Includes RPS, Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Last reviewed: 007 First Light · 4 days ago
I can't get Fish Sticks out of my head. Not the food, but the stray cat with a squished face and stubby legs that I wrangled into my shack in Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel’s new roguelite strategy game, Mewgenics. The shop, the pub, the dentist; no matter where I go, I…
I was, like so many of my 1990s-born peers, a huge Sims girlie. I spent hundreds of hours as a teen and young adult making people I knew, characters from shows I was obsessing over, or original characters I wanted to experiment with, and diligently following their life paths and…
While everyone complains about the technical state that Borderlands 4 released in, whether it’s choppy performance or the lack of an FOV slider on consoles, I found myself on the much happier end of the spectrum. Aside from the gruellingly slow start, where I was drowning…
During my first two hours serving Strange Antiquities ' customers, I tugged the bronze pendulum of an ornate clock at least a dozen times, wondering what the resulting spin and settle of its hands meant. I checked my occult encyclopaedia's index for mentions of time and compared…
I regularly go against my best consumer instincts and check out the yearly iterations of sports games. It’s not something I’d likely be doing without some Steam press account magic letting me dodge the yearly cash sacrifice for a game that usually shares a huge chunk…
I want to give Hollow Knight: Silksong a thrashing. A fully suited C-suite bollocking. I want to verbally repay unto it every cruel death, every pernickety jumping puzzle, every time-thieving runback it’s inflicted on me across the past five days. But I can’t. For…
There's a beautiful, wordless moment about ten minutes in to The Dark Queen Of Mortholme. As the titular queen, you've just casually mace-flattened the same plucky interloper for the Nth time, then snapped their corpse out of existence in a wreath of electric purple fire with…
Switzerland-based Okomotive are here to escape from dystopia once again. In their previous Far: Lone Sails and its sequel, you played a child operating a cutaway landship that often resembled a rampaging beast - the last surviving specimen of a race of monstrous engines,…
The motor carriage noisily trundles down a dirt track in the Sicilian countryside. It’s a beautiful evening or morning. I’ve lost track of which, and I’m too busy thinking to double check whether the pale sun overhead is rising or retreating. How strange it is…
In the realm of pixel artistry, action platformer Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound is a pretty work of dither and parallax. It's full of set pieces reminiscent of a misremembered arcade's heyday. Between the more standard run 'n' chop levels, there are jetski chasedowns, motorcycle…
Killing Floor 3 has an excellent headshot. It’s the kind of frisson-inducing gun/baddie interaction that most FPS games strive for and fail: somehow crisp and explosive at once, like popping a balloon full of wedding china. There’s a deliciously tangible sense that a metal…
You don't use the mouse in S.p.l.i.t, but you won't miss it. Games are sometimes described as 'clunky', but what's more satisfying than good clunk? Each key clank here hits like a heart thud. Axel and two associates are scrambling for root access to launch a malware attack on…
For a low-stakes open world cycling game, Wheel World has a lot of lore. You wake up in the forest and discover a spirit called Skully, a ghost who offers the player a rusty bike and immediately ejects so much fantasy jargon and frontloaded backstory that I started to think it…
There are lots of games in the same way there are lots of crisps. Many of those games are good, in the same way that many crisps are shaped a bit like Jesus. But even a crisp shaped like Jesus ceases to delight after you've seen a few. Great, you think. Another bloody Jesus…
The Drifter is sometimes quite silly in ways I don't think are intentional, and it managed to yank me right out of the experience more than once. You obviously have to be in a thing to get yanked out of it though, which is my way of saying that The Drifter is good, although I…
"Fine" is a funny word. It can mean something is sublimely crafted, but it can also be used in a withering sense. It's fine. This is fine. But there's another, calm and casual sense in which you can say something is fine. Like when a friend handing you some tea apologises…
In Mecha Break you play as a booby anime statuette. She is the one driving the mech. This is a leery game of lasers and ass shots, and sometimes even manages to elicit moments of exciting robo-a-robo combat. You fight other players across a splatter of multiplayer modes, and may…