Finally released as a complete package, last year’s episodic stealth shooter is the best in the series and possibly one of the best stealth games ever made
It's your last impression of the game and it sticks with you, reflecting back on what you've seen. It's the case, though, that the vast majority of Abzû is so beautiful, so well put together, that the fact the ending is a little disappointing doesn't diminish my view of it as whole. When I think back on the game it's not the final image I remember but the turquoise shallows, the pattern of the sun falling on the sand, the great vaulted ceilings of blue water.
Games are capable of ridiculous, absurdist stories. This is not one of them. Games are capable of intense, character driven dramas. This is not one of them. They are capable of being sexy, which this isn’t. They are capable of being funny and respectful and human. Muv-Luv is none of these things. It is flat, and it is tedious, and it is often gross as hell.
In the way that Fallout can be, it has the capacity to be an incredibly tiring game; faced with another looming factory on the horizon, I sighed, steeled myself.
The brilliance of Undertale, its delicate balance that it manages for most of the time you'll spend playing it, is that it understands how to be scary and funny all at once. Inside the Snowdin library there are leather-bound books that contain strange prophecies, books that say profound and disconcerting things about the human soul.
I wish the developers had given the more interesting elements of the game more time to breathe. I wish Pneuma had been a little less hasty—a little more interested in conveying why exactly we should care about his rushed philosophical ponderings than racing to solve high school thought experiments. In a game about creation and existence and perception, I'd have loved some sense of what it would actually feel like to be birthed from the void into a world that was, for all intents and purposes, yours.