Steven Scaife

“Only toward the end does Venba hit upon a cohesive solution for both its story and its puzzles. The perspective shifts from Venba to Kavin, whose complicated relationship with his parents’ culture reframes the friction inherent to the game’s cooking segments: He has difficulty because he hasn’t prepared these dishes before and hasn’t cared to pay attention. Furthermore, his grasp on the Tamil language is rusty, so while he can refer to instructions at the top of the screen, they’ll be inaccurately translated and require the player to experiment while surmising their true meaning. This late change allows the game to finish strong, though the irritation of its earliest puzzles never quite dissipates, like a lingering taste from a dish whose flavors don’t fully cohere.”

“As for the MFN offices, they’re full of detailed memorabilia like posters, props, and episode scripts, to the point where simply taking it all in is perhaps the game’s main appeal. There’s a tangible love and care that has gone into making the game’s equivalent of Sesame Street studios feel plausible, as well as a clear delight in warping our memory of a show that opened up a world of imagination for generations of children into something darker.”

“Other UI irritations abound, serving only to further complicate an experience at odds with itself for how much information it wants to communicate at a given moment. On the whole, Jagged Alliance 3 lays some strong groundwork for the franchise’s resurgence, but it often feels like a series of individual victories that fail to work in concert for something greater.”

“Nothing we see here matters because it’s all been made up for puzzle-solving. As such, the weirdness of the game’s mystery and its visuals is practically obliterated. It’s good, then, that The Tartarus Key squeaks by on the strength of its puzzles alone, because the connective tissue between them seems determined to strip the game of narrative intrigue before our very eyes.”

“But for as pleasant and intermittently clever as it is, Storyteller’s breezy style comes at the cost of any real complexity. Because the game’s variables and statuses are meant to remain hidden in order to avoid overcrowding the screen with information, none of the puzzles can ask very much of the player. It avoids providing too many illustrations to experiment with and too much information to keep straight in your head. A few of the later puzzles demonstrate how easily this spareness can devolve into tedium, with several that require you to establish the family ties between dwarves. Though Storyteller has its share of clever moments, the game never quite finds the depth beyond the cozy archetypes that make up its exterior.”

“Perhaps Colossal Cave’s unthinking fealty to the original, and its seeming dismissal of so many of the innovations that might have improved it, could be forgiven if it featured any puzzles or mechanics that would be tough to replicate in a modern design context. But no such innovations are apparent, and new touches like the first-person camera create new problems like making it easy to miss important items in the cave. Colossal Cave, then, can hardly be called a “modernization,” because it would have felt antiquated even if it came out 20 years ago.”

“Faith’s visual and mechanical variety, as well as its one-button simplicity, helps obscure whatever rules it operates by. Sometimes the “save” function briefly changes, and sometimes a pivotal moment takes place from the ordinary overhead camera view rather than in the elaborate rotoscoped cutscenes, just to keep you on your toes. Faith’s masterful sense of timing and mood create a truly rare feeling of persistent uncertainty where anything can happen. The game manages to be frightening because of its technical constraints rather than in spite of them.”

“Sephonie’s thematic scope is admirably wide-ranging, but its wordiness only crowds a game whose mechanics are tenuously connected. For a game that concerns the interconnectedness of all things, it’s unfortunate how awkwardly some of its pieces are glued together.”

“Details like the cause of the disease and how it spreads are unclear, though it doesn’t appear to be fatal. Much of the game involves simply existing in the midst of this incident, experiencing the story while trying to hold certain relationships together as things grow more grave. The slow progression of the disease lends itself to tear-jerking melodrama, but the characters’ horror is quiet and largely internal. Occasionally, they verbalize their fears, but mostly their memories just gradually and inevitably falls away, like leaves in autumn.”

“Further glimpses into this breathtaking universe are often reward enough for exploring the game’s multitude of alternate paths, but even GRIME’s level design is surprising for featuring a world much larger and more complex than it appears as you discover involved platforming challenges and optional bosses. Though GRIME emerges into an almost comically overcrowded genre, its initial familiarity and rigidity belie a world of intricate and formidable imagination.”

“While these limitations have the potential for forcing nail-biting compromises, the irritating micromanagement clashes with other elements that otherwise suggest a breezier game experience, like the rudimentary combat and the way the environment practically overflows with currency and crafting material. So much of The Wild at Heart elegantly sidesteps the usual pitfalls of a resource grind that it’s disheartening whenever it devolves into busywork.”

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

“In theory, its intricacies should be bracing, but in practice the fixation on spacing and formation further slows down the pace.”

“Make & Break is at its best when injecting variety into the campaign, not only mixing up the environments but the game modes.”

“Few of the game's problems would be insurmountable in the face of an engaging narrative.”

“Though you encounter familiar configurations of levers and passageways and other obstacles, the mansion’s rooms all feel distinct, subtly interconnected in a way you likely won’t even notice unless you hit the load screen and see that every puzzle is coherently plotted on a zoomed-out side view of the mysterious mansion. Creaks hums along smoothly and pleasantly without calling attention to itself, to its sporadic detriment but mainly to its strength.”

“The world of the game may be small, but it brims with a weird sense of life.”

“The game reveals its brilliance by constantly and subtly reconfiguring the emotions behind erasure.”

“There's considerable joy to poking at the edges of its ingenious interlocking systems to see what happens.”

“For Cloudpunk, hardship is merely the wallpaper for a pretty yet thinly conceived gaming experience.”