Got the platinum months ago, there's a dozen other games on my backlog, and I'm still playing this instead. Do I need to say more?

I mean, I can say more, if you want. OK, I'll say more.

How 'bout this: If the first Remnant was "Dark Souls with guns", this one is "Bloodborne meets Destiny". Takes the best parts of the soulslike genre and infuses them with all of the best parts of a modern looter-shooter-- smooth aiming and movement mechanics, semi-random dungeons, simple mission-based quest design, swappable classes that each have their own skill progression-- while leaving behind all of the parts of Destiny that I find incredibly annoying. There's no microtransactions or gatcha BS, no need to grind for random drops, and you can do everything as solo or coop instead of all the good stuff being locked behind 6-person raids. It's a chocolate + peanut butter combo that I'm finding irresistible.

This is my GOTY 2023 by a country mile and, if their DLC plans pan out, it could be a solid game-of-the-generation contender.

The idea of a roleplaying musical is so good that I was willing to forgive a lot here. The songs themselves are mostly forgettable and the roleplaying aspects are underdeveloped, but strictly as a choose-your-own-adventure story very much in the style of The Wolf Among Us I found this a pretty cool and breezy few hours.

Pan— styled here as a classic noir hustler— was my fave side character by several country miles, though your well-dressed bestie Freddie is fun too. Apollo and Persephone both a total snooze by comparison.

Gamified bubble wrap. Tunes my brain to static within 5 minutes of starting a new run, guaranteed.

Which also means that it feels genuinely unhealthy to play this for more than 30 minutes at a time, like the government should intervene before it allows you to start another round after finishing your first one.

So I’m giving this a brisk 4 out of 5 stars but deleting it from my Switch before I have forgotten what the faces of my family members look like.

Feels just like playing the Zerg in Starcraft except you get to prettify a barren landscape instead of enshittifying it. Welcome to the resistance, Overmind.

SPAWN FEWER OVERLORDS
WE RETURNED MORE VESPENE GAS
DE-EVOLUTION COMPLETE

A marvelously creative game.

Here’s the genius of it: At first, I hated flying the spaceship, but every loop I got a little bit better without even noticing— being so focused on the puzzle sleuthing part of the game— and by the end I was Chuck Fucking Yaeger in that thing. That sneaky, trial-and-error progression loop running underneath what is otherwise a very cerebral first-person puzzler is the secret sauce that makes Outer Wilds sing.

On the other hand, though, I also think it’s noteworthy that, despite my enjoyment of it, this was my third attempt to finish the damned thing, starting over from the beginning each time. The game’s initial rush of excitement, as you launch out into the wild unknown, is among the best ever. By the 50th time I did it, though, I started to lose my sense of wonder and the final puzzle and the ending felt less grandiose than I’d hoped.

Still, for an indie of this scale, it’s a huge swing and an undeniably massive home run of a game design.

All praise the New Weird. The New Weird will never die but when it does I will track down its killer and catalog the crime on my Nightmare Computer.

For a solid week, this game is the only thing I could think about. It infected my dreams. Along the way, it had me tossing and turning over not just its mystery plot but thoughts about dead malls and beach vacations, economic inequality and clique-ridden virtual communities.

Also, there’s some jumping puzzles. You don’t have to do the jumping puzzles. (I did all of the jumping puzzles.)

Just an amazingly strange and singular game. Easily one of my favorites of the past few years. Possibly one of my favorites ever. I’ll have to think about it a bit more. Not just because I want to; I have to.

Remedy got tired of waiting for Half-Life 3 and decided to make their own.

… and it’s pretty magnificent. Tension ratchets up as you wander through each cursed office space, and then gets invariably released in a huge, messy shoot-out where you use your mind powers to hurl the scenery at the monsters.

That’s it. That’s the whole game. There are some obvious things I could knock about it— like the copy-pastey encounters in the final hours or the way all the characters feel more like audio log dispensers than people— but that core experience of suspenseful setups and cathartic knockdowns never lost its grip on me over dozens of hours.

I was playing the Ultimate Edition, which adds a bunch of sidequests of the kill-six-wolves variety that felt very skippable. It also adds the multi-launch ability, though, which is simply some of the funnest shit you can do in a video game. Plus, the upgrade to ray tracing on a PS5 looks frankly astonishing. Recommended.

The sort of game that has me questioning history, like "wait a minute... was Fallout this mid?"

But then I remember: naaaah, the thing that made Fallout great was its three-pillar design, where at a bare minimum you could sneak, talk, or shoot your way through every step of the main quest. Wasteland 2 wants you to think it is that kind of game, but once every ten hours or so it funnels you into a chokepoint where you're hard-punished for making characters that do anything other than shoot bullets and take damage.

I could go back and restart with a more boring crew, or I could dial down the difficulty and slog on, or I could go looking for another game that better captures the spirit of Fallout. Of those options, I like the sound of the third one.

A game that I really wish was better. The intricate system that drives the survival half of this survival RPG is first-rate. It's the RPG portion that ends up being a letdown.

And I mean, specifically: The combat system started feeling solved very quickly, except for unwinnable scripted fights that are just there to reset your progress. The visual-novel-style story segments each night add some nice flavor to the day-to-day cycle, but your choices and skills rarely seem to have much impact there. Every person you meet on the island seems plucked from an international grabbag of cringe-worthy cultural stereotypes that feel totally jarring to the Viking setting.

I made it to Day 93, and it feels like I had seen everything the game had to offer 30 turns ago. I'll just be over here looking up the ending on Youtube, thanks. Moving on.

I haven't been a Fortnite lifer or anything, but imo that back half of Chapter 3 (after they rolled out Zero Build along with Apex-style mantling) is the best this game has ever been. So, Chapter 4 had a lot riding on it. I think this new season hasn't quite gotten back to that highwater mark yet, but they're still doing a great job making every weekend feel a little different from the last.

The new island is nicely put-together, and does feel like three separate zones instead of one big funnel. Because of that layout, though, the spiciest locations are farther off-center now, which can be interesting but oftentimes also a letdown. (I can't count how many times I've almost cleared out Brutal Bastion only to have to dip from the last firefight as the storm rolled in, making all those sweat and tears seem like a wasted effort.)

I still miss the creative flexibility of last season's Chrome mechanic too, but the mix of new stuff still has a nice, high-chaos feel to it. The dirt bikes are stupid fun, but mostly as a means of fucking around in the mid-game since they're too finicky to have much impact towards the end. Instead, mastering the right-click on the hammer ended up being the big new movement skill this season, but that bounce ability is so powerful in the end game that every last circle comes down to "do you have a hammer, and does it have more charges than the other guy". No? Welp. Sorry, bro. Enjoy your one-shot Deku smash.

Still: friggin' Forknife y'all! It is a good video game!