Last month we previewed Cult of the Lamb and I left off eager to see how its combination of roguelike dungeon crawling and base building held up in the full game. Now that I’ve had a chance to sit down with it properly, it’s time to see where it’s held up and where cracks have
If you’re a modern gamer, you very likely have or want to have headphones of some variety so you can enjoy your favorite games (and often their music) to their fullest without disturbing others. Particularly in the last decade or two, numerous companies have taken on the challenge of creating a good audio experience from
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
I’m a sucker for a good narrative adventure game, especially if it has a compelling story to tell. However, not all games within this genre are created equal, and titles like South of the Circle make this quite clear. That isn’t to say I had a bad experience during my playthrough, but suffice it to
Twenty years ago (holy crap has it really been that long?), the development studio Inti Creates got their start working on the Mega Man franchise with the much-beloved Mega Man Zero series. After producing a number of games in various different subseries in the franchise, Mega Man went into its famous content drought. But that
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
Both low concepts and high concepts abound in the wide world of video games. Some games have premises that could be the basis of full dissertations, and others can be immediately understood in a single, tantalizing sentence. Endling – Extinction is Forever, developed by Herobeat Studios and published by HandyGames, is thoroughly a part of
As you may well know, Monster Hunter Rise was one of our top games of 2021, earning one of our coveted 10/10s. Many Monster Hunter titles get followed up with an improved “G” (for “guild,” in Japan) or “Ultimate” (in the US), and with the advent of the ease of patching that comes with modern
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
If there was any sort of competition for the most re-releases in popular media in comparison to the original Star Wars trilogy, the Genesis-era Sonic games are definitely up there. Hell, the fact that there have been multiple compilations since then signals to most gamers and even passing fans that SEGA knows how timeless the
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
Despite their tried and true persistence as a popular genre, horror video games can sometimes feel a bit polarizing: you either love them or you hate them. Moreover, they have the tendency to feel somewhat insular as well, with many horror releases iterating and expanding upon the staples established by the genre’s most popular titles.
The last time I wrote a review for an otome game, I couldn’t help but point out how childish the genre’s usual tropes felt from the perspective of an older player. The satisfaction I craved from that particular story never came because I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t the intended audience. This never
You really had to be a certain age to fully understand the absolutely monstrous chokehold that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had on younger kids at the time. Since then, to a certain extent, many other IPs popular with their target audience have had a hard time replicating at the height of its popularity. Save
If you’re a regular here, you may remember the review we did a while back on Nacon’s Pro Compact controller for Xbox systems and Windows 10/11, and what we have here today can fairly be described as its big brother: the Revolution X. Billed as “competition grade,” it does pack in some additional features and
I’ve never been what one would call an avid card game player. Sure, I know which hands beat what in poker, I can count for blackjack, and I’ve bluffed my way through a game of sheepshead or two. But I have no idea if holding out for a flush is wise and I’ve never known
I got into collecting retro games a few years back. Both to reexperience the NES era that I grew up with, and to try out games from other consoles I never owned when I was younger. I’ve managed to build complete collections of three of my favorite franchises (Tales of, Ys, and Fire Emblem), and
What would happen if you took the tower defense and action-adventure genres and threw them into a blender? Games that try to meld two genres that don’t share a lot of overlap are often well-intentioned, but fall just short of the mark when it comes to utilizing both to reach new heights of gameplay. They
[Edit 6/1/2022: Particula has added buying options for both D&D Shells and a USB charger since the time of writing. The following review remains unchanged.] The internet rules everything around us. At least, that what tech toy manufacturers seem to think. The jokes of everything being “smart” are kind of old at this point, but
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,
