I love "TTRPG Design", and it can be magical when a videogame captures TTRPG play without losing the spark in translation. Very few games have ever pulled this off (for my wants, anyway), and nearly all "TTRPG-inspired" games hew too close to D&D rulesets and philosophies for my palate, even within the subset of otherwise-successful titles.

Citizen Sleeper 2 is very clearly leaning over the shoulders of Forged in the Dark games and copying their homework. ... And that is Good!! I will have lived well if I never again roll Stat vs AC for the rest of my time on this earth.

The original Citizen Sleeper (excluding its post-launch Episodes) felt a little "Branched-choice Visual Novel with added TTRPG mechanics" -- and, to be clear, that wasn't necessarily a Bad thing!! -- but the dice problems felt largely "solvable", and were frequently isolated from the real Decisions, which were made through dialogue selections.

The sequel, by contrast, often presents the player with mechanically driven choices. Some problems lack clearly "good" or "smart" decisions, especially when stuck with a string of unlucky dice rolls. Citizen Sleeper 2 stressed me out in Delicious ways, and occasionally forced me to put the controller down for a minute or two while considering my options, even in relatively low-stakes circumstances.

That all being said, if you carefully optimize your turns, you can unintentionally sap away most of the game's tension by its midpoint. I hit the ending with over 2000 credits stashed! Then again, I wasn't on the Maximum Difficulty. Cranking it up would have likely solved some of these issues.

... But mechanical praise only really serves to contrast the bulk of CS2 from CS1. Praise for the first game's writing got me to pick it up in the first place. A thirst for more of that sweet, sweet prose got me through the Starward Belt's front doors on launch day... and it delivers!! I'd imagine most of the thematic material hits much softer if you're full-bore cishet, but if you're any kind of queer -- especially re:gender -- then I can easily recommend picking this up. Time spent reflecting on the Sleepers' trapped-in-a-body-that-isn't-my-own-and-isolates-me-ism hits home in ways that should be obvious.

It's only February, but I'm confident this is going to be on a lot of end-of-year Best Of lists in December, and it will almost certainly be on my own.

The writing is so magical... I feel uncomfortable writing review text anywhere in its vicinity. So I'm going to write this just once, no edits, stream-of-consciousness style. This is one of the very best games of the past decade. And it's only four hours!!

But every second of that runtime is spent articulating the exact feelings of late-capitalist post-internet anxious malaise with a precision that is simultaneously messy yet surgical. It made me feel seen, and understood, and isolated, and hopeful, and desperate. It made me laugh out loud repeatedly. It made me want to make art with a panicked urgency, like it's the only thing I have left, and isn't it?, and I need to be doing it all the time or I'll die, and you'll rot away too if you don't start nurturing something you truly care about. We're trapped in a proto-fascist trillionaire algorithm heckscape, but we can make things for eachother, and we can share them and feel them and love them and support eachother in our creative ambition, and that can never be taken from us as long as we cling to it with all our might.

Buy weird art and treasure it. Buy this game on itch instead of steam. Listen to artists you've never heard of. Pirate a weird foreign film. Delete all your socials. Torch a McDonald's in a wealthy neighborhood. Make your own website, and never shut up about it. Send me your zine.

If you crave unique games, hilariously grim prose, or emotionally resonant art in general, this an absolute must-play.

Tetrachroma has The Sauce. Even its "monochrome" variants, which offer "normal" Tetris gameplay, offer a satisfying sleekness that puts nearly every official Tetris release to shame, but the real magic comes from Tetrachroma's unique color-propagation mechanic.

Initially, it can feel like trying to play two puzzles at the same time, as if the chromatic and tetronomic problems live in two separate rooms of the brain. Intentionality with one requires auto-piloting the other. Eventually, though, after enough playtime, the shapes and colors cross the membrane within your mind and start to intermingle. A cohesive whole.

If that sounds fun to you -- slamming your head into a seemingly insurmountable puzzle until, through sheer will, it congeals in your mind, and you finally grasp what was once just out of reach -- then Golly Do I Have The Game For You.

Pepper Grinder's platforming is so smooth, so satisfying, so deliciously fully of immediacy... the fluidity and danciness of its motion is irresistibly Slick. It took me back to my first time playing Super Meat Boy way back in 2011.

However -- unlike Super Meat Boy, Pepper Grinder's mechanics and level design never evolve much past the initial hour. This isn't a huge problem, especially given the short overall runtime, but it was nonetheless a little disappointing. The gameplay delights with its Goodness, but never quite ascends to Greatness.

Still! The moment-to-moment experience is so satisfying that I devoured its entirety, gathering every gold speedrun medal along the way, in just a few days.

If you've enjoyed the platforming in titles like Super Meat Boy, Pizza Tower, Warioland, or Dustforce, you really ought to give this a whirl.

The core experience here is a stealth/puzzle/action/adventure/exploration hybrid that frequently delights.

For some specific points of reference, we're working with:
- core stealth verbs from Hitman (2016),
- puzzles from Call of the Sea (or any other post-Gone Home puzzle-narrative indiegame),
- narrative action from Uncharted,
- open world design from Breath of the Wild (and later imitators),
all smashed together like some sort of 2010's game design hoagie.

I love the games cited... but I ultimately couldn't love Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, even though I really liked it, for two main reasons.

Firstly, and less significantly -- BotW-style open world design gives me gamefatigue FAST these days. Great Circle's first area was a total delight, but entering the second of three zones and realizing "oh... it's mostly all the same content copy-pasted and reframed" like I'm entering my thirtieth Ruins in Elden Ring or my zillionth BotW Shrine really took the wind out of my sails. In fairness, this issue is greatly mitigated if you're not some sort of completionist freak (oops).

But I also have a more genuine and unavoidable Critique: this game is a Capital-P Product. All of its edges have been sanded off until an enjoyable, bingeable, but tragically toothless end-result emerges. I felt the exact same way playing Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order back in 2019 as it melded Uncharted setpieces, 3D Soulslike gameplay, and Metroidvania structure. Pulling elements from a variety of beloved videogame masterworks is admirable, but simplifying away their uniquest and wonkiest traits loses what made me love those source titles.

... I guess I'm ultimately saying that this game has oodles of Content, and that the Content is Frictionless and Fun. The game has Good Graphics that will really Push Your Pixels using DLSS/RTX Technology. There are many Collectibles and Achievements. If you do every side objective, Thirty Hours Of Content Awaits. The writing is sometimes genuinely good.

I had a great time (I really needed some turn-my-brain-off fun at this moment in my life), and I would AGGRESSIVELY recommend the nightmare-acronym IJatGC to a certain kind of person, but I will forget this game exists in a year.

Metaphor: ReFantazio might be my new go-to recommendation for people who say they can't get into JRPGs. It's an incredibly welcoming entrypoint for those less familiar with the genre, while simultaneously satisfying the most rpg-hungry and dungeon-crawl-y of palates.

The moment-to-moment writing is frequently a little flat, but the overall Plot and charming cast of characters more than make up for any line-by-line shortcomings. The narrative overall feels very "shonen jump", but in the best way possible.

I cannot remember the last time I finished a 30+ hour game and thought, for even a second, "I would like to play some more." And yet, Metaphor's monstrous 90-hour runtime was so delightfully brisk that I might just dip my toes into New Game Plus.

If you like JRPGs, or long-form shounen anime, or fantasy adventures even a little bit, this is an absolute must-play.

I Am Your Beast blends Neon White with Post Void, then polishes each constituent component to a brilliant shine. Every interaction is so juicy I worry it might be filling my computer with pulpy liquid.

But... I feel like that polishing has also sanded off the rough edges that make peers like Neon White so excellent.
I Am Your Beast's levels are clear, readable, tight, and "solvable" in a way that made me miss Neon White's more abstract and obtuse geometry.
I Am Your Beast's combat is a satisfying power fantasy, but lacks any pressure or urgency.

I realize I'm approaching this game from a perspective that might be a little too focused on comparative analysis relative to titles it might not be inspired by at all... but it is very, very hard for me to sit down with I Am Your Beast without thinking about how much I love Neon White and Doom Eternal for the entire duration of play.

The best non-Nintendo 3D platformer of the past twenty years.
Alternately elating and despair-inducing.

Watching facsimiles of old characters long since dropped by the wayside dancing together can be magical... but, more often that not, I found myself lamenting "man....... what are we doing?? what has this industry become?? why doesn't anyone put big money into Real Videogames anymore??"

Astro Bot ultimately tastes like a cocktail composed of one and a half parts party, one part museum, and three parts graveyard.

Had I played Anodyne in 2013, it likely would have impressed me as it swam amongst the glut of amateurish indies that blossomed post-Minecraft/Braid/Fez.

Playing it in 2024 -- the combat is sloppy, the writing actively tramples itself, the exploration is tedious, and the puzzles are shallow.

It's clearly inspired by the original Zelda+ALttP, but the comparison is unflattering.
It makes me wish I was playing those games instead.

Many indie games at that time (and to a lesser extent, still) crib from whatever the Gaming Big Kids were making twenty years prior.
In 2013 it was Super Mario World, Super Metroid, DOOM, and Zelda: ALttP.
In 2024, it's Super Mario 64, Quake, Deus Ex, and Zelda: OOT.

Anodnye serves as a reminder that those sorts of indie games age poorly. In their moment, they're a brand new spin on an old idea. With the passage of time, they are relegated to the past alongside their inspirations, and must stand shoulder-to-shoulder alongside them. Rarely, if ever, can a derivative work's credibility survive that transition.

In the opening hours of Breath of the Wild, on the southeast edge of the Great Plateau, there's a ravine. Crossing it would give the player a direct path to one of their mandatory objectives.

Initially, this route seems impassable -- but, on the player's side of the ravine, there's a tree. The tree sits right near the edge, and it's just a touch taller than the ravine is wide. Nearby, an axe is lodged in a tree, just outside a building labelled "Woodcutter's House". The tree looks ready to topple in the direction opposite the axe at any moment.

Reading this, the solution to this problem seems obvious - take the axe, fell the tree at the edge of the ravine, and cross it. But to actually play this segment, and to piece the elements together for yourself, feels like a moment of intelligent problem-solving. It feels like you've cheated your way into a clever shortcut, even though this is a carefully-designed vignette, with a designer's hand nudging you towards an intended outcome.

Games-likers often seem obsessed with the idea of emergent or fringe solutions. Try typing "the designers never thought of this!" or "i can't believe the designers thought of this!" into your search engine of choice, and bask in the millions of identical-looking thumbnails.

Conversely, I feel like we often undervalue the experience of encountering a problem, feeling the hand (or the voice, or the mind, or the spirit) of a designer gently guiding the player towards a solution, and following them along for the journey. It's an experience that's a little more book/movie/song-esque than game-like, despite being fundamentally interactive, in that the player/reader/viewer/listener gives themselves up to the authorial voice of the artist for a moment. When we play games, there's always a conversation being held between the player and the designer, but in these moments, it is made tangible and laid bare.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is not a particularly hard puzzle game. It is not particularly weird, nor creative, nor thrilling, nor revelatory. However - every single one of its puzzles feels Designed. Solving the smaller puzzles feels like being in on a wry joke with the author; solving something larger feels like sharing in an intimately whispered secret.

This is a lot of words to say that none of the puzzles in Lorelei and the Laser Eyes are best-in-class, but all of them are Solid, Clean, and Designerly. Many of its best offerings can be solved on a pad of paper by someone who has no familiarity with the game at all. Pick this one up if you need a new and modern puzzle book to sit down with on a nice afternoon.