Polygon

We were able to turn Friday the 13th: The Game into a fun sort of playground by making our own rules, but the game doesn’t create much fun on its own. The majority of matches are spent doing a dull scavenger hunt as a counselor, and somehow the game has even managed to make racking up kills as Jason himself tedious. Friday the 13th: The Game manages to mimic the surface level of the movies well enough — their kills, their locations, their gore — but it doesn’t come close to mirroring the campy spirit of the films. The result is a joyless cycle of murder broken up by long stretches of boredom.

The Fidelio Incident makes an admirable attempt to approach a difficult subject from a unique angle. But it fails to capture the emotional subtlety or artful storytelling that games like Gone Home, Firewatch and Virginia have demonstrated within the same kind of framework.

The Long Journey Home may hold many secrets and wonders, but it's hard to hold on to the promise of them when the game's more likely to break both your legs as soon as you step off the front porch. The promise of a truly narrative-driven roguelike is tantalizing, but this isn’t that game.

While Samurai Warriors: Spirit of Sanada doesn’t diverge wildly from what I’ve come to expect, its presentation and impact are unique enough, strong enough and successful enough that I can only hope it heralds a new direction for the franchise. Deeply personal stories about these monumental figures, given ample room to breathe, can bring an overtold legend back to life.

If you'd told me 20 or even 10 years ago that we'd get a better-than-arcade port of one of Street Fighter's best entries that's playable on a portable, I'd have been thrilled. But we've come to expect a lot more from fighting games these days, ironically by Capcom itself, and Ultra Street Fighter 2 just doesn't do enough to justify its price tag or overshadow its shortcomings.

Perception is full of interesting ideas, both mechanically and narratively, but it never fully commits. It’s a game about being blind that allows you to see. It’s a game about things that go bump in the night, but those horrors rarely show up to threaten you. There are some strong moments peppered throughout Perception, and some great, chilling histories to uncover in this virtual haunted house, but it plays at much bigger ideas than its surface-level exploration can handle.

Reservoir Dogs is a movie that succeeds on its attitude and storytelling. Without any of those elements making it into Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days, the attempts to remind me of the film became an annoyance, a reminder that I could be doing something better with my time. But even without the Reservoir Dogs branding, Bloody Days doesn’t come close to succeeding. The time rewind mechanic could have made for a unique experience, but it’s squandered on a mediocre, forgettable shoot-’em-up.

To be straight with you, I had to really plumb the depths of my critical mind to scrounge up those dings. They are problems, don't get me wrong. They just can't come close to dimming the pleasure of this fast, fluid experience. Dead Cells may be the most fun I've had in a game all year.

The result is a game that reminds me of a picture postcard, or maybe a whimsical poem written by a friend on a long journey. Old Man’s Journey is sweet, meandering and undemanding, a pleasant while-away that's full of feeling, at least for as long as the journey lasts.

But these breathers come to feel all too brief over the course of Shadows of Valentia. Make no mistake: This is a game about sitting through cutscenes and playing battles. That gets tiring more quickly than a better-balanced game would — especially because Shadows of Valentia is committed to preserving those same dated systems. Its story was gripping enough to pull me through, but mustering the energy to sit through obtuse battles was Shadows of Valentia’s biggest challenge.