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…
Much like crabs themselves, I am tremendously glad this game exists, but it’s something I’d rather appreciate at a distance.
The result, for me, was anxiety. A low background hum of “did I miss something”, combined with the high notes of being unable to find the next new area. It was enough to shade my entire experience with Carrion, turning a pleasant enough Metroidvania with a one-of-a-kind protagonist into something I felt like I was struggling to escape from.
Maid Of Sker is more frightening when it’s not trying to scare you.
I thought Röki was going to be a cute and throwaway little puzzle game with a light adventure wrapping, but Polygon Treehouse have gone so much further, and so much deeper than I was expecting. Like all great folklore stories, there is a quiet devastation lurking beneath Röki’s picturebook world, elevating this mythic tale of gods and monsters into the pantheon of all-time adventure game greats.
Necrobarista realises that there are no objectively correct answers to the questions it raises about mortality, loss, and how to live a good life. In giving these two characters their different resolutions without presenting either as better than the other, it manages to acknowledge that while simultaneously giving both a satisfying conclusion.
If you’ve always fancied painting a big map in the colour of WAR, but get intimidated by complex UIs, there are certainly worse places to start. That said, I’d be more inclined to recommend something like the aforementioned Unity Of Command, which cuts right to the heart of large-scale strategy without a single mini-game in sight.
Persona 4 is a twisting tale of dreams gone rogue in a town sapped of purpose. It brings personal demons to life in gaudy but plausible ways, and uses this to rejuvenate the dog-eared framework of a town-and-dungeon fantasy RPG. Unceremonious as it is, the PC port leaves all of that peculiar magic intact. It’s just a shame that the insight and empathy on show here doesn’t extend to everybody.
I like the world and the writing, and I especially like how it can click its heels and conjure up a story – as long as you don’t get bogged down in overlong battles. It’s certainly worth keeping an eye on, and if any of this sounds interesting then an early access visit might well be worth your while.
Disintegration has a lot of room for improvement, but I enjoyed my time with it, and it succeeds in finding a balance between its shooting and strategic elements. It’s the kind of game I hope gets a sequel, one which is bolder in pursuing its ideas, and not just in its character names.
Worst of all, so much of the effort that’s gone into making the very deepest locales seem melancholy and strange is wasted, as there’s no sense of scale. Thanks to handwaved technology, Morai is capable of diving in her regular suit even at abyssal depths, and there’s no real sense in having to travel to get there. The madness-inviting vertical isolation of the deeps, the monstrous cold and the pressure, are all absent. These lonely pits feel like any of the other levels: roughly oval patches of water, about so high and so wide, with a certain number of fish spawned within them. It’s not that I’m unimpressed, or ungrateful, you understand. I just think the developers set themselves a near-impossible task.
It’s hard to imagine anyone else not warming to it swiftly.
Eco Lifestyle adds some of the most interesting stuff to The Sims 4 I’ve ever seen.
It’s as close to a perfect restoration as you’ll get, and the treatment these genre-defining games deserve.
Christ. What a thing. Monster Train is at least as good as Slay The Spire. You really should try it.
To me it feels far more like an expansion pack than a whole new game, slightly improving the cutesy graphics and adding in a couple of extra construction materials, but even then it all overlaps a little too closely with the original. A sequel to a game that already looked awfully similar to another series seems like something that should have iterated a great deal further by now. I certainly recommend checking out people’s most elaborate and daft bridges on YouTube – as for creating them yourself, it’s harder to get excited about.