After I was most of the way through 9 Years of Shadows, I asked our review editor if I was allowed to simply post an image to review the game. He was… not enthusiastic about that being the entire review, so I will instead write a full review. But I will include the image itself
One of the things that’s kind of amazing about reviewing games is the fact that you see things you otherwise probably would never have caught. Souls of Chronos is just such a game. It’s a little indie game from Shanghai-based FUTU Studio, published by Astrolabe Games, and the odds are pretty good that it wouldn’t
The interesting thing about the retro FPS revival that’s been happening over the past few years is that in many ways, it has already reached a point wherein you need to have a really strong hook to justify your place in the field. At first, it was just enough to offer a throwback from regenerating
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has read more than a few of my reviews to know that I like games in the general metroidvania sub-category. That having been said, they are also still a genre I tend to be critical of; just like any other sort of game, it’s possible to
Let me start with an anecdote: Kandria, on both its official website and right as the first thing on its Steam page, proudly boasts that the game has zero ability gating and you can go anywhere you want right from the start of the game. The same blurb expresses glee that finally, you will be
I’d really like to be able to say that when we got the full review build for this particular title, my experience of playing through the demo for Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider had already slipped through my memory and faded into half-remembered ephemera. Because that’s exactly what this game feels like it’s emulating right down to
I forget exactly when it was I stumbled across Tower Hunter: Erza’s Trial on Steam long ago, but it was at least at a point when the odds of getting new metroidvania titles seemed… not great. So it was a while ago, and it definitely predates my working here. The game launched into early access,
If you’ve caught the subtle mentions of it many times over the course of the years I’ve been reviewing here, you probably have a vague sense that I actually really like turn-based strategy games. Heck, I like strategy games in general, hence why I keep trying to play RTS games despite being demonstrably bad at
William Goldman wrote the novel The Princess Bride inspired by stories that he told to his two daughters, who at ages 7 and 4 requested a story about “princesses” and “brides” respectively. That’s the origin of that title. Yes, an excellent novel which was adapted into an amazing film came from just slamming two concepts
One of the recurring problems that has plagued the Soulslike genre basically since the beginning is that there isn’t a very good pipeline for getting into the games. Even if you’re someone who absolutely adores these titles, you had to get into it by just finding a game that really clicked for you and then
More often than not, the games I review here are not games I specifically knew about beforehand. That is not the case for Potionomics, though. I forget how far back I first learned about it, but I had flagged it as something that looked lovely and like it could be a lot of fun quite
The last few years have seen an explosion of a certain kind of game, a genre we have yet to really have a solid name for – or if we do, it’s one I haven’t seen floating around. Even if you don’t know the name, though, you know the type. It’s a whole lot of
How do you feel about classic action games from the 16-bit era? Because that’s going to inform a lot about how you feel when it comes to Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider. The 16-bit era of console gaming had a slightly disjointed start, with the Sega Genesis having launched a solid two years before the Super Nintendo
Look, it’s been six years. We don’t need to beat around the bush or hedge any longer. Stardew Valley was a phenomenal game that had an enormous cultural impact on gaming and the indie scene in general. You might be about to point out that this is not the game I am reviewing today, and
Despite what seems to have become de rigeur for the gaming industry, making a game a roguelike is not actually cruise control for making it a game with endless content. In fact, I can think of a lot of games lately that have tried to keep themselves engaging by making themselves into roguelikes when neither
For better or for worse – probably worse – the late 80s into the early 90s were a real time that actually happened. Some of us lived through them. And there was a time, perhaps not so long ago in memory, when there was a real sense of a sun-drenched lush paradise ruled over by
I do not, to this day, remember how I first learned about Recettear. But it remains, years later, one of my favorite games and an absolute delight to play through front-to-back. Sure, most of the characters were broad archetypes rather than being well-developed individuals with rich inner lives, and it was clearly a small title
Despite what it may seem like, I am actually not an enormous Fire Emblem fan. I am, however, an absolutely unreserved massive fan of Fire Emblem: Three Houses. This isn’t to say that I traditionally have disliked Nintendo’s long-running second-party series of strategy RPGs, just that they have rarely risen above “well, that was fun
First and foremost, I think it’s important to look at Power Chord as it presents itself compared to what Power Chord actually is. Because I believe that it’s easy to get swept up in the game’s presentation in such a way that you lose sight of the fact that the game itself is actually simpler
If you’ve been reading my reviews for a while, you have probably noticed by this point that I periodically make a point of picking a game up that I am in no way qualified to review. This would be one of those times, because quite frankly? If there’s one genre I tend to actively dislike,
