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145 Narrative games reviewed and scored, best first.
145 reviews
A free, story-driven tower defense game about an overworked magical girl reshaping a living barrier to hold back monster waves — short, and so consistently compared to Madoka Magica by its own players that the comparison reads as a shared, spontaneous consensus rather than marketing.
8.5 / 10
The former Telltale team proved the choice-driven narrative game was never dead, just badly run — four million copies, a BAFTA and 97.5% across 181,617 reviews, most of whose complaints are about a release schedule that has since ended.
8.5 / 10
Nine years on, the game that taught Larian how to build Baldur's Gate 3 is still the sharper tactical puzzle of the two — a combat system built from fire, water and armour that rewards a party that thinks in physics, and a brutal opening act that punishes one that doesn't.
8.5 / 10
The Definitive Edition of Dragon Quest XI doesn't reinvent the turn-based JRPG, and that's the point — an orchestral score, a full second 2D presentation of the same 100-hour campaign, and combat that trusts the format instead of subverting it.
8.5 / 10
Read review of Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age — Definitive Edition
A point-and-click adventure dressed as a 1996 educational CD-ROM, with something wrong underneath it. One of the highest-rated games on Steam this year at 99% positive — and its single-save-file design is the reason that number isn't higher still.
8.5 / 10
A subscription MMORPG where one character can learn every job in the game, and where the story you're required to sit through before reaching the current patch has grown into a decade-plus commitment. Reviewed with Dawntrail current and patch 7.55 freshly out.
8.5 / 10
A conventional open-world checklist game wearing the most beautiful presentation layer in the genre — and, after Sony's reported retreat from PC in March 2026, quite possibly the last Sucker Punch game PC players get to buy.
8.5 / 10
An Earthbound-flavoured turn-based RPG about a socially anxious old man, his truffle-pig best friend, and a corporate conspiracy involving giant mushrooms — built around a genuinely novel idea where awkward conversations function as real combat encounters, and near-unanimously loved by the players who've played it.
8.5 / 10
A fantasy JRPG from the Persona 5 team that turns an election campaign into a turn-based RPG's core loop, built around a class system deep enough to carry the whole eighty-hour runtime and a calendar that never lets you forget the clock is running.
8.5 / 10
A hand-drawn Taopunk action-platformer that translates Sekiro's deflection combat into 2D with remarkable precision — and asks you to accept that parrying is the only real answer it has.
8.5 / 10
A short, genuinely inventive puzzle adventure that reaches outside the game window to talk to you — 98.3% positive, and if you're on Linux or Steam Deck you should buy a different version of it.
8.5 / 10
A free horror-fantasy visual novel about a messy, thirty-something friend group dragged back into the wish-granting wonderland of their childhood — remastered and re-released this July to a genuinely spotless review record.
8.5 / 10
A masterfully modernized remake of one of gaming's most influential horror games — briefly and seriously undermined in early 2026 by a new anti-piracy DRM that tanked performance on an already three-year-old game, until Capcom reversed it within a month.
8.5 / 10
A retro survival horror game that wears its Resident Evil and Silent Hill influences openly and still manages real originality — beloved for its atmosphere, queer storytelling and puzzle design, with one honest recurring complaint about how tedious that puzzle design gets.
8.5 / 10
Four years on, 97.2% positive across 176,389 reviews — and its critics are still arguing that the only reason it scores that well is that you play as a cat.
8.5 / 10
A genre-defying puzzle roguelike-lite set in a mysterious manor whose floor plan you draft anew each in-game day, celebrated with a 92 Metascore and widely called one of the most creative puzzle games in years — beloved specifically by players willing to take pages of physical notes, and marked by a real, still-unresolved design tension between its puzzle-solving brain and its randomised, roguelike-lite execution.
8 / 10
A 16-bit-style JRPG built almost entirely by one developer over seven years, whose real achievement isn't the pixel art but a heat-gauge combat system that replaces MP attrition with active turn-by-turn risk management.
8 / 10
The Tropico 6 team builds a pirate haven up the side of a cliff, and the vertical construction turns out to be the best idea in city builders this year. The ship combat it's wrapped around is a dice game with no animations, and that gap is the entire argument about this release.
8 / 10
A genuine, widely-acclaimed reinvention of KOEI TECMO's long-running hack-and-slash series — praised by veteran fans as the best entry in over a decade for its overhauled combat — built around a deliberate, controversial trade-off that a large share of the same fanbase argues cost the series something real: a single silent protagonist replacing the roster of dozens of playable historical officers, and a story that stops at the Battle of Chibi, leaving half the classic Three Kingdoms tale untold at launch.
8 / 10
The second act of the Remake trilogy trades Midgar's corridors for open regions, a deep Synergy-and-Folio combat system and a genuinely excellent card game — then buries a chunk of it under checklist busywork and a PC port that still stutters a year on.
8 / 10
A spectacular retelling of the first five hours of a 1997 classic, stretched to forty — and a PC port whose launch grievances have quietly been fixed while the argument about the story hasn't gone anywhere.
8 / 10
Obsidian shrinks you to the size of an ant and lets that single premise reshape exploration, combat and crafting all at once. Nearly four years after 1.0, the backyard is still one of the smartest survival maps in the genre — even as Obsidian's attention has visibly moved on to the sequel.
8 / 10
Hazelight Studios' GAME OF THE YEAR-winning co-op adventure remains one of gaming's most celebrated couch-co-op experiences, Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 266,000 Steam reviews and independently confirmed to have sold over 23 million copies — undercut for a real, recurring minority of players by a genuinely dark, forced late-game "torture" sequence, and by online connectivity friction this review can confirm was substantially, though not entirely, fixed by a documented May 2024 update removing the mandatory EA Launcher requirement.
8 / 10
The sequel keeps the first game's text-only school-of-magic formula intact and pours the budget into scope instead — a bigger spell list, a crew of Wizards you can delegate to, and a familiar system that splits its own fanbase down the middle.
8 / 10
