Polygon

It lays a convincing and entertaining narrative world over a varied and enjoyable set of physical puzzles. It's funny and scary. Its characters and environments are engaging. Its use of hand-based puzzles is thoughtful and satisfying, and despite some minor bits of frustration, this is the most fun I've had with a physical game in years.

This is a game that often left me feeling like complete trash. It brought up some of the most difficult memories in my life, issues I had buried long ago. My reactions to that anguish have run the gamut, but more than anything, I respect that Outlast 2 has the singular focus and intensity to dredge up those emotions; that alone made it worth the time spent for me.

Little Nightmares worked its way into my dreams because it's just bright enough, just safe enough to make me let my guard down. The game isn’t always successful at balancing some game design fundamentals. But when the lights went out, it left me remembering that, really, I'm just a small thing in a dangerous world myself.

Dawn of War 3 makes an admirable attempt to nudge forward a genre that has struggled in recent years to progress. The addition of Elites offers intriguing and complex challenges for those who are prepared to put in the necessary practice. Relic has obviously thought long and hard about how realtime strategy might best be improved — even if true evolution seems out of the game’s grasp.

It’s possible that with a major attitude adjustment, and by buckling down on fundamentals rather than balancing the game with "this guy does a lot of damage to that guy for some reason," that a capable arena shooter can emerge. That’s what’s so frustrating about grading a game like Drawn to Death. I know it could do better if it applied itself toward the little things it doesn’t like doing as enthusiastically as the things it does.

Yooka-Laylee looks the part of an updated platformer, but some of its mechanics should have stayed back in the era it came from. There was a reason we haven’t seen more games like Banjo-Kazooie on modern platforms, and it wasn’t just because Rare as we knew it was gone; its ideas were very specific to a gameplay era that we’ve evolved past. Fourth-wall-breaking dialogue, shiny characters and lush graphics can’t save Yooka-Laylee from the dated framework that it’s built on.

The experience of Thimbleweed Park is so drenched in nostalgia that it made me question whether I was enjoying the game for what it actually was, or if I was just enjoying the comfort of having an old itch scratched. In the end, though, I don't think it really matters. While Thimbleweed Park might be alienating to a newcomer to adventure games, that's by design. It's a game that exists somewhere between 1987 and 2017, and for someone with a love of the genre, it feels like coming home.

MLB The Show 17 continues one of the longest running successes in sports video gaming, and it’s not a regression. But its advances sound a lot bigger on paper than they are in practice. The gestures made to Franchise and Road to the Show are nice, but the enjoyability in those modes still mainly rests on good design choices going back years. Time will tell if the changes to MLB the Show 17 establish a new foundation for what is enjoyed five years from now.

It successfully pushes this series to new heights of polish, allure and charm. It has a few blemishes, enough to distract a bit from the intriguing and weighty themes that the game wrestles with. But even through the rough patches, Persona 5 doesn’t give up a drop of its colorful personality.

There’s pleasure to be found in a challenge. There’s pleasure to be found in difficulty, and in failure, and in obscurity too. I just can’t say that I found any of that pleasure in Rain World. I can't fault anyone who does, because there is something to that awkward little slugcat and the grimey, mean world it calls home. But I never felt properly equipped to discover, to improve. With core systems opaque and unnecessarily limited, all I ever felt equipped to do in Rain World was fail.