I liked Avowed because it made every nook and cranny of its massive world feel worth exploring. Obsidian’s latest foray into the world of first-person action-RPGs is a remarkably well-realized dive down onto the ground of Eora, the fantasy world previously only viewable from the menu-laden sky of the studio’s Pillars Of Eternity series of more traditional RPGs. I enjoyed Avowed’s fast-paced take on swords-and-spells combat, which blends shooter instincts with meaty character build systems to create unique combinations of powers and abilities. But I also found myself deeply admiring its take on first-person exploration. Every building, every half-glimpsed cave, every waterfall, has something lurking inside to goad players to check it out, and I found myself even more engaged with parkour and environmental puzzle solving than I was with figuring out the best “sword-plus-gun” combination to blast apart a horde of hostile beasts. Often, my reward was delicious, wonderful loot, but just as often I was gifted another glimpse at the game’s excellent writing and lore, which takes the themes of the Eternity games—where mortals both rely on, and live in fear of, tempestuous gods—and blends them with an in-depth exploration of the effects of colonialism on the strife-torn Living Lands. [William Hughes]

I liked Blue Prince because it changed how I looked at the world. I’m particularly susceptible to roguelites. I’ll dive headfirst into whatever cycle I’m given, as long as I keep getting incrementally better at whatever the end goal is. Blue Prince not only scratches that itch with its randomized build-a-floorplan loop, but incentivizes going on one more run with tantalizing big-brain puzzles that encourage Pepe Silvia-style note-taking. Unlike some, I found the built-in frustrations of not drafting the specific rooms or rolling the equipment I needed to test a particular theory part of the fun: If I couldn’t make progress in one area this time, what section of my increasingly complex codex of ideas could I poke and prod at? That impulse, and the game’s incredible “one more mystery” depth (you’ll start to feel like Jon Voight at the start of National Treasure), had me seeing patterns around my city, and had me dreaming up solutions while doing the laundry. I would find myself counting statues, scanning for secrets, running through possible codes, humming its soothing soundtrack, when I should be doing anything else. The gameplay of Blue Prince hooked me, but its boundless secrets made me into an addict. [Jacob Oller]

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