A beautiful tapestry of tax forms. If you have a tolerance for F2P-daily-login-engagement-structure, there's some slick combat, but I decided it wasn't worth the work.

Excellently paced ghost hunting. Play it in VR if you can.

Cyberpunk Celeste with some hit-or-miss bossfights.

Should have been sixty hours of wandering around and chatting with people.

Proof that simply hiring talented people doesn't make a good game. Dull level design and a boring weapon sandbox go hand-in-hand to create a smooth, but forgettable shooter.

Playing this in VR is like living inside William Gibson's vision of cyberspace.

A DOOM megawad with the exploration of Unreal and genuinely inspired art direction.

Combat errs easy, and most bosses get circlestrafed to death without a second thought, but I still had a good time taking them out. Doesn't overstay its welcome, either, partially 'cause the actual metroid-like progression is much simpler than its inspirations.

A gorgeous, luxurious visual novel/interactive fiction hybrid bundled with some of Vanillaware's sexiest number-flying combat since Odin Sphere. The tower defense stuff is so slick, I didn't even realize the post-game missions were infinitely generated until I played nearly thirty of them.

A classroom-worthy example of Video Game Cutscene writing.

Playing a true MegaTen game after a lifetime of Final Fantasy is like emerging from Plato's cave.

Game's too damn long, though.

Didn't get this one. Decent enough time with friends, but procedurally generated everything and clunky movement isn't my idea of a good time. Would rather just play Left 4 Dead workshop maps or something.

Comfort-food RPG tropes surround this focused, buttery action game with killer bossfights. Now to play the rest of the series...

Tactile, fast, complex action with genuinely interesting storytelling. Less intimidating than it looks. The best implementation of "dualsense" HD rumble I've felt.

if i was going to make my players constantly strafe around enemies in cramped platforms i would personally try to avoid cluttering those platforms with little hitches and shelves they would get constantly caught up on. that would be annoying

Great core ideas that stand at odds with what have now become cliche indie-game-narrative tropes.