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Never judge a game by its jumpsuit:Friday The 13th on NES was ahead of its time

“There are positives here that bely the game’s bottom-of-the-barrel notoriety. Friday The 13th is horror, and horror games, as they’ve developed since 1989, are largely about managing resources. Early entries in the Resident Evil series made great use out of clunky “tank” controls and limited access to save points and bullets, and while Friday The 13th doesn’t have that level of intention, the hostility toward the player kicks in immediately, setting a tone that’s fit for the genre. Working against the clock and fighting an overpowered foe under rules that aren’t immediately clear is entirely fitting. A good game based on the Friday The 13th series should have a feeling of hopelessness running through it. If Jason were easy to beat, he wouldn’t be scary.”

Downwell is a nonstop struggle against gravity and greed

“And that’s where the driving tension of Downwell comes from. After enough attempts, you’ll start to learn about the enemies and traps that fill each of the game’s themed areas, but the well’s hazards are laid out randomly at the start of each run, so there’s no way of knowing exactly what lies ahead as you plunge into the darkness. Firing your boots and controlling your descent to the point where you can actually plan a route on the fly is the key to survival, but it’s all too easy to find yourself out of ammo and plummeting into the unknown. You could always try to land and cash out your combo, but as dangerous as it is to zoom past solid ground and potentially toward ruin, the allure of seeing that little combo tally above your head tick up even higher is often powerful enough to assuage such fears.”

Katamari Damacy’s whimsical cosmology is built on a father-son relationship

“All due credit to the King: He may be a drunken, irresponsible dick, but he’s not actively malevolent. His rule could best be described as one of benign neglect. Casting the night sky into inky blackness because you have the woozy celestial stumbles is regrettable, but it’s not like he buried all of creation under an unrelenting flood because he spied a few of his denizens dipping their lobster claws in butter. The King is a gnostic deity and uninterested in the universe beyond himself. He’s more Dionysus than Yahweh. His hands-off style of rule might be more consequential if it weren’t for The Prince and his quiet pursuit of doing the right thing.“

Words and illustrations by Nick Wanserski

Constant dread saves the clumsy Fatal Frame: Maiden Of Black Water

“At its best, playing Fatal Frame feels like a more interactive version of movies likeJu-On, putting the player in a terrible place where the only relief is the occasional pause before inevitable doom. The situation is slightly more optimistic, but the feeling of inevitability is hard to shake. Even the few supposedly safe spaces (Ren’s study, Yuri’s apartment) feel like flickering candles in a world of ever-growing darkness. At its worst, Fatal Frame is bogged down by repetition and a frustrating, if inspired, combat system. Your ability to overlook this will likely depend on your appreciation of candlelight.”

Yoshi’s Woolly World is tougher than it looks, but only if you want it to be

“or such an unassuming game, Yoshi’s Woolly World ties together a surprising amount of Nintendo’s creative loose ends. It does right by Yoshi and the legacy ofYoshi’s Island far better than any other attempt in the last 20 years. It makes good on the promise of its other obvious forebear, Kirby’s Epic Yarn, a wildly imaginative game so cuddly and kind that its charms easily devolved into blandness. It avoids the same pitfall by giving players the chance to fine-tune its challenge in ways that are far more natural than Nintendo’s clunky attempts at player-regulated difficulty in recent years. Most importantly, though, Woolly World finds the delicate, flexible game-design philosophy that blossomed in Super Mario 3D World bleeding into and invigorating the company’s other projects, even when, in the case of this one, they’re developed outside of Nintendo’s walls.”

Chibi-Robo! Zip Lash tries to clean up the series but just makes a mess

“The original Chibi-Robo! featured a recurring trope from Japanese comedy—a washpan falling on the lead character’s head for no particular reason. While this superfluous little gag has disappeared from the series’ later entries, it would’ve been a perfect fit for Chibi-Robo! Zip Lash, a new entry that sees the developers throwing everything but the kitchen sink at our tiny robot friend. Were this done with a sense of ambition, an attempt to get as much mileage out of the tiny swashbuckling robot as possible, that cavalier design sense might have been admirable. Instead, it’s a game that feels like it never decides what it wants to be and suffers for that indecision.”

Lego Dimensions is a great way to force your childhood on your kids

“ I try very hard to be mindful of this. In preparation for not forcing my daughter to assimilate my music tastes in a few years, I avoid steering her toy interests now. For the most part, I’m successful, except in one thing: Lego. I’ve attempted, not so subtly, to impress upon her the awesome creative potential of a toy you can build and rebuild to your own whims. When Gameological editor Matt Gerardi asked if I wanted to cover Lego Dimensions—the convergence of both a toy and video game recruitment tool—it was too exciting an opportunity to pass up. Is this an example of every pop-culture relic of my youth intact and primed for dissemination among a new generation of consumers? You bet. And that’s (mostly) okay.”

Mushroom 11’s clever goo-based puzzles triumph over its stiff challenges

“For all the comparisons to older games like Portal or Braid or even the similarly slime-based World Of Goo, Mushroom 11 is never anything less than its own game, with a unique approach to physics and a clear understanding of all the fun things players can accomplish with it. Its real triumph, though, is in how it coaxes players to discover all of its little tricks and quirks via level and puzzle design that never dips below being consistently, delightfully intelligent. Considering that it’s only the second game from a relatively untested team, it’s a fantastic PC debut, and one that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as other members of that aforementioned physics puzzler hall of fame.”

Transformers: Devastation is the best Transformers game ever

“It’s a near-fatal dose of ’80s nostalgia porn: the pitch-perfect art; Peter Cullen and Frank Welker alongside other instantly recognizable voices; original music composed by Vince DiCola, the genius responsible for the miraculous Transformers: The Movie soundtrack. Six-year-old Drew, had he been exposed to this game, would’ve immediately suffered a tragic aneurysm and died in a paroxysm of brain-detonating joy.”

The Taken King is Destiny at its addictive best—and worst

“And to keep up with the virtual Joneses, here I am in the Dreadnaught dutifully gambling for new gear. This cold, sinister ship feels more like a palace imagined by Slayer than Caesar’s Palace, but then again—both are dark, windowless places full of elaborately constructed Skinner boxes. At some point, it dawns on me that my new friends-in-loot and I have become the sad souls playing the dollar slots in Vegas at 2 a.m.—sitting alone with watered-down drinks in hand, blank faces peering into a screen, moving only to insert another token and pull the lever. But so what. They can’t stop, and I can’t stop, and none of us can stop and oh god, will I hit it big tonight?”