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Narrative reviews

145 Narrative games reviewed and scored, best first.

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145 reviews

Baldur's Gate 3

Three years and eight patches after launch, Larian's D&D epic is still the reference point for what "your choices matter" is supposed to mean — and its two real weaknesses, a lopsided third act and a ruleset that rewards system mastery over roleplay, haven't gone anywhere either.

9.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Disco Elysium

A detective RPG with no combat, twenty-four skills that argue with you inside your own head, and writing that has no real rival in the medium. Its negative reviews are almost entirely from people who call it a masterpiece and ask you not to buy it.

9.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Portal 2

Fifteen years on, Portal 2 remains one of the most acclaimed puzzle games ever made — and its small, honest minority of dissent is worth hearing, from real motion-sickness reports to a considered argument that the sequel traded the original's focus for scale.

9.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Celeste

A precision platformer about climbing a mountain while depressed, built on one of the genre's most respected Assist Mode implementations — and still, honestly, brutally hard for a meaningful slice of the players who bounce off it.

9 / 10

Reviewed

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Cyberpunk 2077

The most famous broken launch in modern gaming is now, five years and one total rebuild later, one of the best open-world RPGs you can buy. Ninety-six of its hundred most recent reviews are positive. The thing to check before buying isn't the game any more — it's the licence.

9 / 10

Reviewed

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God of War

A near-universally acclaimed reinvention of the series into a slower, more personal Norse epic — praised almost unanimously, with an honest, considered minority of longtime original-series fans who miss the classic combat, and a real, recurring Steam Deck "Verified" labeling problem tied to a documented memory leak.

9 / 10

Reviewed

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Hi-Fi RUSH

Tango Gameworks' rhythm-action surprise remains Overwhelmingly Positive across nearly 36,000 Steam reviews, widely regarded as one of the finest games Xbox has published in a decade — a reputation shadowed by a genuinely poignant, fully documented history this review can confirm in

9 / 10

Reviewed

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Inscryption

A card-based deckbuilder that spends its first act convincing you it's a horror-tinged roguelike, then spends the next two acts proving that was never the whole game — a genre-shifting puzzle box from Daniel Mullins Games that has held a 96.8% Overwhelmingly Positive rating across 134,000-plus Steam reviews for nearly five years, even as a consistent minority feels misled by its own store page.

9 / 10

Reviewed

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INSIDE

A haunting, wordless puzzle-platformer from the makers of Limbo, whose ending has divided players in exactly the same way for nearly a decade — not through controversy, but through a deliberate ambiguity some find profound and others find frustrating.

9 / 10

Reviewed

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OMORI

A turn-based RPG that splits its time between a colourful dream world and a grounded, emotionally heavy reality, built around themes of grief and mental health with a level of care that's earned it one of the most devoted followings of any recent indie RPG.

9 / 10

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Outer Wilds

A time-loop mystery about a tiny solar system that "everyone says" you need to experience knowing nothing about — Overwhelmingly Positive at 95.6%, and honest enough with itself that its own top negative review is a genuinely unresolved crowdfunding controversy, not a design flaw.

9 / 10

Reviewed

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Papers, Please

A border-checkpoint bureaucracy simulator that turns document-checking into genuine drama, thirteen years on. Its creator says its themes have only become more relevant with time — a fact he finds less like vindication and more like a tragedy.

9 / 10

Reviewed

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Persona 5 Royal

The version of Persona 5 that's actually for sale everywhere now, and the one worth reviewing on its own mechanical terms — a turn-based JRPG whose real engine isn't the combat or the style, it's a calendar that turns every evening into a resource-allocation decision with consequences that outlast the day.

9 / 10

Reviewed

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RimWorld

A colony sim that treats the AI storyteller, not the tech tree, as the main system — every skill point your colonists earn is really just raising the stakes for the disaster it's about to send you. Seven years and five expansions after 1.0, the total price of owning everything has become one of the review's own subjects.

9 / 10

Reviewed

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SOMA

A philosophical sci-fi horror game about consciousness, identity and what survives an underwater apocalypse — nine years on, still Overwhelmingly Positive, and still honestly criticized by a consistent minority for gameplay that some feel gets in the story's way.

9 / 10

Reviewed

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Split Fiction

Hazelight Studios' co-op action-adventure follow-up to 2021's Game of the Year winner It Takes Two, drawing Overwhelmingly Positive reviews and near-universal praise for its inventive, constantly-shifting gameplay and unusually generous Friend's Pass model — with a smaller, coherent minority of the same fanbase arguing its writing and characters fall short of its predecessor.

9 / 10

Reviewed

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Undertale

A decade-old solo-developed RPG that redefined what a choice-driven combat system could mean, sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive across a third of a million reviews. The recurring negative review isn't a criticism of the game so much as a criticism of how impossible it is to live up to its own reputation.

9 / 10

Reviewed

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Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling

The Paper Mario game a huge share of its own reviewers say Nintendo stopped making — turn-based RPG combat, real puzzle-solving abilities, genuine charm — built by a small independent team instead, and rarely called out for anything beyond a handful of specific, old-school JRPG design choices.

8.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Chronigma

A free time-travel Sokoban puzzler that gets one specific, difficult idea exactly right — solving a puzzle by recording your own past actions and then working alongside the ghost of what you just did.

8.5 / 10

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