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145 Narrative games reviewed and scored, best first.
145 reviews
A near-universally beloved web-swinging superhero game whose PC port has carried an unresolved, save-corrupting crash bug since the day it launched — persisting across three years of patches and still blocking full completion for some players.
8 / 10
The most complete redemption story in gaming, a decade on. The 2016 launch reviews and the 2026 ones are describing almost different games — and the newest wave of criticism has nothing to do with the old one.
8 / 10
The game that brought the isometric party RPG back from the dead, and spent a decade being judged against a memory of Baldur's Gate rather than on its own terms. Fewer than half its buyers finish Act I — but the ones who push through average eighty hours.
8 / 10
A genuinely fresh, emotionally resonant sci-fi shoot-and-hack adventure from Capcom, six years after its original 2020 announcement, praised near-universally for its unusual father-daughter bond and inventive combat — undercut for a real, consistently repeated share of the sample by a combat loop that grows repetitive in its back half, and by genuine, well-documented Denuvo DRM access problems affecting even paying, non-piloting players.
8 / 10
Arkane Austin's 2017 immersive sim remains Very Positive across more than 54,000 Steam reviews, widely regarded as one of the genre's finest achievements — a reputation this review can confirm survived the closure of the very studio that made it, when Arkane Austin was shut down entirely by Microsoft in 2024, and a real controversy over the game's own title, which this review can confirm Bethesda forced onto an unrelated story over the objections of Arkane's own founder.
8 / 10
An emotionally overwhelming, near-universally acclaimed western epic — undermined for over six straight years by a mandatory launcher that reviewers say can prevent you from playing even the offline single-player campaign, and a 2024 "Labor of Love" award many felt the game's own neglect made absurd.
8 / 10
A survival-horror triumph in its first half and a widely-debated tonal collapse in its second, wrapped around Capcom's biggest launch of the year — Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 100,000 Steam reviews and 8 million copies sold, while a large, detailed share of that same sample argues the game falls apart exactly when it should be building toward its climax.
8 / 10
A gorgeous, genre-blending horror-action sequel to Resident Evil 7 — beloved broadly, but facing a real, consistent identity debate from series fans who miss the tighter, scarier tone that came before it, plus a launch-week DRM performance problem that's echoed the franchise's reputation years later.
8 / 10
A visually extraordinary, deeply personal Southern Gothic folktale from Compulsion Games, praised almost universally for its art, music and story, undercut by a real, consistently repeated complaint that its combat grows tedious well before the credits roll — released into a genuinely poignant real-world backdrop in which Xbox reportedly began shutting down the studio that made it only months after publicly celebrating its Peabody Award win.
8 / 10
A potato-powered clicker that spends its idle timers on story instead of retention, and then does the one thing almost nothing in the genre does — it actually finishes.
8 / 10
A cozy management game about dying, and one of the few games that earns the crying its reviews describe. The management half is fetch quests and minigames — which is the honest thing to tell you, because the store page sells it the other way round.
8 / 10
A game whose central mechanic is a 400-day countdown that runs whether you play or not — the most literal treatment of idle time anyone has attempted, and it's 92.3% positive six years on.
8 / 10
Respawn Entertainment's 2016 shooter remains Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 284,000 Steam reviews, widely regarded as one of the finest FPS campaigns ever made — a reputation shadowed by a genuine, years-long multiplayer DDoS crisis this review can confirm directly from the developer's own communications, and by the mandatory EA App launcher requirement that recurs as a real, persistent complaint even in reviews from Steam Deck-era players decades removed from launch.
8 / 10
A tactics RPG built on genuine terrain manipulation and a persuasion-driven branching story, from the producer behind Bravely Default and Octopath Traveler — and a game whose own Steam reviews argue at length about just how much dialogue sits between its battles.
8 / 10
A tactical fantasy RPG where you never actually give a combat order — you write a standing set of instructions for each unit and then watch your army carry them out, which makes it one of the closest things a big-budget console release has come to an automation game.
8 / 10
A solo developer in Edinburgh shipped a complete, story-driven survival-crafting game straight to 1.0 with no Early Access period — a genuine feat that's earned near-universal respect, complicated only by a real and recurring complaint that the store page sells it as something more open-ended than the tightly linear campaign it actually is.
7.5 / 10
The most beautiful open world Ubisoft has built, and the clearest case study in gaming of a cash shop reaching backwards into a game's design. Eight years on it costs NZ$19.99 and holds 89% — but the level gates it built around its XP boosters are still exactly where they were.
7.5 / 10
A genuinely bizarre, endlessly quotable first-person incremental game about growing berries and sacrificing them to a sentient hole — Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 8,000 reviews and driven to virality by a streamer discovery, with an honest, consistent minority complaint that its horror-tinged mystery and mid-game unlock tree don't live up to the strength of its opening hook.
7.5 / 10
A visually stunning, richly written supernatural action game widely called a Remedy highlight — with a genuinely well-documented 2021 "Ultimate Edition without the Ultimate DLC" controversy, and a still-unresolved oddity for a single-player game requiring an internet connection just to launch.
7.5 / 10
Pearl Abyss's massive, visually stunning open-world action-adventure launched to a rocky Mixed reception — a specific, documented 51% positive Steam score in its first days — before climbing to Very Positive within a week and staying there through five months of relentless, near-weekly patches, even as a real, ongoing thread of criticism argues the game never fully shakes its origins as an MMORPG stripped of its multiplayer.
7.5 / 10
The best character-driven strategy game ever made, and the clearest case in gaming of DLC that doesn't just add content but withholds answers. Its players log 117-hour medians and write four-hundred-vote reviews about the storefront.
7.5 / 10
Red Hook rebuilt Darkest Dungeon as a roguelite road trip instead of a long campaign, and three years later the review corpus still splits almost exactly down that line — not a launch controversy that faded, but a genre identity change some fans never made peace with.
7.5 / 10
An open-world zombie survival game with a genuine cult following that grew after release — launched on PC in 2021 with one of the most severe, best-documented data-collection controversies this library has seen, since resolved with an opt-out but still shaping how the game is remembered.
7.5 / 10
Kojima Productions' sequel arrived on PC nine months after its PlayStation 5 exclusive launch with one of the best-optimised AAA ports in recent memory and genuinely expanded delivery and combat systems, sitting Overwhelmingly Positive across nearly 26,000 Steam reviews — tempered by a real, remarkably consistent complaint from longtime fans that its writing, pacing and a hand-holding new companion character fall well short of the original's atmosphere and restraint.
7.5 / 10
