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Narrative reviews

344 Narrative games reviewed and scored, best first.

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344 reviews

AETHUS

A solo developer in Edinburgh shipped a complete, story-driven survival-crafting game straight to 1.0 with no Early Access period — a genuine feat that's earned near-universal respect, complicated only by a real and recurring complaint that the store page sells it as something more open-ended than the tightly linear campaign it actually is.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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A HERO AND A GARDEN

A NZ$7.39 visual novel dressed up as a clicker game from npckc, in which a hero who fails to rescue the princess spends two-odd hours making amends by growing magic berries — Very Positive at 95% of 79 reviews for its storybook art, warm cast and unusually deep accessibility options, with the one consistent complaint being that the "clicker" half thins out into repetitive quota-grinding by the later routes.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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A Plague Tale: Requiem

A visually extraordinary sequel that nearly every reviewer, on both sides of the score, agrees looks and sounds better than its beloved predecessor -- while a wide majority of its critics argue the writing that made that predecessor special didn't come along for the ride.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Assassin's Creed Odyssey

The most beautiful open world Ubisoft has built, and the clearest case study in gaming of a cash shop reaching backwards into a game's design. Eight years on it costs NZ$19.99 and holds 89% — but the level gates it built around its XP boosters are still exactly where they were.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Beacon Pines

A gorgeously illustrated storybook mystery whose "charm" branching mechanic promises narrative agency that a large, detailed share of its own reviewers say never really arrives, funnelling every path toward one true ending while the story runs noticeably long after its central mystery resolves.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Berry Bury Berry

A genuinely bizarre, endlessly quotable first-person incremental game about growing berries and sacrificing them to a sentient hole — Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 8,000 reviews and driven to virality by a streamer discovery, with an honest, consistent minority complaint that its horror-tinged mystery and mid-game unlock tree don't live up to the strength of its opening hook.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Blasphemous

A Seville studio's Kickstarter-funded Metroidvania built from Spanish Holy Week processions and Goya paintings -- still Very Positive on Steam seven years and three free expansions later, with the exact same critic-and-player split that greeted it at launch: some of the best pixel art and atmosphere in the genre, wrapped around movement and combat feel a real share of players never warm to.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector

A sci-fi tabletop RPG that expands its predecessor's dice-and-clocks storytelling into a ship-hopping journey across a whole star belt, earning two BAFTA nominations and a Best Narrative award along the way — while a large majority of its own harshest Steam reviewers are the first game's biggest fans, measuring it against a beloved original and finding its punishing new dice system the hardest part to forgive.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Control Ultimate Edition

A visually stunning, richly written supernatural action game widely called a Remedy highlight — with a genuinely well-documented 2021 "Ultimate Edition without the Ultimate DLC" controversy, and a still-unresolved oddity for a single-player game requiring an internet connection just to launch.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Crimson Desert

Pearl Abyss's massive, visually stunning open-world action-adventure launched to a rocky Mixed reception — a specific, documented 51% positive Steam score in its first days — before climbing to Very Positive within a week and staying there through five months of relentless, near-weekly patches, even as a real, ongoing thread of criticism argues the game never fully shakes its origins as an MMORPG stripped of its multiplayer.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Darkest Dungeon II

Red Hook rebuilt Darkest Dungeon as a roguelite road trip instead of a long campaign, and three years later the review corpus still splits almost exactly down that line — not a launch controversy that faded, but a genre identity change some fans never made peace with.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Days Gone

An open-world zombie survival game with a genuine cult following that grew after release — launched on PC in 2021 with one of the most severe, best-documented data-collection controversies this library has seen, since resolved with an opt-out but still shaping how the game is remembered.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Death Stranding 2: On the Beach

Kojima Productions' sequel arrived on PC nine months after its PlayStation 5 exclusive launch with one of the best-optimised AAA ports in recent memory and genuinely expanded delivery and combat systems, sitting Overwhelmingly Positive across nearly 26,000 Steam reviews — tempered by a real, remarkably consistent complaint from longtime fans that its writing, pacing and a hand-holding new companion character fall well short of the original's atmosphere and restraint.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Dishonored 2

Arkane's supernatural stealth-action sequel remains Very Positive across more than 66,000 Steam reviews, widely regarded as one of the finest immersive sims ever made — a reputation that survived a severe, well-documented 2016 launch-performance crisis this review can confirm was genuinely fixed, though a separate, newer, still-unresolved AMD CPU plus Nvidia GPU launch-failure bug persists in reviews dated as recently as August 2025, alongside real, current uncertainty over Arkane's own future following a July 2026 Xbox restructuring.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Dragon Age: Inquisition

A celebrated, GOTY-winning BioWare fantasy epic whose Steam review page has spent six straight years dominated by one complaint that has nothing to do with the game — the mandatory EA launcher, which reviewers are still calling out for breaking the game as recently as this year.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Emerald Flower

A three-hour narrative RPG about a boy searching for a reason to live in a civilisation destroyed by a mind-controlling parasitic plant — priced under a dollar, drawing OneShot comparisons, and beloved so far by an audience that, as of this review, is entirely Turkish.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Esoteric Ebb

A tabletop-inspired isometric CRPG that invites Disco Elysium comparisons directly in its own marketing — Overwhelmingly Positive across nearly 8,000 reviews for fans who embrace its absurdist, Discworld-flavoured take on the formula, with an equally substantial and thoughtful critical minority arguing it borrows Disco Elysium's structure without matching the literary subtlety that made the original work.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Final Fantasy XVI

Square Enix rebuilt Final Fantasy as a single-character action game with a Devil May Cry pedigree and the most ambitious set pieces the genre has ever staged, then paid for it with the party control, gear depth and build variety that used to define the series.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Grand Theft Auto V

A widely acclaimed single-player crime saga bundled with an online mode whose 2017-2018 wrongful-ban epidemic became one of the most documented anti-cheat fairness disputes on Steam — improved since, but echoed by a related complaint that persists into 2024-2025.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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