15 hours ago
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Review: Pepper Grinder

When we first saw Pepper Grinder trailers in our work chat, I immediately responded with a tongue-in-cheek nod to a classic movie joke: “This summer, Dig Dug is back, and this time it’s personal!” Which is easily the first mood you can get out of the promotional trailers. This is a game in which you
4 months ago
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Review: A Highland Song

Out of all of the (probably too many at this point) games that I play, there are two genres that I always get excited for: rhythm games, and games that draw emotions out of my cold dead heart. One is a fun way to jam out to great music while testing my button pressings skills,
4 months ago
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Review: KarmaZoo

As I’ve spent the past several years as a reviewer, I’ve increasingly grown to think of games as broadly belonging to one of two categories. The first category are games that basically wear their hearts on their sleeves. Within the first half-hour you have seen most of the game’s core loop and ideas, and you
4 months ago
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Review: Yohane the Parhelion: BLAZE in the DEEPBLUE

There is a recurring theme for me in taking reviews for games that are spinoffs of series I know nothing about. Yohane the Parhelion: BLAZE in the DEEPBLUE, aside from having the probably most overwritten title I will see all year in my review queue (it has very little time left in the year to
5 months ago
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Review: Astral Ascent

So, hey, that game Hades is pretty good, huh? Like, everyone liked it. Don’t pretend you don’t know that’s why we have a nice big rush of games that are cashing in on the whole roguelike thing. You know it, I know it, a variety of stray cats know it. And most of them are…
7 months ago
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Review: Gunbrella

Christopher Hastings created the character of Dr. McNinja when he just chose that as a forum user name on the Something Awful forums, and then he did art of the character stating that he was available for anyone who needed the services of a doctor or a ninja. Later, he had to give the character
10 months ago
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Review: The Lord of the Rings: Gollum

With any mammoth franchise, it’s standard practice to create tie-in media that seeks to fill in the gaps of a greater narrative canon. This is just as true for The Lord of the Rings as it is for other IPs, and when it comes to video games in particular, the series has seen a lot
11 months ago
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Preview: Trinity Fusion

Every so often, my love of games trying new spins on the metroidvania formula leads me to misread a game. When I watched the first trailers for Trinity Fusion, I was expecting something in that vein. This was perhaps not entirely inaccurate, but it was mostly inaccurate. Sure, there are definitely aspects of the game
1 year ago
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Preview: Afterimage

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
1 year ago
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Review: SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake

Are ya ready, kids? Met with mixed reception though it was, the 2020 remake of SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom served as a much welcome return for fans of the cult classic platformer. It seems it was quite the lucrative one as well, given that we’re now staring down the barrel for the release
1 year ago
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Review: Kandria

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
1 year ago
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Review: Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider

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
1 year ago
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Preview: Frontier Hunter: Erza’s Wheel of Fortune

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,
1 year ago
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Preview: Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider

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
3 Jul 2022
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Review: Sonic Origins

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
27 Jan 2022
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Review: Gunvolt Chronicles: Luminous Avenger iX 2

You know what series is deceptively difficult to make work? Mega Man. The thing about the Mega Man franchise and its derivations is that all of them are based upon a rather simple template. You go around and fight a few bosses, acquiring weapons from each of them, then you go through a fortress stage
21 Dec 2021
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Review: Scarf

For a genre that has given rise to the creation of so many great games, it can often be difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to the puzzle platformer. This is doubly true when games under its umbrella are heavily evocative of one another in certain visual or mechanical elements,
24 Mar 2021
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Review: Get-A-Grip Chip

Okay, I’m just going to put it out there and straight up admit that I have quite the affinity for platformers of many kinds. It was basically the genre that pulled me into video games proper, and I will still happily devour what I can get my hands on if the experience is enjoyable in
28 Jan 2021
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Review: Olija

It’s always refreshing to review a game that isn’t trying to be anything other than itself. There’s more to discuss when it comes to Olija, of course, but one of the things that struck me early on was the fact that, unlike all too many games that are attempting a spin on X formula or
9 Nov 2020
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Review: Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin

A game like Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin feels like an eventual inevitability. I’ve noted before that Demon’s Souls is a game that’s spawned a lot of imitations, largely because… well, it has. But it seems like Stardew Valley has also spawned a number of imitators in a similar vein, and it’s honestly not surprising