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…
A game where music is illegal and you do crimes. It’s the perfect tone-setting tagline for Unbeatable, a rhythm game about a bunch of young adults (and one child) rebelling against an oppressive regime by playing raucous garage rock. Read more
One of the first "moving pictures" ever created is a moving picture of a horse. In the late 1870s, the photographer Eadweard Muybridge produced a series of "chronophotographs" of horses and riders, including the famous 12-frame sequence Sallie Gardner at a Gallop. I know about…
'If you want to torture somebody, first show them your tools' is one of the better horror game design lessons taught by Amnesia: The Dark Descent. I thought of Amnesia's cistern chapter while playing through a later area in Lunar Software's excellent first-person spookathon…
To say that Demonschool comes out swinging with its premise would be an understatement. Trapped on the isolated Hemsk Island and surrounded by increasingly spooky occurrences, it quickly becomes clear that Faye and her classmates have no choice but to kick demons’ spines…
The word "morsel" comes from the Latin "mordeo", meaning "I bite". Every time you play Morsels, you are bitten and eaten by a horrible cat. The beast's incisors crash shut around the screen, and you tumble slowly down its oesophagus after the game's squealing mouse protagonist.…
A teardrop of bog bordered by slithers of fertile ground. The locals call it Natrixia – I call it Sausage Island, and it's at the heart of my domain in Anno 117: Pax Romana. Read more
Ten hours into Arc Raiders, I felt betrayal's sharp sting for the first time. The round began with generosity. I met a fellow raider who had dropped me a rare shotgun as well as a damaged heat sink to upgrade my workbench. They asked nothing in return. It was one of many…
Europa Universalis 5 is a forever game. Insofar as you might be able to play this grand historical strategy forever, but also because - my god - it takes forever to play. After a mere 45 hours of conniving, trading, battling, and scratching my head at menus, I have just about…
I am a baby, floating through space. A decade or so passes while I’m frozen in a pod, dead to the world. Clearly, though, all is not as it seems. Upon finally being rescued and thawed out, I’m given grave news. I’ve been diagnosed with consumerism. Read more
The first level of PowerWash Simulator 2 is cleaning the moving van that just brought you to your fancy new office. 'We're not in Kansas anymore,' say developers FuturLab, as you take in the map wall where you can select levels in an expanded PowerWash world, the open warehouse…
Let's get this over with early: Bloodlines 2 probably should not have been called Bloodlines 2. Shared setting and a couple brief, questionable cameos (plus one utterly rubbish bit of cosmetic DLC ) aside, there is little tying this game to Troika's original janky cult hit…
All hail the Battlefools! They fan out efficiently from spawn and are instantly massacred in a hail of rifle fire and grenades. Arguments erupt in the chat. Who's watching the flanks? Were you watching the flanks? I'm not supposed to watch flanks, I'm an engineer - my two…
The code Bandai Namco were kind enough to send me for puzzle platformer Little Nightmares 3 included a swathe of bonus costumes resembling characters and monsters from the previous games. Another way to phrase this would be that, before I'd had a chance to get to know this…
It's hard to talk about Dying Light: The Beast —the latest in Techland's open-world zombie parkour action series—without talking about its origins. While now living life as a full-priced retail game with a respectable ~20 hour campaign (and one that I enjoyed for the…
Is there anything left that Silent Hill can offer us? Last year, I felt the answer to that question was a resounding no. The series' comeback game The Short Message, a short teaser of a horror experience, landed far, far away from my tastes, and last year's Silent Hill 2 was a…