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…
I am a baby, floating through space. A decade or so passes while I’m frozen in a pod, dead to the world. Clearly, though, all is not as it seems. Upon finally being rescued and thawed out, I’m given grave news. I’ve been diagnosed with consumerism. Read more
The first level of PowerWash Simulator 2 is cleaning the moving van that just brought you to your fancy new office. 'We're not in Kansas anymore,' say developers FuturLab, as you take in the map wall where you can select levels in an expanded PowerWash world, the open warehouse…
Let's get this over with early: Bloodlines 2 probably should not have been called Bloodlines 2. Shared setting and a couple brief, questionable cameos (plus one utterly rubbish bit of cosmetic DLC ) aside, there is little tying this game to Troika's original janky cult hit…
All hail the Battlefools! They fan out efficiently from spawn and are instantly massacred in a hail of rifle fire and grenades. Arguments erupt in the chat. Who's watching the flanks? Were you watching the flanks? I'm not supposed to watch flanks, I'm an engineer - my two…
The code Bandai Namco were kind enough to send me for puzzle platformer Little Nightmares 3 included a swathe of bonus costumes resembling characters and monsters from the previous games. Another way to phrase this would be that, before I'd had a chance to get to know this…
It's hard to talk about Dying Light: The Beast —the latest in Techland's open-world zombie parkour action series—without talking about its origins. While now living life as a full-priced retail game with a respectable ~20 hour campaign (and one that I enjoyed for the…
Is there anything left that Silent Hill can offer us? Last year, I felt the answer to that question was a resounding no. The series' comeback game The Short Message, a short teaser of a horror experience, landed far, far away from my tastes, and last year's Silent Hill 2 was a…
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…