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…
There's maybe a third of a good game in here, weighed down by a mountain of big and ambitious ideas, none of them given the time and attention they needed to really function.
The Forest remains a huge achievement, and a survival horror game that somehow manages to keep those two elements surprisingly separate and yet let each impose upon the other in very interesting ways. I do wish it had been tidied and bug-fixed by now, but I can't stop wanting to play despite it.
If you play in co-op, you'll probably be able to ignore the flaws long enough to have a jolly evening or two with some friends (Windows 10 friends only, of course) and if you're dead set on rolling around in the blood and gore, I suggest this is how you play it.
Despite my (relatively minor) gripes, Red Embrace is actually a pretty enjoyable little game that doesn't take itself too seriously and delivers a well-proportioned slice of blood-sucking boy love.
There are a ton of great ideas here, and I particularly dig this whole concept of a management game that's about a production line for silent slaughter rather than cash-generation as such, but the best stuff can struggle to breathe through the excessive micro-management.
Wizard of Legend is a good, if lopsided game. The moment-to-moment combat is highly flexible and seldom anything less than satisfying, especially in co-op. It's just a pity that while your arsenal of spells and artifacts is massive enough to be remixed a thousand ways, the maps, bosses and enemy types only fit together in a handful of configurations.
It may take a few tries to discover how to land a date, but playing Monster Prom is some of the most fun you'll have trying to figure out a game's mechanics.
It's stuck with me, it invaded my dreams last night, it's impactful like a knife tip is impactful. It's inescapable that at times it's sophomoric, but it's worth it for the more pervasive disturbia that ultimately rules.
As it is, it's a lovely, fun game that too frequently reminds me of its mistakes. And despite that, I want to keep playing. Which is probably rather important.
There is something great glinting just below BattleTech's dour and crusty surface. So much now depends on whether future updates will dig for it or not – I pray they do.
Frostpunk may be one of the most tense, exciting city building survival games on PC, but for a game with such an emphasis on innate justice, and heat, it leaves you surprisingly cold.