Dropsy is a game about making people happy, but it is also one meant to make you happy.
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Read Only Memories is adorable and cheesy and holds itself together with an acute awareness of tone and by subverting a genre it clearly loves to death. It might be fluffy and lack a satisfying payoff, but Read Only Memories tries so hard and has such an enormous amount of heart that I’d sooner embrace it than write it off for such comparatively meaningless qualms.
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There are a lot of easy things to praise Ori and the Blind Forest for, but it really is in how it comes together that makes it such a rich and enjoyable experience.
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Her Story doesn’t look like much, nor is it easy to do it justice through words alone, but it’s nevertheless a game that’s going to be talked about for years by anyone who takes the time to look below the surface.
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Saying Beeswing moved me is easy. Calling it a work of art is reductive and redundant. There isn’t a single word that can describe what Beeswing is and will mean for different people, and that’s why it’s so stunning and important.
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If anything Metamorphabet goes out of its way to never box itself into a certain demographic. It’s full of the sort of universal love and joy that I can’t imagine anyone with half a heart wouldn’t find at least a little delightful regardless of their age. It introduced me to what I imagine my baby niece sees and feels when playing with simple blocks and stuffed animals, simple toys becoming outlets to unleash her imagination in a world that probably doesn’t make a lot of sense but is full of amazing things if only you could see them like she does.
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With Portal 2 Valve has not only given us a bigger and better game, but one of the greatest pieces of interactive entertainment ever.
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Halo 4 doesn’t feel like the manufactured product of millions upon million in development and marketing, designed like a money-making machine forged through data and playtesting. It has a soul, a personality, the way so many AAA games don’t. It may be the most expensive game Microsoft has ever made, but they didn’t bet it on a hollow shell sold on name alone. Rather Halo 4 is the culmination of everything Halo has ever been, brought to life by a new team but without losing what made it a household name in the first place. There were a lot of ways Halo 4 could have gone, but you can rest easy because 343 has not only managed to channel the series heritage, they’ve surpassed it.
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Duet is a dance. Two heavenly bodies entwined, moving in perfect unison to become one whole, inseparable and immaculate in their symmetry and differences. Duet is also a song. Somber, longing, broken and difficult. It’s a song pulled from outside the game, calling at my darker urges and insecurities. Duet isn’t a game about me, or maybe about anyone, but I was inarguably a part of it, and in its darkness and traces of beauty it found me and spoke to me in ways no other game ever has.
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Trace Vector begins with a soundtrack. Well, to be exact it begins with a line. Lines upon lines purposefully arranged into perfectly angular designs, burning neon star charts and spacecraft into an empty galaxy. It’s the soundtrack though which sets the tone, one which the game then eagerly joins in a chorus of 80’s sci-fi nostalgia.
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It's a game so precisely tuned and refined that I found myself becoming lost for hours at a time repeating levels attempting to best my prior run. It gave me a sense of accomplishment and elation at expertly executing a sequence of tricks I haven’t felt in a decade, and reminded me why I’m so sad games of this nature were killed off by their own insistence on flooding the market and deluding themselves with features nobody wanted. OlliOlli suffers from none of that. It’s pure, sublime skating perfection.
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The Marvellous Miss Take is such a phenomenal stealth game that it seems to have snuck by just about everyone.
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Shovel Knight is quite possibly the best faux-NES game I've ever played.
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After three games and two expansions, I thought Bioshock and by extension Irrational Games had run out of ways to surprise me. I thought I knew all their tricks, the sort of experience I was in for, and how to overcome the obstacles they threw at me. I thought I was prepared for the second half of Burial at Sea, Irrational's final piece of work before its disassembly, but, well, you can probably guess from this introduction just how accurate all that hypothesizing actually was.
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The first half of Burial Sea is that rare bit of DLC that manages to add to an experience without feeling like it was stripped out of the original game; expanding upon threads left over from Bioshock: Infinite and providing closure to a few loose ends it didn't have time to wrap up.
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