Kirby Air Riders overflows with Sakurai’s signature style, making bold creative choices even if it limits the game’s appeal to a slightly narrower audience.
Despite stumbling in later chapters, Consume Me is a special game teeming with creativity and personality.
Hades II is the pinnacle of the roguelike genre, a position I previously granted its predecessor, but one that its sequel has handily earned.
I appreciate how Baby Steps commits to the bit by making the player the brunt of the joke, but its frustrating difficulty, paired with occasionally poorly designed levels, kept me from laughing alongside it.
Its adorable aesthetic and wordless storytelling make this brief adventure one worth sharing with family or a friend, but its distant camera angle and visual filters were frustrating obstacles on an otherwise picturesque road.
Is This Seat Taken takes a beautifully simple premise – sitting people in chairs – and iterates on it in consistently creative and exciting ways.
Recent updates have eliminated the tedious grind for upgrades, but the lack of a strong foundation underneath leaves FBC: Firebreak with too little, too late.
Shadow Labyrinth is uneven, overstuffed, and often frustrating. It has decent moment-to-moment gameplay, but it fails to materialize into something coherent.
The realm of indie roguelikes is competitive and crowded, but despite years of tough competition, Monster Train 2 has strongly reasserted its series as one of the leaders of the pack.
As the score soared in the final moments of my playthrough, of The Midnight Walk, I knew it was a journey I was glad to have taken.
Blue Prince harnesses the innate, burning curiosity one feels when seeing a closed door at the end of a hallway and crafts it into an unforgettable experience.
South of Midnight's decent combat and platforming are elevated to great heights by stellar visual and musical presentation, resulting in a game I can't stop smiling about.
Like the world it depicts, something exciting and unique lies at Atomfall's core. I just wish it wasn't walled off by a laundry list of frustrations.
Arco tells a story about consequence, sacrifice, colonialism, revenge, and grief. From small, funny exchanges between siblings to the dramatic, overarching plot connecting the main characters, the phenomenal writing is only elevated by how the player can affect it. The ending I got was a fitting conclusion you'd expect to see in any classic Western film, and I'm eager to return to see how dark it gets if I make different choices.
Mouthwashing is an existential horror show with unique visual effects, brutal dialogue, and surreal consequences that kept my eyes locked to the screen for the entire three-hour playtime.