Her Story isn’t like other games. Hell, it’s hard to even classify it as a game, really. As soon as you begin, you’re shown a 90s-era CRT monitor with a search engine open for the word “MURDER.” Some notes on the desktop indicate that you can search other terms and find videos (actual taped videos, like the infamous 90s-era FMV games) from a police database regarding a murder case.. This experience makes up the entirety of the game: you watch videos of the same actress testifying in the case, take note of potential keywords, search for them, watch “new” videos, and try to put together what happened for yourself. As you dig deeper, it becomes clear that the murder itself is just a jumping off point for a much more complicated story about this woman’s past.

The thing that is going to make or break the game for a lot of people is whether or not this non-linear player-guided storytelling approach is enough to warrant the experience. In a way, there is no real goal or ending here. After watching a certain percentage of the in-game videos, a text-chat window will pop up asking if you’ve seen enough to know what happened. If you answer yes and quit out, the credits roll, but it’s largely arbitrary. I had a pretty complete concept of what happened long before the chat prompt, and players are free to keep searching for more videos long after the game “ends.” The story (which is quite interesting, albeit far-fetched) is definitely the draw here, not the gameplay itself or the satisfaction of completion.

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(This review is based on the PS4 release of Arkham Knight. I initially purchased the PC version, but the port is so bad that Warner Brothers had it pulled from retailers)

Of all the games releasing this year, Arkham Knight was probably my most anticipated. The Arkham series was one of my favorites of the last console generation, a franchise that expanded greatly between its first and second release. Arkham Asylum was a terrific take on the “Metroid-vania” gameplay genre, set in a gorgeous and original version of Arkham Asylum. The level design was superb and both primary gameplay types, combat and “predator rooms,” were rock-solid.

Two years later, Rocksteady released Arkham City, which took the core gameplay components of its predecessor and worked them into an open-world scenario. The result was terrific, with Rocksteady incorporating a “grapnel boost” into Batman’s grapnel gun that, combined with his ability to glide, created a zippy and satisfying way of exploring the city. Warner Bros. followed this up with Arkham Origins two years after, which was more of a step sideways than forward. Few were bothered by this, though; Origins was created by Warner Bros. Games Montreal while Rocksteady prepared their next-gen Batman game, so it was pretty clearly a stop-gap release. The hope was that the next true evolution in the Arkham series would come with Rocksteady’s follow-up.

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There are two approaches one can take in explaining 2011’s Catherine, developed by Shin Megami Tensei/Disgaea/Persona developer Atlus. Mechanically, it’s a puzzle game. The majority of gameplay consists of pushing and pulling a series of blocks, creating paths that allow you to climb to the top of a massive tower. These boxes often contain special properties that can be useful, like springs, or dangerous, like spikes. The puzzles themselves become fiendishly difficult as the game progresses, but you develop techniques through your successes and failures that start to feel like second nature. It’s a very well-designed and challenging game that (usually) plays fair.

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(You can watch me play Broken Age Act 1 and part of Act 2 here)

The adventure game has had something of a resurgence in recent years. After being a dead genre since the late 90s, developers have started to realize how well it fits with the mobile marketplace. The basic gameplay mechanics of clicking things on-screen and dragging items out of your inventory to solve puzzles make quite a lot of sense on smartphones and tablets, where touching and dragging are the only real ways to interface with a game. Meanwhile, Telltale Games’ adventure game efforts ultimately led to their re-alignment as a Bioware-esque creator of player-driven narratives with the success of The Walking Dead. However, the basic “click around a screen to explore the environment” model of the classic adventure game still shines through these later efforts.

Despite this resurgence, though, adventure games are simply not marketable enough to greenlight without an attached license (like Telltale’s Walking Dead, Wolf Among Us, Borderlands, and Game of Thrones series) or a very small budget (like most mobile games). While an adventure game would never require the budget of a Call of Duty game, the game industry somewhat mirrors the modern-day film industry in that moderate-budget projects are no longer considered viable. So when Double Fine, headed up by adventure game writer and legend Tim Schafer, decided that they wanted to build an adventure game, they went to Kickstarter.

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If there’s one thing that Dragon Age Inquisition does especially well, it’s world building. While the first game in the series, Dragon Age Origin, felt like “Tolkien for Adults,” Inquisition seems to model its world and lore a bit more after George RR Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series. Different races and factions have deep, complex histories, with their own myths and legends, and very different accounts of how certain events occurred. When it comes to the various religions and supernatural forces that make up the Dragon Age world of Thedas, all of it is presented with uncertainty. Like the giants and children of the forest in Game of Thrones, it is unclear to the majority whether or not these things actually existed or are simply stories.

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