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…
Although you won't see everything, you can finish Many Nights A Whisper in under an hour. Each day you'll train with your fiery sling, lighting braziers and honing your aim for a looming ceremony where you'll try to hit a distant ritual chalice with a single shot. At night,…
Put me in the camp of point and click aficionados who fiercely believe that 1993's Gabriel Knight: Sins Of The Fathers is one of the best adventure games to ever touch a PC. First in a trilogy of thriller mysteries, it featured writing that was a cut above Sierra On-Line's usual…
Elden Ring had a starting class named the Wretch that gets a club and some ratty underwear filled with dreams and nothing else, and there's something special about the first few hours in Limgrave playing them, scavenging your first pieces of mismatched armour and build-defining…
I am falling asleep at the wheel of a big bulldozer. RoadCraft is not necessarily a boring game, but it is so meditatively slow, lumbering, and bit-by-bit that I find myself dozing when I'm supposed to be, um, dozing. Some of this is down to simple tiredness, but there's also a…
The roguelike deckbuilder is a remorseless evil that strives to colonise every dream ever dreamt by the human brain. It is a sparkling, shuffling plague, germinated by Slay The Spire, that threatens to absorb every other mortal pastime, from space travel through poker to…
They say that if you ignore your detractors, you also have to ignore the praise. But I'm proud that my boss told me I'm a good courier. "I am a good courier", I think, ramming a remote control corvette destined for a local child's chimney into a pedestrian's shins, knocking them…
I've arrested someone who did not deserve it. The chump was carrying counterfeit jewellry and I lazily slapped on the cuffs without reading my police handbook. I'm about to get that book thrown at me. When I sit at my desk at the end of a shift in cop sim The Precinct, I will…
So there's a passage in biographical novel The Moon & Sixpence where art connoisseur Dirk Stroeve spends months helping painter Charles Strickland recover from a life-threatening illness. Once well, Strickland returns the favour by promptly nicking Dirk's wife Blanche.…
Excuse me, waiter, there is a Tetris in my deckbuilding soup. As a combination of roguelike deckbuilder, tactics game, and tetramino tile-builder, Drop Duchy is an interesting mash-up when it works and a somewhat messy experiment when it doesn't. It's intriguing to see the parts…
I was having a pretty good time with Doom: The Dark Ages. Then I rolled credits, reinstalled Doom Eternal, loaded up Mars Core, and realised how much Id have lost their sense of playfulness. Less grounded than landlocked, less weighty than weighed down, this is the slightest,…
Despelote ought to feel idiosyncratic. Set in Ecuador during the country's historic World Cup qualifying campaign in 2001, its protagonist is a half-remembered version of the game's lead developer. Yet there's nothing peculiar about it, either. Despelote is a game so authentic…
How’s this for playing yourself: after a week spent clearing out my old family home, a week in which I speedran the lives and deaths of several loved ones by combing through crates of school papers, diaries and letters; with hands wizened by cleaning fluids, nostrils…
The moment you'll most feel like an adventurer in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is right before you leave the main menu and its music behind - the majestic fantasy epic that music promises doesn't really exist. This isn't Lord Of The Rings. It isn't even Eragon. It's David…
"I. WANT. NINA. PASADENA. DEAD!" This is a distressing thing to hear from the mouth of a space pirate boss, much less see punching onto the screen in bold red text with every word. That's you, see - Nina Pasadena, deep freeze insurance commando. You eavesdrop on the angry rant…
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is Sandfall Interactive's debut, which tells me two things about the French studio. Firstly, that they're a bunch of utter show offs and, secondly, that they're a bunch of utter show offs. You can't do this, Sandfall. You can't just come storming out…