Emptiness resonates troublingly at the heart of Casus Ludi’s hand-drawn co-op adventure game.

Colossal Cave can hardly be called a modernization, because it would have felt antiquated even if it came out 20 years ago.

The game’s dedication to graphical fidelity feels like a blinder to thinking outside the box in every other regard. It can’t help but feel like intensive overcompensation for inconsistent, tension-less stealth, one-note combat, level design that doesn’t reward exploration, generically fleshy enemies, upgrades that don’t reward experimentation, and ineffective jump scares, from enemies that get cheap hits in on Jacob every single time, regardless of how well-prepared the player is.

For a game that relies on a certain level of fluidity in its core mechanics, Sonic Frontiers often feels thoughtless.

The new Saints’ big ideas boil down to Instagram influencer nonsense but with a drop of extra murder involved, punctuated by reams of dialogue that feel like an experimental A.I. at Meta trying to imitate a 20-year-old.

Massive Monster’s Cult of the Lamb plays like an inventory of half-understood mechanics from other games.

When you’re not performing exactly as instructed, the game’s narrow and inconsistent margin of error is just frustrating.

Playing Weird West, it’s hard to shake how much more gracefully other games of this type avoid similar pitfalls.

The game’s story grouses about the downsides of seeking vengeance, but this is plainly the work of people who like to fast forward to the fight scenes.

Nonsensical characterization is the order of the day throughout House of Ashes.

True Colors doesn’t show the world in a new light so much as it slaps an Instagram filter over it.

Twelve Minutes feels like Something Awful copypasta wearing the skin of an Ibsen play.

Every story hurriedly resolves itself, foregoing tidy lessons or ironic endings but still lacking a sense of lived-in authenticity.

Throughout Hired Gun, you very much feel its desire to emulate elements of genre-defining hits like the Half-Life and BioShock games, as well as its failure to understand how they utilized their systems and mechanics to engage and immerse players.

The game rarely goes beyond the cheap laughs to be had from its story.

Earthblood, then, has the essential components to be a righteous, fast-paced action game. Which makes it all the more unfortunate that it undermines itself with cumbersome stealth mechanics, especially on higher difficulty levels.

The blandness of the gameplay might have been somewhat forgivable if the game’s narrative didn’t suffer from an identity crisis.

Everything truly good in Marvel’s Avengers is compromised by its mercenary feature set.

Players would be better off firing up their Hulu apps if they want to get a sense of Samurai Jack’s breadth and wonder.

Even when Fall Guys is working perfectly as intended—no server issues, quick matchmaking, good teammates, balanced levels—its appeal is limited.

These survival horror sequences are neither scary nor fun, and the most challenging thing about them, beyond their forcing you to try to auto-adjust your aim in order to account for the stuttering lag in the frame rate, is how you have to push past boredom. Consider, then, these sequences not so much a premonition but a warning born of experience: Turn back all who enter here, for there is nothing good awaiting within.

Irritating though they may be, few of these problems would be insurmountable in the face of an engaging narrative. But like countless other pretty games trading on emotion, Röki drones on about feelings, namely grief—all of it documented in Tove’s illustrated journal, and complete with occasional asides about Dead Mom or Sad Dad. Repressed memories, shadow selves, and mysterious environmental sicknesses rear their tired heads. Beyond the trappings of Scandinavian myth, there’s precious little to set Röki apart in an already overcrowded space.

It retreads the same ground of the prior games’ fetch-quest-driven, backtracking-filled action-adventuring.

The original game’s cast of characters already lacked personality, and the new visual redesign is most successful at bringing that deficiency into sharper relief.

Take away the characters, myths, and other connections to the Dark Crystal universe and it’s easy to see that Age of Resistance Tactics has no real identity of its own.

The game’s themes feel like facile wallpaper over mechanics that feed into the ideas being critiqued.

Breakpoint’s fixed nature is at direct odds with its open-world design, and ultimately results in a game that less about realism than it is about imposing limits.

Perhaps its efforts to fit in with the big dogs of the gaming world would be more tolerable if there were more variety to its challenges.