There's a little masochistic streak in me that croons with joy whenever I reach the moment of impending doom in turn-based strategy games. You know the moment I mean. The one where the world fills with enemies patiently bobbing and snarling while you try to conjure up an impossibly perfect set of moves that'll keep things going for one more turn? Cobalt Core is great at this. I've only played a couple of runs so far, but boy, you'd better believe I know when the end is drawing near. It's hard to miss, because the entire screen fills up with rows of damage numbers beaming down onto your hapless little spaceship.
]]>Civil Protection officers are shorter than I thought they’d be. Don’t get me wrong, I'm very much a Short King myself, but I assumed the gas mask-wearing enforcers of City 17 would be more vertically intimidating. As I defiantly refuse to pick up litter in Half-Life 2’s opening sequence, I find the approaching officer and his raised electric baton to be weirdly adorable. Until he hits me, of course. The resulting crack gives me such a fright that I fling my arms out and smack my hand against the corner of a bookcase.
This has been my experience of playing the first few hours of Half-Life 2’s excellent fan-made VR mod, a completely free add-on that transforms Valve’s 2004 masterpiece into a full virtual reality experience. Under my direct control, Gordon Freeman is less a time-displaced MIT graduate with a penchant for murder and instead a gawking tourist who’s more interested in staring at canal architecture than liberating humanity. I spend the majority of my time leaning in really close to walls and muttering, “That’s interesting,” before a leaping headcrab shocks me so severely that I damage some more furniture and scare the cat.
]]>I can almost remember the moment in the original Dishonored when I realised, "Crap. Chaos is coming, and there's nothing I can do to stop it." It was around the halfway point of the game that the world of Dunwall was visibly starting to sour before me, and it was all because I hadn't quite taken the time to truly understand how its chaos system worked. I'd let too many of my mistakes get away from me, killed one too many people in the process, and now its Low Chaos ending seemed permanently out of reach. I thought in vain that if I behaved really nicely for the rest of the game, it might balance out my former transgressions. But alas, it was not to be. I ended the game in High Chaos, and I was furious. For whatever reason, getting a game's 'good' ending really mattered to me back then.
It was this personal failing that drove me to some extreme lengths when Dishonored 2 came out a couple of years later. Not only did I resolve to do a Clean Hands run this time, guaranteeing a Low Chaos ending by refusing to kill anyone, but as I cast my eye down its list of Steam achievements, I also got it into my head that, 'You know what? If we're going no-kill, let's Shadow run it as well and do it completely unseen at the same time.' A great idea at the time, I thought, if a little unusual for me. Cut to my fifth hour trying to clean out Kirin Jindosh's Clockwork Mansion on a review deadline, however, and you might think that decision would have worn a little thin. But you'd also be totally and utterly wrong.
]]>Like everyone with a shred of taste and a pair of mostly functional eyes, I can look at Minecraft and appreciate the outrageously ambitious and detailed builds that get shared around every few weeks. Putting form to my own megastructures, though? Can’t, sorry – I already have plans to wander around and gawp at nature.
]]>What lies beyond Limgrave? I honestly don’t know. I’ve muddled my way through Elden Ring’s starting peninsula three times now, but have yet to step foot beyond the crumbling gatehouse of Stormveil Castle. The second Godrick The Grafted is reduced to a sickly pile of wobbly limbs, I turn the game off and walk away.
It’s not that I don’t like Elden Ring. I’m not struggling to connect with its open world take on the Souls genre. I’m not put off by the difficult encounters that await me, or the obtuse challenges I’ll be forced to overcome. The answer is weirdly simple. Limgrave provides me with everything I could ever want from a Souls game to the point that when Godrick croaks his final rancid breath and his (presumably) four tongues comically lop out of his stupid mouth, I’m left with the deep satisfaction that comes with the end of a journey, rather than the beginning of one.
]]>I started with cats. They lapped up all the milk I could get them, earning me splatters of coins plus a further boost from a lucky early beastmaster. I threw some toddlers in too, basking in bonanzas of candy whenever I found a pinata for them to bash open, along with a smorgasbord of chests, fruits, urns and eggs. Then I slowly swapped all of that out for gems, and my board became a pristine, soulless, basically fully optimised money printer.
Luck Be A Landlord is about meeting ever escalating rent demands by playing a slot machine. Each month gives you a limited number of spins to come up with the money, and the chance to add one of three random symbols after each spin. Those symbols bounce off each other in zany but logical ways: bees pollinate flowers, comedians amplify monkeys. Dogs befriend humans. Billionaires get guillotined.
]]>My Dad likes to tell this story from when I was a teenager. I had grumpily asked if he could pick me and a friend up from a local park one afternoon, and he remembers us bundling into the back of his car all smelly and sweaty and terrible as teenagers so often are. But as he pulled away, he caught a snippet of our conversation that was so unusual it's the reason this seemingly normal car ride has cemented itself as a core memory. We were talking about the price of eggs. And tomatoes. And the order in which we were planting crops to ensure the greatest yield.
My poor father interrupted us, turning in his seat to ask what the hell we were talking about. “It’s a game we’re both playing called Harvest Moon” I scoffed in his direction. “You wouldn’t understand”.
]]>Friends, I have a new obsession. A sparkling dopamine oasis l that I simply cannot tear myself away from for more than a few agonising minutes at a time. Oh, Diablo 4? It’s alright, yeah. Quite fun. But it’s recently taken a backseat to something far more illustrious. His name, the subtitles inform me, is Denysov, and he lives in Diablo IV's world of Sanctuary. He is a lone man, with a lone hammer, who, despite nightmare and terror unfolding all around him, come hell or harsh splinters, just works on his lovely door all darn day.
]]>For all its flamingo thigh stews, misshapen clothes model characters and pizza-themed DJ-ing, Betrayal At Club Low is an old-school, dice-throwing RPG through and through. Every interaction you have at Club Low is determined by the rolling of dice, whether it's simply attempting to spark a conversation with a hard-of-hearing bartender, or bluffing your way into VIP backrooms where your blown fellow agent Gemini Jay is currently being grilled by the intimidating Big Mo.
Whether you're successful in your endeavours depends on whether you can roll higher or equal to whatever value is thrown by your opponent, with each face corresponding to a particular Skill Dice you're trying to deploy to win that scenario. A lot of the time, your skill numbers aren't nearly good enough to beat your fellow clubber outright, but for me, the thrill of Club Low comes from clinching a very plain, and highly unremarkable draw, earning you the accolade of 'Success. Barely' in the ensuing results breakdown. It may not sound very sexy, but in a world where the odds are fully stacked against you, barely succeeding will do me just fine here, thanks.
]]>Man, do I love the feeling of jamming out a guitar riff in games. Sure, in reality, I’m slumped on my couch in a position that my body will give me payback for when I’m thirty, but in my fantasy, I’m a musical prodigy whose guitar licks are so epic it would make Slash cry. My joy for virtual jamming came as a direct result of playing hours and hours of Guitar Hero. Harmonix held my music taste in its death grip, and almost breaking my fingers on those flimsy plastic buttons trying to conquer Through The Fire And Flames is a precious memory of mine.
So yeah, I love a good guitar sesh, so when I saw that Hi-Fi Rush was about a wannabe rockstar that smacks evil megacorp robots with his guitar to a catchy rock OST, Tango Gameworks had my attention.
]]>There's a sometimes hard to define line between a game that effectively establishes and embellishes its fiction (good, righteous), and one that has "lore" (tedious, lowly). It's a delicate art that warrants close consideration. It also warrants some good examples, which brings us to ΔV: Rings Of Saturn. Which, as it gets closer to release, I'm going to be nice to and call either Delta V or Rings Of Saturn. Even though Triangle Vee Colon Rings is more fun.
It's also fun, having played it, to keep up with how it’s doing in early access, not just because I'm looking forward to seeing it take off, but because its dev has spent the last few years writing delightful patch notes in the style of in-world news bulletins.
]]>Ezio Auditore, the fire of Firenze, pulls the guard close in passionate embrace. It’s an intimacy born not of love but its close cousin, hate. Gripping the man around the neck, Ezio holds him steady so that a nearby thief - hired at a fixed rate of 150 florins for an indefinite period of rooftop troublemaking - can take a free swing at his exposed abdomen. The sword connects, though not with its intended target. Instead it catches Ezio in the shoulder, knocking the assassin off-balance. He teeters backward across the tiles and over the lip of the building, falling three floors into the packed street below. The farce of it all is worth every one of the twelve hitpoints he loses in the process.
]]>Third person skater shooter Rollerdrome has some really cool weapons, but what is it that makes them so special? I mean, there’s only four of them, and you’re forced to constantly perform tricks to regain ammo, which doesn't make them easy to use. I think it’s because of their more literal significance in the game. Rollerdrome threatens you with multiple enemy types called Houseplayers, all formidable, especially in the heat of battle when they combine their efforts. Luckily, the four distinct weapons you’re equipped with act as an equaliser; each weapon is a solution for a particular enemy. Developers Roll7 could have easily added a bunch of copied and pasted guns from every generic shooter, but instead they were more intentional about the weapons they included, with each weapon complimenting the gunplay and the game as a whole.
]]>I would like to talk a little bit about my experience with The Invisible Guardian. Not the 2017 Spanish thriller movie, but the prodigiously popular Chinese visual novel that quickly became the highest-selling title on Steam in 2019. Why haven’t you heard of it? Because the game is strictly region locked. This is unfortunate, because The Invisible Guardian rules.
]]>I’ve always been terrible at games. Truly. Trying to join in with any online multiplayer game has been met with quotes such as, "What on earth are you doing?" and, "Wow, 84 deaths? Really?", to name but a few. This led to scenarios where it felt far easier for me to give up and try something new. But when the point of the game is to continue dying over and over again to up my knowledge, skill level, abilities and unlock new weapons and perks? There I have found a place for my unending death and incompetence in Supergiant's Hades.
]]>Look, Elden Ring can be really tough, as all FromSoftware games are, and you will almost certainly get stomped at least a hundred if not hundreds of times during your journey in the Lands Between. However, all this attention on playing up the difficulty, as usually is the case once we get into The Discourse, detracts from the fact that the game can also be hilariously easy.
]]>Slight story spoilers for Big George’s Ring Fit Adventure Elden Ring, probably.
The lumbering forms of Elden Ring’s trolls disguise an ancient melancholy. Turned traitors in the war between demigods and giants, their reward for loyalty to the Golden Lineage was an eternity in shackles, used as frontline fodder in bloody conflicts or beasts of burden hauling funereal carriages around the Lands Between. Since learning their history, I often muse sadly upon it, as I weave between their horribly gnarled legs in my freshly tarnished underwear and hoover up the shiny objects scattered underneath their feet.
I’m on my second run of Elden Ring now, progressing slowly and methodically, examining every statue and reading every spell description. But the first time through, the need to cram the whole content buffet in my face at once got the better of me. Underleveled and underprepared for most areas, I developed the winning strategy of stripping down to my burial rags for a speed boost and streaking through the wilds, shoving everything valuable down my pants.
]]>Back in 2012, the late great Antony Bourdain tweeted an impassioned defence of a fellow food writer, then 85 year old Marilyn Hagerty, whose recent positive review of her local Olive Garden had become the subject of widespread memery. I’ve never eaten at an Olive Garden because a.) we don’t have them in the UK, and b.) unlimited pasta sounds like a death sentence. But I understand it’s viewed as a faux-fancy chain for people who think Al Dente was the name of the man who invented spaghetti, and not somewhere you’d want to earnestly praise as a quote unquote ‘serious critic’.
Big Tones was having none of it. He applauded Hagerty’s celebration of Olive Garden as a genuine expression of widespread American food culture, calling her detractors ‘snarkologists’, and then published a book of her reviews. A class act, no doubt. And it’s this championing of the everyman gourmand, this deep passion for non-exclusionary, unpretentious foodie culture, that powers Total War: Warhammer 3’s most joyfully silly campaign experience.
]]>There’s an old chestnut from gaming mythology - you surely know the one - about the movement in Mario’s 3D ventures being perfected by Shigeru Miyamoto at their very start with Super Mario 64. Core Design managed the same thing with the original Tomb Raider back in 1996, too. Nobody really talks about it now, while the Mario story endures. Possibly because Nintendo didn’t make umpteen identikit sequels over the following decade or splash Mario’s stretchy mug on the cover of The Face.
Really though, the Italian plumber and English graverobber were equally confident that if all their moves were available right from the start with no unlocking needed then that was enough. Both games were – are still, after a quarter of a century – the Platonic ideal of their characters. And they had bloody good swimming sections.
]]>Tarkov Interchange, Norvinsk Economic Zone, 1500 hours. As I made my way to the extraction zone after wading through the remnants of a Swedish furniture store - a venture which had cost me most of my ammunition and the use of my left leg - I spotted a figure scrounging for supplies 300 metres away. Aiming my rifle, I took a shot, the bullet’s echo so deafening that I could barely hear the Scav yelling Russian expletives at me.
This is just a microcosm of the stories to tell about Battlestate Games’ online survival FPS Escape From Tarkov. In a genre that often either fails or doesn’t try to convey any type of legitimate emotional response, raids in Tarkov become these enigmatic tales of the senses. My stories differ from most because I play Escape From Tarkov single-player.
]]>I have played a lot of Mass Effect since the remaster came out on Friday, but I haven't really... done anything. "I know we're busy hunting for Saren," a member of the crew will say, before asking if we can make a personal detour for them. I look back at our flight history: the last six planets we landed on had nothing but space debris and the occasional Thresher Maw. Since picking up Liara, we've essentially been on a joyride through every solar system in the galaxy. Look, Saren could be hiding on any one of these uncharted worlds - it would be irresponsible of me not to check everywhere.
]]>It’s a beautiful day in the meadows of Viking survival game Valheim; I’m ambling about picking raspberries, looking for stones and promising-looking sticks. They don’t take long to find, and with trembling hands I attach one to the other, and create a crude axe.
I seek out the nearest tree to unleash my wrath upon. It takes a while to bring my opponent low, but eventually I am victorious, and the great trunk teeters and falls!
The tree comes down on top of me, and I die immediately.
]]>I've started a co-op playthrough of Divinity Original Sin 2, an RPG that feels like learning another language. Slowly, I've grown accustomed to the sheer volume of stats and abilities and decisions I have to make. I now approach situations methodically, identifying enemy weaknesses, and scanning rooms ablaze or bloated by gas, before I commit to an act.
But there's one thing that always gets me. No matter how careful I am, icy surfaces totally pass me by. It's as if they're invisible, the way I think I've clocked every variable, before my dwarf rogue moves two paces and tumbles onto his arse. I don't mind, though, as it's comedy gold; an act so funny I'm convinced there's actually nothing funnier.
]]>Picture your mind as the control room of a massive death robot, which is in the middle of a fight against a millipede the size of Croydon. It’s a hectic duel: the whole command crew are at their battle stations, doing that Star Trek thing where they try to use computers while standing up and thrashing about. And in all the uproar, the communications console has been left briefly unattended. Enter the janitor, then, with a cheeky wink to camera. They are your subconscious mind, in this metaphor. And while the rest of the crew is distracted, they’re going to have some fun.
]]>In space no one can hear you scream. Well, unless you forgot to mute your mic.
This is a core conceit of surprise space-murder hit Among Us. But with multiplayer also being a core part of the Among Us experience, muting mics and silence might not seem that meaningful. When you think about it, though, Among Us is all about that isolation coming from an Alien-style disaster unfolding in deep space. Every round is a set of scales perfectly balanced between paranoid quiet and heated debate. And it's the silence that makes Among Us one of the most compelling multiplayer experiences I’ve ever had.
]]>I’ve never really been one for pre-packaged emotes in games. There’s just some deep-seated arrogance in me, which always sneered at the idea of a piece of software boiling down all the vastly different ways I might react to a situation into five or six cutesy, pre-packaged sentiments, and letting me have no further say in the matter.
But then I met Hearthstone’s ‘Sweating Panda’ emote, and now everything has changed. Blizzard, it turns out, knew me better than I knew myself all along.
]]>Supergiant’s rougelike smash hit Hades has taken the world by storm since coming out of early access in September. Unlike a lot of games, fans seem to be in total agreement on all of the game’s main talking points. For example, we all agree that Meg is hot. We also all agree that Zagreus is hot. That Eurydice is hot. That pretty much everyone is hot. Most also agree that, hot or not, Theseus is the worst.
They are all wrong: Theseus is actually the best.
]]>VINDICATION. That's what Hardspace: Shipbreaker says to me. I have hinted several times that salvage is grossly under-represented in games. And now here's a game all about it, and it as excellent as I'd hoped.
Despite being an estimate year from release, Hardspace Colon Shipbreaker already gets a lot of things right. But my favourite thing about it is one I didn't even expect to feel so good: peeling the armour off a ship.
]]>Travelling in games is special. The Lord Of The Rings might describe Frodo popping over to Mordor to chuck a ring in a volcano, and 1917 might show you every inch of ground covered by those soldiers, but short of physically going on a yomp in the real world, nothing conveys a sense of a distance travelled quite like huffing your way across the open world of a game in real time.
Still, there's a reason Bethesda fill their games with monster-shaped loot-piñatas and mysterious quest-givers. If you've any experience with long-haul travel in real life, you'll know it's often the kind of journey that plays out quite unlike the experience most games want you to have: boredom, insomnia, a severe lack of personal space, and the odd chafed arse. So how do you capture this feeling in a video game, a medium simultaneously uniquely suited to simulating travel, but deathly afraid of boring players? If you’re one of the wonderful minds behind Supergiant’s Pyre, the answer lies in abstraction.
]]>I’m having a moment in Divinity: Original Sin. I’m lost in the limitless depths of my inventory, its small icons denoting vague categories which make me forget which character was meant to give what to whom, or where I put that unidentified sarong I swear I picked up in the last battle. Meanwhile, the NPCs in the market square around me are repeating their lines on 20-second loops. “Quiet day on the market, it seems”, says the lonely bougee lady, to absolutely no one. Yes, I think. It is. But it’d be just that precious bit quieter if I stuck these blooming daggers between your ribs.
]]>It took me a couple dozen attempts to escape hell in Supergiant Games’ early access roguelite Hades. Once I succeeded I thought I might give it a break; return when there were new updates. But it absolutely has its claws in me, which is how I found out that mucking about and losing is actually way better than trying to win.
]]>Griefing, a term applying to any bad faith behaviour in an online game, whether it’s ruining things for your group or harassing other players, has reared its ugly head since early MMOs like Ultima Online. The behaviour existed even further back in MUDs, text-based multi-user dungeons, before the term griefing had been coined. Yet, going by the popularity of Untitled Goose Game, there’s clearly a perverse pleasure in bringing chaos upon a community.
Which brings me to Wattam, a game of action, exploration and puzzles, and like Untitled Goose Game, it's an offline game that could be viewed as a microcosm of online spaces. Think of each of Wattam's sandbox islands as a server and the hundred-odd objects around the world as its users. While the core of Wattam is about building connections with each other, it’s also about explosions and poops, sometimes at the same time.
]]>If there’s anything that can bring a dose of certainty to a dark night in the Polish countryside, it’s that voice. “Flat left over jump, extra extra long keep middle 170,” it says as we speed by trees and hedgerows and fields and barns. I can’t see the world outside the glare of my headlights, but that voice knows everything. “Into six right, opens over crest,” it says. Gentle and precise, it’s entirely unflustered as we catch air at 140 km/h above a rutted Polish farm track, my heart ricocheting around my upper trachea.
Here’s to Phil Mills. He’s my Dirt Rally 2.0 co-driver, my companion through victory and defeat, my rock during a hundred terrible crashes, and my videogame dad, if he’ll have me.
]]>"Audio logs", said a game designer, eliciting a chorus of involuntary groans from absolutely everyone. They're clumsy, they're silly, and they're usually badly done, to the point where it's tempting to insist that they be consigned to history altogether.
That would probably be overkill.
]]>I have been skittering around Outer Wilds like one of those birds who lives on a rhino's back and survives by eating rhino dandruff (I have watched both series of Planet Earth). I haven't been able to sit and play it in big sessions, but I've been picking at it and finding interesting morsels, making a bit more progress each time. I'd be making more progress if I didn't keep going back to the Dark Bramble.
Spoilers follow. You should play Outer Wilds first. You should play Outer Wilds anyway.
]]>While some people might be into neon-lime Dragonblades and only the edgiest of Reaper skins, my favourite part of Overwatch is its spawn rooms. It’s fun to enter the fray guns blazing from time to time, it is supposed to be an FPS after all. But there’s something about the spawn rooms in Overwatch that adds an extra layer to how you connect with the characters.
]]>The submarine is filling with seawater and nobody left alive is doing anything about it. The captain is calmly discussing the battery life of his headset radio with the ship’s doctor, who is standing still on the upper decks fiddling with his inventory. Two decks below them a ravenous trio of giant, shrimp-like sea creatures are burrowing from crew quarters to medical bay, flooding the ship room by room, and twitching around its innards like furious parasites. I can see all this, but my crewmates have no idea their shrimpy death is clawing towards them. As the submarine’s engineer, I should probably warn them. But I can’t. Because I’m dead.
]]>I’ve been virtually flying Spitfires for as long as I can remember. I’ve shot down scores of Stukas, maimed messes of Messerschmitts and hunted hosts of Heinkels. But never have I thought about who refuels my plane when I get home for tea and medals. Who reloads the guns, patches up the bullet holes, and grumbles about me putting too much stress on the engine. Plane Mechanic Simulator changed that.
]]>The Assassin’s Creed series is no stranger to promoting the wholesale murder of folks with whom you disagree. From battling Templars on the seas of the Caribbean to viciously and repeatedly punching the pope, these games have a history of exacting revenge on all-powerful (yet never successful) shadow organisations. A few hours into Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, you’ll come across another one. The “Cult of Kosmos” are a group of nefarious masked ne’er-do-wells who are responsible for many of the ills in your protagonist’s life. But this is good, because soon you’ll start hunting them down.
]]>Even as a kid, I always had a fascination with death. It’s manifested in a number of different ways over the years. From learning various mythologies to get a grasp on their take on the afterlife, to reading mystery novels that taught me hundreds of impractical ways to nearly get away with murder, most of my hobbies involved death in some form. So, it's not shocking that a lot of my enjoyment of RedLynx's Trials series comes from its dark sense of humor in the same direction, taken to new heights in Trials Rising.
Even when successful, levels end with the rider dying in a ridiculous way that takes advantage of the title’s ragdoll physics. It could be said that each level is a lot like life itself: there's a series of challenges that you can either get past or tumble over, but eventually even the best of us will wind up dead, as we all do. From careening over a cliff on a motorbike.
]]>The latest Football Manager is the most accessible yet. Which means less stressing over incremental tweaks, stats and numbers, and more scope to channel your energy in a completely different direction. This season, play it as it was intended (by me) to be played: with a dash of live-action roleplay. Whether you’re a tracksuit coach or a three-piece supervisor, the world’s most comprehensive soccer management sim is best enjoyed when taken really, really seriously.
]]>I like bad weather and I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s the raw, sublime beauty of it. More likely, it’s a form of meteorological Stockholm Syndrome. I’ve lived in Britain long enough to appreciate being constantly rained on (at least until Summer when my face melts off onto the pavement). But the bad weather I’m talking about lies in the Goldilocks zone. I want neither the tacky Clintons Christmas card nor the photoshopped Thomas Cook travel brochure. No, I want that grey zone, that drizzle into downpour. In Metro Exodus, I found the sogginess I long for.
]]>From darkspawn to archdemons, Dragon Age is renowned for its epic battle against undead beasties seeking to wreak havoc in Thedas. However, my favourite mission in the entire series isn’t a magnificent fight, nor has it anything to do with high tales of monsters and men. My favourite mission is a fancy party in Dragon Age Inquisition.
]]>I’ve never been a big fan of hunting, which is why I didn’t think I’d be so captivated by theHunter: Call of the Wild. But I don’t love it for the hunting. I discovered that, once you lay down your arms and forget about bringing home the venison, this hunting simulator becomes an amazingly relaxing experience. If you subvert its purpose almost entirely, it’s actually just a lovely walking simulator.
]]>I’m not usually one for speedrunning. I do however get a kick out of being able to get through a game much faster on the second or third time around. There’s just an immense satisfaction of revisiting a brain-bending puzzle or boss fight that had you agonising over an hour the first time, only to mop it up in minutes on a second run.
Of the different reasons for playing games, mastery has a strong appeal for me, something I get a great deal from Dark Souls -- but it’s a buzz I’ve also found myself getting with the Resident Evil 2 remake, so much so that I’ve been replaying it a lot more than I ever expected to.
]]>Bear with me for a minute, and let me tell you about the greatest Lord Of The Rings game ever released. There have been myriad games based on Tolkien’s work, most of which weren’t very good. Some more recent efforts include War In The North and Shadow Of Mordor. I liked the latter a lot, but the fact remains that there is one game to rule them all.
I first played The Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King back in 2003, when I was eight years old and no taller than a hobbit. My PC at the time wasn’t much better at running games than a calculator would be, but that didn’t matter to me because I got to play as Gandalf.
]]>I have to admit, I’m not the best at every video game, but I’m just awful at Western RPGs. I never wrapped my head around Neverwinter Nights’ D&D style of play. I built my character incorrectly in Knights of the Old Republic and it made my playthrough excruciatingly difficult.
I’ve passed on playing other popular WRPGs like Planescape: Torment just for the fear of having to deal with difficult to understand battle systems and poorly explained skill systems. Having grown up with JRPGs, I can easily figure out how to dispatch a sentient pile of thunder goo, but understanding the damage calculations on a Magic Missile was beyond me. But Pillars of Eternity is different.
]]>Every game of Into the Breach tasks you with just about the biggest, most noble mission there is: save the world, this tiny watery globe we call home, from giant bug attacks, over and over again. But it also offers a smaller, more personal mission that's a little easier to get your head round: save one specific person. At the end of a game - success or failure - you get the option to bring one of your surviving pilots over into a new timeline. I always pick Isaac.
]]>Tacoma is a game about a world that never stops watching. Corporations have achieved vertical integration on a near-total level, functioning as distinct economies running on contract workers and loyalty points. You go to the Amazon school, you work at your Amazon job, you get paid in Amazon points.
The characters of the game are so consumed by the anxiety of keeping up with this treadmill that they don’t have the time to think about what actions they could collectively take to improve their material conditions, let alone act on them. And of course their every waking (and sleeping) moment is logged on company servers by an inescapable Augmented Reality surveillance system.
]]>The purest fantasy on offer in open worlds isn't always discussed. It's the opportunity to take pleasure in being distracted.
It's fantasy because, like hurling fireballs, you can't really do it in real life. Distracted driving leads to fenders in horseshoe shapes around tree trunks. Distraction at work leads to empty-feeling EODs. But distraction in a good open world game is a joy; a chance to take a break from something fun to do another something fun.
]]>Resident Evil HD Remaster is a three-year-old shine-job of a 17-year-old remake of a 23-year-old console game that I’d have little problem believing was a modern release if those corridor dogs weren’t seared into my memory and stained into my underoos. That those corridor dogs are stained into our collective underoos (the vast interconnected underoo network that binds us all) suggests that Resident Evil is best remembered as a scripted spookfest: a one-and-done ghost train ride.
You’d be wrong, though, to make that hypothetical assumption I just invented to give my next point gravitas, you big wrong strawberry.
]]>The first time I pushed someone downstairs in Hitman: Blood Money, I felt faintly guilty. Not because I'd just killed a person, but because The Agency, my bar-coded assassin's employers, had gone to the trouble of providing me with a wealth of lethal equipment. Yet here I was, sending people to their deaths without touching a single item. Was I putting someone out of a job?
Five minutes later, my concerns had vanished, replaced by a sense of malevolent joy as I explored the lethal potential of Agent 47's "shove" ability, a feature that's strangely absent from subsequent Hitman games.
]]>Prior to playing SteamWorld Heist, I had no idea that a developer's dedication to a single material could make me grin from ear to ear. This is a turn-based strategy game centred around metal.
]]>Playing Katamari Damacy Reroll can be a lot more unwieldy than you’d expect. But then using both analogue sticks to move and steer your katamari makes sense because it sort of represents the arms of your little prince who’s pushing this katamari in front of him, which gets bigger and bigger the more objects he rolls up. It’d make sense for it to feel unwieldy, wouldn’t it?
And when you can roll up literally anything that’s the same size as your katamari currently is, including a big-ass sign that’s jutting out of your side, well, it’s going to get awkwardly bumpy.
]]>We easily take the stars for granted. The starry sky is something we can see every night, and while the starscape changes with the seasons, an untrained eye wouldn’t know the difference. While we think nothing of looking up at the stars and the moon at night, in another reality it would be impossible.
In Planetarian: The Reverie Of A Little Planet, Earth is plunged into a global war that kills most of humanity. Dangerous man-made ‘Gods of Death’ still roam the land, killing anyone that stumbles into their path. A corrosive acid rain falls across the planet, drowning plants, rusting metal, and hiding the sky. The scant few remains of humanity struggle to survive the aftermath of a war they didn’t start.
]]>In a game series that seemed to be dominated by male stories, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is a beautiful, sapphic dream by comparison. Women in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey play a huge role. Whether they’re your mother, your lover, your sister or your friend, women are significant in a way that’s always been needed in one of Ubisoft’s biggest games.
So, imagine my delight that the role of women isn’t just embedded into the story, but in your role-playing experience too. While playing as Kassandra and getting my smooch on with every woman I could see, I realized that I had an option that would change the game forever: I could invite them on my ship.
]]>Memory is a funny old thing. Our brains are like faulty cameras, letting us unconsciously suppress moments of our lives and swap them out for brighter, more palatable realities. When we’re reminded of these small time capsules, the serene environments we were in and the people we were with, we often feel an endorphin rush and a lurid longing for something that isn’t there anymore. Plenty of games toy with the fascinating concept of memory, but it’s often very black and white. An amnesiac character to serve a twist, for example, usually employed in the final act to give a narrative some shocking gusto. The trope gets a bit stale once you’ve seen enough of it.
Double Fine’s 2005 debut Psychonauts doesn’t settle for that. The platforming adventure follows protagonist Razputin Aquato as he ventures into the troubled minds of his peers. He explores the unique landscapes of their grey matter and remedies their mental health issues in order to unravel a complex conspiracy. It’s wonderfully strange but ultimately thoughtful, as per Tim Schafer’s usual MO. Hidden it its eight levels are unique collectables called Memory Vaults, sentient safes that run in circles to avoid you. Once subdued, they give up a stereoscope Viewmaster reel with a beautiful hand-drawn story from the memories of the person whose mind you’re exploring.
]]>From the outset, everything in The Banner Saga seems designed to encourage you to be careful. As you lead your caravan towards safety, you try to keep people alive by rationing food, managing the number of your followers and weighing the dangers of the unknown. Anyone who has ever given a soldier in XCOM a custom name knows that it takes very little to get attached, and The Banner Saga builds on this by giving you plenty of chances to get closer to the people in your army.
]]>Within the first hour of Yakuza 0, Kazuma Kiryu has to re-evaluate most of what he’s come to believe in. The crime family he’s been loyal to actually has no problem with selling him out, and Kiryu has to somehow prove his innocence in a murder plot, as well as stop a large-scale turf war.
Over the course of many conversations, Kiryu is quickly established as a man you don’t want to cross – he’s principled, highly idealistic and built like a tree. Unlike his friend Nishikiyama, he didn’t join the yakuza for the money, he just does as he’s told in order to repay what he sees as a debt to the people who took him in and gave him a home. Kiryu could well have been the stoic, hyper-masculine protagonist of so many games, but then comes the moment that shatters it all.
]]>Taken at face value, Artifact Adventure is an unassuming title. It clearly aims to play off 8-bit nostalgia, grabbing the attention of players longing for the good ol’ days. I picked the game up on a whim, not really knowing what to expect as I booted it up and picked my four party members, Final Fantasy style. However, a deeper look revealed that this 8-bit RPG is also an open-world title, where you can do whatever you want… but face the consequences.
]]>I start with only a bow and a sword, fighting against entry-level enemies and depending on my dodging roll for survival. During the next five minutes of Dead Cells, I have doubled my HP. I’ve become stronger, and consequently, I begin to see myself as a walking killing spree that will leave no room hidden or treasure chest untouched, no matter how many enemies are guarding them. My damage is so high that I begin to ignore weaker obstacles. I just rush towards the boss, prepared to show them what I’m capable of. And in that moment of confidence, I lose my balance. And fall prey to my own foolishness.
]]>The labyrinth beneath Dirtmouth is dark and crawling with bugs. There’s a mantis tribunal, a stag beetle with a saddle, and an unending army of worms. Beyond the Infinite Worms is a ruined city lost to dirt and water, and a creature who refers to itself only as the Nailmaster, who apparently bears no relation to that scumbag Chad from college.
In Hollow Knight, wandering the tunnels of Hollownest is an isolating experience. Everything about the world design is meant to make you feel like you’re in over your tiny head. Despite starring bugs, the sense of scale is impressive and humbling. Exploration and discovery are central to the Hollow Knight experience, and Team Cherry are not afraid to you wander aimlessly. And yet, there is Cornifer, a sweet bug with an unabashed love for cartography.
]]>Visual novels arguably have less to impress gamers than other genres. With no real ‘gameplay’ to speak of, visual novels need to rely heavily on narrative prowess to make a lasting impression. Originally released in Japan in 2012, but only getting an English localization in 2016, The House in Fata Morgana is pegged as a horror visual novel. As the player explores the desolate mansion and views the different tragedies of the past, however, the game slowly unravels its tangled plot threads, revealing that it’s much more than just a compilation of sad tales.
]]>My relationship with horror films and games has always been relatively non-committal. Reason being that jump scares irrationally bug me while gore makes me squirm. For all my misgivings though, I find myself engrossed in any entry into the genre that plays on the logic we’ve inherited, be it the mysterious nature surrounding strangers or the fact that clowns are a bit creepy.
A classic example is Wes Craven’s 1996 slasher film Scream, which used horror clichés to make narrative progression harder to predict and as a way of having fun with the tropes that fatigued the genre in the first place. In one scene a character famously expresses bemusement at victims in other horrors who run upstairs when chased by killers, due to it leading to a dead-end. Moments later she is pursued by a killer and runs up a set of stairs. Darius Guerrero’s Dere Evil .Exe offers up a similar sense of meta-horror and fun.
]]>“I learned to love getting lost. You can get pleasantly lost when you don't know where you are but you know you'll find your way if you just keep going. That's the feeling I wanted to create in a game.” This is Stu Maxwell’s philosophy behind his debut game Shape of the World, a serene exploration game where the world’s lush, alien environment organically grows and evolves around you as you walk through it.
After a successful Kickstarter in 2015, Maxwell has been working on Shape of the World as a one person team under the name Hallow Tree Games. I asked him how he first came up with the idea of Shape of the World. “It's while exploring Vancouver's Stanley Park and the surrounding Pacific Northwest that I came up with the desire to create a relaxing game of exploration,” Maxwell explains in our email exchange. “Stanley park is a huge, old-growth forest right next to downtown, full of maze-like paths that I flew down on my bike with great music playing through my headphones. I loved the flow of sailing through the forest with electronic music driving the emotion.”
]]>I am a lowly aspirant with nothing but my name and my failing body. I am uninitiated. I am a worm in the dark, crawling through the pages of the secret histories of the world.
I'm playing Cultist Simulator.
This is “a game of apocalypse and yearning”, in which players attempt to direct eldritch forces and hidden gods without the faintest idea of what they're doing. Yearning and apocalypse, certainly, but it is also a game of ignorance. This is the essential magic of the game.
]]>From Toe Twists to Charlie Hops, Helicopters and Coffee Grinders, there's Air Chairs, Flares, Knee Spins, Jackhammers, Six Steps, Two Steps and Back Spins. No, that wasn't an abstract poem, but a list of a handful of dance moves in the breakdancing rhythm game Floor Kids. There are over a hundred of these different moves, and through a combination of buttons and joystick directions the player can bust out their chosen moves on the dance floor, free-styling on their own or in a breakdance battle against a second player.
]]>As an actual adult human being who still reads DC comics, I have to put up with a lot of BatBullShit. It's not the brooding that gets to me or even the weird and sudden flips between psychologically scarring street-level crimefighting and wacky Justice League space adventures. It's not the callbacks to events from previous decades that I don't care about or understand, and it's not even the fact that the world's greatest detective solves far too many problems by punching people until they stop moving.
It's the romance that bothers me. The sexytimes. I really don't care if Batman and Catwoman are making out on a rooftop, or tearing off each other's costumes in Crime Alley or some other unfortunate locale. It's not that I object to any of these mostly miserable characters having a bit of fun every once in a while, but just as in a computer game when two doll-like faces smash together and I'm supposed to pretend I'm witnessing a passionate and intimate moment, these caped and costumed comic characters don't seem real enough for anything other than the kind of sex-free coupling that Ken and Barbie might engage in.
How remarkable, then, that Telltale's Batman Series actually had my favourite romantic moment in any game I've played for a good while.
]]>Chores are not supposed to be enjoyable. At home, stacks of unwashed bowls, cups and cutlery flood the sink, with the occasional fly fluttering about in search of a morsel. It’s only when I run out of clean plates that I wearily make my way there, caterwauling as I wash the dishes out of sheer necessity. But when staring at the bloodshed of Serial Cleaner, I can’t help but feel the urge to clean. Everything needs to be spotless and neat. I would even top that vase up with fresh flowers, if the game would let me.
]]>Few games nail the ebb and flow of conversations like Oxenfree, the supernatural drama about a group of teenagers on a deserted island. The cast speak over one another, cut their friends off mid-sentence and leave realistic gaps of silence that stretch on awkwardly until somebody says “so...”, and moves on.
]]>Far from Noise's protagonist has gotten herself in a bit of predicament. She is stuck in a car that is delicately balanced on the side of a steep cliff. To make things worse, the car’s engine has flooded and it needs all night to cool down. Now staring death in the face, and with a long night ahead, she starts to question aspects of her life and her past decisions. It’s a narrative-driven game where the player gets to pick dialogue options and participate in light but thoughtful conversations in a visual novel style.
These conversations take place in front of a beautiful setting sun, which is used as both an atmospheric and symbolic icon in service of conveying ideas of transcendentalism.
]]>Subnautica is remarkable for a great many reasons, and one of them is a particular creature discovered at about 300m deep, stomping their way in long processions across a well worn path of the seabed. The Sea Treaders. These titanic crustaceans(?) are a herd of complete joy.
]]>If you've ever played The Binding of Isaac or Enter The Gungeon, then Monolith is immediately familiar stuff. A comforting blend of twin-stick shooter and dungeon-crawl wherein you navigate mazes, hoard loot, upgrade your character (cute little spaceship-people in Pop n' Twinbee fashion), fight menacing-looking bosses, and then do it all again with even more stuff unlocked in the dungeon generator. What sets Monolith apart from its peers, and what has earned it a near-perfect user review score on Steam, is just how little all of that progression means.
Weapons are ammo-limited and ephemeral, upgrades tend not to be especially dramatic, and progression is rewarded by an ever-increasing difficulty level. In Monolith, the most important weapon you'll ever use is the starting pea-shooter. Your default, unlimited-ammo machine-gun may not spit out quite as much damage as the fancier weapons, but it'll still do the job if you're able to dodge bullets for just a couple seconds longer. There is nothing in Monolith that you cannot defeat with raw reflexes and knowledge of enemy patterns alone, and knowing that makes every victory sweeter, and every defeat sting just that little bit more.
]]>Destiny 2 has had a rough time of late, what with players discovering that late-game grinding may very well be a gigantic waste of time, and the general hostility to microtransactions going around these days. Since its launch on PC in October, players have also groused about its strict communication rules: there’s no in-game chat lobby, text or voice, in which to find fireteam members for that Nightfall strike or Leviathan raid. And no public matchmaking for these activities, which yield the game’s most exclusive and powerful gear. Me, though? I love that about it.
]]>There is a lot going on in Figment. It’s a ‘musical action-adventure game’ with combat, puzzle elements, cut scenes, voice acting and several musical boss battles. It’s visually busy, full of strange, warped objects and surrealist structures from Dali’s clocks to Magritte’s apples – the world of Figment is bright and lively.
But beneath all this, there’s the soundtrack, and Figment does something quite wonderful with it.
]]>The Orange Box turned 10 years old this year, and by extension Portal celebrated its anniversary too. Sitting alongside continuations of well-loved games, the short puzzle adventure could have been quickly forgotten. Tacked on to bulk up the box. It was, however, a surprise hit, winning over players with its smart spatial puzzles and writing that fans continue to quote. And while I can list lines off with the best of them (don’t even get me started on that cake), this classic’s hold on my heart comes from a person who never speaks one.
]]>Villain monologues: forever a trope to make the eyes roll. I tend to skip through them as quickly as I can, waiting my inevitable escape. I don’t enjoy self-aware villain monologues either; they’re even worse because the villains know that they’re clichéd yet they do it anyway. I'd prefer it if they just immediately murdered me instead.
Danganronpa, a visual novel/detective adventure in which a sadistic cyber-bear drives teenagers to murder each other, takes this trope and spins it on its head. Ursine villain Monokuma’s monologue doesn’t occur during the climactic scene of the game; instead, it occurs throughout, in segments known as “Monokuma Theater”. Ever wanted to know what chatting with a psychopath over drinks would be like? Monokuma Theater is for you.
]]>Around an hour into The Norwood Suite, I was nestled so snugly into my comfort zone that it would have taken heavy machinery to shift me. That's despite the fact that this is a game that makes me suspect something sinister is lurking just out of view, that the edges of my vision aren't to be trusted. It's a very discomforting comfort zone.
]]>Assassin’s Creed clothes are some of the best clothes in all games. Those layers, all those flowing, flapping, swinging layers: cloth and leather and swords and knives and pouches and harnesses. I often idly wonder, as I watch an Assassin’s Creed loading screen, how many people - how many studios! - produce Assassin’s Creed’s clothes? They’re a wonder of code and art coming together, of layers of beautiful fabric flapping just right. And Ubisoft knocked Assassin’s Creed Origins’ clothes out of the goddamn park.
]]>What Remains of Edith Finch is the kind of game that makes the phrase 'visual feast' feel appropriate again, as opposed to just breathless enthusiasm for CGI battle scenes in quoted four-star reviews on superhero movie posters. There is so much wonderful and surprising detail, both ostentatious and subtle, in the rooms that make up its impossible, wonderful house of dreams and death.
So much that it's very easy to miss things that tell extra stories - the sweetest and most powerful stories, and also the stories that the Finch family told each other.
]]>My career in Street Fighter was a painfully short-lived experience. For a long time, I’d been trying to find a fighting game to really get into and to help me understand a genre I’d always been quietly interested in but entirely apart from. After being gifted Ultra Street Fighter 4 back in 2014, I was quickly hooked on the technical mastery and quick action - a few runs of Arcade, and I was even starting to feel competent. But getting good at Street Fighter, or any traditional fighting game, requires a strong level of commitment: lonely hours spent mastering frame data, grinding against opponents and the local competition. After a disastrous showing at a Dundee tournament, I was out.
Fighting games, I figured, just weren’t for me - until Absolver came around.
]]>Weirdly, none of my favourite Assassin’s Creed Origins moments so far relate to assassinating. Then again, they never really did in the previous games. Instead they’re about buildings, specifically climbing them and going into them. So it’s appropriate that my absolute second favourite thing to do in Assassin’s Creed: Origins is tombs.
]]>My three year old rates games based on whether the character goes into water, and if they do, do they swim underneath. My personal rating systems are a little more nuanced, but it turns out that Assassin's Creed Origins' swimming is so astoundingly atmospheric I'm willing to forgive it a dozen other foibles. In all of gaming, water has never felt wetter.
]]>In ABZÛ, you play as a diver who is exploring the sublime and vibrant depths of the ocean. As you dive further down you heal and restore areas that have mysteriously decayed and help bring back their natural beauty. It’s a wonderful and emotional game that can turn even the clunkiest of players into a graceful aqua-dancer. Yet while moving through ABZÛ’s world makes you familiar with it, it is when you stop and absorb the surroundings that you start to get a sense of belonging.
]]>I hear her before I see her. The young brunette sporting head-to-toe white Vinewood chic, her voice high as she seethes over the phone at a man I assume is her husband. He can barely get a word in through her accusations; he’s been sleeping with the nanny (again), she has proof this time, she’ll take his ass to court. Finally, something he says stuns her quiet.
“Who the hell told you about Raul?” she screeches.
]]>When Wuppo [official site] begins you are gigantic and barely able to run. That is because your lazy character loved watching television so much that he ate one. As you progress, you learn to run and jump and fight, but most importantly you learn to help the people around you rather than being a jerk. Like Undertale and Chulip, this is a game about good citizenship.
]]>In most cases, driving, and this is true of both real life and games, is about the act of getting from point A to point B with your car. It’s about doing it efficiently, safely, and in as little time as possible. In games, your vehicle of choice might be a car with a jet engine under the hood and even a drive from place to place might be somewhat risky, but the point remains - just get from here to there, usually before your rivals.
One of Burnout Paradise’s greatest achievements is allowing you to do something else entirely. You can, and are encouraged to, just get behind the wheel and drive, without enemies, timers, or competition.
]]>At first glance, it's a canvas of green or yellow rather than the blue planet it will eventually become in the estimation of generations to come. Eventually, if progress isn't halted, it'll become nothing more than a dot.
In between that early vibrant canvas and the final departure, Earth is going to get a whole lot more cluttered though, and a whole lot uglier. I recently returned to Civilization VI [official site] and quickly realised that I had no desire to build or settle. All I wanted was to explore the untouched world.
]]>We're poised in the drop zone, hanging on by a thread, and nobody seems to care if we cling on by the skin of our teeth or tumble into oblivion.
I am the manager of Bury FC and the terrible results aren't the worst thing about this season. The truly heartbreaking thing is the apparent demise of a small club and its generations-old local support base. If a last minute goal condemns a team to relegation and nobody is around to see the ball hit the net, does it even matter? In Football Manager [official site], they only sing when you're winning.
]]>Cities: Skylines [official site] is a game in which every single citizen has a name, home and (if you're playing it reasonably effectively) job, but nobody matters in the slightest. For a game with such a chummy, chipper tone, it's weirdly cold. Dozens of people might leave town in protest at your mayoral ineptitude, or tens of thousands of people might die in a freak sewage accident, and not only does the game not care, it doesn't even try to make you care either.
There are eight million stories in the reasonably well-developed city, but if I want a human connection to any of them, I have to build it myself.
]]>Shadow of Mordor [official site] has one of the most satisfying combat moves in gaming. It’s a simple double counter, performed by tapping the counter button twice when separate enemies attack you at the same time. You, the ranger Talion, block one attack. To deal with the other you summon an undead elvish Lord called Celebrimbor, who springs out of your body in wraith form to parry the shocked orc’s sword and pummels them into the ground. Every time it happens part of me wants to jump from my seat and whoop.
]]>A friend of mine started the Saints Row [official site] series with the fourth one. She loved having superpowers and trashing a virtual city, but she did wonder what the deal was with Johnny Gat. Even though he's not in half the game – spoilers for the third and fourth Saints Rows, but Johnny Gat dies and then comes back to life – his absence is felt. Characters talk about how his loss changed them. The dude with the sunglasses and neck tattoos who seems like a generic video game badass is treated like he matters.
Gat's a mascot for Saints Row, whether cameoing in games outside the series or within them. You start Saints Row: The Third with every member of the gang wearing an oversized Gat mask during a bank robbery – even Gat himself has one, pointless as that makes the disguise. Everybody wants to be Johnny Gat. To understand why he has that reputation, why fans love him while outsiders roll their eyes, we have to go back to Saints Row 2.
]]>A secret for you: I have not finished The Witcher 3, even though I think very highly of it. I do not believe that I will ever finish it, and the reason for that is the weather.
I've never uninstalled the game from my hard drive, but though I fire it up once every couple of months, I don't progress.
]]>I like baseball, but I don’t really understand it. I know it’s good when a batter smacks it out of the park and bad if they get struck out. But I couldn’t tell you what RBI means, or what an ERA is, or what constitutes an ‘Error’, all of which are officially tallied throughout matches.
So Super Mega Baseball's pitch is just about perfect for someone like me. It strips the game back into its most fundamental components – pitching and batting – and makes them just deep enough to be addictive without bogging you down in any boring details.
]]>A few hours into Arkham Asylum [official site], I thought Batman's cape was glitching. It does occasionally catch on railings if you brood-squat at an odd angle, but this was different; an occasional flash of colour in the gloom of the garment* caught my eye and I thought Bats' big old utility belt was glitching through the cape. But, no, the cape had been torn and as the long night in Arkham continued, Batman's beatings would make marks all over his suit.
More importantly, he gets a heck of a five o'clock shadow.
]]>I’ve amassed an arsenal of weapons that would make any medieval fantasy army jealous. Shiny daggers, magic staffs, elven bows, orcish cleavers – my inventory is full to bursting. But the weapon I’ve used the most in Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is somewhat less flashy: my right shoe.
It's a first-person action game with role-playing elements. Or maybe it's a kicking simulator, and a brilliant one at that. At its core it’s a game about booting baddies into spikes, into open fires, and off the tops of tall buildings to land with a crunch and a spray of red on the stones below.
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