Our list is, in part, an attempt to reflect the broad spectrum of frights in the world of gaming.
There’s something primal and thrilling to id Software’s further embrace of video-gamey conventions.
The game speaks in specific and effective ways to the sheer exhaustion of living in perpetual strife.
The game improves upon its predecessor, and finds new ways to demonstrate their shared eco-friendly themes.
The game often feels like a survival-horror experience with its sharp emphasis on the senses.
The game is a charming concoction full of endearing characters and set to a wondrous soundtrack.
The game captures place and feeling through honing in on things that are singular, small, and warm.
With their latest, Dan Marshall and Ben Ward successfully extend their lovingly parodic style to a much broader range of genres.
Its point-and-click adventure elements eventually feel alternately rudimentary and more than a little tedious.
The uninspired material is unable to elevate the game’s moth-eaten ramblings about good and evil.
Kentucky Route Zero is about America in a way few games aspire to be and fewer still succeed at.
The game does a fine job of narratively showing the way in which a person can be broken down and made to believe anything.
The world here is littered with side missions out in the wild, and most of them amount to uninspired fetch quests.
The game’s themes feel like facile wallpaper over mechanics that feed into the ideas being critiqued.
SELF rejects the power-building, level-gaining escapism that typifies the majority of pop games.
It can’t step out of the silhouette of its most brilliant predecessor, Portal.
Wherever the medium goes from here, these are the games that point the way forward.
Living in America as a kid with brown skin has never been harder, or more frightening, and the game is a harsh primer in that fact.
Wattam communicates a poignant, refreshing, and all-too-necessary joy in the face of adversity.
In 2019, the best games took the industry’s standard operating procedure and punted it out the window.
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