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145 Narrative games reviewed and scored, best first.
145 reviews
Some of the best-written quests and dialogue in any CRPG, wrapped around turn-based combat that knows what it's doing — and six years of bug reports that never quite stopped, concentrated almost entirely in the co-op mode it was sold on.
7.5 / 10
A gorgeous, confident Bond origin story from the Hitman studio — that abandoned the sandbox design the Hitman studio is famous for, and asks NZ$99.99 for about fifteen hours you won't replay.
7 / 10
A dice-poker deckbuilder set in a shamanic purgatory, reviewed one day after launch on a single professional review, a demo-era user corpus, and Steam's own early data — because the full game itself has exactly one Steam review to its name so far.
7 / 10
An atmospheric, deliberately opaque occult-librarian sim from the Cultist Simulator team — genuinely singular writing and world-building, wrapped around a learning curve so steep and under-explained that a large share of its own reviewers describe needing external spreadsheets just to keep up.
7 / 10
Motive Studio's remake of the 2008 survival-horror classic remains Very Positive across nearly 70,000 Steam reviews, widely credited as one of the finest remakes ever made — a reputation undercut by a real, severe, persistent Denuvo-caused stuttering problem and a mandatory always-online requirement for an entirely single-player game, both of which this review can confirm went unfixed after EA redirected developer Motive Studio to other projects roughly two months after launch, with the studio's own pitches for a sequel subsequently rejected.
7 / 10
A free high-school rom-com visual novel that lets you play the romance or play the matchmaker, fully voiced in three languages, with nothing behind a paywall — the third clean release in a row from a studio that has quietly earned the right to be trusted on that point.
7 / 10
Eidos-Montreal's cyberpunk immersive sim remains Mostly Positive across more than 42,000 Steam reviews for its genuinely excellent stealth gameplay and world-building — undercut by a real, remarkably consistent complaint that its story ends abruptly mid-arc, a flaw this review can confirm the game's own writer has since publicly acknowledged, tied to a since-cancelled sequel that would have resolved it, and to real, dateable studio layoffs still affecting Eidos-Montreal as recently as March 2026.
7 / 10
A one-million-word ChoiceScript interactive novel about a shipwrecked clan finding a new home, nine years in public development before its Steam launch, with one of its two writers carrying a genuinely Very Positive track record on the same imprint and zero independent reviews yet to confirm anything else.
7 / 10
id Software's medieval-set prequel trades DOOM Eternal's frantic weapon-juggling for a slower, shield-and-parry combat framework — widely respected as a deliberate, distinct evolution even by reviewers who call it the "weakest" of the modern trilogy — shadowed by a real, well- documented Xbox layoff that cut the studio by more than half the day before its major DLC launched, and by a long-simmering, genuinely disputed soundtrack controversy resurfacing now that composer Mick Gordon hasn't returned.
7 / 10
A visually gorgeous, warmly voice-acted remake of one of the Dragon Quest franchise's most beloved and expansive entries — Very Positive on Steam, but built around a genuinely controversial decision to substantially trim the content that made the original and its 3DS remake so sprawling, a cut acknowledged even by the game's own fans rather than disputed.
7 / 10
A gorgeous pixel-art adventure with some of the most detailed, distinctive sprite work and sound design in the genre, wrapped around a story a large and consistent share of its own reviewers say loses the plot somewhere in its middle stretch.
7 / 10
Emeteria's debut turns into a fluid, chain-reacting sphere and reshuffles reality around you, and that idea alone is worth the price. The kicking-things-off-ledges combat underneath it never catches up.
7 / 10
A chaotic, systemically fun open-world shooter set against an American cult uprising — increasingly reviewed less on its own merits than on a 2025 Ubisoft EULA change that reviewers say gives the publisher the right to revoke access to games players already paid for.
7 / 10
11 bit studios' sequel trades the original Frostpunk's intimate, one-building-at-a-time survival for a zoomed-out, district-based political simulation set 30 years later — a deliberate redesign that draws Mostly Positive reception on its own terms, but recurs across a remarkably consistent share of longtime fans as having lost the emotional, personal intimacy that made the original a genre-defining classic.
7 / 10
Klei Entertainment's deck-building roguelite wraps card combat and card-based negotiation around real narrative choice — praised widely for its writing and world, while a consistent, thoughtful minority argue the cards underneath don't hold up to the genre's best.
7 / 10
A hacking game that uses the real tool names — nmap, hydra, nslookup — attached to a linear, guided mission structure. If you've never opened a terminal it's an excellent doorway. If you work in security, it's a puzzle game wearing your job as a costume.
7 / 10
A minimalist incremental where every life is a countdown to a death that actually matters — the queue you plan, the story chapter you're on, and the instincts you've earned all carry forward, right up until the game itself stopped moving forward three years ago.
7 / 10
A handsome, deliberately linear twelve-hour crime story in 1900s Sicily that three in five buyers actually finish — released at NZ$119.95, which is the number most of its arguments are really about.
7 / 10
One of the greatest games ever made, rebuilt shot for shot and shipped at NZ$114.99 with performance problems Konami stopped patching in January — now 60% off, eleven months later, for reasons the review page makes obvious.
7 / 10
A genuinely well-written, beautifully presented monster-taming JRPG that sits at Mostly Positive on Steam — noticeably lower than the other entries in Capcom's extraordinary 2025-2026 run — because of two real, well-documented problems even its fans agree on: severe launch-window crashing that Capcom itself has confirmed and investigated, and a genuine feature regression from its predecessor, stripping out multiplayer and meaningful endgame content.
7 / 10
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
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
