Quantum Break is a highly-experimental, groundbreaking attempt to fuse the worlds of video games and television. It’s not the first time that some sort of synthesis was attempted; just three years ago Syfy and Trion Worlds tried a similar thing with TV show/video game project Defiance. However, Microsoft and Remedy Entertainment’s Quantum Break really goes all-in on the connection between the two by packaging them together and placing the episodes at particular points in the game’s narrative.

The result is far more effective than I expected going in. While the episodes occasionally feature awkwardly-written dialogue and have trouble introducing the show’s central characters mid-narrative, later episodes are very engaging, and the production values and aesthetic are roughly what you would expect to see in a Fox TV show. The two mediums are used to inform each other in some really cool ways. While somebody could play the game without watching the episodes and still follow the events and character motivations, playing it with the episodes lends a lot of extra insight and depth to the proceedings. Certain moments are far more significant because of the background information gleaned from the TV show.

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It’s rare that a game comes along with a narrative hook as strong as SOMA’s. The story takes on the digitization of the human mind, and through the progression of the game and story, multiple complex quandaries about the nature of human identity are brought to light. Are we defined by our minds or our bodies? If an exact replica of our mind is duplicated in a new host, is it just as “real” as the original? Since all of the cells in our body are continually replaced over a seven year time period, does that mean that we’re essentially a completely different person than we were seven years ago?

It’s a great basis for science fiction (one that I’ve wanted to write about for some time now), and too-often ignored in favor of more well-tread ground. To see such heady subjects in a video game at all is rare, but for the game to focus itself so intently on its narrative is even more commendable. Despite its weaknesses elsewhere, SOMA stays afloat due to its excellent writing and thought-provoking moral dilemmas.

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Firewatch is notable for its ambition over anything else. It’s technically in the same genre as other recent “walking simulators” like Gone Home and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, but here the player engages more directly with the narrative, or narratives, as it turns out. The game begins by setting up your character’s tragic backstory in a way that I’ve never seen done in a 3D title, incorporates a growing relationship between two characters into almost all of the game’s interactions, hints at a conspiracy thriller plotline, and tells another personal tale of tragedy along the way. That all of these narratives fail to come together in a significant way is perhaps understandable, then, but I was still hoping that the separate threads would feel more complete than they ultimately do.

I’ll try to stay away from overt spoilers in this review, but let’s begin with lead-character Henry’s personal backstory. The slightly-interactive opening is beautiful in its minimalism, and borrows heavily from narratives like Pixar’s Up. The goal is clearly to give the player-character baggage that informs his actions in the otherwise-disconnected main narrative. However, unlike Up, Firewatch fails to really provide an arc for its characters. He takes his job as a fire lookout at a national park as a reprieve from his crumbling marriage, and by the end of the title, that’s all it ever is. He doesn’t come to terms with anything, he doesn’t make any major decisions, he just gets wrapped up in a separate plotline with his boss, Delilah.

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(This article is based on a “True Pacifist” playthrough of Undertale. If you would like to watch my playthrough up to the “Neutral Pacifist” ending, feel free to check it out on YouTube here)

It seems like the current conversation around Undertale is about how divisive it is. Its fanbase is notoriously rabid, dominating forum conversations and flooding online surveys regarding the best games of 2015. Many people seem to have sworn the game off largely because of these fanatics, or because of its frankly ugly aesthetics. Unlike a lot of recent pixel-art games, Undertale looks like something that could have been achieved on the original NES, and plays about as well as a Flash game. This means its first impressions aren’t especially strong, and convincing somebody to spend 5-10 hours on something so visually unappealing and poorly controlled can be a hard sell (believe me, I used to try with The Secret of Monkey Island).

But here’s the thing: Undertale really is as great and as special as its fanbase would like you to believe. I’ll try to avoid any overt spoilers in this review (the game is MUCH better if you don’t know quite what to expect), but developer Toby Fox has managed to hide surprises in every layer of Undertale, from the game mechanics, to the save system, to the story, and beyond. Unlike many modern games, which feel like they’re pointing the player toward everything worth seeing and experiencing, Undertale gives off the feeling that there is always something new to discover, if you just poke around its world a bit more.

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2013’s reboot of the Tomb Raider franchise was much stronger than just about anybody would have expected. After Tomb Raider had faded into many gamers’ memories as a relic of the past, Crystal Dynamics decided to start fresh by creating an origin story for Lara Croft and rethinking many of the game’s mechanics. Borrowing liberally from the Uncharted series (which, in truth, borrowed significantly from Tomb Raider in the first place), they managed to create a very solid platformer-shooter with a more open-world feel to it. Combined with a strong arc that saw Lara grow from a scared girl with potential into an army-decimating badass, Tomb Raider really stood out from the crowd and even got “Game of the Year” consideration from a number of publications.

So if 2013’s Tomb Raider was a risky and innovative renovation of the brand, then 2015’s Rise of the Tomb Raider is the “victory lap” game. It’s still engaging, and the combat and traversal mechanics are generally solid. But it’s also a pretty safe entry into the series, with few innovations and little to truly get excited about. There’s a feeling that Crystal Dynamics created it as something of a stop-gap release while they really think about how to elevate the series in the future.

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