Hong Kong is one of the best levels I've ever encountered in any game, ever.

The rest of Deus Ex is all just as strong, too.

My non-lethal run started out as a teeth-pulling, save-scumming stealth game (still fun, even if a bit basic and slow as such) and gradually evolved into ballistic-armoring, speed-boosting, and occasionally straight up invis-walking past enemies. The progression that the augmentations afford is incredible and empowering, but never so strong that one approach feels obviously superior--a tough proposition even among the best immersive sims. Admittedly, if you're not feeling creative, some newer Arkane games occasionally run into this thanks to the omnipresent strength of blinking around. System Shock 2, while a master class in atmosphere, doesn't really have that many viable playstyles. Thief is an incredible stealth game, and I love it for that, but Deus Ex director Warren Spector had bigger ideas: he wished you didn't have to play Thief as a stealth game in the first place. Deus Ex is the first great, even masterful execution of that idea.

Another thing that is striking about Deus Ex, even to this day: almost all of the meaningful choices in the game, where possible, are presented through mechanics, systems, and open-ended situations rather than menus, text boxes, or button prompts. Want to kill or spare a character? Just do it. (It might not be easy, but that only makes it more immersive.) Want to avoid learning the passcode to this door? Stack some boxes to climb into the window. Or do whatever else you want. Only you can judge yourself. Try to stick to the approach you feel is right, or experiment wildly. It's all here. It's all tight, atmospheric, and--as clunky as the stealth, shooting, and AI can seem--it all works together as a brilliant clockwork contraption of mechanics, simulation, and downright satisfying game design.

0451/10

A few overlong levels, many of which are focused more on tiring exploration than on taking advantage of Yoshi's incredibly satisfying moveset, only slightly drag down what is otherwise possibly the prettiest, most well-presented game on the SNES. Its weaknesses are tangible, but it's still hard to hold a grudge when the game otherwise feels so great.

While it's rarely all that hard, the few times it is--particularly when spikes, pits, or other insta-kills are involved--it gets rather tedious to replay the games' sprawling levels from the beginning. Since the challenging portions usually only make up about 20% of the level, getting back to your checkpoint feels more like a waste of time than a test of skill. Further evidence in the case against lives in platformers.

Remnants of Naezith starts strong, offering terse but tense challenges with a skeletal straightforwardness straight from the pages of Super Meat Boy. It performs a careful balancing act with its difficulty curve, providing obstacles that will stump new players but be wholly surmountable to experienced ones.

Unfortunately, it seems to lose its balance by the end, presenting levels that are entirely possible to beat, but never feel as fine-tuned as your typical Meat Boy level. It produces more and more moments where the difference between success and failure no longer feels like a miscalculation, but sheer bad luck outside the tolerances of human precision and timing.

That's not to say that everyone will feel that way, but by the time I conquered the last world, my experience felt soured by obstacles where I died and died again, and then succeeded, not feeling that I had consciously done anything differently or even become any more consistent at the level.

Remnants of Naezith is challenging, and by and large, I think this works in its favor, but it's not the challenge that makes this game sing. The game is at its best in moments where you perform feats of swinging that would make Spider-Man blush or use momentum to make a near-impossible leap look effortless. The game's later worlds escalate the precision and complexity, but rarely if ever do they surpass the feeling of ecstasy the earlier ones create by just letting you swing unfettered.

This game really is the sum of its parts. Evidently made by an incredibly talented team, Pillars of Eternity is polished in so many ways, but weathered in so many others.

The world is interesting, I think, and some of the companions can be interesting, I think. But so much of the dialogue, especially early on when fluid exposition is crucial, feels like a text-dump. In its worst moments, it feels less like you're exploring a world full of genuinely interesting ideas, compelling mysteries, and richly developed characters and more like reading a history textbook about just such a world. That's not always a bad thing, but it doesn't always capture the spirit that set games like Baldur's Gate, Planescape, and Fallout apart.

One thing that can't be overlooked: the load times feel bad. It's perfectly playable, mind you, but even on an SSD, PoE is just a bit too heavy for its own good. I understand that there's only so much Obsidian can do, but Baldur's Gate 2: Enhanced, a re-release of one of the twenty-year-old games that Pillars models itself on, loads effortlessly and instantly. It makes you wonder if the increased visual fidelity that comes with modern hardware and development was worth it. Maybe in another fifteen years, Pillars will load just as quickly on modern hardware. But in fifteen years, will as many people still be playing Pillars as are still playing Baldur's Gate?

The combat is, on most levels, an improvement over the clunky encounters of Infinity Engine RPGs. Pre-buffing before fights is a thing of the past; most spells can only be used in combat, and encounters are balanced around this. Enemies and their abilities are designed with fewer "gotcha" mechanics, so there's little need to research solutions to break some obscure magical protection or exploit poorly explained weaknesses. The resting mechanics are also better tuned to the GM-less play patterns of a video game, making resource management more meaningful. Martial characters have more active abilities, making strategy less automatic for them. Yet, somehow, for every fight I find more fun than the average BG2 combat (and there are plenty!), there's another that is less so. Pillars is, in many ways, deeper and more tactical than BG's semi-literal translation of AD&D, and it is far and away the better-balanced game. Its combat gameplay is unerringly fair. But in turn, it's markedly less electric.

Not being able to use spells out of combat means that, while preparing for combat is less tedious, there are also no creative applications of spells outside of combat. No invisibility spells to let you steal that item you need, no charm spells to manipulate NPCs in your favor, no reward for learning the mechanics deeply enough to cheese tough enemies. This is one of many ways in which the game streamlines out creative problem solving. If there's an alternative ending to a quest in PoE, it's probably a matter of choosing a different dialogue option or talking to a different NPC. It's almost never a mechanical solution. You're not going to pickpocket or problem-solve your way around an obstacle unless it's scripted in. It's Obsidian, so of course there's usually a solid suite of alternative choices scripted in, but I still find myself wondering: what if they took off the leash? You can already choose what to ride in their RPG theme park, but what if they let us climb on the tracks instead?

The game's original mechanics, spells, and stat allocations, while well-thought-out objectively, lack the intuitive familiarity of famous D&D rulesets. I often find myself disengaged from the mechanics to the point I'm not able to make meaningful decisions in combat or character-building. Sure, I've intuited that debuff and crowd-control spells are valuable, but I can never retain which ones actually do what, or are more or less effective. Oh, this spell reduces the enemy's might, and this spell reduces their DR, and this spell increases our accuracy... but which do I need right now? Do the enemies I'm facing have a high enough DR that lowering it would matter? Is their might high enough to be concerned about? Am I missing enough hits that accuracy would help? I truly can't tell. I can never tell. I don't have any frame of reference for how the enemies are statted to begin with, even after filling the bestiary enough to check in combat. Fights against enemies you're sufficiently familiar with to have unlocked their stats are rarely challenging enough to need to examine them. And because of how hectic the combat can be, even with generous auto-pausing, it doesn't always feel possible to suss out which spells have a noticeable impact and which may as well be whiffing through observation alone, or even trial and error.

Not to mention how slow the combat gets when you're stopping to read the log and analyze each move, or how tedious it feels to load a save if you spend all that time pausing and planning only to die. And with such hectic combat, martial characters having more abilities to micromanage--though a massive step up in terms of depth and engagement--also means even more pins to juggle in a crowded circus. Even easier fights can grow tiresome because of how many there are in some areas. I spend most of the game in Fast Mode, and still I wish there was a faster mode so I could get through sprawling overworld areas or dungeons full of trash-mobs just a bit faster. Where in Baldur's Gate 2 you might have cast a Haste spell and torn through lesser enemies in a few seconds, here, any level-appropriate encounter is going to demand your time and your attention, sometimes at the expense of the pacing. Yet, if you're doing the DLC and enough side quests, it's easy for the main questline to no longer be level-appropriate. The strange thing is, while being overleveled makes things a bit too easy, I sometimes feel like it's more fun just mindlessly clicking on bad guys and getting where I need to go than it is having to run through the flowchart of buffs and special abilities that I've devised for regular combats.

But then, just when you think you've had your fill of the game for all those reasons and more, Durance will say something that takes you by surprise. Or you'll learn something shocking about the world. Or you'll find a piece of unique gear that gets you excited for the next battle instead of exhausted. Or you make it to the ending, which has such interesting choices and engaging themes that you wonder why it didn't frontload more of its best ideas. Or you play the White March DLC, which is more dense with memorable quests and worthwhile content than most areas of the base game. In moments like these--of which there are still many--Pillars lives up to its promise. I just wish there were as many of those moments as there are unwelcome Kickstarter NPCs.

Not the first video game to adapt social deduction and traitor mechanics (remember Town of Salem?) popularized by board games like The Resistance (colon Avalon), Battlestar Galactica, and Werewolf/Mafia, but the first to reach this level of mainstream success. I don't entirely understand why this one in particular took off, but I'm not complaining. It's loads of fun even if it isn't perfect. The digital chat will never replace the joy of arguing at a table with your friends about why they're lying (spoiler: you're the one lying), but it works unexpectedly well. A private lobby with friends is obviously better, though there's always someone who breaks it a bit by talking outside of meetings.

The addition of semi-random minigames for crewmates to solve is a strange but surprisingly fun wrench in the gears.

Ninja Gaiden is probably not worth beating, but it's something any platformer enthusiast needs to try if only to experience some of the tightest, most responsive control ever to grace the NES, or any platform for that matter. While its difficulty skews toward masochism by the end and the early levels are still marred by near-objective flaws, the sense of rhythm and flow the game affords when you memorize and master its levels is admirable.

Yes, the trial-and-error gameplay and tediously respawning enemies that pervade it are hardly defensible by modern design philosophies, but anyone who sticks this game out long enough will see how these awful inconveniences lead them to eventually execute every jump, slash, and climb with absolute confidence. They will discover the joy of a rare form of platforming, never turning back, never hesitating, and never feeling like anything less than a real goddamn ninja when they make it to the end of the level.