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 extremely rare to come across a game in which all of the details of that design intertwine so effectively. And then you realise it lets you redefine a lot of the parameters individually instead of having monolithic difficulty levels and, wow.
It's a game that dearly wants you to have fun, and fast. It's quick, colourful and without pretension. The map-specific gimmicks inject dynamism into matches that, given its relatively reduced hero complexity, might otherwise risk strategic stagnation.
Hatred fails in every way. It fails to be a fun, entertaining game. It fails to be a technically competent release. And most of all, it fails to be a controversial, shocking experience.
It's a flawed masterpiece, but make no mistake, it absolutely is a masterpiece – one of the best RPGs ever created, and a true tribute to Sapkowski's stories.
NEON STRUCT is a game about hide'n'seek as paranoid fear, not superthief glamour. It gives you large, heavily-guarded maze-like spaces and asks you to find your own way around them, whether it's by roof or street, by stolen keycard or opened vent, by planned strikes or pure evasion, by gadget or by wits alone. Welcome back to Liberty Island. You're not safe here.
Sunset is a wonderfully atmospheric slow burner and a valuable addition to a medium where the predominant approach to conflict is to just give you a big old gun and invite you to get stuck in.
[I]t is a beautiful-looking and well-written game, in a way that adventures far too rarely see. It's a game that proves to me that I'm right to demand so much more from point-n-clickers that get eulogised despite their enormous flaws. It has restored my faith that the genre deserves high expectations, even if it occasionally fails to meet them. And it's a long, detailed chunk of hefty sci-fi, with some careful character work.
It's one idea done well, consistent and compact. As Bunnylord might say – Not A Hero might not be cooking with floppin' sexy gas on all cylinders but it's a facemurdering good time nonetheless.
In Kerbal Space Program, we have a perfect game of experimentation. Checking to see what goes wrong and correcting your next trial accordingly. When struggling with my first launches and landings, and the tricky controls, I was close to believing it was a game of impossible luck. But it is so far from that as to make the initial belief laughable. Instead, it is about accruing and applying small units of knowledge, one on top of the other.
It's a shame the same anything-goes mindset doesn't apply to the mission structure and the story, because the dryness, repetition and general rudimentary air is what will ultimately keep me from coming back for more, but if you want a few hours of XCOM-lite with cyberpunk trimmings and the option for co-op, you could do a lot worse than Shadowrun Chronicles.
The Assignment and The Consequence are dark, they're frightening, they get the blood pumping, and there's nothing else quite like them around. You'll know when you've been Tango'd.