down a hallway as wind blows inside through the windows, and the shadow of a woman is painted against the wall like Nosferatu peering in -- with a look of contempt or sorrow? This horror game is a rare feat of melancholic fright, where the shocks come secondary to the surrealistic worldbuilding and funereal desperation of its suggestive, impressionistic narrative.

When art loses its escapist lure, an endless, instatiable appetite will demand a feast. Then it starts all over again. The artistic process trapped in the throes of a perturbed creator's block, as gamified through hellish, labyrinthine, grief-stricken wandering.

The developers at Bloober Team (ie. the artists) place the player (ie. the art consumer) into the shoes of the artist, which is made abundantly clear from the get-go, to instigate an understanding of our protagonist better than he is able to himself. In other words, to find truth through artistic inquiry and appreciation where the artist is otherwise blinded by ambition and self-affliction. The true horror of Layers of Fear stems from the notion that in a desperate effort to seek truth through artistic expression, the artist, this father and husband, disastrously fails, and the distance seperating him from his observers forms a chasm of despair to tumble down for eternity. For indeed, the work tells far more about the artist than his subject.

EUREKA!

A remake broad in its intentions; equal parts camp absurdity and intensely perturbed. Yet the sophistication is resoundingly clear. The original title's brilliant, groundbreaking acceleration of adventure game systems is copy/pasted here and matched against a far more esoteric, lively setting than the PS1 could ever allow. Spencer Mansion is a timeless icon of enigmatic storytelling in games, positing isolated madness at the hands of a quirky architect clearly obsessed with puzzles and enabled by a rich fortune.

The nonlinear progression correlates perfectly with the labyrinthine environs, where Barry and Rebecca are wont to show up out of the blue to promote narrative development. Sure as shit, they don't make 'em like they used to. Resident Evil revels in its apocalyptic vision, in an era where survival horror meant more than just point and shoot and jumpscare.

Some scenarios are a bit too ambitious for the sake of player understanding, maybe especially one involving a dreadful timer and a zombie shark. And the final encounter is an anticlimactic letdown. Nonetheless, the game is a hodgepodge of immediately memorable concurrences, each as unique as the numerous doors the player steps through on their way down the rabbit hole. From the classical architecture of the main mansion, to the backwoods area surrounding beyond, to the giant-spider infested halfway home, to the dreadful underground laboratory; a constant sense of desolation prevails, as though every possible sign of Life has suddenly disappeared off the face of the earth, replaced by the festering undead and a wondrously animated setting implicating lived-in space now abandoned.

Time has been entirely impeded. Spencer Mansion rests within a purgatorial realm which could only sincerely apply to the video game medium, moreso even than film, for progression lies entirely in the hands of the player. The ancient and the state-of-the-art collide in a fit of barren, somber eternity; the past and future forging an everlasting now.

The warm glow of the save room offers a false salvation, akin to the bonfires placed throughout Dark Souls. Lecherous monsters suggest malformed technological pursuits, leading the world into death and chaos. Subtle capitalistic criticisms edge their way into the underlying events, where corporations exploit their consumers and workers alike for the sake of experimentation and profit, and work with governments to cover up detrimental failures.

This is all to say that Resident Evil is an essential work, as influential on games as it is on media in general -- often one's first thought regarding pharmaceutical controversy recalls the Umbrella moniker. And this transformative remake is proof of the medium's capabilities in pushing forward the envelope, the more advanced the technology grows (how ironic).

Imposing darkness and menacingly funereal aesthetics, performing alongside a bevy of intimidating creatures -- particularly one of which literally evolves the dim-witted zombies into elemental threats to reign amidst the cavernous hallways. The fixed camera angles and tank controls will forever remain an essential component of these early entries' composition, proposing claustrophobic fear to humble the tactical postures of these mercenaries. Every aspect of Resident Evil's design, simply put, works. To instill dread, to promote cautionary movement, to harbor a sense of capability in spite of the looming unknown lying in wait.

With its cacophonous city street designs and bold vibrant greens and reds, Resident Evil 3: Nemesis is arguably the series' most plainly beautiful release. The claustrophobic, labyrinthine alleyways and avenues are clearly spawned from the minds of Japanese developers, and offer this American-set apocalypse a dream-like atmosphere to buoy the action elements and exciting horror fodder. Alongside the artistic vision, this scenario also habitually imbues the subtext with a sort of nationalist retort to pride; a significant American city on the eve of doomsday, a clocktower counting down the seconds till mass destruction, in the wake of a particularly capitalistic failure.

The zombies have never looked better up until this game, as they're reactive to combat and have a striking sense of physicality, as opposed to the target practice enemies which came before. Indeed, Nemesis pushes the PSX's technical capabilities to the edge, and each map, each room, each frame is a delight to the senses beside the delectable carnage.

The central gimmick here arrives in the form of the titular beast: an experiment in genetic warfare, created to destroy truth-seekers and cover up the inimitable Umbrella Corporation's vile, exploitative operations. Nemesis is prone to appear at any given moment, especially as the player progresses through the game, and depending on the difficulty setting can prove a formidable foe.

The recent Resident Evil 2 Remake's Mr. X doesn't hold a candle to this opponent, mainly due to level design working in favor of the rules governing Nemesis. Each door leads to a new area separated from the next, so being chased through a gauntlet of doorways and fixed cameras (not to mention puzzles) restrains perspective and limits adaptability. Mr. X can be vanquished and made a fool; Nemesis, aside from triggered cutscenes, is always an oppressive threat. It is a testament to the lasting power of old-school survival horror game design; if you're low on ammo, better get running.

A proper sequel, Nemesis builds on the core gameplay strengths of its predecessors without succumbing to fatigue. If Resident Evil 4 never happened, one might only guess as to the prospective future-present of tank controls and tactical combat, especially given how successfully RE3 builds layers over its series roots, like a thick coat of luscious, bloody paint. The story's conclusion is morbid and deceptively victorious, as Jill flies off into the sunset, leaving behind a ruptured piece of America left smoldering in flames, brought to ruin by its own hands. Citizens sacrificed for the sake of national security. There just polygons on a screen after all, right?

Horror games can't kill you, so they have to scare you. Or shock you. Or make you feel uneasy enough to fail. Death is often an inevitability, especially in walking sim horror titles, where linearity normally undermines the tension if the dramatic escalation isn't subversive or surprising enough to keep the player engaged. P.T. is a well-regarded masterpiece because its vision was inspired by an absolute reversal of expectation. The creeping dread instilled in a singular L-shaped hallway, which forces them to turn and peek around the bend each time they pass it, matched with the limited gameplay positing the player to look closer at the haunted environs, forged an iconic, consistent experiment in game design and psychological terror.

Home Alone, the first chapter of Fears to Fathom, succeeds 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦 of its linear design. It is an exception to the otherwise ideal norm; a tale of home invasion with an inevitable conclusion, which clearly and perturbedly maintains a player-character disconnect, even as they control the studious, unaware teen, narrated by a real Life victim, to further cement the notion of inescapable Fate. In other words, it may in fact be the closest videogame adaptation of Halloween, in thematic spirit, ever produced, even moreso than Puppet Combo's brilliant Babysitter Bloodbath.

That Fate comes in the shocking form of a hollowed man, holstering only a deep black facade and the intense wail of an inhuman subject. A monster taking the shape of a passing glance of a suspicious figure, as his feet slyly run up the stairs beyond the foyer, or when he can be seen standing at the front door in security footage the boy's Mom sends to him via text message.

Isolation devises uncanny visions of the obscure creeping around within the empty darkness of a room. Home Alone cleverly instills that same sense of impending doom, and the curiosity it manifests, with solemn audio-visual cadence and a suburban aesthetic which toes the line between artificial and realistic. Jumpscares can be easy copouts for developers and writers who don't understand how to accurately imbue fear; but here, as in Puppet Combo's incredible Power Drill Massacre, the shocks come with a forlorn sense of imminent, perhaps even necessary doom.

The fact that the story is inspired by a Reddit thread only further emphasizes its modernistic portrayal of atrocity exhibition. An author and a participant readily perform a ubiquitous scenario, to ponder habitual human inquiry into the fascinating and terrific unknown.

EUREKA!

Authorship is a loaded subject. If one is to view a game developer as a sort of 'god' who forges landscapes from their worldly vision and linear pathways to guide stories, then Iconoclasts serves a grand dissection of the blurred line separating myth from reality. Faith and science collide in a bout of political urgency. Turmoil becomes allegorical, until its gargantuan, sublime image proves a reckoning of purpose.

Personal strife corresponds with mechanical restoration; a wrench becomes a weapon for the good of mankind. Destruction is inherently a constructive act, and tools are used to turn objects and apparatuses into new, advanced, manmade inventions. Revolution and defiance provide the cornerstones of progressive civilization, and faith unites people through collective understanding. A singular purpose.

"Perhaps we create our own purpose." As the player guides the heroine through her linear venture towards answers, faith is inherently placed in the game's maker to provide those answers sought, as well as reward for their trials, and entertainment overall. "You've come a long way, child. You followed your linear path and it led you here." Is fate ordained by the gods? Or perhaps by a presumed generational destiny subsequently written and passed down by each new limb of a family tree?

Chrome is a wicked soldier, and a fascinating villain, determined to forge unity even through the most didactic and fascist of methods. As a leader, he quietly rejects insubordination, all while understanding compliance as a natural human trait when faced with great existential ordeals.

"They see something above them and reach for it. If they catch it, they look up once more." A supposed terror pervades all throughout Joakim Sandberg's game, that one's ordained beliefs very likely may not turn out to be true. But this fear is only spread to those who refute dissimilar viewpoints, and use oppressive tactics to silence opposition.

The earthen powers Robin faces against are mortal threats equally tactical and imposing as her own capabilities allow for herself. Indeed, few Metroidvania titles present such an impressively consistent array of enemies and boss fights to overcome; and each encounter carries with it an affirmative sense of redemptive conflict. For the sake of personal victory, and thus self-improvement.

Fixing problems in Iconoclasts dons a whole new meaning when interpreted through the lens of demolition; in other words, as the Oxford Dictionary defines "iconoclasm," "the action of attacking or assertively rejecting cherished beliefs and institutions or established values and practices." "Iconoclasm" may also be described as heretical, to suggest atheism or agnosticism, or traitorous reasoning, or simply disagreement. Disagreement is a fundamental motif driving the manic storytelling in Iconoclasts, which ultimately leads towards immolation on a widespread scale. Two robins meet, and clash in conflict, as He watches from above, another victim of martyrdom. Sunflowers always look towards the sun, and nature reclaims its beloved home. Through selfless aspiration, through communal understanding and growth, through fruitful destruction, an electrical current breathes progressive, technological Life back into the human endeavor, and sanctity is rekindled. A sacrifice, an embrace, and finally acceptance.

The ironic 2D sidescrolling canvas offers a deliberately opaque sense of left or right, this or that, right or wrong; but the game's storytelling refutes simplistic morals which its contemporary ilk so often adopt. The silent protagonist trope is used here to effectively emphasize a notion of a predestined channel guiding us wordlessly, presuming a moral grey area by acknowledging the absence of choice in game design. Robin is a character, first and foremost -- unlike the ironic protagonist in Undertale -- but her viewpoint is appropriately dictated by the player's own responses.

Players save their game through prayer, illustrating videogames as a determinedly spiritual undertaking where established rules provide tools for liberating, escapist reward. Freedom through order; achievement through struggle. By subverting indie credibility through genuinely evocative design and calm, brazen philosophizing, Iconoclasts proves the storytelling relevance of its entire medium. A love letter to old-school game development becomes a righteous ode to human endurance and the pursuit of higher purpose. A beautiful, poignant, necessary venture for our godless times.

EUREKA!

As players grow more and more conditioned to prefer 'realism' in modern games, the medium's full potential as escapist entertainment remains increasingly underwhelmed ever so ardently. Bless Tim Schafer and his Double Fine crew then for delivering one of the most endlessly, consistently creative visual works of the millennium, to prove the enriching, artistic power of the craft.

Psychonauts offers nothing less than the evolution of an entire genre, merging adventure game design with a 3D worldscape, where the human mind offers a multitude of labyrinths to plunge into. The serpentine levels address a stream of consciousness, while the meticulous construction implicates an inherently methodical subconscious.

Child abuse and neglect form the backbone of the plot's engaging metastasis, and artistry becomes an arbiter for literal escape. Yes, in spite of its '1970s summer camp flick' aesthetic, Psychonauts is a grim tale of mental anguish, in which an array of subjects propose a perpetual torment besides their greatest insecurities and misgivings. But aside from dishing out some curse words every so often, the game is most astutely mature in its regard to profound musings on psyche.

While a script's instinct to explain its universe normally undermines natural worldbuilding in any work, here it prompts rumination on the human brain's fantastical properties which distinctly set reality apart from fantasy. Classic adventure game logic translates here through traditional 3D action platformer behaviors. Player abilities become manipulable puzzle items to progress. Symbolic representations of psychical patterns level up the character. Health, currency, and ammo items (infuriatingly) have a mind of their own, as if to portray the mind's animated status, constantly whirling like cogs in a machine.

As the Clairvoyance perk humorously suggests, we all see the world and our neighbors differently; logic is molded by subjective perception. Indeed, this mythical venture through chaotic suburbs in the sky, mental battlefields, monstrous underwater pursuits, and even monster movie homage is infused with a healthy dose of reality. One cunning sequence follows the bold, inquisitive Raz into the operatic mind of a retired stage actress, whose subconscious has been littered by self-criticism and childhood trauma as enacted like cheap theater starring a stilted subject of sunny energy. The villainous critic represents any artist's greatest nightmare: their own sense of failure directed back at them from the inside and out.

Raz might as well be named Alice, as he tumbles down rabbit hole after rabbit hole on a crusade for personal overcoming and righteous justice-serving. Double Fine's mischievous item quests have arguably never fit more in line with a crafted universe than here -- paintings grow into traversable vines, stop signs and rolling pins provide comically unconvincing disguises, tags rekindle pent-up emotional baggage. Indeed, this endless tea party is as mad as a hatter; a slyly psychosexual romp (Raz's parental disdain implicates an ingrained prejudice towards the non-conformative) amidst lunatics and everyday people just trying to overcome their apprehensions and misgivings.

The game's glorious sense of humor is most portentiously rooted in an increasing social numbing of the mind by the consequences of media overconsumption, illustrated with poignancy as a brainless child repeatedly demands: "TV." An ironic notion given the screen's potential for artistic creation, and nonetheless a parallel conceptualization of media's prescribed rabbit holes we plunge ourselves into time and again.

Psychonauts defies typical genre musings to ruminate on the various everyday existential squabbles we endlessly endure, that which form our perceptions of time and space and identity. It posits rehabilitation through empathic understanding. It's a psychological horror comedy unlike any other.