Tears of the Kingdom feels like a magic trick: an open world game that reuses its predecessor’s setting and still manages to feel novel and exciting to explore. Going in, I was skeptical about how much they could possibly add when we’re just back in the same Hyrule again, but between the sky islands, the caves, and the Depths, there’s an incredible amount of new sights to see, not even counting the familiar locales that have undergone significant changes in the years since the events of Breath of the Wild.

The new abilities are fantastic as well; as much as I kinda missed abusing Remote Bombs, Ascend and Recall are incredibly useful, Fusion is a clever improvement on the weapon durability system, and Ultrahand basically completely transforms the way you play the game if you let it. Need to get to the top of a mountain? You could always climb it like BotW, slowly and painstakingly scaling a cliff face looking for shallow enough inclines to briefly stand on and recover stamina, or you could construct a flying machine with a couple fans, a hot air balloon, or a rocket and reach dizzying heights with ease. Plus, even when your contraptions fail to work as intended, the consequences are usually hilarious.

I do have a few minor quibbles with the game, but my biggest complaint is that the 4 main quests do basically nothing with their principal characters. I’m not asking for anything deep, just an arc of some kind or literally anything for them to do beyond follow you around. As is, they feel kinda disposable and interchangeable (doubly so for the faceless ancient sages), and hearing a bunch of the same exposition each time, sometimes word for word, gets old fast. (“The Demon King? Secret stones?”) At the end of the day, narrative and character just aren’t the game’s priorities, but I still feel like they should have done more just for the sake of making the main quests more distinctive and memorable. (Though that’s not to say they’re completely uninteresting; the ascent to the Sky Temple is incredibly cool, for instance, it’s just that Tulin might as well not even be there.)

I'm very much of two minds about this latest murder-mystery adventure game from Danganronpa creator Kazutaka Kodaka; there's a lot I actively disliked and I had a pretty low opinion of the game for a good amount of my playthrough, but when things finally kicked into high gear in the last couple chapters, I basically found myself totally won over and was suddenly having a great time with it.

On the one hand, some of the character writing can be pretty grating (Desuhiko's whole wannabe playboy shtick and Shinigami constantly saying things like "boom-kill" and "mysteriful" and repeatedly referring to a teenage girl as "flatty" are the worst offenders), the pacing really drags in the middle to the point where I was pretty bored for a lot of chapters 2 and 3, and the game runs pretty terribly on Switch, with frequent and lengthy loading screens.

On the other hand though, the presentation is top notch, Masafumi Takada killed it with the soundtrack as always, and like I said before, the last couple chapters were so good that they completely turned around my opinion of the game. The final reveals were actually really interesting (and way more fucked up than I was expecting), and there's one tidbit in particular that's such a clever play on audience expectations (especially if you're familiar with Danganronpa) that it genuinely had me cackling when it was revealed.

Basically what I'm saying is, I do recommend this game, but only if you have the patience and tolerance to slog through many uneven hours to get to the best parts. I found the experience extremely worthwhile in the end, but your mileage may vary.

Proud backer of this on Kickstarter. Played through all 3 of the currently available routes (I think there are a couple more still in the works) and found the whole thing really engaging. The relationships run the gamut from sweet and wholesome to textbook emotional abuse and all make for interesting stories, the lofi soundtrack is great, and I loved the ways the game plays with its presentation and interface during certain key moments.

My only real gripe (other than the unfortunate number of typos) is the semi-blank slate player character. Partially it’s just personal preference; being prompted for my name and pronouns at the start of the game gave me real bad “I do not want to be perceived” feelings. But also, I feel like there are so many central details about the player character (friendships, sexuality, upbringing, choice of major) that are out of the player’s control—not to mention the story beats where the player is specifically denied agency—that it ends up kinda at odds with asking the player to define and take ownership of the character.

An effortlessly stylish puzzle/adventure game from the developers of Device 6, Year Walk, and Sayonara Wild Hearts. Loved the largely monochromatic aesthetic, the Resident Evil-style fixed camera angles, and the metafictional cross-media fuckery (they don't have Remedy money so there isn't an entire live-action short film you can actually watch or anything like that, but the narrative is very concerned with films, sculptures, music, paintings, art installations, intricate little puzzle boxes, and of course video games).

As for the puzzles, this is definitely one for the Tunic/FEZ/Void Stranger sickos out there who love nothing more than scribbling feverishly into a notebook (or in my case, a Notepad document and MS Paint canvas on my second monitor). I had a ton of fun playing this alongside my brother and racking our collective brains trying to figure out some abstractly presented math problem or which of the many, many documents in our possession held the pivotal clue for solving a puzzle.

Another excellent programming puzzle game from Zachtronics. I'm a sucker for touches like tucking away the documentation inside printable zines with extra worldbuilding, and I really enjoyed trying to work around the kinds of very limited constraints that Exapunks revels in. (My kingdom for just one more register!)

Besides the main programming puzzles, there's also the obligatory solitaire variant (which I always enjoy), an arcade puzzle game (I'm no better at it than I was at the expanded version in Last Call BBS, that whole genre isn't really my thing but I'm sure other people will have fun with it), a level editor, a multiplayer hacker battle mode (I didn't try it myself but the hacker battle levels in the main campaign were neat), and wildly, a sandbox for making your own video games for a virtual handheld console, using the same assembly language that you solve the game's levels with. The thought of trying to make a video game within Exapunks' constraints is staggering to me, but then again people have made playable games in everything from Minecraft to Baba Is You, so I'm sure some ambitious programmers out there have actually made use of it.

Anyways, I thought the final level was gonna be the death of me, but I did conquer it in the end and it was immensely satisfying. Probably gonna give Exapunks a rest for now and save the post-game bonus levels for later since I'm currently feeling kinda at my limit with the game, but overall I had a great time with it.

As a certified horror-game wuss, I'm admittedly not terribly familiar with the games that Signalis draws inspiration from (the closest thing I've ever played genre-wise would probably be Alan Wake), so I'll leave it to others to decide how derivative it is and whether it's able to stand alongside or even rise above its influences. All I can say is that from my narrow perspective, Signalis is cool as hell. Its bold aesthetic and cryptic presentation had me hooked from minute one, and even though the frequent need to backtrack in order to free up my extremely limited inventory space for new key items could sometimes be frustrating, I really enjoyed my time with the game.

As someone who plays a lot of 5e, I had a blast with this video game adaptation, especially when I was curb-stomping bosses using ridiculously overpowered builds no DM would ever let me get away with. (Spell slots and long rests are for suckers, who needs them when you can kill even a dragon with just two rounds of cantrips and crossbow bolts?) It’s a wildly ambitious, occasionally broken mess of a game whose moments of extreme frustration (like having to restart the final boss fight after discovering that disguising my character inexplicably locked me out of triggering the 2nd phase) did little to change the fact that it’s otherwise an extraordinary achievement.

The gameplay gets a little tedious as it goes on and you start repeating fetch quests for the dogs at the gates (doubly so when you have to do a couple back-to-back because there isn't a direct flight to the airport you're trying to get to), but the writing is very silly and the relationship stuff that makes up the central narrative is really sweet. There are some good mechanical goofs as well, like how the large coffee is so big it immediately starts vibrating through the coffee shop geometry because there isn't enough room for it at its spawn point and then once you pick it up it almost completely blocks your view.

A puzzle-platformer that answers the question “What if Inside had bright colors and a little pet that follows you around?” It’s cute enough and quite pretty, but honestly I wasn’t super engaged for most of my playtime; the puzzles were mostly just a lot of pushing boxes and waiting for patrolling enemies to turn around and trying to remember which buttons I needed to hit to make my alien companion stand in the right spot, and and the pretty landscapes mostly kinda blended together. It did start to win me over eventually though, first with a really gorgeous scene of a night sky and sunrise, and then with some really cool aesthetic shifts and fun setpieces towards the end, and I was pleasantly surprised by the use of stillness in a climactic scene. There’s nothing nearly as wild or surprising as Inside’s ending, but I came away from the game liking it more than I was expecting.