It’s not being spelt out overtly, but there is a whiff of Intel’s new Battlemage GPUs being pitched as what the Alchemist generation should have been. Those eventually grew into their PCIe shoes, but only after months of dial-shifting driver updates – whereas the flagship B580 promises Nvidia-besting games performance from the off. Even at such a stage in the current graphics generation (the GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 could be revealed literally tonight, at CES 2025), there is something enticing about that proposition.
]]>At any given moment I am in the center of a wonderful vortex of skeletons. Bones splash and rattle and burst out of the ground in sharp, horrible spurs. My weakest skeletons, sensing their death coming, explode into fire and shards. My strongest skeletons fight so hard and with such alacrity that upon dying, they drag their spirits together and keep fighting as ghosts for a while. Foul little bone scorpions skitter around on fans of legs made from human hands. Somewhere in the middle, almost invisible among the noise, is the character I am actually playing: Path of Exile 2’s mean-spirited, callous, and gleefully enjoyable Witch.
This is a review in progress. It has to be. Even in its incomplete early access period, Path of Exile 2 is a great sprawling mass of a game. Three meaty acts of a planned six act campaign are followed by a trickier return tour through them, before the absurd endgame kicks into gear and the real work begins. If I came to you having played everything on offer I would be wild-haired, bloodshot-eyed and possessing perfect, incomprehensible knowledge. Let’s compromise: I have toured the dark caverns and the antediluvian crypts. I have been killed by various accumulated nasties. I’ve had a great time.
]]>"We are a people who honour democracy," said the dog, scratching himself. "Per our custom, you may drink of our fresh water." The dog was called Senator Umeshefaat, and he was very civil, even if he was shedding his black and white fur everywhere. We spoke in his home village at dawn. Later, I examined the senator's personal history more thoroughly and discovered he was "hated by bears for cooking them a rancid meal." I suppose every politician has their enemies.
That Caves Of Qud creates fun anecdotes out of simple encounters shouldn't be a surprise. It has had 15 years of early access to establish itself as a small-but-mighty story generating roguelike of repute (there's a reason it sits deservedly side-by-side with Dwarf Fortress in the same publishing house). After creating many characters, and dying and dying and dying again, I understand why it grips the brain with such fierce glee. It is a machine of grand imagination and adventuresome comedy. A deceptively powerful RPG that isn't half as obtuse to newcomers as the screenshots make it out to be. Qud's low-res bark is just a complement to its bite.
]]>At first I thought Marvel Rivals was basically rebranded Overwatch, in the way it's a free-to-play PVP hero shooter. And in some ways, it is. Fights are like if you took a MOBA and forced both teams to bash heads constantly. Success lies in picking off Spider-Man or Squirrel Girl or Marcus Fenix so as they wait to respawn, you hop on the big area that needs capturing. Or you push the cart while tanky Hulk absorbs bullets with his biceps and John Marvel snipes from afar.
The more I played Rivals, though, the more it hit me that it's specifically a messier, more complex Overwatch. A hero shooter with a surprising amount of polish and charm, sure, but also one that slides off my brain like water off Birdman's back. I understand why it's supremely popular at the moment and yet, I really don't.
]]>Pity the "relaxing" games which set out to blanket their players in a wholesome fog. These minimalist or slight experiences set their stall against the mainstream philosophy of video game design focused on action, rules, clear progression, and often violence. So it is with Naiad, a sometimes pleasant swim down a river in which you sing to make flowers grow and discover poems by interacting with birds, bees, butterflies and other fauna.
Yet here's the cause of my pity. All those other games, with their decisive action, systemic consequence, and neck-snapping: I was playing those to relax, too. Why else would I have snapped all those necks? Being shorn of base pleasures does not make Naiad a restorative oasis amid a desert of stressful video games, and it doesn't make it more relaxing than its peers. In fact, it makes for an experience that left me restless, even a little anxious, when it made me feel anything at all.
]]>London Gatwick Airport is a rare shade of brown, known to neither science nor art. A brown that doesn’t appear on the light spectrum. No easel contains it. It is a dusty brown, a damp brown, a hot and earthy brown that hums with the stinging malodour of disturbed ancient moss where once old forests stood. Descending into Gatwick’s cloying brown from 33,000 feet is like flying under and up Gandalf’s wretched cloak and landing in one of the several horrible little magic pouches he keeps by his balls.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 captures Gatwick’s brown perfectly. Next to the stupefying natural beauty of Yosemite, the imposing imperial skyscrapers of the Manhattan skyline and the surging majesty of the Alpine peaks, this local rot-tinged patch of West Sussex is the most impressively realistic depiction of a place I have seen in a game.
]]>I’m quite smitten by the Nintendo DS stylings and traditional roguelike charms of Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon Of Serpentcoil Island, but I’m having real trouble summoning up the motivation to repeatedly grind through its opening levels to get to the interesting stuff. Early stages soon lose any real sense of surprise, and later ones can feel low on real agency. I want a new roguelike run to feel vital and verdant; heady with grand plans and plan-shattering twists. But by having randomness influence each run so significantly, Mystery Dungeon feels fickle instead of emergent - less than the sum of some incredibly novel and creative parts.
]]>Every fascist in this game has a cold. The Hitlerites and blackshirts of Indiana Jones And The Great Circle sneeze and cough as they patrol the dig sites of Gizeh, or the marble corridors of the Vatican. Although this is the Machine Games' clever way of letting you know where your enemies are at all times, it is also mildly funny, as if all the Nazis have been secretly kissing each other, spreading the same rhinovirus from Italy to Egypt to Nepal and beyond. More than that, it's a stubborn reminder that, despite the many hours of perfectly motion-captured cinematics that accompany all this, you are still playing a video game. A snotty tissue that separates the Indy of taut two-hour cinema and the Indy of a sweeping first-person punch 'em up that will take days to complete. All this is to say, you will notice the difference. But that might not matter; they're both still Indiana Jones.
]]>Nightdive, you done good. The Thing: Remastered is an ultra-sharp and commendably playable update to a game that history will remember as ‘actually a pretty good pick at Choices when you really just popped in to get some Revels but got embarrassed when the till staffer said “is that everything?” in a tone that could have been neutral but equally could have been a damning indictment of your character’.
I’m being slightly facetious here, of course. History actually remembers Computer Artworks’s 2002 shooty horror game for how incredibly ambitious and conceptually inventive its proto-sus social squad system was. In homage to the body-snatching alien paranoia of Carpenter’s 1982 horror classic, The Thing tasks you with not just assembling and directing a squad, but keeping them from breaking down or turning on you - in fear you might be hosting the titular molecular stowaway.
]]>I'll come out and say it: I had no idea, really, what Infinity Nikki was about before I dove in. I knew from some trailers that it was a free-to-play game about collecting pretty dresses and exploring a relentlessly positive open world. In those respects, I was correct.
I'd just missed the really big part - the fact it's a pacifistic Genshin Impact wearing a pretty dress. And as that realisation sunk in for the first time, my heart also sank with it. I really tried, I mean really tried to get into Nikki's gacha offerings; to delight in its menagerie of menus and cash in countless currencies for fun socks or glitzy tiaras. Sadly, I won't be logging back in ever again.
]]>While Mechabellum’s disparate roster of roast ’em riddle ‘em robots might initially seem to lack the characterful coherence of a writhing Zerg ecosystem or ancient Greek phalanx, this strategy autobattler’s array of lumbering tanks, hulking automata, and zippy fliers do share a common thread: each one of them has the potential to be either the most terrifying nuisance on the field, or to instantly crumble like a soggy strudel in an angry washing machine. With each mech able to become another mech's worse nightmare, it becomes a game about stretching tight budgets to balance reactive counters with devastating offensives; about identifying the butterfly wings that can send tornados through your opponent’s ranks. It’s about the moments that eat up the hours like nothing else.
]]>We’re probably all past "And in the game" jokes by now, but it is fitting that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart Of Chornobyl is about venturing into a shattered world and enduring the worst of its logic-defying hardships to find the treasures within. This is a bold, uncompromising survival FPS that can easily capture you for days on end – but I can’t invite you back into the Zone without hammering in a few hundred warning signs reading "DANGER: BUGS". In Ukrainian, obviously.
]]>My time with Threshold has been fraught with pain. Five times. Five times I had to restart this psychological horror game because of some game-breaking bug. And yet, I persevered, booting it back up and returning to my government-mandated shift atop a quiet mountain.
Ultimately, I gave Threshold chance after chance because I was totally taken by my shift and my immense desire to find out just what I was actually doing. Anyway, it's time for me to clock off! I urge you to take over until I'm back. It's worth it.
]]>I am a very casual enjoyer of Metal Slug games. I've never actually paid for one of these side-scrolling shoot 'em ups, except for all the countless coins I happily pumped into arcade machines as a child. To this day, if I see a rare glittering cabinet running one of these crunchy shmups, I will go ham for twenty or thirty minutes, and walk away satisfied that I have seen a lot of very good pixels. These games, I am convinced, were never really designed to be completed, but to be played exactly like this, as a coin-gobbling invitation to become a bandana-wearing sisyphus, a tiny Rambo pushing a bouncy, juddering tank up a hill occupied by cartoon nazis. You die a bunch and say: "ah, that was good."
So what happens when you rearrange the molecules of this run and/or gun 'em up into an isometric turn-based strategy game? You get Metal Slug Tactics, an off-kilter nod to Into The Breach and other grid-based turn-takers, but secretly housing the aggressive notions of an unhinged pyromaniac. You still die a lot. And you still walk away feeling fairly happy about it.
]]>Sorry We're Closed is a retro survival horror-inspired game about escaping the clutches of an excessively horny demon who desperately wants your heart. As someone who isn't often into the 'lore' behind things and prefers to just shoot and ask questions later, I found myself actually asking the questions. I wanted to know why I was targeted by such carnal eroticism. I wanted to know more about my character's own relationships. How angels fit into the picture. And why lots of the demons seem quite chill, really.
But when it came to the actual survival - the bit I thought I'd enjoy the most - I came away a bit disappointed. Exploration is fine, it's just the combat is often too frequent and too frequently irritating. I came to dread the action more than the atmosphere, in the end.
]]>Theme park management sim Planet Coaster was all about making roller coasters that would push your park guests to the edge of puking up their overpriced burgers while making sure the excitement levels of your twisting rides remained high. Planet Coaster 2 wants to do that again, but this time adds water parks into the mix, with slides to design, pools to plop down, and raft rides that you can click together to form ambitiously speedy spirals. You can feel some creative pride when you look down on the watery wonderland you've made with these tools. But you may also wonder if it was worth the effort. As a newcomer to Planet management games, I've found this slippy sequel fiddly, cumbersome, and poorly explained.
]]>Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake's premise is bluntly, delightfully simple. The Archfiend Baramos, as evil as he is mysterious, is up and about. He’s got ill designs on the world. Your Dad tried to stop him, and he died. He fell into a volcano. We absolutely can’t be having that.
This is, more than anything else, a game about Going On An Adventure. Well walked ground, of course, but it’s rare to see it embarked upon with such barefaced delight, or such a wholehearted commitment to going the distance. It is a very big and a very simple RPG that is as wide as an ocean and as deep as a pond; a game to curl up with and play lazily and—with some sour caveats—enjoyably, for an entire winter.
]]>Here’s a Steam quote for you: ‘The Rise Of The Golden Idol is the best game I’ve ever played where I spent most of my time staring at the screen going “well what chuffing well is it, then?!” Fiendish but fair, this detective puzzler demands a heady mix of observation, deduction, and logic, but rewards you with a progressively engaging story, and steadily more infuriatingly brilliant puzzles. Despite teaching you everything you need to know in the tutorial, it still manages to introduce new wrinkles and twists on the formula with each fresh chapter. My verdict? Imagine me lying my floor, massaging my temple with one hand and giving a fat thumbs up with the other.
]]>Great God Grove is, in a word, bonkers. I’ve stopped a small community from completing a blood ritual, played the role of matchmaker to a group of lonely hearts that involved organising a date with god, and plastered a statue with paint as part of a revolutionary movement to uplift the power of art. My time with GGG has been a pick n’ mix of colourful escapades, and together with its story of godly woes, striking art style, vacuum-based puzzle-solving, and nightmare-inducing puppet work, I’m now a die-hard LimboLane devotee.
]]>When I was a competitive long-distance runner at school, breath control was paramount. We were never really taught this, mind. It was an art you picked up through practice: how to breathe before the race, saturating your blood with O2 without dizzying yourself; when to permit the shorter, emergency breaths and when to apply restraint; when to deepen your inhales and charge yourself up for an attack on a hill.
And then, how to organise your body around your breath, straightening your posture to expand your lungs without tipping back too far and squandering muscle power; how to breath in time with your stride and the movement of your shoulders, so as to firm up your momentum and shave a miraculous-feeling minute off your finishing time. All this, plus various daft psychological war gambits of my own devising. When overtaking or being overtaken, I used to seal my lips shut on that side and breath through the other corner of my mouth, to make it look like I was hardly out of breath at all.
]]>As a yearly blockbuster, Call of Duty, through sheer expense and effort, would like you to think it is the Die Hard of video games. Or, depending on the setting, the Saving Private Ryan of video games. But it is barely Black Hawk Down. This latest campaign in Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 reminds me more of the forgettable Netflix shootfests that thumbnail their way across your TV screen as you try to find some gritty nothing to aid you in zoning out of life. Still, there is an anecdotal contingent of casual sofa sitters for whom Call Of Duty is the game. A balls-to-the-wall shooter to return to every winter and rinse through in a weekend. Ed has already gestured at its multiplayer, announcing: "yup, it's COD", like a deeply tired Captain Birdseye inspecting the day's catch, wondering when his life will change. But never mind that. How does the single player story mode hold up? Some are calling it the best campaign in years. And I guess that's true, in the sense that it is the least worst.
]]>To say that Factorio: Space Age throws out the rulebook is an understatement. It'd be more fitting to say it's somehow automated the whole process: an inserter plucked out the rulebook from my brain and deposited it in hot magma, while a new rulebook was churned out in a nearby machine and plopped into my brain from the other side - only for that to be immediately plucked out and incinerated as well. With each new planet and each new phase, Space Age reinvents itself. I'm battling hyperbole here, but ah hell, I admit defeat. Factorio: Space Age is a masterpiece, the final form of perhaps the most well-crafted building game I'll ever play.
]]>It’s tempting to frame Straftat as a throwback to an older, better time for the multiplayer FPS, when the lingo was coded in frags and gibs and sucking it down, when satisfaction was drawn entirely from performance rather than some convoluted, artificial system of progression. Not only would this be inaccurate, but it would also do a disservice to what Straftat truly is, namely a wild overcorrection in response to the direction of modern multiplayer gunfests, one that careens straight through retro stations to arrive somewhere new and exciting.
]]>I was excited for Slitterhead, an action adventure game by Bokeh Studio, a studio founded by none other than your boy Keiichiro Toyama: the creator of Silent Hill, Gravity Rush, and the Siren series. And within that first hour, Slitterhead's body-possessing and Hong Kong-inspired streets had me thinking, "Is this it, the sleeper hit of 2024?!"
No, sadly not. It's no doubt built a compelling universe filled with brain-sucking aliens that masquerade as humans, and it attempts plenty else besides: bouncing between bodies as you stealth around dingy apartment blocks, fighting with blood katanas, and gorging on pools of red plasma to refuel skills, many of which require more body-flitting. Thing is, they are ultimately just attempts, attempts that fall victim to an emptiness and jitteriness that quickly reveals Slitterhead's true, irritating form.
]]>People have asked me, a Call Of Duty liker, "How's the new COD?" - such is the mass appeal of Call Of Duty that even a lot of my non-industry pals are invested in whether Black Ops 6's shooty really does bang. And every single time my brain clunks into gear and I turn inwards, where I struggle to come up with anything meaningful to say. So much so that a fog develops and out of the fog emerges a figure - it's me. I'm holding an M4A1 with an extended barrel and a vertical foregrip. My brain and body perform a pincer movement of physical response: 1) I shrug 2) I say, "It's like Call Of Duty".
]]>You can feel two ways about something at the same time. The feuding academics of Life Is Strange: Double Exposure might call this "emotional superposition". But the word "ambivalent" already exists. So let's say I'm ambivalent about this new adventure featuring Max Caulfield, the returning hero of Life Is Strange, and time-travelling photographer whose powers have resurfaced after years of off-screen atrophy. I've been deeply moved by individual scenes in this sequel. By the end I was sorry to leave its characters behind. At the same time (please now imagine my face is splitting into a second, colour-washed expression with wobbly VFX) I am relieved it's over, so I don't have to deal with the inconsistent behaviour of those characters, the flimsy plot, and a convoluted approach to murder mystery.
]]>If there’s one thing I’d like to get across about my time with Dragon Age: The Veilguard - perhaps a surprise given Bioware’s recent history, Anthem, and some of the early marketing for this game - it’s that in my 50 hour return to Thedas, I very rarely felt I was playing something cynical.
]]>Look up major events in 2011 and there's some world-changing stuff... and some not so world-changing stuff. Shadows Of The Damned's Xbox 360/PS3 release may slip into either camp, depending on whether you liked it back in the day or not. It's a third-person action adventure where two famous video game folks joined forces: No More Heroes' Suda51 and Resident Evil's Shinji Mikami. And to my knowledge, it's considered a bit of a cult classic.
So, having played Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered after never experiencing the original, do I think it's any good? If you were a fan of the OG, there's no doubt you'll like it. If you're coming in as a newbie, I think it's refreshing in the sense it's a trim throwback with some interesting ideas and middling-to-good execution. But its whole schtick isn't only a product of its time - it's actually downright yucky.
]]>Zotac are one of the better graphics card makers of the post-EVGA era, so even as the early pangs of handheld gaming PC fatigue start to creep in, I’ve been keeping a hopeful eye on the Zotac Zone. This is their take on a Steam Deck rival, or more specifically, the Steam Deck OLED, as this is the first real competitor to go for a similarly star-bright, colour-erupting AMOLED display. Cor, phwoar, and indeed, wowzers.
Much like a Zotac GPU, the Zone is chunkier than you might like but ultimately well-crafted. It successfully combines that rich screen with oodles of input features and Deck-thrashing performance, though between its high price and a downright vampiric thirst for battery juice, it’s definitely more of a specialist tool than a crowd-pleasing portable.
]]>One of my favourite internet jokes is: "I enjoy video games because they let me live out my wildest fantasies, like being assigned a task and then completing that task". Wilmot's Warehouse felt like that joke made manifest, putting you in the shoes of a tiny warehouse working squareboi. This puzzle-solving sequel, Wilmot Works It Out, doesn't come packaged with its predecessor's wry humour, nor the same sense of compulsion. Instead, it exudes a calm and homely sense of idle comfort. For me, that ultimately makes it less compelling, even if it is thematically the entire point. This is about a warehouse worker doing jigsaws on his day off.
]]>When I was little, I really liked what I saw of Shin chan, even if it was just largely flashes of his bare arse on Japanese TV. He seemed mischievous, a bit of a menace, and part of a fun family dynamic. Flash forward to now and I can only describe the lad as… jarring. At least, I think he's an odd flag-bearer for a series of games where you live out a nostalgic, Japanese summer in the countryside.
And I think it's doubly weird that Shin chan: Shiro And The Coal Town opts for a collectathon approach, that doesn't necessarily make the act of living out a Cicada Summer all that mesmerising. But, and this is a big but: I can't stop thinking about it. Of all the games of 2024, Coal Town may have left the biggest impression on me. In a way, I hope it does for you, too.
]]>Neva is the Sophomore effort from Nomada Studio, who you may remember from their beautiful, dreamy platformer Gris. Neva is not a literal sequel to Gris, but it certainly seems to be one in a spiritual sense, as it, too, is a floaty hand-illustrated platformer fond of metaphor. Neva introduces some drama, with combat and a health system (if not actual stakes because of near-instant restarts), and although neither the platforming nor combat are precise enough to be neat bedfellows, I think we should be willing to forgive most of the mess.
]]>Write travel journalism to imaginary places, my spaghetti once spelled out. Do package holidays count? In Nahantu’s jungles, I linger to take shots of vines spilling from verdigris-kissed cages, of footfall-slicked stone paths and mesoamerican mosaics. Even Vessel Of Hatred’s malignancy feels like a grimly gorgeous tourist trap. Trip Advisor-recommended cyclopean polyps. TikTok viral demonic cysts. I’ve even got a leopard cub to pose with. He’s not sedated, promise. He’s just like that. I told him how much the ultimate edition costs and he’s been catatonic ever since.
I’d like to stick around, but I keep getting ushered along to the next leg of the tour. There are mobs to pop into goo like ripe spots, each fight as slick and frictionless as a pygmy hippo in a butter bath. There are a dozen different tiered resources and event types designed to make repetition feel like progress, until hell freezes over then melts again. It’s fine, Blizzard packed me some wellies. It’s all so comfortable I suspect they’d have thrown in some Xanax and a back rub if they could.
]]>A paper aeroplane falls at my feet, with a note written inside: "Even through everything that has happened... I never stopped loving you." Kind Words 2 is full of touching and drifting remarks like this, written by other players and tossed into the winds for you to find. If you're allergic to vulnerability, or find cuteness or the "wholesome" games trend hard to digest, you've probably already turned your face away. But if your heart is open, even a smidge, if you carry a deep craving to peer through the cracks in the internet to discover a small realm of common humanity, then Kind Words 2 can show you a glimpse of that warm and welcoming world.
]]>Mouthwashing's greatest triumph is placing you at the scene. The first being the most obvious crime: a captain steering their space freighter into harm's way, entirely on purpose. You're there, staring through the eyes of the person in the cockpit. You open the locker and grab the key and insert it into the safety override panel with a satisfying click. You see the plastic casing spring open and the red button emerge. You press it and listen to the sirens whirr. You grab the steering wheel and yank it.
]]>No game protagonist is more willing to stick his hand down a toilet than James Sunderland. Why is he doing this? You would have to ask him or the psychiatrist he badly requires. And it's unlikely he'd explain himself. This isn't the type of story in which the protagonist has difficulty accepting the existence of horrors, nor struggles with the surreality of what he needs to do to get through a locked door. In the opening minutes, James finds a well with a glowing red square floating inside, stares into it (it saves your game), then makes a calm remark about the odd sensation he feels, and moves on. The human corpses that pepper the town of Silent Hill are noticeably that of James himself, his head bludgeoned and bloodied beyond recognition but his jacket and boots unmistakable. He makes no remark on this. It's probably nothing.
]]>Graham asked me if I'd discovered what the metaphor in Metaphor: ReFantazio might be, and I replied, "I don't know haha", or something along those lines. Having given it more thought, I think there are two metaphors: 1) It plays quite like Persona. 2) Its story is like a commentary on our society… or something to that effect.
Metaphors aside, though, the game is a gigantic fantasy RPG that's technically better than Persona 5 in a lot of ways. Structurally, it feels less repetitive. It has more animated cutscenes that elevate those key story moments. You can brush aside weaker enemies in real-time combat, rather than face them in tiresome turn-based tangoes. And overall, I think it's the best game Persona or Persona-like Atlus have put out - it really is brilliant. But there's a part of me that feels like it's missing something that'll leave it less ingrained in the memory than Persona 5 once its final chapter has closed.
]]>There’s a genre of lesser fun that only makes itself known to me once I’ve completely given up on enjoying a game in any traditional sense, lurking under the surface like a silly icon on a losing scratchcard. I’ll call it ‘system tourism’ in lieu of something better. It’s not like the actually fulfilling virtual tourism you might do in something like Yakuza’s Kamurocho, where you’re scarfing down deep fried whiskeys, entranced by the lights. It’s more like doing a Google street view tour of Venice’s canals to see if you can spot someone taking a leak off the side of a gondola - hunting for anarchic anomalies because, honestly, the sights just aren’t grabbing you.
At the risk of sounding like some sort of horrible joy-mathematician: My experience with open world zombie survival game Dread Dawn involved precisely two and half discrete instances of fun, plus some additional appreciation for a few genuinely good ambient bits I’ll get into shortly. With a significant overhaul of basically every player interaction Dread Dawn offers - from the abysmally tedious looting to the rusty combat - it might some day be worth your time. It harbours some incredible ambition, though it’s surrounded by murk and detritus, like a dictatorial rat in a toilet bowl. Mostly, though, I can only give you advance warning to avoid it.
]]>Playing Phoenix Springs feels like David Lynch spliced together the ripped pages of a pulpy sci-fi comic with the storyboards of a broody noir. Its visuals are stark and foreboding, its dialogue delivered in riddles, and its haunting choral music sounds like it's been recorded in a wind tunnel. It’s a point-and-click that calls back to early 90’s Lucas Arts adventure games, and while it shares the same frustrations, the presentation makes it feel entirely contemporary. What begins as a standard detective game - chatting to strangers, rummaging through junk, finding addresses found on the net - soon spirals into something else entirely. I’ve finished it twice and I’m still not sure I totally understand what it all means.
]]>I am puzzled by Ara Colon History Untold's priorities. At its heart are a couple of interesting ideas undermined by its own determination to put the wrong thing on centre stage. Make a rich and elaborate resource management game with an unorthodox research system, but then spend so much time on a simultaneous turn system and detailed animations that you're left with a cumbersome interface and lifeless AI, and you too might wind up making Ara.
There's an almost great game here, but it's all neglected and bruised from being shoved into the packaging of a lacklustre 4X.
]]>Something feels off. I’ve brought an utterly improbable Champions League title to Aston Villa, built an enviable Ultimate Team and developed a formation that keeps at least outright humiliation at bay in online matches… And yet, my heart isn’t bursting with the joy of joga bonito. This must be how Guardiola feels, popping onto the pitch to celebrate his annual Prem title with the latest batch of ruthlessly efficient, lab-grown wonderkids and pushing down the feeling that this one doesn’t feel quite as special as the first.
That is to say, EA Sports FC25 is a bit like FC24. Which was quite a lot like FIFAs 21-23, which had a lot in common with the FIFAs our ancient ancestors used to play by the fireside in their primitive tribal dwellings. There are noticeable additions - particularly new tactics controls and a 5v5 Rush mode - and I’m glad they’re here. But as much as they contribute towards a continuously compelling suite of foot-to-ball, they can’t quite dislodge the nagging feeling that this shouldn’t be an annual, full-price release anymore.
]]>The beauty of cards is that they can be anything. You can slap together a working game with them in a couple of minutes. Take 12 blanks, doodle some faces and landscapes, and lo, you have a procedural narrative generator. Make some duplicates, invent a few rules and lo, you have systems.
Conversely, the great drawback of cards - especially in those roguelite deckbuilders people have been churning out since Slay The Spire - is that everything can be reduced to them. For example: last night, I played a round of Fungi with my partner, Fungi being a charming tabletop foraging sim in which you gather scrumptious chantarelles and boletus from the forest floor. This morning I resumed playing Breachway, out now in early access, in which you guide a starship through a series of wartorn solar systems, with battles unfolding as a turn-based exchange of cards corresponding to ship components.
]]>As befits the “very normal gardening game” that puzzly mystery box Grunn winkingly bills itself as, the first tool I obtained was a pair of shears. The second tool I obtained was a trumpet. It doesn’t really work like a trumpet, and it does things no regular trumpet could or should do. I got a trowel next. Here’s the thing about the trowel: it’s a pretty good trowel. Nothing fancy. But recently, I keep digging up… objects. Objects most peculiar. I’ve got the weekend to sort this garden, and a cosy little shed to sleep in, so I really should just get on with it. Again, though, I must reiterate: I keep digging up… objects.
I go to clean some rubbish from the bathroom. I interact with the mirror and the game says: “You do not see anything in the mirror”. I take a note that says: I do not see anything in the mirror. I check the game again and no, I still do not see anything in the mirror. Sure it’s fine. Just a shit mirror, probably. They should get it replaced. What good is a mirror you can’t see anything in?
]]>Wartorn sci-fi extraction shooter The Forever Winter has had a messy launch into early access. For those who don't know the game, this third-person helljaunt sees its players wandering through the battlefields of an endless conflict between three major world powers. Mechs stomp past you, ignoring you in favour of decimating enemy soldiers. Bug-like drones hover overhead, scanning for prey. And horrifying mommy harvesters scavenge bodies from the debris. As a collection of imagery, it's powerful stuff. As a game that you can play (with up to three pals) it is very rough, and not just around the edges.
]]>Like a samurai poised patiently for an opening in their opponent’s defences, Shogun Showdown understands that focus and finesse are the means to delivering an impactful blow. This rare roguelike distils the genre down to its purest components, all in favour of amplifying its dizzying combat that plays gracefully with the concepts of positioning and patience. Highly refined, stylish and complex, Shogun Showdown is a delight.
]]>For years, a dangerous and charismatic game has evaded the grasp of many designers. Some say it doesn't exist, that no publisher would ever back it. I'm talking about the one city block RPG that Warren Spector has often mentioned. Sure, we've seen a few usual suspects already - Deus Ex Mankind Divided, Disco Elysium, even Else: Heart.Break - they all grimace in the line-up but nothing ever sticks. Now, out of the gloom of indie development, comes another perp ready to have his mugshot taken. Shadows Of Doubt is an open world detective sim that comes perilously close to being our guy. Its clothes, stature, gait, and fingerprints match the description of what Spector often describes. And yet, if you tilt your head, something is just a little off. The game isn't confined to one block. It's not an RPG precisely. And its simulation has plenty of bugs, jank, and unintentional comedy. But after all this time, in the absence of a smoking gun, shouldn't we just put this guy in the slammer and call the case closed? I say yes, let's. Officers! Arrest this game, it's brilliant.
]]>When playing a new Soulslike, there’s an element of translation involved while you figure out the language of the game. What are the upgrade materials called? What’s the equivalent of poison? What are experience points and checkpoints called, although you’re going to call them souls and bonfires anyway? I’ve done this many, many times, but on this occasion there was a surprising twist, one which would have notorious pearl-clutching racist HP Lovecraft spinning in his grave. Enotria: The Last Song’s arcane Soulslike language is actually just Italian.
]]>Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed is a remaster of Disney Epic Mickey, a cult classic 3D platformer first released a decade ago on the Wii. In the original you controlled the titular Mickey Mouse who, armed with a magical paintbrush (wieldable by waving the Wiimote about), could paint or rub out surfaces to solve puzzles. It was the work of Junction Studios led by Warren Spector, best known for being The Deus Ex Guy. No, sadly Mickey could not nano-augment his brush for better target acquisition, nor project laser-guided anti-tank rockets from his podgy white mitts.
And no, Rebrushed doesn't let him do anything of these either. Clearly a missed opportunity. But is it better nonetheless? With an updated look, some added secrets, more moves for Mickey, and controller/M&K support, I'd say longtime Mickey heads will adore this nostalgia trip. For total newcomers like me, I'd say it's a platformer that's certainly charming and clever and wonderfully experimental, but a bit flat in places too.
]]>Spoilers throughout. TLDR: fun, generous, beautiful animation and cinematography. Worked mostly fine on my PC. I would not have given it the best narrative award if it were up against Gran Turismo 7.
Writing of the frigid framing of Clockwork Orange’s atrocities, the film critic Pauline Kael asked: “is there anything sadder - and ultimately more repellent - than a clean-minded pornographer?” The lavishly directed and animated universe of God Of War Ragnarok is far from repellent, but it also feels spiritually squeegeed; a world of pulpy violence so chirpy and chaste as to strain belief that the scars that haunt its reformed anti-hero could have ever been inflicted there.
]]>I'm reasonably sure Final Fantasy 16 isn't the longest Final Fantasy I've ever played, but it feels that way, for a multitude of reasons. The major one is that a lot of its quests exist to create distance between places and plot beats. They are overwritten errands such as bringing people lunch or fetching herbs or carrying letters - dessicated, MMO-ish fare, thrust into a moderately enjoyable action-RPG for the sake of incremental worldbuilding and scale.
]]>Frostpunk 2 was an ambitious gambit. With survival achieved, and the introduction's excellently sinister advisor whispering evil Tory ideas, the whole city you built in Frostpunk is now just the headquarters for a sprawling expansion effort, and your rule is no longer absolute. Rather than retread the same "prepare for ultra-Winter" ground, your biggest obstacle will likely be your own people, now formed into shifting political parties, and looking outward with colonial eyes. The result is a complicated, laborious survival citybuilder that's two parts compelling, and one part frustrating for the wrong reasons.
]]>I really wanted to like action adventure The Plucky Squire more than I do now, having given its charming 2D to 3D platforming a proper whirl. Yes, it's lovely to look at. Yes, hopping out of a storybook and making friends with an illustration on a coffee mug is cool. And yes, everyone can have a mildly fun time with its puzzles and fights. But that's the problem: who is everyone? At first I thought, "This game is for young kids and that's fine!", given its relative simplicity. Then I hit some puzzles and thought, "Ain't no kid figuring this out".
Then it hit me. It struggles to balance the fine line between being approachable for tiny tots and layered enough for people who've graduated from "goo goo ga ga" to "oo oo aa aa my back hurts". And that's down to how plucky you're allowed to squire at any given time, because it can be surprisingly limited and, sadly, a bit underwhelming.
]]>You can't travel back to the 1980s. But what if I told you it was possible to gently warp your memories of that time? UFO 50 is a kart of 50 games that once existed for an old computer system, all lovingly restored by a gang of coders. The old console, of course, is a fiction. The LX-I never existed. But it's a fun pseudo-history against which to create a grab bag of small games (some throwaway, others mighty) all designed with a distinct 80s look. It's an exercise in adhering to an aesthetic. Like an oil painter working with a limited range of colours, the developers of this bundle have stuck to a 32-colour equivalent of the Zorn palette. Yet play a little of each game, and you start to sense the smirk of chronos. These games aren't stuck in the past, but they are enjoying a holiday there.
]]>Tiny Glade has been a constant presence on TikTok for the last year or so. It's never far away. In between burrito recipes and hymns to the Fujifilm X100v, this gorgeous toylike art tool's gamely turning stretches of balmy meadow into semi-ruined castles, semi-ruined villages and semi-ruined citadels.
Dreamy and slightly haunted, it's conjured words like "bewitching" and "spellbinding" in the comments sections, too. It makes sense, really. Tiny Glade's a game about making rustic dioramas and then photographing them. It's not hard to imagine some exiled magical person might live in here among the rocks and reeds and wild heather.
]]>I am lost in my own factory. From every direction, every angle, conveyor belts and smelters and assemblers obscure my senses and envelop my being. Twenty hours ago I placed my first manufacturer somewhere around here. Back then it represented the state of the art, hatching me a pristine batch of 1.25 computers every minute - now I’ve forgotten where I put the damn thing, after delving into my factory’s guts to hook that piddly yet still useful batch of old relics up to my main production line. I’m building supercomputers now, and the many manufacturers that make those are hungry.
Something is always hungry in Satisfactory, and that hunger pulls you from task to task in a near-seamless and frankly beautiful daze of ever-escalating industry. It is mesmerising and it is fearsome, and after five years of early access it’s finally complete.
]]>Better check those desert dunes again Caravan SandWitch, someone’s buried the lede. An open world you can explore in a few relaxed evenings? One that favours the joyous freeform sightseeing of an Elden Ring or Breath Of The Wild; where you’ll scramble up vast industrial concrete ruins on scavenging missions for inquisitive frogs, instead of being nagged by bothersome checklists?
]]>There are cold opens and there are freezing ones. Sci-fi roguelike shooter Wild Bastards doesn't start on its strongest cowboy boot. You are dumped into the middle of an interstellar chase and summarily shown the ropes. The guns feel simplistic, the arenas bare, the loot vanilla, and the entire loop of beaming down to a planet and getting into small-scale "showdowns" threatens to become stale within the first hour or so. But then you find an outlaw buddy who offers a new way to shoot human dirtbags. Then another fellow bandit. And another. By the time your spaceship is half-filled with scoundrels and weirdoes shouting at each other, the game has warmed up enough to reveal its central idea. This ain't no grand FPS campaign, nor is it quick as roguelikes go. It's a snacky shootout sim with tumbleweed towns that feels best when you savour the pre-fight suspense.
]]>There's something about mostly empty urban centers in the US that depresses me and disturbs my soul. Whenever I visit family in the States and find myself in a derelict shopping plaza or some other place affected by America's depressing sense of architectural planning and overreliance on cars, I can't help but feel a sense of dread.
Devil's Hideout, a point and click horror game made by indie dev Cosmic Void, takes place in one such abandoned American city, and manages to deliver on this sense of dread even if its eerie hellscape is rough around the edges.
]]>Bear with me on this, but I adore how swordfighting works in Dune. Ubiquitous wearable sci-fi shields repel any attack that comes in too fast, so everyone has to learn this unique, overtly dance-like form of close-quarters combat where every thrust and parry is necessarily slow and considered. Picture it: careful judgments of your movements, weighing up the right time to strike, every measured jab part of a wider strategy that culminates in the kill.
MOBAs are like that. Both in the fights themselves, sort of, where probing lunges lead up to bursts of lethality, but more broadly in each match as a whole. They’re map-wide knife fights, where a thrust is a well-judged lane push and a parry a savvy item buy. At first, playing Smite 2 felt akin to watching on helplessly as my opponents repeatedly shoved their crysknives through my ribs. After 30 hours, it often still feels like that - but I am enjoying myself. Mostly. Despite Valve’s third-person elephant in the lane.
]]>It's been 13 years since the first Space Marine came out. While it wasn't outstanding in the grander landscape of gaming, enough Warhammer 40K fans seem to have cherished the escapades of bulky blue boltgunner Demetrian Titus for the action game to merit a sequel a decade later. It left its story on something of a cliffhanger, with said hero being dragged away to face untold tortures by the Inquisition, the most zealous sect of this preternaturally paranoid sci-fi universe. Today, Titus is free again. Free to stomp towards hordes of alien foes, blast them with a plasma incinerator, and shred the stragglers with a chainsaw sword. Space Marine 2 is an often-satisfying scrapper that has me convinced of 40K's merit as a crafting ground for excellent-looking environments and creatures, even if I'm not particularly moved by the bland character of Titus and his fellow Ultramarines.
]]>Keeping your eyes on the road isn’t easy when the horizon hosts crackling azure nebula; when the voluminous nightglow from the planet below makes even the gargantuan industrial indicators look like so many tiny, twinkling cat eyes. I, a terrestrial chump, cannot help be taken in by it all. But I get the sense all this spacey wonder is just so much unremarkable grease pooling at the rim of a diner plate for my Star Trucker. He’s seen a couple things, that’s for sure. Taken the long way round the spiral arm to slip past security checkpoints and offload cases of booze for off-the-record cash. Seen reduced-to-clear Ginster’s wrappers glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. Hummed that Freebird solo a thousand times while waiting for the traffic to thin out near the shoulder of Orion.
]]>Sometimes you forget to build a graveyard. It happens. When ten citizens dropped dead on the roads of one of my settlements in post-apocalyptic city builder Endzone 2, I had to work fast to avoid a sickness breaking out. But graveyards require a lot of space, and if you've already filled your shanty town with a sea of corrugated metal roofs, this poses a problem. Welcome to the pleasant headache of town planning in a post-nuclear world, where most of the land is brown and uninhabitable.
]]>Stormgate is a confusing proposition. It's an RTS directed by former Blizzard developers that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike StarCraft. It's a free-to-play game, but has a business model that makes you feel like you're getting a rougher deal than if you just dropped thirty notes for it outright. It's available now in Early Access, but has already been available in a kind of gravity-defying Super Early Access for several weeks (which you had to pay to get into).
All of which has made me feel very tired, and yearn for the days when you went into a shop and bought a game in a box for a set amount of money, and the whole game was in the box and you went home and put it on your PC and played it until your mum said "Richard!" (only my mum calls me Richard) "get off that computer and go outside and get some exercise! Do you want to be dead at 35?" Well, I'm 36 now mum. Nearly 37. So who's laughing through their heart palpitations now?
]]>When we talk about a game having a sense of place, it’s often about how adroitly it covers up the necessary falsehoods of a world contrived to accommodate the player character. It’s the good kind of lie. One with purpose, like Lucas smearing vaseline over the camera lens to cover up the landspeeder’s wheels. Star Wars Outlaws, then, is a strange case. Because while its planets and cities do feel ersatz as living places, they’re kind of incredible as film sets. That’s your job here. This is where the game is. You don’t play it so much as you perform your role in a series of loving, enthusiastic callbacks. That’s a star war. This is a star war. Oh, hey, I know that! That’s one of my favourite star warses.
]]>I've yet to discover a SteamWorld game I don't like. Whether plundering the earth in SteamWorld Dig 2 or mucking about with magic in SteamWorld Quest, these are solid and approachable adventures that enthusiastically embrace whatever theme the developers have decided upon. Cowboys? Sure. Wizards? Why not. It barely matters, as long as it results in some good puns. As a studio, Thunderful have a reputation for hopping from one style of game to the next, boiling entire genres down to their essence, and reconstituting them with competence and style to exist within a now-familiar steampunk world of colourful pals and Saturday morning cartoon jokes. The studio is a perpetual notion machine. Yes, with SteamWorld Heist 2, they're revisiting the sci-fi bullet-bouncing of their 2016 tactics game SteamWorld Heist, but they're also introducing significant changes to create a compulsive XCOM-like full of sea-faring submariners that may be their best work yet, even against a back catalogue of blinders.
]]>Tactical Breach Wizards is a tactics game for people that don’t like tactics games. Magically, it’s also a tactics game for people who love them like nothing else. It’s permissive and demanding; playful and tense. Its globe-spanning plot covers conspiracies, PMCs, and brutal theocratic dictatorships. It also features a traffic-summoning warlock named Steve wearing a hi-vis robe. It’s finding that one absolutely, perfectly ridiculous XCOM turn, every turn…and at the same time knowing it’s absolutely, perfectly fine if you don’t. In short: it’s one of the most enjoyable tactics games I’ve ever played, and the only tactics game with a pyromancer so rubbish he relies on making his enemies pass out from heatstroke.
]]>Black Myth: Wukong is an action RPG that leans a bit into the Souls camp and a bit into the adventure camp. And either way, it's a spectacular journey that works for mostly everyone: those after challenging fights against Chinese mythological creatures, and those after the same thing, but with a little less challenge than your typical Soulslikes. What separates Black Myth from the crowd, though, is its slick presentation and a sense of generosity. You're to witness the most lavish, cinematic worlds and its creatures. And you're to enjoy battering everything with your staff as a highly athletic monkey with copious spells at his furry follicles and fingertips. It's been a while since I've played anything quite as impressive as this.
]]>Over 2000 hours spent in various factory games makes me a bit of a purist, I suppose. In theory, I should then be the ideal reviewer to enjoy Shapez 2. But I'm also the ideal reviewer to tear it apart over the most minor hiccups and defects. I'm the Anton Ego of factory games. I don't like food, I love it. If I don't love it, I don't swallow.
Ah, you needn't worry. This is by far the most fun I've had reviewing a game, and Shapez 2 has, in my mind at least, turned the holy trinity of factory games (Factorio, Satisfactory, Dyson Sphere Program) into a holy quartet. Its pared back, everything-is-free-forever approach is quite liberating, and I've never had so much fun placing conveyor belts in my life. But 40 hours into my save file, I've often found myself yearning for a bit more creativity in the challenges, a few more curveballs sent in my direction.
]]>The Crimson Diamond is a proper old-school style puzzle adventure. It's 2D pixel art, with a limited colour palette as in EGA games, and you control it with a text parser, like King's Quest or one of them other Sierra adventures old men like Graham remember. It's important to mention this up front because it's very possible that, despite The Crimson Diamond's tale of betrayal, murder, and mineral rights in 1914 Canada, the text parser element will be a Rubicon you instantly can't be arsed to cross. A not unreasonable stance - though I think the text parser in The Crimson Diamond is fantastic. Such beef that I have with this adventure game is down to the specificity required to solve some of the puzzles.
]]>When I zoom the camera on Alex's momentarily untensed face while he's dozing by the pool, it's not because I'm a creep. When I pursue Ayo and Dija around the garden, keeping their feet and butts in shot as they belittle each other, it's not because I'm a busybody and a lech. And when I pan to the lighthouse piercing the sunset beyond the security spikes it's not out of any feeling of wonder, or even curiosity about possible escape routes. Please understand: I do not see these people, these objects at all, just the boneless, faceless traces they leave upon my own servitude to the lens.
]]>Hm. Hmmmm. Right. So, what have we got here? There’s my Blood Donor card, which reduces the value of the hearts I play, but also heals me. That’s fine, actually. Reduced score means I can squeeze in another card for more healing. If I can pull my Tarot card, I'll deal damage with each heal, and I’ve already pulled two scratch cards for yet more quick damage. Now, if I can just pull a Jack, I can plonk down the King Of Space And Time for a brutal finisher. That’ll transfer everything on my side over to my opponent’s, forcing a bust for a nice final chunk of hurt and…
]]>The first World Of Goo was a cheerful parade of goopy engineering with a sense of never-ending novelty (well, never-ending for about four hours). Every level would introduce a new goo type or a twist on the basic bridge-building puzzle that challenged you to get a gaggle of gurgling balls to the nearest pipe. World Of Goo 2 pursues that sense of novelty with just as much twitchy eagerness as its predecessor, throwing new toys and goos at the player in an effort to keep you on your sludge-coated toes. That pursuit doesn't always result in pleasing new levels, though. There is a "hit and miss" feeling to things this time around. But those hits are hits. For anyone who has spent the last 16 years yearning for more sticky structure-building: I hope you like comically unpredictable fluids.
]]>"Again, but better" has become the maxim of post-Steam Deck portable PCs. Or, to be more specific, post-Steam Deck OLED ones. Now that Valve have shown it’s possible to quickly turn around an upgraded handheld without enraging owners of the original, Lenovo have hinted at a new Legion Go, MSI have revealed an improved Claw, and Asus have released this here ROG Ally X. A ROG Ally, again – but better? Yes, it is, in almost every way except the speed at which it’ll plunge you into financial destitution.
]]>British comedy is too often defined by its relationship to America: either as merely irony and sarcasm, which we're told Americans don't understand, or as a sprightly ideas factory for works such as The Office, which Americans can bless by re-making at scale.
Peel back the curtains of American cultural hegemony however and you may find the true pulsing core of British comedy that lies beneath: innuendo. No American network is in a bidding war to import Vic and Bob or remake Bottom, and Carry On and Benny Hill are assumed to be anachronisms in our modern times, but Thank Goodness You're Here! enters the conversation with a nudge and a wink. It's a cheeky 2-3 hour adventure through a small northern town, and it's here to educate the entire world of our nation's obsession with sausages and bare bottoms.
]]>At ten past nine every evening he sends you out into the darkening world. He's the presenter of Krypta FM - pronounced with the chopped staccato of every good radio announcer as Kryp! Ta! FM! - and you are his eager listener and hopeful protege. Sniff the evening air. Breathe deep! The small town world that lies sleeping all around you is just teeming with cryptids, surely. Anyone seen a mothman lately? A werewolf? Grab a camera and get out there - but be safe, okay?
]]>Capcom's turned back the clock with Kunitsu-Gami: Path Of The Goddess, bringing to us an action RPG tower defence hybrid that's very 2000s and very welcome in this age of open world, live service-ness. And for some, it'll deliver what's needed: a fairly good time. A time marked by a loop that does hack 'n slash, management, and a dash of base repairs to an average degree. For me, though, and possibly many others, I simply don't think this mix ever truly captures what makes even the simplest of tower defence games so captivating.
]]>In the heyday of Sierra's adventure game years, there was a series called Space Quest that featured an intergalactic janitor named Roger Wilco. The series was more satirical than King's Quest, less preachy than Police Quest, and not quite as adult as Leisure Suit Larry. Spearheaded by Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe - a pair of devs who called themselves "Two Guys from Andromeda" - Space Quest was renowned for its humour, and there was a nice sense of progression throughout most of the series, with Roger Wilco leveling up from working class spaceman to the head of his own Star Trek ship.
]]>Arranger is a puzzle game about moving, in both metaphorical and literal senses. Movement is the entire basis for the puzzles in Arranger, and is hard to explain without showing you (if you're able to watch the trailer that will be helpful). The world of Arranger is divided into a grid, and you don't move the main character, feisty misfit kid Jemma, across the squares. Rather, imagine that the row or column Jemma is on becomes a travelator, and you control the direction and speed of it. Jemma stands still and you move the ground, and anything on it left, right, up or down - like How To Say Goodbye but with more squares. It's one of those things that makes sense when you're doing it, trust me.
]]>Take me back to the soft blue light, Conscript. It’s safe there, in the save room. No body-armoured heavies with trench raiding clubs. No tunnels choked with sickly, mushy-pea green gas. No rats feasting on my ankles, occasionally inflicting a disease that halves my health bar. “Christ, they’re sending runners now?” the rifleman asks as I hoof south from Fort Souville after a gruelling trench defence whittles down my resources to a busted fightin’ spade and a handful of pistol bullets.
]]>Usually when a game makes me want to stop playing and go outside it’s a bad sign, but with Dungeons of Hinterberg it’s different. It’s an action RPG that made me pine for the outdoors and want to be whisked away from all my responsibilities and just exist for a bit. Each time I would finish playing I’d be thinking about my next getaway, and although dungeon delving wouldn’t be on my holiday itinerary Dungeons of Hinterberg is making me think twice.
]]>I increasingly judge Souls-adjacent games not by the height of their bosses or the depth of their dungeons, but the cleverness of their shortcuts, and Flintlock: Siege Of Dawn has my favourite shortcuts in an age. Rather than just being routes around to the other side of a barred door - though there are plenty such Lordrannish loops to find in this game - they consist of aerial chains of magic, purple triangles that suck you toward them when you hold a button. They lend vigour to a branching, faux-Napoleonic world that might otherwise be a collection of atmospheric strolls between bonfire-equivalents and fights defined by taut resourcing systems. They're idiot-proof grappling points from which you can launch yourself at another triangle, a ledgeful of upgrade materials, or a loitering musketeer who is in urgent need of a ground-pound.
]]>My favourite ever mode of travel in games is flying, so I was already poised (in mid-air) to really enjoy swooping around the world of Flock. It's a gentle exploration game from the people who brought you Wimot's Warehouse and I Am Dead (including Pip Warr, RPS in peace) where you never touch the ground, instead gliding around the strange forests and rippling meadows atop a giant bird with a beautiful trailing tail. Big Journey vibes, but more whimsical and colourful.
]]>So I’ve just hopped on my motorbike, enjoying one of several pleasingly incongruent classical musical tracks that plays from the radio, on my way to tick tasks off a list in the top right corner of my screen by scavenging an abandoned hospital. It’s a great hospital, by the way. Spotlight-headed phantasma shamble about corridors reminiscent of The Division 2 or The Last Of Us’s naturalia.
Striking, but also within easy reach of comparisons. And if Once Human was purely the collection of x from ys it very much appears to be, I’m not sure I’d have much positive to say about it. On the surface, what you're getting here is a 6/10 third-person shooter from ten years ago that gleefully spills thumbtacks along any simple paths to progress with live service obfuscation, propped up by a detached crafting and building economy that has you popping mined rocks and chopped wood in the oven then taking out freshly baked shotguns a few minutes later. Its systems run the gamut from numbly enjoyable to being a source of major psychic damage, and even the simple act of replacing your initial tier I rustic baseball cap means navigating several menus, currencies, and resources.
]]>Lots of games use frogs as a means to appeal to those who believe they are cute, me being one of those people. The humble croaker dominates the wholesome category, where they take centre stage in farming sims or as detectives or as green lads who hop over platforms and hurt enemies by lashing them with their tongues.
Schim is different: you play as a frog of the shadows, not some green attention-seeker. And in a mundane world of vibrant colour, you're to bounce between patches of shade in search of a human pal whose shadow you've been unwittingly severed from. What ensues is a charming puzzler of both freedom and flow, which genuinely has you view everyday environments through the googly eyes of a phantom amphibian. It's a lovely thing, if perhaps not as emotionally charged as it implies early on.
]]>You ever do that thing on a fairground ride or rollercoaster where you sort of pull your neck and face back in preparation for extreme motion? Welcome to kick-exalting FPS Anger Foot. Violence is brutal and cartoonish. Slight mistakes kill you instantly. The soundtrack slaps. There’s an easy Devolver labelmate orientation point here, but if Hotline Miami was a cocktail of chemical euphoria and gut guilt, like realising you’ve accidentally pocketed someone’s lighter at a festival, Anger Foot is doing whippits out of balloon animals then having a great time rhythmically headbutting a portaloo for a few hours. Similarly, it’s also a bit of a masochistic ordeal to put yourself through. But, man. What a buzz.
]]>Many years ago game designers advised their peers to make their prototypes "juicy". They were talking about the nebulous collection of sensations a player is exposed to when heads explode, coins jangle, and balls bounce. Zenless Zone Zero is a game deeply informed by the philosophy of juice. Like the lootbox hawkers of yesteryear, gacha designers understand the appeal and power of a pleasingly animated gizmo, ker-chunking open and fizzing with potential. This poppy visual and sonic language stretches across Hoyo's latest game, from its cinematic moments, to each character's attacks, to the cute bunny mascots that erupt into gatling guns, to the barista's coffee-making ritual and the recipes of the robo-limbed noodle server. The menu screens, the maps, the free-to-play storefront, everything. It is all very juicy. It is pumped with juice, but only in the same way supermarket chicken is pumped with water.
]]>What to compare Nine Sols’ flowing Sekiro-like 2D combat and layered metroidvania exploration to? The eternally sequel-less Hollow Knight? The punishing roguelite trappings of Dead Cells? 2D Souls-nuzzling Salt and Sacrifice? I wouldn’t know, because I’ve always had such trouble with slashing, blocking, and jumping in two dimensions that not only have I barely played any of the above, I’ve missed out a swathe of important platformers in the belief I just didn’t have it in me to manage them. But Nine Sols is so generous, so creative, so lucid and upfront in its ruleset, even as it crushes you with sometimes absurd difficulty, that playing it has opened up an entire library of classics I might have otherwise missed out on. I don’t have the experience to tell you what this game does better than others of its ilk, but I can tell how it made me feel. And for a game that murdered me with such relentless frequency, Nine Sols made me feel invincible.
]]>If nothing else, Workers & Resources Colon Soviet Republic will give anyone an appreciation of the incredible complexity and difficulty of building and maintaining a city. On another day I might call it the first ever city building game.
Even a Settlers or Factorio cannot match its extreme focus on logistical simulation. It isn't realism for its own sake (look no further than the automated vehicles and the ludicrous citizen behaviour to refute that), but a fundamentally different interpretation of what city building means. It's about co-ordinating all your pieces so they'll be in the right place to support each other, and how the whole is all that matters, but that whole will fail if you don't organise its parts. It is… a lot. It's too much at times. But if you have those times, it will occupy them like nothing else.
]]>I'd been in Paris to see open world action-RPG Shadow Of The Erdtree early and when I got back, Edwin messaged me. He asked whether I thought it was big enough to consider the DLC a pseudo-sequel, and at the time I said something along the lines of, "It's hefty, but I think that's probably pushing it".
I was wrong. The Land Of Shadow may not be as expansive as the base game's Lands Between, but it's knottier, denser, more of a twisting mass that burrows into the earth and soars into the skies. For this reason I think it produces some of Elden Ring's finest moments, as exploration leads to a truer sense of discovery reminiscent of old Souls. But I also think its sheer density exposes more chinks in its open world format, where its interconnected sprawl leads to even greater recollection paralysis.
]]>Scottish petrochemical horror is not exactly a genre, but maybe it ought to be. From the opening moments of Still Wakes The Deep you know life on its 1970s North Sea oil rig is precarious. Leaky ceilings, busted panelling, faulty drill machinery - the omens pile up as you spend your first thirty minutes wandering through the colleague-packed canteen and over the platform into the boss' office for a severe dressing-down. It's a classic pre-disaster setup for a mostly traditional monster story, yet the game sticks expertly to the first-person horror form, and its voice actors' performances are so spot-on, that it'd feel churlish to judge this foaming fear simulator for sticking to type. It also has some markedly unsettling use of the shipping forecast, a famously dull feature of British radio I definitely did not expect to freak me out in a video game.
]]>“When I was young,” the villager washing garments in the river says, “I thought it was enough to clean the dirty laundry once and be calm. Not that it will get dirty forever.” I’m not sure I’ve ever felt the crushing weight of universal entropic decay so keenly as in that RPG maker textbox, nested upon Felvidek’s nicotine-stain hues. I’ll need to clean my keyboard soon. I keep taking screenshots of Felvidek. I can’t take enough. I want to make a scrapbook of every character and every line. Neither my laundry nor keyboard will ever be clean forever either, but if I hate Felvidek for emphasising that, I love it for reminding me that all the best art is buttressed by an irremovable layer of deep, thick grime.
]]>You like F.E.A.R.? You like DOOM? Yeah, I bet you like FPSing where you're outsmarting soldiers in offices with a nailgun and gibbing demons like you're ploughing a Hummer through a sequence of pheasants in an alternate universe Evil Somerset. No, it doesn't boast a title in all-caps, but Selaco's early access release more than deserves it's spot as a must-play for those who desire some sophistication with their ultra-violence.
]]>I regret not covering Skald Colon Against The Black Priory when its developer told us about it 2019. I'd get to be so smug now.
Skald is terrific. I've tried to come up with a clever angle on its journey, but they all wind up saying the same thing: For all its retro stylings (right down to party portraits taking up an unnecessary quarter of the screen at all times), it's an accessible, charming treat, and the best modernisation of 80s RPGs that I've ever played.
]]>I cannot compare my experience of writing a review for The Splintered Sea, the first paid expansion for dastardly clever physics puzzle builder Besiege, to that of a journaling sailor facing lethal storms on the horizon. Still, if we take for granted the idea that a review is only really valuable as an insight into the experience of the player: I haven’t been feeling especially great this week. That in mind: Splintered Sea is more Besiege, thoughtfully applied to its already expansive toolkit. More importantly, it's currently bringing me deep and deeply needed moments of untainted, childlike, vaguely-Orkish joy.
]]>Hauntii sets the scene with a rather magical opening sequence. A beam of light shoots out of a mysterious planet and a zoom in reveals the beam to be an asteroid, but not just any asteroid: a crystal shaped like a teardrop, with a little ghost nestled inside. You awaken as this little ghost, who it turns out, has crash landed in Eternity (and who, it turns out, is called Hauntii). Soon you bump into a ghostly girl, who guides you to a tower that thrusts you both up to a higher plane - but though she ascends, you're dragged back to the bottom at the last moment by some netherworldly chains. And so, as Hauntii you travel through Eternity to discover who that girl was and, ultimately, how to ascend to those heavenly skies yourself.
]]>Three questions before we start:
1) Do you like Robert Eggers' film The Northman? 2) Do you like games that mainly involve pressing 'forward' and not much else? 3) Do you like rocks?]]>Two years of early access have been kind Songs of Conquest. Its strategy fundamentals were already strong enough to impress me in 2022 that it's been quite tricky to even remember what's changed. But there's more of it, and although after much reflection I think it's not quite, quite for me, more of a good and unusual thing is definitely enough to push me into a very nearly wholehearted endorsement.
]]>Wacky space station management sim Startopia and wacky hosptial sim Theme Hospital are two of my favourite older games, so I was very pleased with the concept of Galacticare, which is a wacky space station hospital management sim. And you know what? It's great! From early reveals and previews I thought it might veer into being too wacky, but it nails its tone, has some really striking levels, and bugs in earlier builds have been squashed (much as you can manually splat small parasites that make their way into your hospital). I can see this becoming a go-to comfort game for me.
]]>The characters in Read Only Memories: Neurodiver are deeply into anime. They love manga and figurines and trashy movies and horror novels. The interests of the game's creators have not so much leaked into this fictional world as they have been generously pumped in with an industrial hose. Even the visual novel's loading screens take the form of those two-second intermission panels that flash up to signal an anime's commercial break, complete with random characters announcing the game's name ("Neurodiver!"). In moments like that, the passion is endearing. But in other places, it is overwhelming. Neurodiver is obsessed with media in a way that often distracted me from the bright-eyed cyberpunk story it wants to tell.
]]>I’d like to start this review with a question: What’s the difference between overcoming a challenge and thinking “I did it!” and one that leaves you sighing “It’s over!”? I may leave little insights scattered throughout. A Paper Trail, if you will. A puzzle game named Paper Trail that has you solve discrete head-scratchers by folding the screen like a piece of paper in different ways to create new paths, I might even say, if I were trying to cram a bunch of information right at the top without breaking theme. Let’s talk about it.
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