It’s indicative of just how important a game’s moment-to-moment hooks are that even with its shortcomings, Dredge is by and large an enjoyable experience.

For as pleasant and intermittently clever as the game is, its breezy style comes at the cost of any real complexity.

You’ll be lost in the dark for a few hours, and probably for several more after that, but few JRPGs in recent memory can boast gameplay mechanics this dynamic or storytelling abilities as accomplished.

In the end, Have a Nice Death can’t escape its own premise.

As is the case with the Destiny of late, this is a three-steps-forward-one-step-back situation.

With Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, you must take the good it offers along with its regressive design in order to even begin to ride its eerie wavelength. Which, for what it’s worth, is an exceptionally uncanny ride that never puts on the breaks long enough for boredom to ever set in, as even its wildest swings result in some considerably discomforting set pieces (the funeral-themed room inhabited by the hostile spirit Kageri Sendou and her maleficent doll Watashi, while a tad on the nose in its design, is a disturbing highlight). This may not be a game that was made for these modern times, but for those willing to put up with its old-school frustrations, it’s also one that will certainly keep you up at night and stick in your subconscious for weeks to come.

Final Bar Line is a musical museum, but it’s a self-guided one that could, especially for those who aren’t connoisseurs of Final Fantasy soundtracks, benefit from a bit of curation.

What makes Fire Emblem Engage especially frustrating is that, even for all of its glaring issues, there’s an undeniable joy in successfully conquering a difficult battalion through a mixture of skill, luck, and good timing.

SEASON is a poetic, meditative game, but it often bluntly calls too much attention to its intentions, especially with fussy dialogue like “I feel a dulcet tension in the air.” Then again, it does capture the soothing sensation that comes from immersing oneself in another world and learning about it, and with the exception of the game’s final encounter, it’s nothing if not consistent. In the end, SEASON isn’t about answers so much as it is about coping with loss. As one character puts it, repeating one word like a mantra, time always moves on: flow, flow, flow.

Even with some much-welcome extra polish, Reunion still feels like a game of the past, but it’s also a strong reminder of why FFVII fans are so immensely excited about the future, and what defying the fates might bring.

Somerville feels like a slightly more grounded successor to suspenseful platformers like Limbo and Inside, though controlling an actual adult here is a welcome change of pace.

What nearly sinks Pokémon Violet in the end isn’t any pretense of player freedom. Rather, it’s the game’s glaring technical issues, as this is easily one of the sloppiest-looking triple AAA titles in recent memory.

As a mystery to be solved and a mediation on how stories evolve over time, the game's focus wanders and ironically comes to fixate on elements like presentation and background lore that can all too easily overwhelm the basic tenets of telling an engaging story.

Because its gameplay is already dramatically simplified compared to that of the Arkham series, Gotham Knights fails to fill the cowl.

This game never makes the leap from smaller-scale locales to more epic-sized ones, meaning that the notion of laying waste to a city block as Mr. Stay-Puft or some similarly silly, over-the-top paranormal leviathan against the Ghostbusters remains only a fantasy. Like the film that preceded it, Spirits Unleashed is stuck sending us down memory lane at the expense of stepping forward into new terrain. For many, this nostalgia will be enough, but even with updates it seems unlikely that Spirits Unleashed’s core gameplay will sustain it for long.

It feels strange to complain about simply getting more of a good thing, but Splatoon is still a young and creatively fertile series that can do even more, and should.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 just cannot get out of its own way. This is, after all, a game that provides a tutorial on how to complete tutorials, and it keeps piling on slight mechanics well into the 20-hour range.

The cutesy art style of Cursed to Golf obscures just how punishing the game can be.

Stray is most fun when you allow yourself to, well, stray from its narrative path.

The story, too, is left a bit wanting, though not for lack of ambition. Mothmen 1996 includes many character and conceptual threads that allow for the game to be engaging from moment to moment, but then the end suddenly arrives and it can feel as if a bow hasn’t been tied on everything. In particular, we never get a complete picture of everyone’s interpersonal relationships and insecurities. Mothmen 1966 is a compelling introduction to “pixel pulp,” though it’s something of a mixed success for the degree to which it leaves us wanting more.

Where the similarly ambitious Until Dawn felt relatively seamless, The Quarry often feels as if it’s bitten off more than it can chew.

The game’s faithfulness to its brutal and campy source material isn’t enough to make up for a litany of bugs and problems.

The line between a leisurely atmosphere and an aimless one is quite thin, and Sephonie often drifts across it.

This isn’t the first game to offer a dense, incredibly detailed rendering of Tokyo, but maybe it’s the first to make you feel like all of that work isn’t window dressing.

The Forgotten Land may not nail the world-building or plotting, but it’s not snoozing when it comes to Kirby’s transformations.

WWE 2K22 is a fine wrestling game, but the most frustratingly realistic thing about it is just how hard it is to make new stars in it as it is in the WWE.

Rainbow Six Extraction hopes to evoke the sensation of battling the unknown, and that’s terrific when it comes to each alien encounter.

The game runs away from any grand moment of clarity, skipping over self-reflection and settling for the thrill of nostalgia.