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344 Narrative games reviewed and scored, best first.
344 reviews
A gorgeous, warmly-written 2.5D skateboarding platformer that earned its Very Positive score on the strength of the game itself -- and has spent the years since fighting a genuinely documented publisher controversy that has nothing to do with skating.
7 / 10
Owlcat's debut CRPG launched in 2018 famously unfinished, and years of patches earned it a real redemption arc in its own reviews — only for a 2024 change of ownership to hand it a fresh publisher-trust problem that shows up plainly in this year's numbers.
7 / 10
Read review of Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition
A bold, deliberately alienating reinvention of Ice-Pick Lodge's cult plague-town saga — swapping the survival-sim hunger and infection management longtime fans loved for a time-looping detective mystery — that landed Very Positive on Steam even as a genuine, detailed split opened up among the series' own most devoted players.
7 / 10
Obsidian's pirate-flavoured CRPG sequel draws real praise for its writing and open-sea setting, but "combat" is the single most-discussed word in its negative reviews — and one detailed review sums up a whole pattern in the corpus: 100+ hours logged, and still never finished.
7 / 10
A lovingly remembered cult-classic choose-your-own-adventure JRPG, first released on the WonderSwan Color in 2002, brought to Steam by its original developer with genuine long-term fan devotion intact, undercut by AI-upscaled art several returning fans say makes the remaster look worse than the games they grew up with.
7 / 10
A gorgeous Scandinavian-folklore adventure about grief and redemption from a debut studio of PlayStation veterans — critically Strong and Very Positive on Steam, with a very consistent minority complaint that its puzzle pacing, backtracking and slow, unskippable animations undercut the story it's telling.
7 / 10
A stylish "brain punk" action RPG from Bandai Namco with two playable protagonists and genuinely striking presentation -- Very Positive on Steam, though a large share of even its own positive reviews describe a game that runs out of ideas well before the credits, and a cloud-save bug that reviewers say has gone unfixed for years.
7 / 10
The closing chapter of the rebooted Survivor trilogy swapped Crystal Dynamics for Eidos-Montreal and gunfights for stealth and puzzles -- a deliberate pivot that split reviewers in 2018 and, eight years and a Definitive Edition later, is still what most players argue about, alongside a specific progress-blocking puzzle bug that outlived several rounds of patches.
7 / 10
A sci-fi skating-platformer from Heart Machine, the studio behind Hyper Light Drifter -- Very Positive on Steam and genuinely loved for its movement and art, but shadowed across years of reviews by a consistent verdict that it never quite lives up to the pedigree that sold it.
7 / 10
Sonic's first open-world entry, warmly received for boss fights and writing that reviewers say the series hasn't matched in years -- while a growing, high-vote complaint about Denuvo's always-online requirement has nothing to do with hedgehogs at all.
7 / 10
Shift Up's PS5-exclusive-turned-PC-port lands with genuinely praised combat, striking visuals and one of the strongest PC ports of its console-exclusive generation, undercut by a real, widely repeated "style over substance" complaint about shallow side content and a thin story — one this review can confirm the game's own director has publicly, directly admitted was underdeveloped.
7 / 10
A Prohibition-era mafia idle/incremental with 5,000-plus words of dialogue, ten narrative ascensions and multiple endings — well liked by most of its early players, with a save-wiping bug at the finish line that the developer appears to have patched days after two reviewers independently reported it.
7 / 10
A NZ$10.29 fusion of time-loop adventure and idle incremental that has held a Very Positive Steam rating across four and a half years — not by avoiding friction, but by turning the loop's reset into the exact mechanism that makes idle progression permanent, while never fixing the one interface complaint players have repeated since launch week.
7 / 10
An outstanding fighting game that added a cash shop and premium battle pass two months after launch, then spent a year buffing offence until its own 300-hour veterans stopped recognising it — and is only now climbing back.
7 / 10
A genuinely inventive sci-fi survival game about a stranded scientist cloning alternate versions of himself from different life choices, whose acclaimed writing and design were overshadowed at launch by a confirmed, publisher-acknowledged failure to disclose generative-AI content — including leftover AI prompt text found in shipped translations — that this review independently verified through press coverage rather than relying on review-corpus allegations alone.
7 / 10
The trilogy's middle chapter, widely framed by reviewers as a "sophomore slump" that carries over the same combat-design critique this outlet found in the original game — plus a new complaint that its own attempt at a new mechanic (barricades) adds tedium rather than depth, and an ending several reviewers call less satisfying than the first game's.
7 / 10
A stylish witch-fantasy narrative game whose tarot-deck-crafting hook and Deconstructeam pedigree draw strong praise, undercut by a widely repeated complaint that the story pivots midway into a management sim many reviewers found tonally jarring, and that the marketed branching choices resolve into little more than two endings decided by one mid-game question.
7 / 10
A gorgeously atmospheric Victorian folk horror point-and-click whose exceptional opening hours and voice acting draw near-unanimous praise, undercut by an ending a large and vocal share of players say betrays the protagonist and the story's own logic — though a meaningful minority argues it's exactly the cosmic-horror payoff the genre demands.
7 / 10
A menu-driven text adventure about a haunted movie theater and the five black-and-white B-movies inside it — the third entry in Storycentric Worlds' interactive-fiction series, well liked by the small audience that has reviewed it, with recurring complaints about a clunky interaction menu and old-school pixel-hunt puzzle logic.
7 / 10
A life-sim RPG about inheriting an empire that is already failing, built on the most detailed consequence machinery the genre has attempted — and undone slightly by how visible that machinery is.
7 / 10
A 400,000-word gothic CRPG about a minor 18th-century noble's slow corruption into a master of the undead, widely praised for its writing and choice-consequence Trust system — and just as widely criticised, by a smaller but vocal minority, for basic combat, opaque reputation swings, and softlocks that can strand an underprepared build for hours.
7 / 10
A mystery-investigation adventure game set in an oriental fantasy city of humans, dragons and anthropomorphic "beastlings," Very Positive across 154 English-language reviews for its writing and cast -- and consistently misjudged from its cover art, with reviewers repeatedly reassuring newcomers put off by the furry-adjacent character designs that there's nothing adult about it, just a slow-starting, dialogue-heavy story that most reviewers say pays off.
7 / 10
A cyberpunk retelling of the Three Kingdoms crossed with a bishoujo gal game, turn-based combat and a bar-management sim — reviewed on its complete, tiny 29-review Day 1 sample, which already contains a real localization complaint and a genuinely detailed combat critique worth reading before the hype settles.
7 / 10
Obsidian's "evil already won" isometric RPG opens with one of the most original premises in the genre — and then, according to a large share of its own fans, simply stops rather than ends, a truncation reviewers link directly to the sequel and expansions it never got.
7 / 10
