Polygon

West of Loathing elicits this powerful emotional connection with stick figures. It bonds you to its world with nothing more than doodling and dialogue. There’s a pretty good turn-based adventure game there, under the hood, but West of Loathing’s many strengths are all personal: connections made between developer and player when you both laugh at the same time.

I went into Dream Daddy hoping that it would be good, but not necessarily believing it. I want what Dream Daddy is selling: a romance game about queer dads that love each other and love their kids. It doesn’t necessarily approach this construct with the nuance and hard edges that are present for real-life queer single dads. But at its core, this is a game that’s funny and good-hearted, presenting a world where a single queer dad’s ability to be a good father is never called into question

I started out really disliking Fortnite, but now that I’ve dug into its metagame, I actually want more.

I continue to think of Tacoma as a story first, but it’s more than that, clearly: It’s an interactive experience, and that plays for and against it. The story is built out of the playback mechanic, which gives birth to the subtler suggestions of what’s really going on with this station.

Anyone who can’t stand the Mii characters might be put off by Miitopia, just on the basis of its stars. I’d urge those people to reconsider that impulse. Yes, it’s imperative to find Miis cute and charming in order to really get into this game — and, frankly, how could you not? — but there’s something just as clever underneath the silly script and Mii matchmaking.

Hey! Pikmin did exactly what it needed to do, without extending itself any further. It gave me a series of interesting places, a series of clever puzzles, a series of cute vignettes and soft storybook scenery. The worst thing to say about Hey! Pikmin is, simultaneously, a recommendation — it’s perfectly pleasant, well-rounded, and didn’t leave me dying for more.

I spent the equivalent of a working week playing Aven Colony and it was hard labor. This is a game of relentless concentration and chore-work, with only the briefest flashes of magic and relief, offering almost nothing new to the city building, or resource management genres.

Like all successful pieces of nostalgia, Kingsway knows the adventure on the screen is less important than the adventure in your mind.

In some ways, Gigantic is a jack of all trades, pulling influences from half a dozen different disparate games and genres. That mixture might sound messy on paper, but in practice developer Motiga pulls it all together to create matches that feel tense, challenging and hugely rewarding.

What the first Splatoon did well is still built into the sequel’s barnacle-encrusted DNA, and now it’s on a system that you can stuff in your bag or play on the couch.