Most younger SW fans are baffled by the relatively mixed reception Empire Strikes Back received in 1980. So was I.

It’s a shame, because I think it’s the best immersive sim since the original Deus Ex. It has a remarkable clarity of purpose, and each of its systems fits seamlessly with the others. There’s also a thoughtfulness to its lore and level design (which complement each other beautifully) that I don’t see in a lot of other…

That level in Edith Finch was so effective. I felt like I was really going crazy while playing it.

Glad there was a nod to Dishonored too. That series has had some of the best level design in any game. Dishonored 2's Clockwork Mansion and the time-jumping Stilton Mansion stages were masterful.

Very minor spoilers follows...

I love that there are always about ten different ways to accomplish anything in Prey, and that the game never seems to have any preference as to which one you go with. So often, “player choice” in this type of game comes down to a menu of predetermined paths toward completing any particular objective (i.e., “do I do…

Prey was easily one of my more favorite gaming experiences in recent memory. And I feel like it wildly flew under the radar. I know one other person who played it and they barely got a few hours into it because “it was too hard”.

Thank you for having Prey on this list. Best advice I ever followed was the advice on this site to turn off waypoints. Prey was the first game that gave me that same feeling I had playing Half-Life for the first time. The exploration and non-linear puzzle solving was a blast. I loved finding a way into a room and then…

The Art Museum heist in Persona 5 is an absolute masterpiece of design and gameplay from beginning to end. Can’t express how much that level has stuck with me over pretty much anything else I’ve played this year.

I don’t think any 2017 gaming moment was more downright shocking for me than when Prey implored me to pick up a wrench and shatter the window overlooking the generic near-future city, only to reveal that the window was a space age two-way looking glass that hid a vast lab devoted to studying the every move of the hero.

Yeah, who wants to see a beloved entity be taken over by some corporate overlords? Why that’d be like this here AV Club being purchased by some large conglomerate and shifting its editorial viewpoint to accommodate their new corporate masters.

I liked Prey because it made suspending disbelief so easy.

What a great coverage of titles in a year fully saturated with all-time classics. My quick top 5:

This was an astonishingly good year for video games, if not always the culture around them. The best games were confident, experimental, thoughtful, surprising, and entirely sincere. Wolfenstein II had a deranged vision about the horrors of American Nazism and what was needed to fight it, but it was also one it fully…

Sorry for the double post, but because 2017 in particular had so many darn outstanding games released, I wanted to do a separate thread for personal top 10 lists.

/cheer Battle Chef Brigade praise!

I finally watched Homecoming the other night and, yeah, that was way better than I expected. Among Spiderman movies, it did the best job of characterizing a Spiderman that’s actually a high schooler. Also, Keaton was an amazing villain (that conversational scene in the car... I know you already used the phrase “hot…

It honestly felt like they took a look at all the action cinema of recent years and decided to take everyone back to school. Seeing fury road literally ruined me for all other action-y movies for like two years afterwards. All those weightless CGI extravaganzas that go wide and sprawling and feel like watching someone…

I can’t believe how much I enjoyed The Man From U.N.C.L.E. It was charming as hell.

A seemingly endless series of indelible images, and some of the best action ever committed to film. An instant classic. Mad Max: Fury Road is the only movie I have seen twice in the theater in the last decade. I just watched it on blu-ray for the first time in preparation for this column, and I don’t know if it was…

The Life and Death Brigade is egregious, especially their random Steampunk-Beatles (specifically Across the Universe reminiscent which is even more random?) scene in the reboot but I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for “You Jump, I Jump, Jack.” It’s totally indulgent and overdone and everything wrong with the LADB…