A Plague Tale is just one of those games that is so unique that all you're left wanting at the end is more. No one else is making games like this right now. Stealth games with real stealth-based combat and puzzle solving - the stealth IS the puzzle, that's the key. Metal Gear Solid is close, but this grand adventure thing with a powerful linear narrative helps guide it so well.

Plague Tale also has some absolutely incredible music, and the first 2 acts of the narrative are heart-rending. I played this game with French voice acting not for the sake of immersion but because I really found Amicia's English voice off-putting. I also speak French fairly well so I could follow along without watching the subtitles too closely. The VA was stellar, some of the best I've heard this year.

The last act feels artificially elongated with characters acting illogically to basically lengthen the game time, but Chapter XIV sneaking into the castle is one of my favorite segments of any game ever. A Plauge Tale definitely hits some of the same pleasure centers for me as Dishonored, being equipped with a wide set of tools and being asked to use them to solve puzzles. The guards are, to be honest, not that intelligent, but it's a fantastic time nonetheless working around the rats and with the light puzzles.

The last boss was, to put it bluntly, kind of bull shit. The game has been a stealth game up till now and suddenly the final act is Dark Souls? I'm dodge rolling away from a man made of rats doing giant slams. Meanwhile, the previous bossfight, against Nicolas the executioner, was excellent. It used stealth in an intelligent way as a form of combat, and it makes me even more upset that he wasn't the final boss. Why the Inquisitor? Sure, he's more powerful, but the inquisitor has no emotional connection to Amicia. Nicolas killed her father, tortured her mother and brother, killed her friend Arthur. He should have been the final boss and it was a grave misstep lunking that honor off to a Emperor Palpatine rip-off with even less character we met 2 hours before.

Despite this qualms I had SO much fun with this game. I loved these characters, especially Amicia, who is a greatly compelling protagonist, and all the supporting cast, especially Lucas and Mellie. While the narrative gets messy at the end, it still doesn't lose sight of the themes of forgiving your loved ones. Great work, and I am absolutely psyched for Requiem. If they can fix a few things we'll definitely be in 9 territory!

In 2014, after finishing Virtue’s Last Reward, the second Zero Escape game, I finally had a purpose in life: Operation Bluebird. This loose conglomerate of folks was basically a campaign to push publisher Aksys and developer Spike Chunsoft to make the final Zero Escape game and complete the trilogy. Somehow, my reward for this was becoming Facebook friends with director Kotaro Uchikoshi. While Zero Time Dilemma did eventually arrive, and is best described as “fine”, Virtue’s Last Reward remains the most intelligent narrative structure I’ve ever seen in a game and is an-all time great.

Uchikoshi’s follow up in 2019, AI: The Somnium Files, was a neat new direction that I had a great time with, but desperately needed tweaking in a few places. When the sequel, The Nirvana Initiative was announced, I knew Spike Chunsoft had taken notes. I can’t describe how hyped I was for this game, how confident I was that it would be my game of the year, and Spike Chunsoft’s best game yet - and against all the odds, I think it is.

The first question most people likely have is “Can I play this game without playing the first one?” Ordinarily in video games, the answer is yes, as the publishers generally want as many people to be able to buy it as possible. For the Nirvana Initiative, I think my answer is “kinda.” The characters in the game tutorial actually ask you, the player, if you played the first game. If you say yes, they quiz you about the events that transpired to prove it. If you tell the Nirvana Initiative that you skipped the first game, they’ll tell you that’s quite alright and will add extra bits of exposition when meeting returning characters so that their actions and dialogue won’t leave you confused. So technically, yeah, you could. There is a considerable amount of interaction with returning characters though, and a lot of nuance, jokes, and references are going to totally fly over your head. So, final answer; you could, but don’t. The first game is currently on PC and Xbox game pass, so get to it!

If you’re not familiar with the Spike Chunsoft Visual novel hybrids like AI, Danganronpa, and Zero Escape, they’re much more packed with gameplay than the genre tags would lead you to believe. While Zero Escape blends horror with 3D puzzles and agonizing decision making, AI is much more of a detective thriller. You’ll find twists, turns, secrets, and clues hidden about everywhere as you hunt down a merciless serial killer who has been terrorizing near-future Japan by splitting people in half at a molecular level - alive.

For the first half of the game, you’ll take control of Ryuki, a junior detective at ABIS, which is a special crimes unit of the police that use cyberpunk gadgets and machinery to investigate specialized crimes. This first half of the Nirvana Initiative takes place only a few months after the first game’s conclusion, and you and your AI-ball companion Tama will investigate the string of mysterious murders across Tokyo by traveling to dozens of interesting locations, meeting tons of well-writted three dimensional characters, and solving some very innovative 3D puzzles.

Tama is an all-powerful AI that lives in an artificial eyeball in Ryuki’s head, and has a direct link with his mind as well as all information in the internet and at ABIS, and can even help Ryuki see around him in X-ray or thermo vision. In Somnium (we’ll get to that), she takes the form of a mature woman relentlessly teasing Ryuki and keeping him in line. Her relationship with Ryuki is probably my favorite in the game, and she’s brought to life with some excellent voice acting by the wonderfully talented Anairis Quinones, who you might know from Pokemon, My Hero Academia, or Demon Slayer.

The general rhythm of the Nirvana Initiative is traveling to a few locations, working your way through many fully voiced dialogue trees, investigating locations and items Phoenix Wright Style, and then speaking to Tama to help you mentally piece together what it all means. You’ll then bring in a person of interest to the Psync machine back at ABIS, which lets you travel into their Somnium. You have exactly 6 minutes to solve it, but brilliantly time only moves when you’re moving. You have unlimited time to stand still and consider your next action, so it’s a great balance of strategy and racing against the clock. Each of the Somniums is wildly different; one’s an escape room, one is literally Pokemon Go, one is a crazy Japanese game show - and so on.

A person’s Somnium is basically their eternal dream - it’s not a dream they’re having while asleep, it’s the physical manifestation of the things that are their mind. The Somnium presents itself with a number of mental locks, or things that person is either repressing or hiding. The Somniums are monumentally improved over the first game. In that game, you basically would need to trial and error/brute force your way through puzzles since a lot of them didn’t follow logical sense. And why would they? They’re dreams, and things in dreams mostly don’t make sense. This, however, does make it a poor game mechanic, no matter if the lore explains it.

In the Nirvana Initiative, every time you make an action in Somnium, you’re given a small piece of information on how the rules of the Somnium work. Is down up? Does fire put out water here? Do soda cans need to be unlocked with a key and locked door popped open? You’ll find out slowly as you experiment, and take advantage of TIMIEs. Every time you take an action in solving the puzzles, you’ll be given a TIMIE that can be applied to a later action and reduce the time cost. This adds a second layer to puzzle solving of rationing the better TIMIE’s for actions that take longer, but knowing you can only hold three of them at once.

All of this balances out to exactly what they were trying to nail in the first game - the Somnium is a chain of challenging but solvable logic puzzles where the rules of the world are slowly revealed to the player , each providing clues on how to progress, with both the strategy elements of puzzles combined with the anxiety of a time crunch seamlessly. Besides two puzzles in a later Somnium, I was able to logic my way through all of them without outside help just based on the clues provided to me and what I knew about the character. And that’s the genius part - getting inside each person’s Somnium shows you who they are on the inside vs who they are on the outside. Getting to know the amazing characters this way brings a whole new level of depth to them that you just aren’t going to get out of most other games.

In the second half of the game, you’ll play as Mizuki 6 years later, and the gameplay loop remains largely the same, but with more intrigue. Every so often, you’ll get to an action sequence. These are definitely the worst part of the game. The action sequences happen about once per chapter, and largely consist of you watching Ryuki or Mizuki running around doing anime style kicks and flips for 6-7 minutes, and every minute or so doing a quick time event. I would say about 75% of them aren’t even necessary to the plot, just “some thugs show up and another fight sequence happens”. I’m not gonna beat around the bush, they suck. Watching long stretches of cutscene with random QTEs is not what anyone is here for.

What I AM here for is the fantastic, best in class music. The first game had good music, honestly nothing notable to me, but the Nirvana Initiative has absolutely the best soundtrack of 2022 so far. It’s bangers straight from beginning to end and hits pretty much every genre I can think of. Composer Keisuke Ito has an impressive resume including every Pokemon Mystery Dungeon game, Yakuza, and Bloodstained Ritual of the Night, but this is very certainly his best work. I have been jamming to this soundtrack every day. I cannot recommend it enough. It’s on Spotify! Stop watching this. Go. Listen now ! And not to mention the dance sequences that will never fail to bring a smile to my face. Oh well, I’ll eat a donut in the bathroom.

One last major thing I haven’t really stressed - The Nirvana Initiative is probably the funniest video game I’ve ever played. Yeah, funnier than any of the Yakuza games. And it does it so consistently, I laughed out loud every few minutes during this 25 hour romp. Tama and Ryuki especially have a perfect relationship to produce constant comedic moments, and I always loved seeing people kick the shit out of Date for being an asshole when he showed up again. The performances in this game are top of the line with some great talent behind them, including Sungwon Cho, who you may know as Pro ZD, as the gentle giant Gen, youtube musician Amalee as Kizzy, and the immensely talented late Billy Kametz in his final role as the show-stealing serial killer Tearer. The English cast is full of the industry’s best, and you can tell not a single person phoned it in.

I haven’t even gotten to the real brilliance of the story, which I cannot reveal. Suffice it to say that when you reach it, you’ll realize that your preconceived notions of what a video game is and can be have led your entire investigation astray. The cracks that form in the story as you’re playing are not writing mistakes - they are your brain’s mistakes. There’s no way you’d figure it out before it’s revealed, but all the clues are theoretically there. Honestly I haven’t had a story twist experience like this since Bioshock in 2008, and that’s what pushes the Nirvana Initiative so close to a perfect game for me.

In addition to my previous comments about the action sequences, there’s a weird amount of time in the Nirvana Initiative that’s just dead air. Luckily there is a skip button to fast forward through segments where a character slowly walks for a full minute without speaking, so I’ll forgive that. The Nirvana Initiative improves on its predecessor in every way, bringing in twice as many interesting, layered characters that all get their time in the sun, crazy mysteries with twists i never saw coming, intelligent writing, vastly improved puzzles, impeccable voice acting and the best soundtrack of the year. I am shocked to say this, but I think the package as a whole outdoes Spike Chunsoft’s previous works. Whatever Uchikoshi’s next project is, whether it’s AI 3 or something else, we all need to be there day one. No one else is making games like him, and, frankly, I'm not sure anybody could if they tried.

Blake: The Visual Novel is a passion project from solo indie dev Ori Mees that takes us to what I’d call a cyberpunk-noir future - the world and characters capture the feel of cyberpunk without relying much on the aesthetic and hone in on the feeling of being a detective. Regardless, it’s a quick story worth exploring with memorable characters, great comic book- inspired art and absolutely killer music.

Blake has been having strange dreams, but not nearly as strange as his real life has become when he wakes up with a crate of stolen owls from the zoo in his bedroom. With the help of some legitimately enjoyable characters such as Max, Orlo, Lee and Hari, Blake seeks to get to the bottom of everything while uncovering some deeper mystery and finding out about his blood family that he never knew.

Unfortunately , as this is a visual novel and is entirely a story, I can’t say anything further about the plot without spoiling it. What I can talk about is the refreshing nature of providing actual choices to the player that deviates the story greatly. There are a few points particularly where the player makes a choice and branches the story in a totally different direction. There’s also a few mini games peppered throughout that are a good time. There are a good few endings, and it all comes together to give you the feel of a good ole fashioned paperback choose your own adventure novel.

I wasn’t a fan of the ending that I got, as it felt abrupt, but I know there are a few others to unlock which might be more narratively satisfying. I also felt that some of the characters, particularly Jonathan, didn’t really have a believable dialogue back and forth with Blake. In fact, he felt so fake that I was sure he was secretly a villain until the end, as his story just didn’t add up. Blake’s coworkers are delightful though, and I especially loved Hari and was kind of irritated that Blake didn’t enjoy her company. There also wasn’t an option for autoplay, which would be a great accessibility option besides removing the annoyance of constantly tapping Enter. There are a few issues here and there with the writing’s flow and transitions from scene to scene, and yes some of it feels like being jerked between one revelation to the next, but I had a good time with it and the characters are definitely crafted with heart.

I also want to give special props to the soundtrack. It is fantastic and probably the thing that has stuck most with me, giving a perfect flair to both the cyberpunk and noir sensibilities of the visual novel. In fact the ambient music is so pleasing I left the game running on my computer while cooking dinner so I could keep jamming out to it. It fits in with the atmosphere and the story the developer is crafting seamlessly and honestly I’d just buy the soundtrack as a standalone at this point.

Overall, Blake The Visual Novel is a fine entry to a niche genre and I think is worth playing for anybody who already enjoys visual novels. If you are one of the many people that doesnt, however, I do not believe this one will change your mind. I’m a very fast reader and it took me about an hour and a half to finish, and I think the average time is around 2 hours so it’s not gonna take up too much of your time. I think if I could give any award to Blake: The Visual Novel, it would be for most directed vibes. The city of new stone is cool, interesting, and I advise anyone who is even a tad interested to give it a run.

This charming choice-driven visual novel is chock full of vibes, and with some stellar music and great characters, fans of the genre shouldn’t skip this one.

In Fall 2016, I arrived at the College of Charleston for grad school and was coming off some bad times. I had no friends, and I was eager to make some. I found my way to the Quidditch team, which was exactly the large group of cool nerds that I had been looking for, but still couldn’t quite call any of them my friends. However, on Halloween weekend that year, I decided to cast a broad invitation to people to come to my apartment and try out this game I had been wanting to play that I needed a group for. That game was Until Dawn.

That night, our group was formed and I met a few people who would go on to become the closest friends I’ve ever had. I want to stress how incredibly important Until Dawn is to me, because I want the weight of this statement to come through - The Quarry is, finally, a worthy successor to Until Dawn.

The Quarry features a cast better than any of Supermassive’s previous games, and it feels much more cohesive than the casts of the three Dark Pictures games. I think the difference in tone between those games and this are the dynamic between a group of close friends trying to survive a B-horror movie versus a group of reluctant strangers trying to survive a self-serious horror movie. The Quarry features Ariel Winter of Modern Family, David Arquette of the Scream franchise, Grace Zabriskie of Twin Peaks, Lance Henrikson of Aliens and Terminator, and of course Brenda Song of The Social Network and The Suite Life of Zack and Cody. This incredible cast pulls out all the stops with great facial and body motion capture and realistic face physics that far outdo the quality of Supermassive’s previous games.

The Quarry sets up a similar premise to Until Dawn - you’re given a selection of CW-attractive 18 year olds in the summer before they head off to college (or not), and your job is to keep them all alive until the next morning. This time, however, the game’s UI is built for couch co-op. My partner and I chose the couch co-op option and I streamed the game to her over Discord, inputting her decisions for her characters. This is a great and easy way to play the game with a group without buying multiple copies of it.

With Until Dawn, the way most people played was to divvy up characters between players to make decisions and to pass the controller around when someone’s character came up. In The Quarry, Supermassive cuts out the middleman and has you assign each character to a real life player in your group and prompts you to hand the controller to that person when their character comes up again.

There isn’t too much I can say about the story without spoiling it, and the story is the entire game, really, so I’ll try to keep to generalities. Your teens are 18 years old and packing up after 2 months being counselors at Hackett’s Quarry Summer Camp. It’s that turbulent time in your life where everything is changing and innocence is coming to an end. There’s of course some of that hot CW-level drama that I know you’re craving, and lots of deep relationships and friendships will be formed and/or tested throughout the night.

There’s a separate storyline happening featuring a playable character named Laura, who’s life is turned upside down after swerving off the road to avoid a ghost on her way to Hackett’s Quarry. The multiple storylines provide some relief without breaking up too much of the story, and Laura, played by the fantastic Siobhan Williams, holds up the weight of her own storyline with grace.
The decisions that you make throughout the game feel like they both have immediate repercussions and have you questioning for the rest of the game whether what you did back then is still affecting what’s happening now. It’s even more fun when a decision your partner made on one of their characters seems to have negative repercussions on your own character, and accusations begin to fly about who’s to blame.

The Quarry is designed to turn players against each other while having them stay on task to cooperate and try to keep everyone alive, and it balances this difficult line well. For instance, there was a segment where we had to choose to take a wrench or hammer. My partner was nervous about this decision even leading into the final hours of the game, wondering how and why it mattered that we had chosen the wrench and if it had been to blame for the deaths of some of our compatriots. This was of course followed by a thorough roasting of my choices that got 4 characters killed, which was well earned.

I am issuing a public apology here: Max dying was my fault, and I was wrong to doubt you Kristen, O Great Knower of All Things.. Regardless, all of our decisions felt like they had weight, whether they were active ones like yanking a gun away or shooting someone, or just choosing to go up or down a set of stairs. I began a 2nd run with my friends from college last night, and I’ve already seen things playing out differently.

In between chapters, you’ll be greeted by Grace Zebriskie as Eliza, the witch who acts as a narrator and 4th wall-breaking host similar to the psychiatrist in Until Dawn. She turns in what I believe is the best performance in the game and definitely one of the best of the year, guiding the players through the story and reading the tarot cards they find to show them glimpses of the future that only make decisions more confusing. She’s scary, warm, welcoming, and threatening all at once and holds the story together for its 9.5 hour runtime.

Overall, the Quarry does exactly what it sets out to do. The characters control much better than in Until Dawn, the graphics are impressive, and it ran extremely smoothly on ultra settings at 60 FPS on my RTX 2060 Super with no frame stutters. Besides a few audio desyncs, I had no bugs to speak of. My partner and I genuinely wanted to keep these kids alive through the night and felt real disappointment and guilt when we didn’t, questioning our decisions anywhere from a few seconds ago to hours ago.

The third act gets a little messy and drags a bit in chapters 7-9, but outside of that it’s the exact tone, gameplay, and most importantly vibes that fans have wanted from Supermassive that the Dark Pictures Anthology and Hidden Agenda just didn’t deliver. There were a few segments where I felt a little like I had been trapped and neither decision would save me, and whether it was earned or not the feeling of a loss of control is never fun in these kinds of games. I will admit I became a bit irked when a single decision killed two of our remaining characters at once with just half an hour left in the game.

I believe the loss of the newness factor also makes The Quarry a tad less exciting than Until Dawn, which was a totally new idea at the time, but factoring all that in it’s still an amazing experience that you and your friends are going to love. I do not recommend trying it solo, as the story and even interface aren’t built for it. This is a co-op game through and through, and ironically one of the jolliest in years.

The Quarry manages to, after all these years, harness the things that made Until Dawn a classic and replicate that feeling almost perfectly. Besides a few story hiccups in the last act, these characters and performances are going to keep you and your friends eyes glued to the screen all night long.

When I arrived at grad school in Charleston, I didn't know anyone. I tried to make friends by joining a bunch of clubs, and the one that stuck was the Quidditch team. That Halloween I invited everyone at large to show up to my apartment to try out Until Dawn, which was something I had been wanting to check out for a long time. The people who happened to show up became our friend group, and some of them are still my closest friends in the world. I have played this game 4 times through with different groups and never gotten even a little tired of it. This was a master stroke and I can only hope and pray the Quarry is as good.

Ashina the Red Witch is the newest adventure title from Stranga Games, sporting fantastic music, fun puzzles, well-made pixel art, and a story that is poignant, heartbreaking, and gripping right up until it isn't. While the narrative, characters, and dialogue were excellent most of the way through, Ashina shoots itself in the foot with the most thematically dissonant and laughably bad ending this side of Game of Thrones.

As I stated before, Ashina is a thrilling and gripping tale for about 90% of the 3 and a half hour runtime. Stranga Games has taken more inspiration from Studio Ghibli’s masterpiece Spirited Away than I’ve perhaps ever seen anything take take, even Ghibli’s own game Ni No Kuni. And to be truthful, it’s all the better for it. Spirited Away is my favorite film of all time, and the second I arrived in the spirit world I started to see the similarities. So yeah, it’s a quick way to my heart, what are you gonna do about it?

Ashina follows the story of Ash, a twenty-something girl exhausted with life, tired of raising her younger sister Tema who is of course always getting into trouble. The two are transported to the spirit world by way of a mischievous spirit named Tanto who has stolen their late mother’s pendant, and after they’re separated Ash sets out to rescue her little sister, just as she always does.

You’ll be taken to several different towns and areas, and the gameplay mostly consists of doing small quests for one NPC in exchange for an item for another NPC to get you to the next thing. It’s all very simple, and most of it is just walking around and talking to the delightful characters. There are a few puzzles scattered about, and they do a great job hitting that medium of not being too tough while offering a challenge and feeling like a natural part of the environment.

Ashina is a very story driven narrative heavy game, so I don’t want to spoil too much more of the story - instead i want to talk about themes. Right up until the end, this story is tied together by the theme of learning to sacrifice for others because it is our responsibility. The characters Ash meets along the way have all given something up, all lost something, for the sake of others. The way to truly love is to sacrifice, to work selflessly. It hits hardest when Ash asks a miner why they keep digging for the coal that powers the city. She responds “why are you trying to rescue your sister?” Ash responds, “because it is my responsibility.”

There is even a part of the story where Ash is offered an escape back to the real world if she agrees to leave her sister behind for dead, after having a meltdown and revealing how much she hates Tema because of what she gave up to take care of her after their mother died. And yet, back into the pit she goes for her sister, her only remaining family. Because to love is to be selfless, stupid, and steadfast.

This story ends with perhaps the most baffling, and contradictory ending I can call to mind. The lesson at the end is that one should, in fact, be selfish. The characters that act for their own selfish purposes are rewarded. The characters that act out of love are punished with death, or worse. It’s not just a matter of evil winning and it being a tragic ending - the theme that the story pushed so heavily is completely invalidated in one fell swoop. The ending makes it clear that to love is to be weak, to sacrifice is to be doomed. Nothing you did in the game matters, actually - it was all stupid. Ash should have gone home and let her sister die.

After becoming so invested in these characters, in what I felt was maybe the best story in a video game this year, I was absolutely gutted by this ending. As I said, it’s not about the tragic nature - it’s about spitting in the face of theme. If you throw away your ending for shock value at the end and tell the player plainly that your story wasn’t worth anything, guess what? They’re gonna feel like they wasted their time. And I do. What was on track to be on my favorite indie games of all time list is now a bad taste in my mouth.

There are alternate endings, but this isn’t the “bad” ending - they’re all relatively like this. It’s also worth noting that Ashina is a prequel to a previous game from Stranga Games, My Big Sister. Ash’s fate was always going to be what it was, since the sequel is already written. For reference, I did skim through a playthrough of My Big Sister to see if it somehow made Ash’s story make sense - it does not. If anything, it’s even worse than I had originally thought.

Overall, there is so much good going on in Ashina: The Red Witch that I would be a fool not to acknowledge. Part of the reason I reacted so badly to this perplexing ending is that I genuinely cared about these characters. Even the ones I hated, I at least cared about them. They made an impression on me. Not to mention the wonderful slew of references and design inspirations from the works of Hayao Miyazaki, the absolute banger soundtrack, and the pleasantly memorable locations and one-off NPCs along the way. The issue, however, is that the writer invalidates everything they did with such a profound lack of self-awareness I feel like I genuinely lost these hours of my life.

Despite its charming art, music, character work, settings, and inspirations, Ashina’s last 30 minutes invalidate the entire story before it and slaps players in the face for being stupid enough to care about it.

When Todd Howard stepped onto the stage at Bethesda's E3 Press Conference in 2015, the crowd went wild. Everyone knew what was coming. The most open secret in video games, the legendary Fallout 4, was about to be announced. Fans both in the audience and watching online lost their collective minds for the next four months, spreading rumors, speculating wildly and hyping themselves beyond belief. And I, meanwhile, was only just made aware of the Fallout franchise when an ad popped up on TV in October.

Something about the trailer captured my heart—I knew I needed to be there, in the wasteland, fighting the good fight. But alas, the only game console I owned was a Wii U. And so I downloaded Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 3 on my potato laptop from college and began my journey through the post-capitalist apocalypse. By Christmas, I was irretrievably hooked. I purchased a PlayStation 4 and Fallout 4 for myself and sat down to play—and never got back up. The first weekend I had Fallout 4 was the first and only time I was so trapped in a game I lost a whole day of my life. I went 16 hours that Saturday without moving, without eating. It's something we all wish to find in a game at some point in our lives, and at that particular time I desperately needed it.


It's well known among my friends and colleagues that I'm something of a Fallout fanatic. I've spent close to 800 hours in Fallout 4 now, and about 550 of those were on PS4 without mods. So, how did I find the fun in what I agree is a pretty disappointing RPG? I just looked a little further, and somewhere in the Commonwealth, in between Preston's endless settlement quests and the anticlimactic story endings, I found home.

I understand that many, perhaps even most, players chose not to engage with the settlement building in Fallout 4. That's fair; based on the previous games in the series, you'd be forgiven for thinking you were signing up for another RPG. In this respect, Bethesda falls flat on its face. With the unforgivable gutting of dialogue—reducing thousands of nuanced and complex sentences to, "Yes," "No," "Sarcastic Yes," and "Well no, but actually yes,"—BGS firmly declared their focus was no longer on dialogue, no longer on the idea of creating a complex web of layered ideas. Here was the quest option, and you'd go down it whether you liked it or not. But out of this misguided attempt to make the game more accessible to casuals, a wonderful thing happened.

With underwhelming writing to carry the story, including a few minor deviations from established canon, Fallout 4 became an open-world survival sandbox with some RPG elements to keep things running. When survival mode dropped a few months after release, it became clear that this was Bethesda's aim all along. I still maintain that if you are searching for an open-world, single-player survival game, you will not find one better than Fallout 4.

"But that's not Fallout!" a chorus of voices cries from the depths of Reddit, and they're right to a large degree. Fallout 1-3 and New Vegas all centered on communicating the nuanced ramifications of late-stage capitalism taken to its extreme end. Fallout 4, on the other hand, fails spectacularly at grasping this core tenet of Fallout and instead offers you a chance to rebuild this post-neoliberal world into something of your own choosing. The world, the history, the iconography of Fallout is intact. To these critics, I say this: the heart of Fallout is in the destruction of the old, of the hyper-capitalist world where a ticket to Nuka-World cost $6,000, and the creation of a new world. A new hope, even.

I agree that all four faction endings for Fallout 4 are underwhelming, but despite being sloppily written, they are tonally in sync with what the franchise is known and celebrated for. The real story here, the real ending, is the creation of the new world. Building dozens of settlements slowly across the land, with your own two hands, is the reward. This network of communal societies with open trade routes is the true ending. This, not the destruction of the Institute and a fake son, is the reward. The closed off, isolated tribal nature of the Commonwealth is a thing of the past by time the Sole Survivor has finished building this new empire. The settlements are not an impediment to what Fallout 4 could have been; they are the heart and soul of it.

This new society built by scavenging the junk, the literal broken pieces of the old world and rebuilding them into a civilization that is built on sharing, caring for others, and sustainability. It is a better society; in a lot of ways, Fallout 4 feels like the chronological "end" of Fallout. I hope that future games, like Fallout 76, take place before the war with the Institute and the invasion of the Brotherhood of Steel so as not to disrupt that narrative finality. I also appreciate that Bethesda leaves the option in to keep the world broken; following the Overboss ending of the Nuka-World DLC leads the Sole Survivor to raze the Commonwealth, to tear down everything that they have built and fought for. It's not a rational choice, but it's one that I appreciate is there. I think Howard and his team understand the choice they've presented here - if the player finds the world so despicable that it should not continue on, it's in their power to end it all.

I wholeheartedly agree with the common sentiment that Obsidian Entertainment's Fallout: New Vegas is the best game in the series, and it's not even close. But while Obsidian focused on creating hundreds of branching storylines across dozens of quests that allowed me to tailor-build a story to my character, Bethesda Game Studios elected to take a more hands-off approach. Environmental storytelling is left to pick up the slack, showcasing micro-stories across the hundreds of quiet buildings in downtown Boston. Some are sad, others comedic; most drive home the feeling of emptiness. Many would say this approach was a little too hands off, but hey, that's the Wasteland, baby.

Fallout 4 is not, overall, a well-written game. There are occasional bursts of genius: The Silver Shroud, Nick Valentine's backstory, the true identity of Paladin Danse, and the entirety of the Far Harbor DLC. But these moments that remind us of the brilliance of previous games are the exception, not the norm. Fallout 4 came so, so close to making a poignant statement about what makes us human, but fell short of saying anything meaningful in any of the four faction endings. This, again, is rectified in the Far Harbor DLC, where Howard and his team take a more nuanced look at what separates the humans and synths and how in the end, it may not even matter.

All this is to say that when I arrived in the Commonwealth, I gathered the tools that BGS had laid out for me and set to work on building my own story (literally). My character, Heartha, had her whole life torn apart when the bombs fell and her family was forced into the vault. After losing her husband and suffering the kidnapping of her infant son, she sets out into an unfamiliar world, determined and filled with adrenaline. She makes fast friends with a wild dog and some washed-up revolutionaries, and with their help establishes a homestead. This would be a place for the weak and weary, a town for the disenfranchised. For those who had, as she had, lost everything. This town would be a Sanctuary.

She travels across miles of hellscape to find the shining capital of the Commonwealth, Diamond City, and with the help of new and resourceful teammates she quickly tracks down the kidnapper and begins to unravel the mystery. An Irish junkie from the fighting pit, a robot detective, a magical helmet that makes you immortal, an underground network of borderline terrorists, a team of high-tech fascist soldiers that attempt to "cleanse" the Commonwealth—each of these things are stepping stones to Shaun, the only thing she fights for. Back and forth, allying and betraying factions, building up some towns and razing others—it's only in pursuit of finding her son. She will tear apart the entire world if she has to, and turns out she does have to.

While bigger in scale, I believe Fallout 4 sticks to one very important theme the whole way through: parenthood. What will a tear-stricken mother, a howling, enraged father do to rescue their only child? I see Fallout 4 through perhaps a different lens than some critics do. This was never about politically disparate factions or the nature of humanity; it remains, as always, a story about war. And what could be a greater cause for war, a greater feeling for war, than losing a child? Bethesda Games Studios did not, quite frankly, put in the work to make a story that deserves the passion with which I have described it. But they did give me the sandbox to build it, and build I did. This, again, is the reward. Not in the receiving of a well-told story, but in building one.

Many fans of Fallout lament the series, sighing loudly here and there that Bethesda Game Studios will never make another good game. I disagree - they have the tools, they have the talent, they have the understanding to do so. While the initial state of Fallout 76 was undeniably abysmal, the Wastelanders update has proven that Bethesda Game Studios does have the chops necessary for a "real" Fallout game. With the return of almost every hardcore RPG element fans missed from New Vegas combined with their dedication to the cycle of building and destroying, Bethesda is close to tapping in to a perfect merging of the Black Isle Studios/Obsidian take on Fallout and their own.

Fallout 4 is an interesting game that will continue to divide players. Despite being dismissed by most hardcore RPG players, it is one of the best-selling RPGs of all time, beaten only by Bethesda's own Skyrim. It opened the world of Fallout and even the world of RPGs to millions of people, and I don't think it'll be soon forgotten. Iconic in both the best and worst ways, I look back at Fallout 4 today as an open-world adventure that disappointed many and delighted so many more.

In this microcosm I found a broken world and built a new one out of the ashes, and for that I am thankful. I think there is a path to this perfect, ideal Fallout game that appeals to most everyone. Perhaps it's through a joint effort with fellow Microsoft studio Obsidian Entertainment; perhaps it's in some new blood taking a crack at their favorite game series with fervor. However it comes to us, I am content to head back to my settlement in Bunker Hill for now and fix up those turrets that I've been putting off.

Why do we love Sonic so much? This question has been asked many times to many people over the last 30 years, and every year it becomes increasingly harder to answer. Do I love Sonic? Hell yeah. Why? Um, the colors? The whimsical characters? The TV shows? Maybe. It sure as hell isn’t because of the games, though.

I will preface this with a disclaimer that although I do love sonic games, and have played most of them, I can’t point at any specific game as honestly being excellent. Just so you know where I stand, Sonic Adventure 2 Battle on Gamecube was a HUGE part of my childhood. My brother and I played hundreds of hours of that game, between the fun extra challenges that were available for EVERY STAGE (collect 100 rings, find the chao, time attack, and hard mode), the Chao Garden and its mini games, and of course the ridiculous 2 player mode (Chaos Spear! Ouch!). And the music was straight bangers, from Live and Learn all the way to the Chao Garden Lobby. But for how much I love the game, it’s not particularly good. It’s clunky, glitchy, the voice acting is hilarious and horribly dubbed (I found you! Faker!) and the “shooting” stages, roughly 1/3 of the game, feel like garbage to play. But I love it. I didn’t purchase Sonic Forces with the expectation that it’d be great. I hoped that it would be campy and funny and playable enough that I would remember why I loved Sonic so much. Spoiler alert: It wasn’t.

Remember Shadow the Hedgehog, the edgier version of Sonic? Well say hello to Shadow 2, the sequel. The story begins with Sonic facing off against a new, even edgier hedgehog named Infinite. Please listen to his theme while reading this or you won’t truly understand what you’re getting into.

Sonic is taken by Dr. Eggman, and Tails suffers PTSD. We skip to 6 months later, and Eggman has taken over the entire world with the help of Infinite. This is where perhaps the only truly great part of the game comes in — the character builder.

This is something that I did not ask for, but now can’t believe I ever lived without. I created my own guy, Cowbop, an anthropomorphic something or other. The point is, he’s very fancy. I wanted a Texas oil tycoon vibe around him and I think I got it in one. Anyway, there’s a character builder with an insane amount of outfits, hats, shoes, and other gear to unlock as you play the game. The Gamer Hat sticks out as maybe the most memorable of the bunch. Your avatar will join the cast of Sonic Forces and you’ll get to high-five Knuckles, just like you always dreamed. I had a ton of fun changing up the styles and customizing by avatar throughout the game, and I think that’s the last good thing I have to say about Sonic Forces.

So why is this game so bad? I can sum it up in one sentence. It feels awful to play. The game is split between modern Sonic stages (3D similar to Colors and Generations), Classic Sonic (2D as presented in generations), and Avatar stages (3D stages like modern Sonic). The Avatar and Classic Sonic both feel like garbage to play. I can’t say much about the classic Sonic stages except that they’re uninspired, hard to navigate, require a lot more slow careful movement than actual speed, and are quite boring. The Avatar stages themselves are mostly sound, and playing with Modern Sonic doesn’t feel as bad, just kind of boring. The Avatar character does not have a homing attack, which Sonic veterans know is literally his entire thing in the 3D games. Instead he’s got a grappling hook that works sometimes, and much more slowly than a homing attack. This was intended to make the character more versatile, since you can install weapon modules that give you different abilities later on, but I’ll get to why that ruined the entire game further down.The whole thing is clunky, and nothing about the avatar’s movement is fluid or smooth… which is like the one thing you need in a Sonic game. Again, modern Sonic’s stages are passable, but mostly don’t require you to do anything. There are sections of the game where you can literally not touch the controller for 2 minutes and continue progressing through a stage.

Sonic games are often praised for their music, even when the rest of the game is actual garbage. Unfortunately, this didn’t happen with Sonic Forces. The typical thing we’ve come to love and expect from Sonic soundtracks is that upbeat rock sound with atmospheric hard vocals. The soundtrack of this game is almost entirely EDM. Now I like EDM normally, but it’s not Sonic music. There’s a lot of generic singing and beats and sounds and all the tracks blend together. Not to mention the main theme, First Bump, is not super good. It’s not bad, but it’s probably the least exciting and catchy of the main game themes. The Infinite song is its own beast.

Speaking of Infinite, fighting him felt very… dumb. It was repetitive and there were no consequences for screwing up. It took a long time to do the mini boss fights against him, and really didn’t make me feel like I had accomplished anything. The final boss fight was challenging and forced me to try 4 different weapons before finding one that actually allowed me to win. It took probably half an hour to do, but on the run where I won the final boss took maybe 5 minutes. I was… unimpressed. Winning required me picking the right weapon, not learning how the boss worked and outsmarting it. That’s just me, though, it’s conceivable that other people enjoyed the boss fights. Big snake, anyone?

The environments were largely, to use the word again, uninspired. All of it was totally forgettable with the sole exception of the Casino Forest, which I would love to have seen more of. Sonic veterans will know there’s always a casino stage and they’re normally pretty samey, but putting it in a forest really mixed it up and I actually paused the game to admire the scenery a few times. Hoping it comes back in the next installment, which I will for some reason still buy.

My last main thing to talk about is a specific incident I ran into that ruined the whole idea of the game (luckily it was the penultimate stage.) I will first preface with the fact that nowhere in the game are you told that certain stages can only be completed with certain weapons. I had been switching weapons almost every stage with my avatar and hadn’t run into any problems I couldn’t get around, even if it would have been easier with, say the fire gun instead of the lightning cannon. This stage has a section in it at the very end that is only doable with the drill weapon. That’s right, after spending almost half an hour trying to get past one specific part of the stage and getting stumped over and over, I finally had to look it up. In all the playthrough videos I watched, everyone said “just attach the drill.” Cool. There are 8 different weapons in this game. You can’t switch weapons mid-stage. So I had to go back and restart the stage with the drill weapon, and I blasted through that section. Cool. So it was literally impossible to beat this stage with all but one weapon, and I wasn’t told anywhere that this would be the case, nor that this kind of thing could even happen in the game. After all the time I lost on this section in vain, I was more than a little salty about the experience. But about half an hour later, the game was over. A smooth transition to my next point.

This game is 4.5 hours long, if you spend some time character creating and do a few extra missions along the way. There is some replayability built into the game but it feels so damn bad to play it you won’t want to do that. The Shadow DLC, which is also not fun and fully of RNG bullshit traps that randomly toss you off the stage, takes about 15 minutes. Thank god it’s free DLC. I paid $40 for this game, but that’s my own fault.

Sonic Forces is not a good game. It feels clunky, the levels and music are generic and uninspired, it’s full of annoying pandering, and your player character you spent 45 minutes making handles like a Razr Scooter in a swamp. Infinite is a boring villain with boring boss fights. The customizability of your avatar’s gear is fun and overloaded with outfit combinations, but the fact that certain weapons don’t allow you to complete certain stages with literally no warning from the game is inexcusable.

If you’re itching for some Sonic Forces, I highly recommend the Game Grumps playthrough of it. It’s hilarious and they don’t shit on it nearly as much as I did here. It’s one of their funnier things and they finish it completely.

Steamworld Dig 2, perhaps more than any other game in history, is the shining example of what a sequel can and should be. Every single aspect of this game is improved up on from its predecessor. Gameplay mechanics, upgrade systems, characters, dialogue, economy, music, art, substance, emotional impact. This game is a perfect sequel. SD2 does directly follow the events of Steamworld Dig, but no knowledge of the previous game is required to understand the story or engage with the world. I do highly recommend that you play the first game though, I’d absolutely list it in my indie must-plays.

In SD2, you take control of Dot, a robot visiting the charming sci-fi western town of El Machino. The inhabitants of the the town are friendly, colorful, and memorable. The music is calming and yet exciting. The plot begins! You are searching for your uncle, Rusty, your voiceless protagoist from the first game, who disappeared at the end of Steamworld Dig. You team up with Fen, fire spirit/best boy, and together set off to the underground to dig, dig, dig.

In this metroidvania, you’ll dig down into the earth to find caverns, enemies, puzzles, challenges, and some pretty crazy boss fights as you progress towards the bottom. The great part about the game is that each tool you acquire and each skill you gain (by spending money back in town) serves a very specific purpose: to help you keep digging. Whether its an upgrade for more water (water is basically mana and makes all your gadgets work), a mobility tool like the hookshot, or an upgrade like the drill to bore through rock faster, each of these tools makes you just good enough, just fast enough to make it to the next checkpoint and unlock its mysteries.

Like many metroidvanias, there’s a hub world (the town) with a pipe that lets you fast travel to any of the checkpoints you’ve unlocked. You have a limited amount of light every time you travel to the underground, and must find places to recharge it for extended stays or else be lost in the darkness. Trips to the surface become less frequent as you progress farther underground and gain powerups and tools that help you keep the lights on longer. There’s plenty of collectibles too! Find all the cogs if you can. You’ll collect gems to sell for cash and use the cash to buy upgrades so you can dig for more gems. Feedback loop!

There aren’t a huge variety of enemies, but the fact is they’re not really there for you to fight, they’re mostly there to try and impede you from digging. Dig around them, fight them, whatever. Bossfights can get tough, I got stuck on the Prophet for a good while. It never gets overly challenging though, you can easily play on your switch while watching TV.

This game may not look like it has very much of a story, and it doesn’t, but what is there hits very hard. Dot and Fen have a great relationship, and the characters you meet around town and elsewhere all have something interesting going on. I don’t want to spoil anything, but the last scene of the game hit me so hard I teared up. You need to finish it.

Steamworld Dig 2 takes every aspect of the previous game and doubles, if not triples, its quality. The upgrade system is perfectly balanced so I was never over or under powered. The characters are fun, goofy, and memorable. The gameplay is smooth and satisfying, and use of mobility tools like the grappling hook feels like a natural addition to the formula. This is a perfect game to escape to while watching TV or listening to a podcast. Make sure you’re paying attention at the end tho — the last scene is well worth working to reach.