No launch-day verdicts, no preview embargo theatre. Every piece here was written after the credits, and it says how long that took.
For eleven hours this game asks you to walk toward something it has already shown you. When you finally arrive, it takes the moment away — and the refusal is the most honest piece of writing I have encountered in a game this year.
Most turn-based games reward the player who reads the board fastest. This one quietly rewards the player willing to waste a turn doing nothing, and forty hours later I am still not sure I have adjusted.
It is not farming. It is the experience of having a small number of obligations and enough time to meet all of them, which may be the most fantastical premise in the medium.
Four games, four philosophies of help. One of them respects you, one flatters you, one gives up on you, and one is so afraid of your frustration that it solves itself before you can.
The genre has spent twenty years perfecting a sensation that lasts four seconds and then asking you to repeat it three hundred times. I finally understand why I keep coming back.
Purists want the original hardware, the original timing, the original everything. I want people to be able to play the thing at all, and those two positions are further apart than they should be.
Large games have started teaching for a quarter of their length. We looked at where the instruction actually stops, and whether anything replaces it.
Three games that let you tune the challenge, and what each of those menus reveals about how the designers imagine the person holding the mouse.
