Includes RPS, Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Last reviewed: 007 First Light · 5 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…
I only wish that the mechanics and feeling of Pyreball lived up to that strong storytelling, because it so often feels like an interruption to a great tale.
It may be slight, but it's delightful.
If you put up with its clumsiness, there's a tough-as-nails isometric twin-stick action-me-do (that's the one!) here to play. Just one that doesn't really stand out from the crowd.
I don't think Aven Colony is terrible, despite these 1,500+ scathing words. The combination of survival and constructing a frontier colony is still an intriguing concept, and Mothership Entertainment have used the alien world conceit to create some novel, if ultimately irritating, obstacles. But the balance is all off, and its slog of a campaign and the attempts at streamlining make this a disappointing extraterrestrial outing.
I got my money's worth and I've got enough complex games to play. I want more that are simple and that are as satisfying as this, and while I'm done with it for now, I'm betting I'll be drawn back before the year is done.
I can't talk about The End Is Nigh without comparing it to Super Meat Boy because in so many ways it feels like a conscious alternative to some of the defining properties of that rapid, colourful, classic game. But measured on its own qualities, The End Is Nigh is a good game, but not a memorable one.
I've not gone deep into the game, despite having given it a whole pile of my hours, because it's the sort of thing that'll take me ages to chip away at until I wonder how I ever used to be so bad at it. Which is the sign of this mishmash genre at its finest, for me. I hope for you too.
I've had such a splendid time just mellowing and wallowing in Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles, not needing to care why it has such a terrible name, not being rushed along, or nagged to do anything. Sure, I now want to also play a game that rushes me along and nags me to do things, ideally with a sword to swing around, but what a wonderful piece of balance Yonder offers.
Maybe Serial Killer is a great idea with appealing style, saddled with iffy design and insufficient flexibility. Walks the walk, but the talk's another matter.
It's big on personality too, from the wide choice of thief avatars to the Gangs Of New York toughs and the comedy cockernee urchins, and I dig the Darkest Dungeon But Chipper cut-out art style.
Even if it isn't top of my list of collectible card games to get into (yes, that honour still goes to Duelyst) it has an attention to detail that is admirable and should be noted by others in the room.
For me it felt far too derivative of Inside (it was of course in development before Inside's release, but looked awfully different), which was itself derivative of Limbo, and without the precision of either. Utterly beautiful when it remembers to be, but more irritating than fun in execution.
Get Even is a true original, of the kind we all too rarely see made with this degree of gloss, and I found it deeply interesting for all its stumbles.
Housemarque and Eugene Jarvis have created something very special, and I suspect, enduring.
The characters all strongly stick with me after finishing, and I think that's probably more important than anything else.