As a boy, I always loved mazes, and today one of my favorite things about video games is the ease with which they can impossibly manipulate space.  So you can imagine what a dream-come-true Expand represents for me as it continuously draws and redraws its maze, repurposing the same canvas over and over again.  It appeals directly to the child at the core of me with its beautifully animated clockwork machinations.

A horrifying examination of human psychological weakness, Clicker Heroes is more disturbingly respectable than clear satire such as Progress Quest for being a fully realized and quite serious effort of game design, but it is not to be played—it is to be hooked up to a computer in a museum where children can go and watch it work (from behind the safety of a thick glass shield) so that they might return home motivated by recurring nightmares which serve to forever remind them of the ease with which a person can be seduced into wasting their life.

Whenever a highly challenging arcade game with quick runs based upon dodging obstacles comes along, every journalist and pundit in the industry declares it a new incarnation of Super Hexagon—though sadly not, as far as I have seen, accompanied by the gruesome headline that we masochists so richly deserve: "Super Hexagain."

The difficulty of reviewing role-playing games is that they so often seem more an assembly of parts than a sum, and, while Child of Light's parts do cohere nicely, it remains a challenge to describe as a whole rather than a collection of discrete elements.  Perhaps this reveals that its coherence is an illusion, or it could just be the nature of the genre.  It's a game that clearly has a soul, but that soul doesn't seem to come from a single auteur so much as a group of artists and designers working hard to ensure that their ideas coalesce.  At times, they strain themselves, but to their credit the seams rarely show.