This year has been fantastic for story-driven video games. A few months after the release of NORCO, an exhilarating but unsettling point-and-click adventure, came Citizen Sleeper, a cerebral science fiction story with several narrative strands. But I Was a Teenage Exocolonist has suddenly emerged as my favorite of the bunch. It follows the first human space colonists as they establish themselves on a distant planet (apparently) devoid of complex life. The time loop mechanism adds a lot of replay value to this narrative role-playing game’s deck-building, card-based combat, and skill-based checking gameplay. Your spacecraft lands on the alien planet Vertumna

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were one of the most popular forms of children’s entertainment in the late 1980s and early 1990s after making the transition from a dark, satirical comic book to a revolutionary Saturday morning show in 1987. There have been several Turtles video games, each with varied degrees of success. Two arcade games came closest to accurately mimicking the look and feel of the shows, with four-player activities that gobbled up coins quicker than the Turtles went through pizza. Tribute Games created Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge as a love letter to the 1987 edition of