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…
It’s fair to say On A Roll does a good job of capturing the cartoon. It’s bland, repetitive, churned-out rubbish seemingly based on the mantra, “Oh who cares, it’s for three year olds.” I’ll tell you who cares: THE PARENTS.
When a single character’s dialogue is the most annoying thing about a card game, the creators probably deserve some credit. Lord knows the voice acting is at least as good as it is The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and so is the writing. By that I mean the writing is a passable exploration of fantasy tropes and power politics that’ll probably become hugely overrated.
It can be confounding at first, not to mention the ugliness of those grey boxes. But it doesn’t take long to realise that this is something special. A management game that feels like you’re in charge of people – beautiful, flawed people – instead of a handful of impersonal bots. And it’s those little people who will keep you going.
It's just simply a wonderful creation that you absolutely should buy and play. It's brief – the nine levels will perhaps take you a couple of hours – but a splendid couple of hours they are. Daft, fun, exuberant and very pretty, it captures a sense of joy like little else.
It's neat, and it's much more tense than any of these screenshots make it look. In another world, it would have carried itself less like a tie-in browser game for Cbeebies and attracted a more Spire-like audience. The price of insanity, perhaps.
As it stands now, Mothergunship has a lot of likeable elements that sometimes mesh into an excellent whole, but just as often bump awkwardly against each other.
I've had such a blast playing it all over again, and desperately wish Volition would announce a new entry in the series that – unlike the follow-up Armageddon – is also set outside in a big open world.
Games that give us spaces to become familiar with have a special place in my heart and Far: Lone Sails has earned its place there. A game that offers us both a memorable journey and a place to call home. Of course, how much meaning can one have without the other? Far: Lone Sails gave me a wistful sense of both that I won't soon forget.