Game reviews

Twin-stick shooters like Sektori are a dime a dozen, and they’re especially cheap when they’re abstract. Arcade action without some sort of theming — ancient Greece, plucky spaceships rescuing dudes, giant bugs, ghost and goblins, swords and sorcery — isn’t just naked, it’s barely there. Unsexy when sexy can make all the difference. Quaker meeting houses to Catholic cathedrals, plain donuts to sprinkles and pink icing, greyscale resale value to cherry red with painted flames. So what’s a game like Sektori to do in the Geometry Wars postbellum?

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When developers IO Interactive obtained the rights to make a James Bond game, it’s like a tiny cog in the machine of the universe fell into place. IO Interactive’s flagship product is the Hitman series and the titular hitman, Agent 47, is basically James Bond without the sex drive. He’s a snappy dresser that attends cocktail parties and infiltrates military bases. He meets all sorts of interesting people… and then kills them. However, Hitman fell into a bit of a rut. On the other hand, the James Bond franchise has multiple games under its belt, but those were mostly straight-up shooters. Apparently, the Broccoli family, the historical owners of the James Bond IP, were wary of allowing violent games to be made with the licence. That’s weird, but I get the point. Bond is not just a guy that shoots people. Where’s the spycraft? The gadgets? The suave party chatter? All of this happens to be IO Interactive’s strong suit.

IO Interactive and James Bond are a match made in heaven. So how did they do? I’m a bit anxious… Okay, deep breath, let’s do this.

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It is a well-known fact that critics are like sea monsters. They latch their miserable appendages upon the ships of passing artists, leeching sustenance by taking down other people’s hard work. If the artist’s ship is sound, if their creation has no visible flaws, it is that much harder for the wretched critic to latch onto.

Look, what I’m getting at: it’s harder to write a review for a good game than a bad one. Where are the clever put-downs going to come from? The witty repartee? The first Hades has become the new gold standard for action roguelikes. It’s probably not going to surprise anyone that Hades II is also good. Very good.

What’s a sea monster to do? It’s a conundrum.

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Once upon a time, there was the perfect boardgame, and it was called Twilight Struggle. It came to us in 2005, otherwise known as the Dawn of the Age of Caylus, which was a threadbare—even penurious—era, a time when gameplay was as cold and austere as ye olde English lords who created it to keep the boardgaming peasantry groveling for scraps in an unending servitude to mechanics. The fact that it took a couple of breakaway designers across the Atlantic to set gaming in a new direction simply mirrored the arc of world events, and thus when Twilight Struggle rose to the very top of the Boardgamegeek rankings, it was as momentous as the time in 1992 that Francis Fukuyama dubbed “the end of History.” As the game itself was about that very period, it all threatened to wrap itself into an infinitely self-reflecting vortex, but games like Agricola soon arrived to carefully shepherd boardgamers away from geopolitical aspirations and towards portraying themselves as actual shepherds. And thus the peace was kept nigh many years.

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It’s wonderful stuff, snow. Very multi-faceted.  Did you know that the Inuit have a hundred words for snow? Oops, that’s an urban legend. Oh wait, it is true, sort of. Anyway, leaving linguistics aside, snow can be many things. It can come down in great globs of Christmas magic. It can be hard as rock, strong enough to make an igloo. It can be heavy and full of water, perfect for making a snowman, or fine like sand, stinging your eyes as it is carried by the wind. It can even be soft underneath with a thin crunchy layer on top, like a crème brulée for your feet.

Snow deserves a video game worthy of its majesty. It’s so often treated as a mere change of scenery to be sandwiched between the lava world and the tropical world. Canadians eat snow for breakfast, they’ll know what to do.

Enter The Long Dark, a game about surviving winter in the Great North after “The Quiet Apocalypse”, a geomagnetic event that has made modern technology inoperative.

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Jill Valentine has bleached her hair and gotten a desk job. When her boss sends her to a serial killer crime scene, zombies happen. This is when she realizes she’s in a Resident Evil and needs a male sidekick to do the combat parts. So Chris Redfield gets vectored in to take turns playing the game with her. They go to a — stop me if you’ve heard this one — creepy mansion with a secret lab underneath it. Resident Evil: Deja Vu. 

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Having played a few minutes more than a realworld day, as an election-night pundit might say after taking up the first round of reports from fair Pennsylvania’s polls: “I’ve seen enough.” 

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Strange Jigsaws is an apt enough title. Most of these puzzles are iterations on jigsaws, and many of them are nothing if not strange. But this is not a jigsaw puzzle. The average window shopper might mistake it for a lo-fi Glass Masquerade, that series of digital jigsaw puzzles with a luminous stained glass window aesthetic. But the Glass Masquerades live in the category of time-wasters, games you power down your brain to play, much like doing an actual tabletop jigsaw puzzle. Strange Jigsaws is more active, more brain food than mind bath, something you grind and process and digest rather than soak in. 

I kind of wish Strange Jigsaws were called something else, because it’s only tangentially linked to jigsaw puzzling, and it’s more than just a set of puzzles. It’s got a narrative thrust, and it eventually reveals itself as a journey. It’s a guided tour through the mind of a man who doesn’t just make puzzles, but who cannot resist tinkering. Strange Jigsaws is his inner monologue turned outward, the diary of someone who looked at a jigsaw puzzle one day and simply couldn’t keep his hands off it, who couldn’t resist turning jigsaw puzzles into, well, something else entirely.

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I expect a JRPG to take its time getting underway. They tend to open slowly, as they amble casually through their opening hours. They meander among bouts of worldbuilding, new systems tutorials, and character introductions. You’re not really playing a JRPG until you’ve paid several hours of game tax. Even then, there might be several more yet to come. JRPGs are not for the impatient.

But I don’t think I’ve ever played a less eventful first ten hours than the first ten hours of Clair Obscur. I am utterly nonplussed. I simply don’t get it. I don’t understand the lack of worldbuilding, systems, or characters. And what is there seems underdeveloped. The worldbulding is inscrutable and arbitrary, the systems are simple and few, and the characters are glib videogame puppets with luxurious hair and meager motivations. This is the critically acclaimed Clair Obscur: Expedition 33? This is what won our forums’ yearly awards? 

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The fact that Pathologic 3 even exists is a small, maggot-infested miracle. For one, there are not many games about curing a plague in a tiny town in the middle of the steppe, a town overflowing with butchers and philosophers where magic realism meets absurdist theatre. The more complicated reason requires a bit of an explanation. Sorry about that. If you can’t stomach a dry intro, you probably won’t like this obtuse game about a plague. Call it a test. Triage.

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It was on a Monday, April second — I was cruising in the vicinity of Betelgeuse — when a meteor no larger than a lima bean pierced the hull, shattered the drive regulator and part of the rudder, as a result of which the rocket lost all maneuverability. I put on my spacesuit, went outside and tried to fix the mechanism, but found I couldn’t possibly attach the spare rudder — which I’d had the foresight to bring along — without the help of another man. The constructors had foolishly designed the rocket in such a way, that it took one person to hold the head of the bolt in place with a wrench, and another to tighten the nut. I didn’t realize this at first and spent several hours trying to grip the wrench with my feet while using both hands to screw on the nut at the other end.

–Stanislaw Lem, Star Diaries, “The 7th Voyage of Ijon Tichy” (1957)

Lem, who is often referred to as a “science fiction” writer, has anticipated cooperative videogame puzzles years before videogames have even been invented. Our hero, Ijon Tichy, has encountered a situation in which you need another player present. Coincidentally, this is how The Alters opens. And in both cases, another player isn’t available. Because the Alters is single player only, and Star Diaries isn’t even a videogame! So what now? 

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You are in a dingy cell with a toilet, an ATM and a slot machine. Win enough money to pay an ever-increasing debt or the floor literally drops under you. Maybe you’ll earn the key to escape, maybe not. It sounds like the pitch for Saw XIV, but this is CloverPit, one of the bigger roguelike hits of 2025.

CloverPit is pure distilled “roguelikiness”. All the excitement of choosing perks, levelling up and creating a build, only to lose everything and start over again… all without having to deal with anything as pesky as a main gameplay loop. This is the game’s biggest strength and its biggest flaw.

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I’d like to preface this by saying that my skating expertise is sorely lacking. I don’t really know my Ollie from my Nose Grab and I’ve barely played a skating game since Tony Hawk on the original Playstation. That being said, Skate Story is just too tantalizingly weird to be left solely to the skate park kids.

In Skate Story, you’re a demon made of glass and pain that has to eat the moon in order to catch a break from the devil. Cool, cool. I can dig it. We can all relate, am I right? That being said, does Skate Story pull off the trick of being more than trippy visuals and a cool soundtrack? Or does it fall flat on its face?

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I wouldn’t normally play a game like Dispatch. I’ve had very little experience with the Telltale games (well, “games”) that set the stage, mostly because I have very little patience for games that don’t actually have much game. But then I fell in love with a lighthouse. After my reaction to Double Fine’s Keeper, whose lighthouse lumbers amiably between walking simulator and adventure game, I’ve nurtured a newfound curiosity to try adventure games. Just how much have my changing predilections changed? After a brief thrill, Dispatch offers a sobering answer.

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I fuss a lot about interface and documentation and how videogames teach themselves to us. When I play a game, it’s important for me to eventually know what’s going on, to understand the systems, to wrap my head around the design. I want to know enough to make informed decisions, to fully appreciate what I’m seeing, to share a perspective with the designer and better appreciate what he’s done.

But sometimes, I just have to let go of that. Xenotilt, like Demon’s Tilt before it but absurdly moreso, is one of those times.

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