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344 Narrative games reviewed and scored, best first.
344 reviews
A standalone sequel to one of the sharpest deduction games in years, trading its predecessor's ancient-world mystery for a 1970s conspiracy -- slightly less airtight than the original by its own fans' admission, but still one of the best pure puzzle-narrative games released in 2024.
8.5 / 10
An expanded, engine-rebuilt reimagining of 2013's landmark narrative game, still regarded as one of the most original and cleverly written pieces of interactive fiction ever made — its only real, substantive criticism, buried under an avalanche of in-character joke reviews, comes from longtime fans questioning whether the new content justifies a doubled price for people who already own the original.
8.5 / 10
A surreal, Love-de-Lic-inspired adventure about a cursed intelligence bound to a corpse, helping a desert island's misfits across a game explicitly built around 24 replays -- one of the most positively received games this lane has covered (98.75%), with the tiny negative sample converging on a specific, real complaint about late-game grind and unclear puzzle guidance.
8 / 10
A solo-developed open-world action-adventure RPG stuffed with hand-written dialogue and reality-bending secrets, drawing genuinely rare "hidden gem" praise from reviewers who describe it as what Undertale could have been if Undertale had been more fun to actually play, held back only by simple combat and a navigation system some players find genuinely disorienting.
8 / 10
A Mesoamerican fantasy RPG that fuses turn-based planning with real-time execution across three interlocking revenge stories, built around a guilt mechanic that manifests literally as ghosts hounding you in battle — critically adored by almost everyone who played it, and a commercial underdog its own fans openly wish had found a bigger audience.
8 / 10
An Overwhelmingly Positive Indonesian-set coming-of-age adventure whose pixel art and emotionally resonant story draw near-universal praise, dragged down by a specific, widely repeated complaint that fetch quests and backtracking bloat what could be a much tighter experience.
8 / 10
A single Japanese developer's 15-year solo project -- a sprawling 2D action RPG that earned an Overwhelmingly Positive badge on scale and ambition alone, with a review corpus that argues hard over its writing, its grind, and whether its combat gets too busy to read.
8 / 10
A solo-developed, old-school text RPG with a genuinely rare feature — a fully screen-reader-accessible interface built for blind players from the ground up — that quietly launched on iOS in March 2024 before reaching Steam in September 2025 with a perfect, if tiny, 11-for-11 positive review record.
8 / 10
The foundational CRPG that gave Baldur's Gate 3 its name, still Very Positive and broadly beloved a quarter-century later — undercut by a genuinely disastrous April 2016 patch that broke the UI and multiplayer, and an unforgiving, famously brutal opening stretch this review verified with hard data rather than reviewer exaggeration.
8 / 10
A dice-driven, one-sitting narrative RPG from the creator of the surreal Off-Peak series, whose replayable, tabletop-flavoured storytelling wins over nearly everyone except a small, vocal group of longtime fans who specifically miss the studio's earlier first-person exploration format.
8 / 10
A genre-defying puzzle roguelike-lite set in a mysterious manor whose floor plan you draft anew each in-game day, celebrated with a 92 Metascore and widely called one of the most creative puzzle games in years — beloved specifically by players willing to take pages of physical notes, and marked by a real, still-unresolved design tension between its puzzle-solving brain and its randomised, roguelike-lite execution.
8 / 10
A 16-bit-style JRPG built almost entirely by one developer over seven years, whose real achievement isn't the pixel art but a heat-gauge combat system that replaces MP attrition with active turn-by-turn risk management.
8 / 10
The Tropico 6 team builds a pirate haven up the side of a cliff, and the vertical construction turns out to be the best idea in city builders this year. The ship combat it's wrapped around is a dice game with no animations, and that gap is the entire argument about this release.
8 / 10
A two-person studio's isometric action-adventure about a soul-collecting crow, nominated for two BAFTAs and named Golden Joystick's Best Indie Game of 2021 -- Very Positive on Steam five years on, with one specific design choice, a total absence of any map, dividing even its fans.
8 / 10
A Zelda-shaped action-RPG about dungeon crawling as an extreme sport, set in a magical-realist Austrian ski resort where the real hook is who you meet between dungeons, not what you fight inside them.
8 / 10
A genuine, widely-acclaimed reinvention of KOEI TECMO's long-running hack-and-slash series — praised by veteran fans as the best entry in over a decade for its overhauled combat — built around a deliberate, controversial trade-off that a large share of the same fanbase argues cost the series something real: a single silent protagonist replacing the roster of dozens of playable historical officers, and a story that stops at the Battle of Chibi, leaving half the classic Three Kingdoms tale untold at launch.
8 / 10
The second act of the Remake trilogy trades Midgar's corridors for open regions, a deep Synergy-and-Folio combat system and a genuinely excellent card game — then buries a chunk of it under checklist busywork and a PC port that still stutters a year on.
8 / 10
A spectacular retelling of the first five hours of a 1997 classic, stretched to forty — and a PC port whose launch grievances have quietly been fixed while the argument about the story hasn't gone anywhere.
8 / 10
A turn-based tactical RPG where you crew a living tank with a village of orphaned animal children, and where losing a boss fight can mean feeding one of them into a cannon — a war-is-hell premise this review's negative sample barely challenges, since only 5 of the game's 384 reviews are negative at all.
8 / 10
Obsidian shrinks you to the size of an ant and lets that single premise reshape exploration, combat and crafting all at once. Nearly four years after 1.0, the backyard is still one of the smartest survival maps in the genre — even as Obsidian's attention has visibly moved on to the sequel.
8 / 10
Hazelight Studios' GAME OF THE YEAR-winning co-op adventure remains one of gaming's most celebrated couch-co-op experiences, Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 266,000 Steam reviews and independently confirmed to have sold over 23 million copies — undercut for a real, recurring minority of players by a genuinely dark, forced late-game "torture" sequence, and by online connectivity friction this review can confirm was substantially, though not entirely, fixed by a documented May 2024 update removing the mandatory EA Launcher requirement.
8 / 10
A coming-of-age sci-fi RPG about growing up on an alien world across ten years and card- battle skill checks, praised by a huge share of its own audience as genuinely moving, undercut for a specific minority by a replay-driven structure several reviewers say betrays its own central promise that choices carry across lives.
8 / 10
A narrative-driven tactical RPG about an insurance adjuster who has to deny a claim and save the world, mixing Fire Emblem-style grid combat with a fully voiced dating-sim layer and a time-management system some players find liberating and others find punishing.
8 / 10
A pixel-art survival horror RPG confined to a single apartment building where glancing out a window turns people into grotesque monsters — a genuine cult phenomenon whose storytelling and atmosphere draw some of the most passionate praise this outlet has documented all year, sitting alongside a real, specific mechanical complaint cluster about a punishing save system and RNG-heavy combat from a small but consistent share of its own reviewers.
8 / 10
