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During my fifteenth birthday party, my parents offered me a choice between two video games: Super Smash Bros. for the Nintendo 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening DX for the Game Boy Color. We weren’t well off so they were going to return the game I didn’t pick, putting some extra pressure on me. In the end, the choice was simple: my friends were over and I had already played Link’s…
I recently went trawling through my GOG library for games to play on my Ayn Thor and pulled up Dredge, Black Salt Games’ cosmic-horror fishing adventure from 2023. I played a taste of this near release (not even a full first hour), and have been intrigued by its premise and the fishing gameplay. Somehow fishing has almost become a core mechanic in video games so I’m always interested to see how…
Has a game ever kept you up at night? Not that you stayed up late playing it (though that happened here, too), but that thinking about the repercussions of its plot spirals you out in despair, keeping you from falling asleep. The Incident at Galley House did that for me. On its Steam tags, “Horror” barely cracks the top ten most popular, but this is one of the scariest games I’ve ever played.…
Fifteen years ago, I published my original review of Radiant Historia for the Nintendo DS. I leveraged the game as a way for me to return to the JRPG genre after feeling burned out by Persona 3: FES and Odin Sphere . As a trio of Atlus games from around the same period of time, in retrospect there was really nothing significant about me enjoying one of these titles more than the other two. Radiant…
Almost 19 years ago, I reviewed just the first hour of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night . I had fun with it but had already played the flurry of Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS Castlevania games that had come out in recent years, so the formula felt a bit stale, even though this was the game that changed the series. I don’t think I actually beat Symphony of the Night at the time, so I decided…
When it comes to top-down action platformer games, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Link’s Awakening still both reign supreme. Their simple combat design along with rewarding exploration and semi-challenging puzzles both set the bar and gave inspiration to game designers for decades to come. There’s been more games in their ilk, hell, there’s been many more 2D Zelda games, but none of…
I’ve played games without an ending , games with just one ending , some that have a few endings based on meaningless choices right at the conclusion, and even one with dozens . But I’ve never played a game with one hundred endings. Granted, this is a bizarre proposition, especially when it takes over 30 hours just to reach the first ending. The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy for Nintendo…
What do you get when you combine Invincible, Critical Role, and Telltale Games ? The funniest game I’ve played in years. Half interactive superhero cartoon, half frantic management game, Dispatch stands as a playable season of television for adults that I immediately wanted to replay to see what I could change, and to laugh at the jokes again. Presented across eight episodes (released two at a…
I only saw the original Wicker Man film a few years ago during an October run of watching scary movies. The folk horror classic had been overshadowed in millennial minds by the American remake starring Nicolas Cage. What he and director Neil LaBute would parade out was a terrible update thanks to Cage’s notorious acting style clashing with the worst sensibilities of 2000s filmmaking. Also: not the…
At first glance, Mouthwashing appears to be about the perils of capitalism. This is not a galaxy of post-scarcity. The space transport you find yourself forced to crash into an asteroid in the game’s opening scene does not invoke Star Trek . The people on board with you are not the friendly if unsteady crew from Murderbot. The ship itself has no sense of home to it. Mouthwashing features a wolf in…