TEKKEN 8
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
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Narrative reviews
145 Narrative games reviewed and scored, best first.
Browse the reviews
145 reviews
The Life and Suffering of Prince Jerian
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
TK Punk Gold
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
Wolfenstein: The New Order
MachineGames' 2014 reboot remains Very Positive across more than 61,000 Steam reviews a decade later, widely credited with successfully reviving a dormant franchise through genuinely strong gunplay and an unexpectedly earnest story — undercut for AMD graphics card owners by a severe, reproducible technical incompatibility this review can confirm has gone unresolved in the developer's own communications for well over a decade.
7 / 10
Assassin's Creed Shadows
Ubisoft's feudal Japan entry delivers genuinely beautiful visuals and a widely loved shinobi protagonist, undercut by a real, consistently repeated "formula fatigue" complaint — towers, icons, repetition — a verified gap between Ubisoft's public promise of full offline play and what reviewers report experiencing in practice, and a heavily monetised in-game store layered on top of a full NZ$109.95 purchase.
6.5 / 10
A Way Out
Hazelight Studios' prison-break co-op predecessor to It Takes Two and Split Fiction remains Very Positive across more than 102,000 Steam reviews for its inventive, purely two-player design — but this review can confirm a real, still-current complaint It Takes Two eventually resolved: A Way Out's mandatory EA App launcher continues to cause connection failures, crashes and Steam-invite friction in reviews dated as recently as August 2025, with no fix announcement found anywhere in the developer's own Steam communications.
6.5 / 10
Blue Archive
A well-loved anime school RPG going through a gacha revolt in real time. Nine of its last hundred English reviews are positive — and the change they're protesting isn't in the version most Steam players are running yet. Reviewed 4 August 2026, mid-storm.
6.5 / 10
Celestial Descends
A Chinese-developed xianxia tactics RPG with a genuinely good grid on it, sold at a fair price with 19 chapters already in the box — and a cultivation ladder that turns out to be the thinnest system in the game.
6.5 / 10
Deathloop
Arkane's stylish time-loop shooter won Game of the Year honours from multiple outlets in 2021, but sits Mostly Positive across more than 30,000 Steam reviews — a notably wider gap between critical acclaim and player reception than sibling title Dishonored 2, driven by a real, detailed "undershoots Dishonored and Prey" complaint from longtime Arkane fans, and by a persistent Denuvo DRM and mandatory-online requirement this review can confirm, unlike Dishonored 2's, has not been removed even five years after launch.
6.5 / 10
Diggin
A short, charming incremental about a young mole drilling into a meteor crater — genuinely distinctive for giving its dig-upgrade-repeat loop an actual story, but held back by spiky progression pacing and a back half that plays itself.
6.5 / 10
Directive 8020
Supermassive set up the best premise they've ever had — a shapeshifting alien aboard a crashed colony ship, where the horror is not trusting the crew — and then spent the second half forgetting to use it.
6.5 / 10
Dragon Age: The Veilguard
BioWare builds its most mechanically confident combat in the series, then spends most of the RPG scaffolding around it — choice continuity, itemization, party structure — to do it, leaving a fun action game wearing a Dragon Age name plenty of longtime fans don't recognise.
6.5 / 10
Fried chicken wings cause love fires
A solo-developed BL suspense visual novel about cannibalism, class and a very literal kind of appetite, two days into Early Access with zero Steam reviews yet — reviewed on the developer's own Early Access FAQ, patch history and a genuinely positive 18-month demo record.
6.5 / 10
Ghostwire: Tokyo
Tango Gameworks' supernatural open-world action game remains Very Positive across more than 20,000 Steam reviews for its genuinely striking, densely realised recreation of Tokyo — undercut by a real, remarkably consistent "beautiful but repetitive" complaint about its combat and side content, and by a specific, unusual, dateable controversy this review can confirm directly: Bethesda added Denuvo DRM to the game roughly a year after launch, bundled inside what its own update was billed as free content.
6.5 / 10
Graveyard Keeper
A medieval cemetery sim with a tech tree the size of a small factory game and a sense of humour about corpse disposal. Also the only game I've reviewed where a player says they finished it out of hatred — and where the community's fix is a mod list that removes the walking.
6.5 / 10
NORSE: Oath of Blood
An XCOM-style Viking tactics RPG with genuinely praised writing that launched in a technical state its own reviewers compared to Early Access — and has spent the months since visibly recovering as negative-review volume collapsed following a string of patches.
6.5 / 10
PatriotMemoirs
A live-action interactive drama about a double-agent infiltrating a collaborationist spy agency in Japanese-occupied Shanghai in 1939, built on genuine branching and a day-cycle resource system, undercut by a narrative its own dedicated audience says leans far harder into romance than the espionage thriller it was sold as.
6.5 / 10
The Unfamiliars
A short, atmospheric first-person horror sim from a solo developer with an established following, whose genuinely effective scares and Night of the Living Dead homage were nearly undercut by real launch bugs — since addressed by nine patches in the game's first week alone.
6.5 / 10
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus
MachineGames' sequel brings B.J. Blazkowicz's fight against a Nazi-occupied America to Steam with genuinely praised gunplay and presentation, sitting Very Positive across nearly 50,000 reviews — undercut by a real, remarkably consistent "step down from The New Order" complaint about cutscene-heavy pacing and underdeveloped new characters, and by a specific, dateable technical incident this review can confirm: an August 2018 patch that broke previously-working video memory handling, which the developer then hotfixed within roughly five days.
6.5 / 10
Yellowcreek Stories - The Cabin Watcher
A first-person, no-combat stealth slasher where a masked killer hunts by noise, light and movement rather than a script — built for one intense sitting, released day one with a single verified user review and a demo that had already been public for five and a half months.
6.5 / 10
Star Wars Outlaws
Ubisoft's first open-world Star Wars game delivers genuinely praised atmosphere and world-building as scoundrel Kay Vess, undercut by a real, consistently repeated "Ubisoft formula fatigue" complaint about an empty, on-rails open world, a specific, reproducible manual cloud-save failure that has cost multiple reviewers dozens of hours of progress, and a patch cadence that this review can confirm effectively stopped in mid-2025 even as bug reports continued well into 2026.
6 / 10
UNSIGHT
A two-person team's espionage FPS split almost evenly between fans who compare it to Project IGI and critics who say its weapons don't hit as hard as its marketing promises — a complaint this review found the developer had already dated patches addressing within days.
6 / 10
Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties
A technically polished remake of a beloved Yakuza entry, bundled with a well-regarded new prequel chapter, whose Mixed reception is driven by two distinct and separately documented problems — substantial cuts to the original's beloved side content, and a genuine, well-sourced controversy over the studio's decision to recast a character using an actor who has admitted to sexual misconduct, despite a sustained fan campaign asking them not to.
6 / 10
The Callisto Protocol
A visually stunning Dead Space spiritual successor that never fully recovered from a disastrous December 2022 performance launch — and whose save-corruption bugs, reported by reviewers three years apart, still haven't been fully resolved.
5.5 / 10