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344 Narrative games reviewed and scored, best first.
344 reviews
A visually gorgeous, warmly voice-acted remake of one of the Dragon Quest franchise's most beloved and expansive entries — Very Positive on Steam, but built around a genuinely controversial decision to substantially trim the content that made the original and its 3DS remake so sprawling, a cut acknowledged even by the game's own fans rather than disputed.
7 / 10
A gorgeous pixel-art adventure with some of the most detailed, distinctive sprite work and sound design in the genre, wrapped around a story a large and consistent share of its own reviewers say loses the plot somewhere in its middle stretch.
7 / 10
Piranha Bytes' post-apocalyptic science-fantasy RPG traded Gothic's medieval valleys for a comet-scarred planet of jetpacks and magic swords, and kept every bit of the studio's famous jank along with it -- nine years on, it is a genuinely divisive game whose fans use the word "uncut gem" without irony and whose detractors mean "worst game ever made" almost as literally.
7 / 10
Emeteria's debut turns into a fluid, chain-reacting sphere and reshuffles reality around you, and that idea alone is worth the price. The kicking-things-off-ledges combat underneath it never catches up.
7 / 10
Hironobu Sakaguchi and Nobuo Uematsu's love letter to PS1-era Square RPGs, its handcrafted diorama worlds finally escaping Apple Arcade exclusivity onto PC and consoles, undercut by pacing that locks core systems away for 20-plus hours and a final stretch reviewers describe as a genuine grind.
7 / 10
A chaotic, systemically fun open-world shooter set against an American cult uprising — increasingly reviewed less on its own merits than on a 2025 Ubisoft EULA change that reviewers say gives the publisher the right to revoke access to games players already paid for.
7 / 10
11 bit studios' sequel trades the original Frostpunk's intimate, one-building-at-a-time survival for a zoomed-out, district-based political simulation set 30 years later — a deliberate redesign that draws Mostly Positive reception on its own terms, but recurs across a remarkably consistent share of longtime fans as having lost the emotional, personal intimacy that made the original a genre-defining classic.
7 / 10
A solo-developed roguelike from Istanbul that turns career survival into a weekly trading floor — clear your student debt or get walked out, across three branching story threads and nine endings, for a one-time NZ$9.99.
7 / 10
Klei Entertainment's deck-building roguelite wraps card combat and card-based negotiation around real narrative choice — praised widely for its writing and world, while a consistent, thoughtful minority argue the cards underneath don't hold up to the genre's best.
7 / 10
A noir-western action-platformer whose fluid movement and art draw strong, consistent praise — reviewers compare its platforming favourably to Celeste — undercut by a title weapon gimmick that a large share of players say never gets used in genuinely interesting ways, and a story that leans heavily on narrative weight it hasn't earned.
7 / 10
A hacking game that uses the real tool names — nmap, hydra, nslookup — attached to a linear, guided mission structure. If you've never opened a terminal it's an excellent doorway. If you work in security, it's a puzzle game wearing your job as a costume.
7 / 10
A card-and-dice tabletop RPG that most reviewers call a genuine improvement on its predecessor in almost every way except the one that matters most in the moment -- the real-time combat every encounter drops you into -- from a small Australian studio that closed for good less than two years after release.
7 / 10
A visually striking, thematically ambitious action-adventure whose bold "no map, no quest markers" promise turns out, according to a large share of its own players, to mean hunting for symbol-matched locks and keys rather than genuine intuitive exploration — and whose combat, marketed heavily in trailers, is repeatedly described by its own fans as not actually the point.
7 / 10
A tactical tower defense from solo developer Tearevo built around one flying fortress under siege from every direction — a hex-grid network of turrets, resource collectors and support modules, split between grounded sieges and scrolling air battles, with a roguelite boost draw and a between-mission tech tree layered on top.
7 / 10
One of gaming's most notorious commercial flops of 2023 — an independently verified $125 million budget, half the studio laid off within months, EA later handing 100% of net revenue to the developer — sits at a genuinely solid 72% positive on Steam, with reviewers criticising clichéd dialogue and poor optimisation while frequently defending the combat and expressing real sympathy for a game whose commercial failure outpaced its actual reception.
7 / 10
A minimalist incremental where every life is a countdown to a death that actually matters — the queue you plan, the story chapter you're on, and the instincts you've earned all carry forward, right up until the game itself stopped moving forward three years ago.
7 / 10
A gorgeous, Pixar-adjacent debut from first-time studio Ember Lab that launched on PlayStation and Epic in September 2021 to near-universal praise for its visuals -- and a just as consistent complaint, across years of reviews, that the combat and story underneath don't quite match them.
7 / 10
A cosy, genuinely inventive horror-comedy about running a 1980s late-night radio show while a killer stalks your callers, undercut by minimal gameplay some reviewers call closer to a visual novel — and by a VR version that was marked for Steam before launch and never arrived.
7 / 10
A handsome, deliberately linear twelve-hour crime story in 1900s Sicily that three in five buyers actually finish — released at NZ$119.95, which is the number most of its arguments are really about.
7 / 10
A genuinely excellent tactical card-battler from the XCOM team, buried at launch under a season pass and paid cosmetics stacked on top of a full-price single-player game, forced launcher software that broke performance, and — years later — a Terms of Service change reviewers describe in the harshest possible terms.
7 / 10
One of the greatest games ever made, rebuilt shot for shot and shipped at NZ$114.99 with performance problems Konami stopped patching in January — now 60% off, eleven months later, for reasons the review page makes obvious.
7 / 10
A genuinely well-written, beautifully presented monster-taming JRPG that sits at Mostly Positive on Steam — noticeably lower than the other entries in Capcom's extraordinary 2025-2026 run — because of two real, well-documented problems even its fans agree on: severe launch-window crashing that Capcom itself has confirmed and investigated, and a genuine feature regression from its predecessor, stripping out multiplayer and meaningful endgame content.
7 / 10
A genuinely unsettling psychological horror story about grief and identity, praised even by its critics for atmosphere and sound design, undercut by one specific, near-universally disliked mechanic gating its true ending — an apple-picking replay loop several fans single out by name as the game's one real flaw.
7 / 10
The Bearded Ladies' XCOM-inspired tactics game, from former Hitman and Payday designers, is Very Positive on Steam eight years on -- but its marketing promise of open tactical freedom runs into a review history that's remarkably consistent about a harder truth: there's really only one viable way to play it, and the game punishes almost every other approach severely.
7 / 10
