Gave this a few hours but it never presented me with any real stakes to motivate me to keep playing.

Surprisingly addictive for something so low-key.

Awesome premise and genuinely impressive at times, but I found the solution to getting off scot-free disappointingly simple for as many moving parts as this game has.

A little luck, a little skill, perfectly addictive.

Disappointing. Starts out promising and has a few genuinely great moments, but those are few and far between in The Devil In Me's overly long story. There are way too many long sequences wandering aimlessly or fumbling around in the dark that grind everything to a halt. Long QTE sequences where a single mistake is punishable by death and arbitrary decisions with surprise fatal consequences make this the hardest of the Dark Pictures games as well, extra frustrating when the game is already so bloated.

I feel like this game is Supermassive giving in to some of their worst tendencies, and I hope they learn the right lessons from this misstep going forward.

Using a bedtime story as a framing device adds a nice layer to an already fun little Halloween-themed adventure game.

I really liked this season a lot less than the first, which I already thought was pretty forgettable. I just want my spies to actually look like spies in this game, so dressing them up in some weird cyberpunk garb does nothing for me. Deceive Inc. needs some new maps desperately, and this season failed to provide any.

I think this needed one more episode in between the first two to help the reveals towards the end have more impact. In any case, I really enjoyed the puzzles. Combing through documents for clues, fiddling with machinery, and playing off-screen text adventures ended up being much more engaging that I expected. Even if the story failed to land for me, I'm glad this exists.

Varney Lake sets up lot of story threads that don't go anywhere and has an ending that doesn't feel at all earned. Its cardinal sin, however, is that it just isn't all that interesting.

It would be easy to dismiss Where the Heart Leads as "we have Kentucky Route Zero at home" and leave it at that, but I think there's more going on here than the obvious influence KRZ had over this game.

The big draw for Where the Heart Leads is the massive amount of choices and outcomes that the game offers. It is genuinely impressive how many decisions big and small have a tangible effect on the way things can play out. The narrative itself is personal, never straying from the confines of the Anderson family and the small town of Carthage. Your choices as Whit define how his life and others play out over the span of a lifetime. Helping Whit navigate his and his wife's dreams and ambitions while also building a life for his young family led to some genuinely great and relatable moments, and the choices involved really made me sit and think about what I wanted to prioritize in Whit's life.

Though I do think that Where the Heart Leads illustrates the limits of this type of storytelling, prioritizing player choice over all else. Having all of these variables and branching paths is cool, but what meaning can there really be when all possible outcomes need to be satisfying in at least some way? Should I pursue a career that is more practical or one that is more fulfilling? Both paths are treated as reasonable, just different, smoothing over any truly hard consequences in service of this ethos. Sure, you can take things off the rails if you want to, but there's always an easily identifiable out given to get you back on track. In the end, the game's only real identifiable message seems to be a lackluster "your choices affect your life in a lot of ways."

In my playthrough, Whit Anderson lived a good life, and was a generally positive influence on the people around him. He took a few risks here and there, but in the end they all worked out. His kids turned out fine, even if they had a few struggles of their own. A life well lived, even if it was one without much to say, despite the pages and pages of text hoping to make me feel otherwise.

So, yeah, we have Kentucky Route Zero at home.

I really loved the world and the ideas in Dishonored. I'm a big fan of games that give you the option to use stealth and a non-lethal approach, but the non-lethal approach here just isn't rewarding. There are limited options of how to take out enemies, and for the most part figuring out how to dispatch your targets without killing them is just a matter of talking to the right person.

Though disappointed that I didn't love Dishonored like I had hoped, I still had a pretty good time and was taken in by its world enough to be left wanting more.

The puzzles are mostly good, although most can be easily figured out by finding all of the journal notes. The visuals are often striking, unfortunately the narrative is disappointingly a bore. In the end I think I liked Call of the Sea, though I don't see it sticking with me for very long.

Well-written and nuanced, but also disappointingly unambitious.

Bizarrely clunky controls for such a simple premise.

Mediatonic announced today that they are doing away with seasons, and I think that's as good of a reason as any to go ahead and write this review.

The creative mode introduced in this season is... fine? Building levels is easy enough, although it could do for some quality of life improvements. The user-created levels I've played have been mostly okay, although they all give off this sense of emptiness not found in the levels created by the devs in Unity. Hopefully this will improve as people get better at using the tools and as Mediatonic makes more tools available.

Unfortunately, discovering good creative levels is extremely difficult, and even when you find good ones they become a solitary platforming experience without a dedicated group to try levels out with. And without a good way of getting players to try out your levels aside from the one-in-a-million chance that Mediatonic decides to feature it in a playlist, there really isn't much incentive to get me to spend time making them.

As for the game itself, Fall Guys is on autopilot at this point. The same events, same rotating playlists, and no new developer-created levels. There will be new costume collaborations and Fame Passes to spend your money on, but creation of the actual in-game content has been passed down to the players.

It blows my mind that Fall Guys has been around for 3 years and that it has kept me coming back nearly every day for that entire time. It's been a great ride, even with its less than stellar free-to-play relaunch. I don't plan on totally quitting, but I've already stepped back quite a bit the last month or so and don't know that anything will really suck me back in at this point. But I do hope that it will be there for me whenever I do come back around.