KeyWe’s final act, Winter, expands on that camaraderie, and not just within the office. You’ll be baking cookies and decorating cards to send out during Hollyjostle (the game’s answer to Christmas), and when an ice storm hits, you’ll be glad that you mastered those transcription skills so that you can quickly get out overlapping emergency broadcasts and ship supplies to those in need. KeyWe succeeds at creating novel ways for players to carry out familiar tasks, but it also turns a game about operating a telepost into a noble calling.

No More Heroes III shows no respect for the artistry or cultural context of the pop culture that it pilfers from.

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

If so much of this game is a reiteration of what worked about its predecessor, it functions as a reminder for just how much of the medium is still catching up to Psychonauts.

The game runs smoothly and looks great, but it would be more entertaining with just a little more gatekeeping.

By himself, Greak feels like a dull carbon copy of so many protagonists from recent action-exploration games, namely Hollow Knight. Having Adara and Raydel eventually accompany him, so that you’re simultaneously controlling three characters, adds a superficially more creative, if awkward, layer to the game, a multi-character gimmick that Greak never fully utilizes. But the puzzles tend toward the rote, as in one character needing to hold down a pressure plate or crank open a door to facilitate the path forward for everyone in the group.

The game’s initial familiarity and rigidity belie a world of intricate and formidable imagination.

The game will easily hook you with its well-crafted, hyper-focused narrative and immersive worldbuilding, if not its combat.

While time magic serves an elegant and creative function throughout Cris Tales, it’s not a fully realized part of the game.

The game handily transcends its mod origins and tells an ambitious and thought-provoking story, but it eventually reaches a point where it doesn’t seem sure how to end.

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

Despite its title’s declaration of intent, Rift Apart isn’t willing to stand on its own.

Intergrade not only reintroduces a fan-favorite character ahead of her fated meeting with Cloud, Tifa, Aeris, and Barrett, but it also lets us play with a few new mechanics and fleshes out a little more of the periphery of the main game’s narrative.

This set makes the galaxy that you’ll gallivant across for 90-plus hours feel so much more immersive, beautiful, and tangible-seeming.

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 choices you make throughout the Outer Zone’s engrossing cyberpunk therapy adventure may just keep you up at night.

Even after getting used to everything that Biomutant throws at you, the array of options at your disposal spreads the game rather thin, leaving precious little room for depth.

The game’s top-down perspective is quite zoomed in, amplifying the gorgeous details of the storybook art style.

The game branches the series out in new directions without trying to fix what wasn’t broken about its predecessor.

The more you learn about Selene across the game’s gripping campaign, the easier it is to relate to or agree with her observation that “I deserve to be here.”

The shotgun blast of gameplay types and tonal shifts isn’t quite as varied or seamlessly integrated as it is in Nier Automata, but it’s still impressive just how far ahead of the curve the original game actually was.

As diverting and fun as Judgment can often be, it’s clearly the product of a studio too wild to fill the niche of a private detective game and keep a straight face.

At its best, Outriders is a looter shooter that’s surprisingly generous with its loot.

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

Time and again, It Takes Two finds new ways to demonstrate how vital communication and effort are in getting two individuals on the same page. It even riffs on classic toys like the Etch A Sketch and See ‘n Say, as well as seminal video games (like Mario Kart’s Rainbow Road, Crash Bandicoot’s chase sequences, or Diablo’s isometric combat), to bring that message to us. But even when it isn’t toying with our nostalgia and just reveling in the sublimely ridiculous, the game is sneakily, delicately balancing our desire to remain kids at heart with the reality of our adult responsibilities. That’s a valuable lesson, and it’s one that the developers at Hazelight deliver without making it feel like they’re tasking us with grown-up homework.

Mundaun’s greatest achievement is the Swiss Alps setting that’s brought to life with tangible vigor.

Loop Hero functions as a statement of persistence in the face of the seemingly insurmountable.

Despite all the fighting you will do here, and despite all the room that the developers have made for sociopolitical theater, Strikers is still a well-earned vacation for our heroes, an emphatic, energetic punctuation mark to a much larger experience.