What an opportunity...

This game isn't bad, but it's also not great. I liked a lot about the solo campaign. Kamala is great. Hell, I really like this game's Bruce and Tony.

But the moment the game turned into Destiny-lite, I had to turn it off. This could have been a very straightforward character action game. It could have been one of the best.

But all that stuff made the more linear character action parts less good.

Characters control well. Fights are fun enough. I'm just not sure why I should keep playing any of it if it's going to be "fine" at best.

I'm done trying to have fun with The Last Spell.

I like a lot about it, but it's so crunchy.

The UI is atrocious, and the controls on every platform are a disaster because of it. There's like 4 shops and an inscrutable upgrade menu, and there's a base builder section that is so slow-to-start that I haven't even really understood enough to know what I would need to do there.

The tactics gameplay is really great. They just added so much on top of it that I don't love

I've been sitting on this game for years.

My husband is an immigrant. We were scared of border checkpoints for 6+ years. Not because he'd done anything wrong, but because in the US, your fate is up to the officer you run into that day. So despite him having all the necessary paperwork to take a trip to Canada on our many Great Lakes vacations, we waited until he was a citizen.

Papers Please is obviously saying something. It's not exactly subtle about it. But to me, the reality of being tossed around by the American immigration system made it something I couldn't spend too long playing.

I won't be rating this game.

Immortality is very much my thing. And the films within this game are so well crafted. I would watch Minsky tomorrow.

But it fails to follow up on what I see as one of the greatest successes of its predecessor, Her Story: the credits. Her Story lets the player decide when the game is finished. Immortality decides for you, and in my case, I still had over half of the footage left to be viewed.

If it had nailed that moment, the putting together of the mystery, the way Her Story did, it might have been one of the best games this year.

Listen. I love all elements of this game individually. Digimon? ABSOLUTELY. Visual novels? Hell yeah. Tactics RPGs? Yup.

This game, and I truly hate to be this negative, blows. The visual novel portions are so tedious and poorly written. The smallest of story spoilers, but on the second morning of the game, the main character literally wakes up and asks each other character how they're doing. I'm sorry, but I don't care! And the mechanics of how the VN works feels like a chore.

I could forgive a lot of this if there was any vibe at all, but it's just nonexistent.

I've not been so disappointed in a game in a long time.

1.5 stars for tactics combat that is enjoyable.

Before Your Eyes has a unique mechanic in that is controlled through the player's blinking. Is this occasionally a gimmicky mechanic? Absolutely. Except for the times that it is not.

The game uses this mechanic to tell a well-worn kind of story. It is a story of an artist with an overbearing parent struggling with his own success. And it hits the beats you would expect in a story like that. Except when it doesn't. When it does something new.

The best use of Before Your Eyes' blinking mechanic is in the game's final scene, a moment where the game showed me that it understood exactly what kind of story it wanted to tell. It is a moment where the gameplay matches the needs of the story so well. I was blinking through tears, and the game knew I would be and accounted for it. This is the kind of gameplay and story synergy I search for in games.

Before Your Eyes is not a masterpiece, but it is a damn good video game.

Citizen Sleeper asks you to decide if escape is possible. It took several minutes of impasse and tears and not touching my controller for fear of making a decision before I was ready for me to know what I thought about that question. Citizen Sleeper gives you several potential answers and in the ones that resonated with me was the kind of deep personal freedom you only find, sure enough, through community.

Citizen Sleeper is about disability and body dysphoria and the inevitability of corruption, and it is about the things the grow among and around those things. The antidotes and the byproducts. Citizen Sleeper is good.

I wanted Norco to be more than it was, I think. I was looking for something in conversation with Kentucky Route Zero and Disco Elysium, and what I got was good, but it wasn’t that.

The narrative is interesting. The tone is funny and also serious in the way that real life is. The game is stunning to behold. But it is ultimately a tone piece with plot attached.

From the game’s creator: “The narrative in many ways was almost a stream of consciousness.”

It felt that. I get what they were trying to do. Represent Norco and its people in an honest way. It’s “games as vibe” and I love that shit. But I don’t think it came together for me.

I would give it a 3 if it weren’t for several visual and auditory moments that blew me away. It’s really just beautiful in so many ways.