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344 Narrative games reviewed and scored, best first.
344 reviews
A free, solo-developed idle roguelike that spent a full year in Early Access before its 9 May 2025 1.0 exit — Mixed at 64% lifetime across a small but genuinely long-playing corpus, whose own most-invested critics (one at over 4,700 hours) describe a game whose systems, especially crafting, arrive far too slowly for how much waiting it asks of you.
6 / 10
Ubisoft's first open-world Star Wars game delivers genuinely praised atmosphere and world-building as scoundrel Kay Vess, undercut by a real, consistently repeated "Ubisoft formula fatigue" complaint about an empty, on-rails open world, a specific, reproducible manual cloud-save failure that has cost multiple reviewers dozens of hours of progress, and a patch cadence that this review can confirm effectively stopped in mid-2025 even as bug reports continued well into 2026.
6 / 10
The trilogy's finale scores meaningfully lower than either predecessor — a severe, still-live crash and freeze problem compounded by the absence of a manual save option can cost players 30-40 minutes of progress at a time, and reviewers who loved the first two games widely call the conclusion rushed and unsatisfying.
6 / 10
A genuinely unique premise — a disgraced writer who literally dives into books to steal fictional items — undercut by combat reviewers call unnecessary filler and dialogue choices that a striking number say don't meaningfully change anything.
6 / 10
A Lovecraftian open-world detective game that spent nearly four years yanked off Steam entirely by a publisher lawsuit, then came back in 2024 as a self-published "Remastered" rebuild that swapped out the version some owners specifically wanted to keep -- Mostly Positive today, praised for atmosphere and mythos, criticized for repetitive investigation, weak combat, and a rocky relaunch.
6 / 10
A Kickstarter-backed spiritual successor to Planescape Torment that inherited its predecessor's greatest weakness (combat) more than its strength — checked directly against Planescape's own current numbers, the gap between "spiritual successor" and "successor" is stark.
6 / 10
An emotionally resonant underwater narrative adventure about grief and isolation, sold to many buyers expecting a Subnautica-style survival game and undercut for keyboard-and-mouse players by controls the game itself warns you to avoid.
6 / 10
A two-person team's espionage FPS split almost evenly between fans who compare it to Project IGI and critics who say its weapons don't hit as hard as its marketing promises — a complaint this review found the developer had already dated patches addressing within days.
6 / 10
A technically polished remake of a beloved Yakuza entry, bundled with a well-regarded new prequel chapter, whose Mixed reception is driven by two distinct and separately documented problems — substantial cuts to the original's beloved side content, and a genuine, well-sourced controversy over the studio's decision to recast a character using an actor who has admitted to sexual misconduct, despite a sustained fan campaign asking them not to.
6 / 10
A genuinely striking noir art style and story wrapped around two half-realized game systems — a business sim too simple to satisfy and a detective clue-connecting mechanic several reviewers call arbitrary enough to feel like a coin flip.
5.9 / 10
A NZ$2.49 comedy RPG about a duck-obsessed space captain fighting an evil wizard with dice instead of combat — a genuinely tiny, self-aware indie project with zero written Steam reviews in either direction, but real achievement data confirming people do finish it.
5.8 / 10
A PSP-era Japanese JRPG finally reaching Western PC players via FURYU, whose reviewers split sharply between "runs great, lovely art, fun combat" and "crashes constantly, controller support doesn't work" — a divide specific enough to read as an inconsistent port rather than a bad game underneath it.
5.5 / 10
A gorgeous, comic-book-styled pirate tactical RPG whose dice-and-deckbuilding combat system splits opinion sharply along one measurable line — reviewers who bailed within the first hour call it an unexplained mess, while those who stuck it out and actually read the in-game instructions largely came around, on top of a genuinely short, linear campaign with no ship battles.
5.5 / 10
A dark fantasy colony strategy game steeped in Slavic folklore, praised for its art, voice acting and Darkest Dungeon-style sanity management even by players who can't recommend it. The mechanics underneath rarely earn the same trust, and day-one paid DLC on top of a NZ$61.99 base game became the review corpus's loudest single complaint.
5.5 / 10
A beautifully scored, well-drawn flooded-world adventure that a real share of players who loved this small studio's earlier games call a step down, mainly because of turn-based combat several reviewers, fans and critics alike, describe as slow and undemanding.
5.5 / 10
A visually stunning Dead Space spiritual successor that never fully recovered from a disastrous December 2022 performance launch — and whose save-corruption bugs, reported by reviewers three years apart, still haven't been fully resolved.
5.5 / 10
Square Enix promised a genuinely new fusion of real-time strategy and tactical RPG -- its own review corpus, positive and negative alike, spent the game's release week explaining that the pitch outran the execution, and that a workable build trivialises the "strategy" fast.
5.5 / 10
A striking black-and-white samurai action game built on Kurosawa-style cinematography -- and a rare case where even the game's own top-voted positive review opens by calling the combat "GOD AWFUL," in a corpus where that complaint appears in three out of every four negative reviews.
5.5 / 10
A gorgeous, story-driven Darkest Dungeon-alike from a four-person South Korean studio, still stuck at a Mixed Steam rating seven years on -- gorgeous art and an unusually generous first-week patch run against a punishing UI, a party-wipe-on-main-character-death rule, and cosmetic unlocks that reviewers consistently call not worth chasing.
5.5 / 10
A cheap, chapter-based choose-your-own-adventure through an alternate 1888 British Empire from a developer better known for jigsaw puzzles — genuinely witty in places, undercut by a missing save system and a colonial-frontier premise played disappointingly straight.
5.5 / 10
A beloved, nostalgic third entry in a genuinely well-regarded hidden-object adventure series, undercut by a severe, independently corroborated bug that makes the mouse cursor disappear for a meaningful share of players — described by more than one reviewer as making the game nearly unplayable.
5.3 / 10
Read review of Awakening: The Goblin Kingdom Collector's Edition
A charming season-manipulation fantasy adventure with a genuinely smart central mechanic and a well-told story, sunk at launch by a level of bugs, screen-tearing and broken abilities that both critics and players describe as feeling closer to a beta than a finished game.
5 / 10
A free-to-play sci-fi idle game split almost exactly down the middle, with "AI slop" the single most repeated word in its negative reviews — and a store-page disclosure confirming AI tools were used across art, writing and UI text, rather than leaving that complaint unverified.
5 / 10
A tiny, stark, art-forward interactive short story from the makers of Milk Inside a Bag of Milk Inside a Bag of Milk, held back almost entirely by one specific, near-universally criticised element — its English voice acting — rather than its atmosphere or premise.
5 / 10
