I can't get Fish Sticks out of my head. Not the food, but the stray cat with a squished face and stubby legs that I wrangled into my shack in Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel’s new roguelite strategy game, Mewgenics. The shop, the pub, the dentist; no matter where I go, I…
I was, like so many of my 1990s-born peers, a huge Sims girlie. I spent hundreds of hours as a teen and young adult making people I knew, characters from shows I was obsessing over, or original characters I wanted to experiment with, and diligently following their life paths and…
It's clear that Cypher is beyond me. The first couple of rooms were a breeze, but quickly I was finding it too obtuse, too interested in being difficult and not interested enough in teaching me how to solve it. And that's very much a personal taste thing. For people super into this sort of thing, with brains bigger than mine, this'll be a sweet treat.
If you want pretty anime boys and don't care too much about their questionable grasp of female anatomy (and, in some cases, consent) then this game might be for you.
That it ultimately collapses into a string of unpleasant platforming sequences that the core design simply can't sustain means I grew to loathe Crossing Souls, once it entirely abandoned its redeeming features for everything it couldn't get right.
The measure of an open world is ultimately not the story it tells but whether you're happy to kill time within it, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance offers plenty of ways to do that, even if a lot of them will, in fact, get you slaughtered.
Easily confused with Life is Feudal: Your Own, Life is Feudal: MMO takes the multiplayer medieval crafting and survival game and makes it larger and, through developer-run servers, more permanent.
Rust is a strange, harsh game that's worth exploring – but only certain parts of it, and only for so long. I'll never commit to constructing my own fortress, but I'll happily knock on the door of one belonging to another player.
Rise and Fall adds, tweaks and expands, but it doesn't address some of the underlying issues, particularly those related to the AI. We're not quite in the new golden age yet.
Of what I've played so far Dandara offers a fresh new way to play a very familiar format, with deft design and strong puzzling wit. I just wish it had remembered to give me a reason to do so.
Octogeddon refers back to the arcade cabinets of the '80s, both in the simplicity of its opening premise, and in much of the presentation. But it is its own unique idea, that while not world-changing or particularly revolutionary, is quietly brilliant in its delivery. I only worry that it's slightly too quiet.
For me, the more of it I played, the more I found it got in its own way. Its clumsy prose is a struggle to read, its difficulty spikes are aggravating, and the sense of being directionless is too all-pervading. I feel certain this will find its audience, and what a joy for them. But sadly, not so much for me.
Celeste is a difficult game about overcoming difficulties. Come for the challenge, stay for the joy of Madeline's company and the generosity of this wonderful game.