Proof of concept.

It was almost a decade ago that I had the pleasure of my friends pointing me toward Shadowrun: Dragonfall when I was getting my feet wet with old-school and throwback CRPGs, and since then that game has become one of my favorite RPGs of all time. I followed it up immediately with Shadowrun: Hong Kong and while that game was ever so slightly the inferior of the two in writing, it too wowed me with its incredible plot, mood, and world-and-character-building.

I'm going to warn you right now, I am going to compare this game to those two games non-stop throughout this review.

You see at the time, I was told to go directly to Dragonfall - skip Returns. "It's the worst one," "it's really barebones," "it's basically a proof of concept" came the warnings, and coming from friends whose opinions I'd trusted, that was good enough for me. But years later and as I find myself delving into the genre again with CDPR's Cyberpunk 2077, and after doing a little listening to the (very catchy) soundtrack on youtube, curiosity got the better of me. I legitimately wanted more Shadowrun, so I decided to finally ask the question: is Shadowrun Returns any good?

The answer is yeah. It is any good. On the other hand, all my friends were right on the money. Shadowrun Returns has all the same mechanics as its expansion and sequel (with fewer guns, spells, and equipment of course) and largely plays like Dragonfall with a missing quality of life feature from the latter here and there... though with some questionable mission design. Decking is only necessary in one run in the entire game, and it's never done simultaneously with meatspace combat. Cyberware is limited to glorified stat boosts, so magic seems more fun, and simply shooting a guy with a gun seems to be more fun and more optimal. Other than that it's not bad. Hasting yourself and firing an assault rifle on full auto and instantly killing a dude is still fun.

The big issue is that Returns is empty. Set in the aptly-named Redmond Barrens in future Seattle, SR's plot is that your friend Sam has been killed and sent you a video-email triggered by a dead man's switch asking you to find his killer in return for a whole lotta money. Turns out there's a serial killer involved, and the rabbit hole goes deeper from there. Unlike Dragonfall or Hong Kong, however, that depth doesn't extend to the themes. The story progresses in a linear fashion and while there are one or two big revelations, none of them evoke fear or awe or catharsis, none of them require you to pay any great amount of attention to the characters and what they tell you about themselves or the world around you. There's no enriching emotional payoff for doing something thoughtful for another person, nor is there any eureka moment for figuring out a great mystery the game has put before you. The game explains everything that is happening to you very matter-of-factly, which is fine, but given that Dragonfall and Hong Kong do all these things I've mentioned and more, it's a little underwhelming.

Ironically, while the plot is incredibly easy to follow, the dialogue, ridden with setting-specific slang, can be a bit impenetrable or worse still, undermine the tone. SR assumes you know what the UCAS is, it assumes you know why people sometimes speak in Japanese loanwords, it assumes you know who Renraku and Ares are and why everyone keeps saying "chummer." One guy threatened me by calling me an "aho" and telling me I was about to "get fragged" and I think if a guy said that to me with a gun in his hand I would laugh in his face before getting shot.

The maps are similarly shallow - they're pretty enough, lots of little visual detail, but remarkably few things to interact with and virtually nothing to explore beyond finding a medkit or grenade in a junk pile sometimes. Whole rooms and closets and hallways will exist as nothing but set dressing. No fights, no secrets, no alternate routes or optional encounters or incidental NPCs. Again, this is all very notable because this game's sequels don't do this.

There's no party to speak of, just a bunch of nameless NPCs with headshots you can hire for each run using your own money (which you get a LOT of specifically for this purpose), with a few named recurring characters sprinkled in who participate in the plot sometimes but otherwise largely do not intersect with your story. I get that they were trying something different from other CRPGs here but this is one of the game's biggest flaws and given the depth of the character writing in the games to follow, it's clear the devs felt this way too. To make matters worse, the scaling on hiring prices seems to be all over the place. At the start of the game, mercs are very affordable with plenty of wiggle room for you to buy equipment, but the costs quickly double or triple and outstrip the money you're making off of runs, which nearly led to me having to run some jobs solo - that is, until I realized that the Nephilim Network - a second tab of mixed-build mercs (which I believe are kickstarter backers) appear to have bugged hiring rates. At the start of the game they're universally more expensive than the normal guys, but for some reason in the back half a bunch of the strongest ones drop from 1500 nuyen to 1000 - and the weakest ones go from 1000 to 3000. My assumption here is that someone typo'd the values on a spreadsheet somewhere, but it's a saving grace for the late game until you suddenly receive an obscene cash injection right at the end of the game and money becomes a non-issue entirely.

Other (admittedly very small) weird holes and design issues crop up towards the end of the game too - some very odd typos appear in character dialogue, with one very minor NPC not using proper punctuation in his sentences (and no it's not a netspeak thing - his dialogue just strikes me as a first draft that missed a proofread.) In the final mission, you'll find yourself at a dead end after clearing out every enemy in the level, but combat doesn't end and no matter how many turns you wait, nothing triggers. I thought it was broken scripting until I looked up the solution - you have to backtrack to a previous room and sit next to a breakaway wall so that the enemy AI will path to you properly and smash through it, allowing you to finish the monster off and progress. It's a minor gripe, but it's also a bit of a sour note on an otherwise pretty fun finale.

Taken altogether, these factors all contribute to a game that feels less like an RPG set in a living, breathing world and more like a series of jobs that your guy does in sequence while occasionally things happen around him. I said towards the beginning that I came into this wanting more Shadowrun. Did I get what I want? Yeah, I think so. It didn't blow me away, but it fed my craving, and perhaps more importantly it sated my curiosity without leaving me feeling worse for the experience. The nicest thing I can say about it is that it made me want to play Dragonfall and Hong Kong again, and it does make me wish they'd make more of these things. That's not bad, all things considered.

This game has a pretty snazzy final boss theme.

This is Arrowhead's triumph.

If you'd told me ten years ago that the guys who made Magicka would produce a AAA budget title with CGI that outdoes square enix, with visuals that are both artistically and technologically among the most impressive of its era, that ends up being WILDLY commercially successful beyond anyone's imagination, and that they did all of this without ever compromising the spirit of comedy, mayhem, and danger that made games like Magicka or Helldivers great, I don't think I would have believed you.

This game is nothing short of a miracle. I don't say that to be hyperbolic about its quality - although it is a really well made game and is a ton of fun to play. I say that because in its triumph it is a dream come true for a little indie team I've loved for a very long time. It is the realization of all the goofy fun that Arrowhead's design philosophy has embodied since their first game in 2011, and everyone loves it and celebrates it.

Helldivers 2 captures the spirit of the original perfectly - being one of the funnest coop shooter experiences out there, but the switch to third person was genius. The combat and shooting feel better than ever, there's a greater level of precision over what you can do to deal with enemies and patrols, and simultaneously more and less obfuscation of details critical to success (you can now see past the edge of the screen but fog and rain are a big deal!) Perhaps the biggest change of all this is that you can now split the team to accomplish multiple objectives at the same time! All of these changes are net pluses to a gameplay loop that already worked like a dream.

All my favorite mechanics - the konami code inputs for strategems, the inevitability of wanton friendly fire, the insane hostility of the game's higher difficulties and the emphasis on doing everything you can to prevent a situation from going bad and then having to BOOK IT when it inevitably does - it's all still there. Nothing has been compromised. If anything they've only taken this stuff further. And the public loves it despite not dumbing down a single element. Astonishing.

I'm happy for Arrowhead. I'm happy for their success. I'm happy for me, as a fan of their games, to see that they've knocked it out of the park yet again and this time everyone else appreciates it too. This game makes me happy. This is Arrowhead's triumph.

Not as bad as people say. Still not very good.

Resi 6 marked a pretty dark time for the franchise and Capcom in general, being both a part of and herald for a period when the company was trying REALLY hard to appeal to gamers in the west by catering to what they believed western gamers wanted. Slow-paced horror with mechanical complexity and the potential for getting yourself in difficult situations was out. Endless shooting at bad guys with guns and monsters with guns through gritty corridors was in. Big budgets and EPIC (in all capital letters) storytelling were in. Realism (or rather a warped perception of realism based on trying to ground outrageous hollywood spectacle in a cartoon caricature of real military procedure) was in.

Thus was Resident Evil 6 born. And despite all that - it has its moments. For series veterans, it really is kinda neat to see Leon and Chris meet up, it is neat to see Sherry grow up and pick up a gun, it really is neat to see more weird Ada Wong intrigue. For everyone else, the ideas here aren't bad - the shooting isn't nearly as good as RE4 or 5, but the weapons are serviceable and some feel downright great to use. Locational damage still exists and enemies are largely quite reactive instead of feeling like the meat puppets of other seventh-gen shooters. Enemies explode into weird bug-gore when you take them down, or even before that, transforming into new enemy types in real time by acquiring monstrous claws if you blow off their arms or spider legs if you blow off their legs. The monster design is inventive both artistically and in terms of what they can do. Diving around Max-Payne style is kinda fun. It has elements of what made the previous two more-action-oriented RE games great. It's just also buried in QTEs and bland visuals and bad netcode that will see zombies warp to grab you constantly.

Much like RE5, this is not a game to be played solo. The game saddles you with an AI partner if you do this and while they aren't terrible, it drags down the experience enough to make the entire game markedly worse for your trouble. Find a friend to play with or don't bother. Or just don't bother. I don't hate this game, but honestly you're not missing anything by skipping it.

I used to think some of the QTEs were really unforgivingly punishing but it turns out the friend I played with is just terrible at mashing. lol.

It's Undertale! No, wait, it's Paper Mario! No, wait, it's a creepypasta! No wait, it's a metaphor for toxic relationships!

Impressively enough, Buddy Simulator manages to fumble all of these things individually, and rather than fumble the job of blending them together, it doesn't bother. The elements don't mesh, nor do they clash. They're just sort of there. It does one thing it's seen before, and then it does another, like a monkey imitating a man with no real understanding of why he does the things he does.

In fact the entire game can be described as a series of monkey see, monkey do moments. Undertale had irreverent NPC dialogue and creepy tonal shifts, so we can do that too. Paper Mario had quirky side kicks and action commands, so we can do that too. All of these elements are used once and then discarded because there's no overarching thought to how they contribute to the whole, either in terms of gameplay loop or thematic resonance. The narrator is clingy and annoying and that's supposed to be scary. Surprise! Your computer is haunted, and it's possessed by a discord sadboy.

Stunning to learn that Daniel Mullins didn't make this game because it really does have his stink all over it.

Ever since Grand Theft Auto 4, Rockstar has had a real fascination with creating technologically marvelous games with incredible sandbox potential, populating them with fun verbs and toys for the player to play with or use to interface with the world, and then implement arbitrary restrictions anywhere and everywhere to slap you on the wrist every time you try to have fun with any of it. This is all done in the name of Immersion. You see, the Houser brothers have Very Important, Very Mature stories to tell you, stories inspired by Michael Mann and Martin Scorcese films, so it's very important that Grand Theft Auto doesn't have jetpacks or parachutes anymore, that you don't do interesting things like attack Area 51 or steal tanks from the military, and that our cowboy game centers 90% of its mission design around Following A Guy On A Horse And Listening To Him Talk.

Red Dead Redemption 2, as with every Rockstar game now, feels like a game at war with itself. It offers you a wide open cowboy fantasy landscape teeming with wildlife, towns, and the folk who live in them. It lets you shoot guns and bows, hunt wild game, tie people up with lassos and drag them from horseback, tie them to train tracks, etc, etc. It lets you rob trains, rob stagecoaches, rob ordinary people and their shops, all intuitively done by simply pointing a gun at a guy and pressing a button. A good 90-95% of the verbs you use in RDR2 (and for that matter, any Rockstar game) are inherently villainous. It offers you unlimited potential for wacky cowboy antics, tinged with silly ragdoll physics and the unbridled cruelty that freeform gameplay allows for, and the moment you engage with any of it, the Fun Police spawn around you in infinite numbers until you ride out of the annoying fucking magic circle that continuously spits hostile NPCs from the ether just outside the draw distance because you dared to ask "what if I tried to have fun in the Mature Cowboy Game For Sophisticated Adults"

For decades, other developers have understood significantly better than Rockstar the fun inherent in mayhem - that the joy of a sandbox is in manipulating the sand, but sadly developers like Pandemic Studios and Volition have all gone under in 2023, taking with them their Mercenaries and their Saboteurs and their Saints Rows. Somehow, inexplicably, the guys who know the least about making a fun open world game continue to release these things year after year to maddening acclaim from the gaming press and the public alike and every time I try to engage with one of their games, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Is it so much to ask for a mission designed around something, you know... fun?

anyway this game is significantly better with a trainer installed mashes the ragdoll button until arthur collides with a horse and cart at mach 5, killing everyone in a 3 mile radius

The Imperial Guard is a super fun faction to play, and the opportunity to play as factions that are actually interesting (read: not the space marines) in the campaign is a big improvement over the base game, but the design in some of these missions is absolutely atrocious. I don't know who was smoking what when the decision was made to design Order Mission 4 around defending an AI-controlled vehicle that insists on driving itself into infinitely respawning enemy anti-vehicle units. I don't know whose idea it was to have your only recourse be a button on your commander you mash thirty times a second to say "PLEASE STOP DRIVING INTO LANDMINES, THANK YOU" until you can spam enough units to push through an infinite number of chaos horrors and heavy turrets, but it was probably the same guy who also thought it was a good idea to disable base building in the same mission.

Played for a few hours and immediately moved on to Dark Crusade. Didn't look back.

I really thought it would be a funny joke to play this on stream for some friends. I've come out the other side a little more depressed thinking about how you can make money off of something like this.

I think the worst part is the sincerity. If this had been a cynical half baked asset flip by a scam artist that'd be one thing, but I'm pretty sure this is a sincere, heartfelt project by a pair of German college students. I know everyone starts somewhere, but after 2 hours of poorly playtested first person jumping puzzles I'm left with only one thought: I think they should stop.

Honestly wasn't really expecting this one to vibe with me, and certainly wasn't expecting to list it among my favorite games of 2023. Holy shit were my expectations blown away. Everything in this game works. Music, animation, design, movement, core gameplay loop - everything is exactly what it needs to be. I don't necessarily think it's the greatest game of all time, but I do think it is a perfect game in the sense that it is perfectly put together. Everything was tested to hell and back, everything unnecessary being cut or removed and every element that remains being polished to a mirror sheen. It's downright impressive, and it's a blast to play. Probably 2023's best.

Insanely cool CRPG, which I don't play a whole lot of because so many of them tend to drag. WOTR is long, and it's wordy, but the writing across the board is super compelling and the gameplay is great. Not nearly enough d20 adaptations attempt turn based combat faithful to the tabletops, and fewer still do it so well.

I think one of the most impressive aspects of the game is its reactivity in the mid and late game. It's a little railroady towards the beginning, and thematically much of the game pushes the player in a Lawful Good direction, but ultimately the choice is yours and I haven't played a game that made being this evil this much fun in a very long time. It might have the best tyrannical undead lord RP I've ever played, full stop. Choices have meaningful consequences in both the dramatic and mechanical sense, with many decisions influencing events far, far into the game in ways you don't always expect, which is just fantastic in a genre plagued with meaningless binary Paragon/Renegade dialogue trees. Even when going for a particular alignment, I found myself making a lot of value judgments based on my feelings because the characters and the plot had me emotionally invested in the goings-on. There aren't a lot of games that truly make me feel rotten and satisfied in equal measure for doing something evil, or so torn over figuring out the right thing to do.

The character writing is (mostly) top notch, with the worst examples just being sort of dull in comparison to the high notes. When the character writing hits the high notes, it REALLY hits the high notes. The companions, especially the neutral or evil-aligned ones, are filled with some real charmers. Daeran, your sassy gay evil aristocrat divine caster, is a treat. He carries a tragic backstory tinged with mystery, but ultimately his alignment is what it is simply because he is a hedonistic dickhead, and he's all too happy to explain this to you, no excuses. Then there's Woljif, tiefling thief and dumbass scoundrel, who's a hoot, but heralds a subplot about confidence and powerlessness that adds depth to the character you wouldn't expect. Camellia, half-elf shaman is... well, she's unforgettable. Wenduag, fucked up bloodthirster and half-spider mutant, is fascinating, seemingly puddle-deep when introduced but later revealing a remarkable complexity behind her backstabbing tendencies and might-makes-right philosophy. Regill, who is essentially Darth Vader in gnome form, might be the coolest companion in an RPG in decades. There are no hidden depths to Regill. He just rules. Even the side characters and antagonists are full of life. Areelu Vorlesh might be one of my favorite RPG villains since Irenicus, and in my opinion rivals the latter for complexity in character and motivation.

When these elements mix, when the themes meet the characters and the characters meet morality, this is where the game's writing really shines. There's a particular young priest, a farm boy of no more than 20, introduced close to the start of the game. For much of the early chapters he is a background character, you hear his story and get a feel for his personality by talking to him - he's meek and ineffectual, but some great courage in him inspired him to drop his plow, pick up a sword, and leave home to come fight the demons in Sarkoris. Later, he transitions to being an important merchant, developing his cleric powers and learning to heal your troops on the march. You get a sense that this boy is finding his wings, that one day he will lead a great and noble legacy as a hero of the crusade. Then chapter 3 happens. In a completely missable sidequest, after investigating the temple he has been put in charge of protecting, you discover that in his cowardice he has been harboring a group of cultists in the basement. Their leader placed a curse on him so that if anyone ventures into their base, a swarm of rats will eat him alive from the inside out. And so he lies to you. Deceives you. Tries to hide the truth from you. It's hard not to sympathize, but the boy's lack of responsibility is quite literally getting dozens, perhaps hundreds of people killed. In a flash, the game demonstrates to you with a moral dilemma just how evil your enemy truly is, how hellish this war and its consequences, how out of his depth this peasant boy has landed, how he should 100%, absolutely never have left his comfortable home and journeyed to this horrible place. After that, the choice is yours. Do you venture into the basement to find clues as to the cultists' whereabouts? Do you take mercy on the poor child and agree to overlook the den, perhaps at the cost of more lives? Maybe you're an evil necromancer and your character chastises the boy, enters the basement without a second thought and resurrects the corpse of a noble warrior from within to serve as your thrall, the only price you pay being a rotten feeling in the pit of your stomach when you come back up the stairs and find the boy devoured.

I have to stress here that at this point you have known this character for, at minimum, a dozen hours. You were given time to grow attached, to dream of his ideal future before the cruel reality of this war rears its head and you are given power over his fate. Wrath of the Righteous is littered with stories like this, great and small, starting early and carrying forward into the heart of the game dozens and dozens of hours in before reaching their conclusions, and every time the power to influence these events lies in your hands - but sometimes the influence you have may not be as great as you like. So you think about them. You think about them hard. You struggle over right and wrong, fair and unfair, and perhaps ultimately go against your own conscience simply to play a role - you roleplay. And then you understand what the term "RPG" truly means.

The game's most glaring flaw, undoubtedly, is the half-baked nature of the Crusade Mode metagame that crops up in chapter 2 and beyond. It's HoMM-inspired, but lacks critical elements that makes those games work and is absurdly poorly balanced. Your first battle with a spellcasting demon general WILL result in entire stacks of units being melted by lightning bolts that do infinite damage for some godforsaken reason. You can turn this off, but you miss out on some useful magical goodies and what I think are some genuinely interesting RP moments that ultimately contribute a whole lot to the fun of picking a mythic path. After all, why would you deliberately skip the part where your undead kingdom begins to annex its neighbors? The solution, universally agreed upon by the playerbase, is to cheat. Just install the toybox mod and cheat through the Crusade layer. You'll miss nothing, as the real meat and potatoes of the game lies in the Pathfinder stuff anyway.

As an aside, it really pisses me off that Backloggd won't let me make this my game of the year even though it's still being updated.

Anyway, great game, highly recommend. Areelu Vorlesh did nothing wrong.

Crysis is misunderstood. Thought by many to be little more than a "tech demo," Crysis was legendary at the time for its system requirements and beauty in equal measure. "Can it run Crysis?" was the meme of the day for PC gamers, and anyone who could answer yes had surely invested unspeakable sums of money and blood magic into their rig.

But that's not important in 2023. What is important is that Crysis is secretly the greatest Predator video game of all time. Armed with a high-tech nanosuit that can switch between armored, super-speed, super-strength, and invisibility superpowers with the press of a button and the flick of your mouse, Crysis - when played in a way taking advantage of its unique gameplay features - elevates itself above the dread-inducing moniker of "7th gen first person shooter with regenerating health" and becomes a thrilling jungle hunting simulator, allowing you to sprint through the trees, super jump onto corrugated tin roofs, toss grenades into shanty houses and collapse them on top of hapless commandos before leaping back into the foliage and cloaking yourself to reposition and do it all again.

The story is irrelevant. It's a goofy, jingoistic plot about Secret Alien Ruins in the Philippines and how you must secure them for the United States because the CIA, renowned for its caution and foresight, knows better than the wily and power-hungry North Koreans that some powers are not meant to be controlled by man. And then the aliens wake up and you shoot them like Halo. That part sucks, and unfortunately the fact that the latter third of the game is mostly that detracts pretty heavily from the experience.

But the first two acts of the game are secretly brilliant. Most missions are comprised of an open map with a waypoint on it where you need to go blow something up or go kill some soldiers. How you make your approach - your path, your methods, your weapons and techniques - it's all up to you, and the game offers a shocking amount of freedom and experimentation in this regard. You COULD play this like a boring 7th gen cover shooter and just engage in firefights with the KPA while using armor mode... OR you could have fun and never use armor mode at all. You could use rocket launchers to collapse a guard tower instead of counter-sniping the guy at its top. You could rocket that tank or you could cloak yourself, drop C4 on it, and sprint away whlie you hit the detonator. You could shoot the gunner in that jeep or you could sprint around it, shoot the jerry can on its back and watch it explode. You could go grab a car and turn yourself invisible in the driver's seat, then drive it at top speed into that machine gun nest and jump out at the last second, creating a fireball of death that leaves the AI scrambling for cover.

Speaking of AI, it's the reactions of the KPA soldiers that really helps complete the fantasy. They're attentive and dangerous, but if you use your powers right, they're also completely hapless, and it's the act of sneaking up on a fireteam from behind, grabbing one of them, and throwing him into the rest of his team like a bowling ball that really completes the power fantasy. Without their desperate attempts to stop you, the reactivity of the AI, their shouting and firing wildly into your last known location when you activate your cloak - without them all of this would fall apart.

Crysis is not perfect, but it is great. It's greater than history gives it credit for. It is a forgotten giant of 2000s stealth video games, and for anyone who enjoys a little Metal Gear Solid or Splinter Cell sneaking-and-hunting action and is looking for more - Crysis has your fix.

Remaking the greatest video game of all time would be a daunting, foolhardy task for even the most legendary of video game developers. RE4 didn't need a remake. It still doesn't. Yet I'm happy this game exists regardless.

To try and re-do RE4 beat for beat would be a fool's endeavor. The best thing Capcom could have done with this installment would be to make it its own beast - rather than try to retread the steps of a giant, they would have to create something that feels entirely new, with its own combat loop, its own identity, merely inspired by the original. This is precisely what they did, and it's marvelous. The recognizable pieces are there - the plot beats, the campy villains, the melee prompts, the plagas exploding from heads - but the changes are sweeping enough to make an encounter in RE4make play out very differently from its namesake. The star of the show is Leon's knife - now incredibly powerful and versatile, faster than ever, capable of finishers and counters and even parries, but now also a resource to manage - its durability is finite, and you'll feel the pressure if it breaks.

I have gripes here and there. No game is gripe-free. The freer movement allows you to duck and weave like never before, but enemies can be frustratingly aggro on Ashley on higher difficulties to compensate, and she can't always keep up with you the way she could in the original. What does and doesn't have i-frames can seem inconsistent, and the learning curve on hardcore and professional can be frustrating as a result. The writing is top notch, and I either don't mind or enjoy many of the changes, but the voice work for most characters ranges from "good enough" to a clear downgrade from the original. Enemy resistance to staggers and melees on higher difficulties can really suck when RNG decides that ganado is going to choke you even though you shot him in the head 4 times. Yet despite these complaints, the game shines. I may cuss it out at times, but when you step back and look at the whole picture, the game's shortcomings pale in comparison to its strengths.

What really elevates RE4make though are the little moments of magic. It would be good enough if it was a fun romp. It would be good enough if it had a satisfying combat loop and fun puzzles. It would be good enough if it flawlessly established tension with thrilling, dangerous encounters that demand you carefully ration your resources. But the magical little moments - moments like getting bonus time in the shooting gallery and hearing the "la la las" of the original car drive salsa theme soar over a wailing trumpet solo - that's the stuff that really makes this game special.

RE4make will never supplant its namesake, but in a feat defying the laws of the universe itself, lives up to it. That's really the highest possible praise I can lump on this game. It deserves to be called Resident Evil 4.

To this day, no RPG has made me feel an overwhelming sense of dread the way this game's antagonists instilled in me at the end of the first act. To this day no game has made me truly feel the shift from being clueless, powerless, and on the back foot to gaining the upper hand, having an army at my back, and giving the powers that be the boot up their ass they deserve the way this game has. To this day, I have not fallen in love with my party in an RPG the way I have the characters in Shadowrun: Dragonfall.

Rarely in an RPG has a game's reactivity rewarded me (or punished me) for my narrative and mechanical decisions the way that this game does. The player character arc in this game is unmatched. The transition from being the new kid on the block to the Kreuzbasar truly feeling like home is something that I haven't seen any other RPG manage to successfully replicate to this degree, which I think is a product of this game's unflinching, emphatic focus on hope in the face of overwhelming odds.

This game is secretly one of the greatest computer RPGs ever made and tragically, the world simply doesn't know. Discover it for yourself.