Reviews
It’s been a long time since I’ve used a gaming handheld, and longer still since I’ve wanted one. I bounced off the Nintendo Switch hard when it became clear it was a jack of two trades that was just o...
The rural Korean village of Gokseong has a problem. People are killing one another in frenzies of homicidal glee. They’re also growing rashes and boils all over their bodies, erupting in foul-mouthed...
I’ve been describing Brigandine: The Legend of Runersia to my friends as “What if someone made Fire Emblem, but with six houses.” Throw in a dash of grand strategy (e.g. Crusader...
I have often thought that the most important part of impressionism is not the subtle display of light that its most famous painters were known for, but instead the way motion rolls across the canvas....
Picking up trash in Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor is honestly not that bad. It’s entertaining, actually — which is a big departure from other games I’ve played which are about living in povert...
Everyone knows Shovel Knight, Yacht Club Games’ 2014 release that aped the style and design of NES games (updated for modern eyes and thumbs) to huge success. Which makes it a little strange, i...
The first three “levels” of Beglitched are extremely, deceptively easy.
Phoenix Wright and his Ace Attorney pals have solved thirty cases at this point, if you discount Edgeworth’s investigations, Wright’s dalliance with Professor Layton, and that one old-timey s...
Let’s get this out of the way: Landfall Games’ Clustertruck is a first-person platforming/bizarro-parkour game where the play area is made up of hundreds of of identical, bright-white, high-spe...
Usually, if a press email includes a phrase like “a guy getting his eyeball actually punched out of his head,” that’s typically enough to pique my interest. In the case of Mother Russia Bleeds...
On a recent episode of Radiolab, the linguist Guy Deutscher discussed teaching his daughter the names of different colors. He would point to different things in the world and say they were either gree...
Before I tell you about my experience with Valley, let’s just get one thing straight: this is not a horror game. Just because it was made by Blue Isle Studios, the creators behind Slender: T...
The ripples along the Tacoma Narrows Bridge right before it breaks up are mesmerizing.
I first heard of Mu Cartographer during the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at GDC this March. The EGW is a (relatively) long-running GDC event designed to highlight truly weird game de...
VA-11 HALL-A (verbalized as “Valhalla”) is a “cyberpunk bartending” game, in which you mix drinks and listen to your patrons’ problems (although increasingly as the game goes on, they end up...
Crush Your Enemies is a textbook example of “don’t judge a book by its cover” in practice. It looks a little underwhelming — with its cartoony barbarian art and doofy storyline about a bunch...
Homefront: The Revolution, the sequel to Kaos Studios’ underwhelming 2011 shooter Homefront (a game best remembered for correctly predicting the year of Kim Jong-il’s death), is nast...
It takes a lot for an FPS to impress me. I would consider myself only the most casual fan of the genre, someone who enjoys the off-kilter offerings (the BioShocks, the recent DOOM, etc.), and just dab...
Good things come to those who distract themselves with other good things. Sega 3D Classics Collection inspired this adage that I just made up. When I fire up either Thunder Blade or...
