A serviceable point and click adventure game, but oof some of the writing in here should not have been happening in 2012.

One thing that will always stick out about this game to me is that to show that a neighborhood was getting safer, they change its name from "La Mugre" to "Green Bay".... wow! Harsh!

The hallmarks of Limbo and Inside are there- short runtime, clever puzzles, trippy story told without dialogue. But where Somerville goes wrong reveals just what made those two so special. The 3D environment makes it confusing where you’re supposed to go or what could be interacted with; the character moves slow enough to make a player want to quit; and honestly I had no idea what was going on here story-wise by the end. I do think a 3D Limbo-like (is there a term for this?) could work, but this one isn’t it yet.

The first game I really really loved, played for the first time in ~30 years. It holds up! Shorter than I remember, and missing some of the bells and whistles of Mario’s home console games of the time, but a major step up over Super Mario Land and Mario controls just as well as ever.

I love a good narrative-heavy game, so I was excited about Kentucky Route Zero, but it just didn’t sit right with me at all after the first chapter. I was bored to tears. Might be the highest ratio of time spent checking my phone to playing a game I’ve ever had, I’m not going to waste my time with the rest of this.

A solid puzzle platformer in the vain of so many great games that have come before it, The Pedestrian lives and breathes in the world of signs, your 2D playing environments scattered around a lively 3D world. This setting allows for The Pedestrian’s greatest innovation, the ability to pick up and move these signs around, connecting them in new ways to alter the flat space your character will traverse. Early puzzles proved a little boring as some seemed to just throw as many signs as they could at you just to brute force the right combination of doors and ladders that will get you through them, but later puzzles really felt clever and by the end I felt plenty satisfied with the few hours I spent on The Pedestrian.

I love the attempt to reinvigorate the point-and-click adventure game genre with a big budget and an interesting hook- you're trying to piece together a mystery involving your wife and a murderous home invader in a world that's constantly resetting itself every few minutes. Unfortunately even for such a short game there is just so much repetition and wasted time every time you want to try something new. Some effort to make this more user-friendly (more shortcuts? selectable branching paths? fast-forwarding?) really could have improved the experience, and the payoff is pretty disappointing too.

There will always be more ways to make a puzzle out of pushing a cube

Really should be considered part of the main series. I'd love to see a remake of this one. Only downside is it's very easy to find yourself in an unbeatable scenario, so be careful overwriting those save states!

Giving up on The Evil Within about halfway through. There’s a few minor flashes of a good game here- a great opening level, a few mechanics that could have added to the survival horror experience in a better game; but too often this turns into the same-old “explore the linear underground caverns/factory/asylum/whatever and take down a few bullet sponges, rinse and repeat”. I’ve heard the sequel is better but I doubt I’ll bother.

I respect the hell out of Nintendo for taking a swing as big as this, mostly blowing up the Zelda formula and giving us something that plays out more like a Western RPG. It wasn't quite my cup of tea- my favorite parts of Zelda games is how incredibly dense and meticulously planned Hyrule always feels, whereas Hyrule here felt a little bloated and repetitive. But Nintendo took the "try the temples in any order" from Link Between Worlds to its natural conclusion, adopting that philosophy even inside the non-linear temples themselves, with a final boss you can take on an hour into the game should you feel up to it. I really hope the upcoming sequel strikes a better balance between this open-world ethos and the classic Zelda formula.

Again, not sure what makes this a spin-off, plus it has almost nothing to do with the first Revelations. This was fine but the co-op character switching was a pain when one is clearly so much more fun to play than the other.

A very strong spin-off, pushing the 3DS graphics to impressive limits despite being an early release. A cruise ship was an inspired setting for giving a tightly enclosed space with few places to run despite a large map and a variety of different environments. Plus, where are you going to run to- you're in the middle of the ocean! Anyway this game kept the series afloat at a time when some garbage was being released on the major consoles.

Cool idea for a game, pulled off about as well as I can imagine- you’re reinvestigating a years-old murder by studying some long-forgotten witness testimony tapes, but the catch is you can only view them by plugging in the right keyword based on what you’ve watched so far. Maybe you watch a video that mentions a new name, or location, well you can check that and see what other information is available; there’s hundreds of clips, so it’s satisfying investigating and unlocking more and more clips. Personally I pulled out my notepad app and had a stack of topics that grew to 40 or 50 long as I tried to put the whole story together. What’s even more impressive is that even though all of the clips in the game could conceivably be viewed in near-infinite different number of orders, Her Story still manages to weave a plot together, with twists and a strong sense of pacing. Cool stuff! I’ve heard nothing but bad things about follow-up Telling Lies, so I guess I’ll skip it.

If you're going to make a short walking sim, at least make it cool to look at. Still this is barely a "game"