I think this game belongs at least adjacent to Disco Elysium in a conversation about excellence in video game writing. A beautiful, horrifying, funny, and deeply poetic game which somehow manages to be acutely a game about the present and the now, despite containing androids, mutants, and visions from God. Feels like a dirge in video game form, and it uses the video game part well, using the interactive medium to make you feel, more than anything else, like a person in a family, a person with history, a person who has come home.

If I had to criticize anything, there is a combat system which feels not ancillary per se, it adds a bit of spice to the otherwise-straight-adventure-game gameplay, but it's definitely not interesting. Some of the puzzle design also features a smidge of pixel-hunting and a smidge of moon-logic, but nothing too terrible on either front.

Genuinely something special, play this immediately.

Absolutely wonderful little murder mystery whodoneit. Absolutely scratched the logic puzzle part of my brain, and was deeply satisfying to unravel over time. Highly recommend for anyone who even sorta likes the murder mystery genre.

wordle found dead in Miami

Necrobarista, simply put, is sublime. I absolutely love the look of this game, the characters and the arcs they go through are gripping and fascinating, the writing is sublime, jumping between meaningful introspection and a very modern sense of humor in a way that makes the characters feel real, and the plot is just absolutely fantastic. Set aside an afternoon, grab some tissues, and enjoy the ride.

TL;DR It's XCOM 2 except you don't get to build the squad from scratch and (as of review time) it's, like, way buggier.

I really like Chimera Squad! Sure, you don't get to build your squaddies to your liking like in other XCOM games, but the tradeoff is that there's a new challenge of trying to mix and match squads to best compliment the powers available to you at that moment. If Terminal gets wounded in a fight, you either need to deal with a substanial debuff to here from here on, or go on without a dedicated healer in your next fight. I find these sorts of decisions interesting!

The Breach system that's been added is nice, if only because it spares you empty turns of slogging around an empty map trying to find the next enemy pod. The buffs you get for Breaching from certain entrances are minor and barely noticeable, and I wish the Breach Abilities that characters got were just regular abilities, to give me more options in combat.

The biggest downside I can give, as of time of writing, is that this thing is buggy as ♥♥♥♥. The camera has no idea what to look at, some of the animations are just completely broken, and I've had 3 hard crashes in 12 hours. The autosaves (assuming you're running with them) are pretty generous, so it wasn't too big a deal for me, but the game is definitely not totally stable right now.

Frankly, it's baffling how good this game is. What is, on the surface, a fantasy sports games (down to team names and logos, arenas, and tossing a big dumb ball into a big glowing hoop) is actually an incredible character-driven story of exiles trying to earn their freedom from purgatory and forgiveness for their past crimes. Every character is made deep and interesting, to the point where sometimes you debate if you should free your opponents instead of yourself. The worldbuilding is deeply interesting, and the art direction beautiful. As is the case for all Supergiant games, the soundtrack is phenomenal. All in all, if you like strong, character-driven narratives and interesting takes on fantasy worlds, this is one for you.

I adore Bucket Detective. A quick, weird first-person narrative game, similar in length to the creator's previous game, The Static Speaks My Name, but with some enhanced gameplay and multiple endings. If your sense of humor is bleak, and I'm talking /bleak/, this game is an absolutely wonderful mix of revulsion and laughs that leave you ultimately feeling a little digusted that you're laughing at all.

Smash Up's aight as a board game. The card effects mean it's really hard to plan a long term strategy without just getting boned by random card effects, resulting in gameplay that's less strategic and more just two players taking turns telling each other to go ♥♥♥♥ themselves.

Where this goes horribly ary is the quality of this PC porting of the rules. The UI is extremely clunky, pausing gameplay at arbitrary points, hypothetically waiting for players to respond to in-game actions, but when the player has no ability /to/ respond, resulting in points where you're staring at the screen waiting for play to continue, before realizing that you're supposed to click this tiny inconspicuous button in the corner.

The biggest problem, though, is that the game doesn't tell you the targets of actions, meaning that a player will play a card and you'll be scrambling through the cards on the field to figure out what the hell just happened, ignoring what the hell is /currently/ happening in the process and making the whole thing a mess. Just play it on TT Sim.

Calling Into The Breach a strategy game feels like a misnomer. In practice, it plays much more like a puzzle game in which you're presented a new puzzle every time. As a game almost completely devoid of random chance or even hidden information of any kind, every mission, every round of Into the Breach feels like a logic puzzle, and the fact that the game always configures itself into new, interesting, solvable (unless you _really_ messed up) puzzles makes it one of the best brain-benders in ages. Combine that with the infinite combinations provided by the mech abilities and loadouts, and you could be playing this game for hundreds of hours and still have fun.

Firewatch is an excellent argument for the quality of the "walking simulator". The story is engaging, the characters deep and memorable, the scenes impactful. It has just enough going on mechanically to keep you from getting bored, and to instill a feeling of accomplishment, and just enough to explore to give a sense that you are missing out on just a bit more. Excellent game.