1 month ago
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Review: Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth

So here we are, back to dealing with the Planet all over again. Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth is a game that has a complicated history to deal with and a complicated set of fan desires to assuage. It’s not a stretch to say that the first game in the remake series was well-received, but it’s
2 months ago
0

Review: Hidden Through Time 2: Myths & Magic

Some of the games I review on this site are like nesting dolls, and each time you think you have a handle on what the game is, you find yourself diving down another layer deeper. Other games are exactly what they appear to be. I mentioned this during a recent review, but I think this
5 months ago
1

Review: Roboquest

Sometimes my reviews require a fair number of caveats. That’s just good practice, in my mind. It’s a good thing to make it clear if you are predisposed to not particularly like a game or predisposed to like it, that sets out a baseline. If I say that I wasn’t really inclined to like something
6 months ago
0

Review: RoboDunk

When you first start RoboDunk, it asks you if dunk is the meaning of life. This sort of faux-serious absurdity is, I won’t lie, kind of the sort of thing I live for. Lamentably, as much fun as that question might be, you can expect the game to basically leave it there. It does not
7 months ago
0

Review: Affogato

As a reviewer, I tend to pick out games that I want to review based on one of three criteria. The first are games where either I had been following early development or just saw the trailer and thought that the game looked like a lot of fun. The second are games that are somehow
1 year ago
1

Review: 9 Years Of Shadows

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
8 Aug 2022
0

Review: Tyrant’s Blessing

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
25 Jul 2022
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Review: Cartel Tycoon

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
30 Jun 2022
0

Review: Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes

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
13 Jun 2022
0

Preview: Power Chord

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
26 May 2022
0

Review: fault – StP – LIGHTKRAVTE

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,
13 Apr 2022
0

Review: Cat Cafe Manager

It takes very little effort – bordering on no effort – to get me interested in the prospect of a cat cafe. My two cats are two of the most important living things on the planet to me, and I love cats in general. They’re stupid furry pillows full of knives who vibrate and make
14 Mar 2022
0

Review: Triangle Strategy

On January 28th, 1998, Square-Enix released Final Fantasy Tactics to a North American audience. People who played that game have spent twenty-four years looking for more. I open with that because I feel it’s very important to note my biases at the very least. When I first heard about Triangle Strategy my immediate dream was
15 Sep 2021
0

Review: Metallic Child

Here’s the hidden secret about Metallic Child: It is perhaps best understood not by what it claims to be on the cover but by a series of otherwise ornate references to other games. At a glance, this game is a roguelite, and indeed that’s what it claims to be right on the cover when you
4 Aug 2021
0

Review: Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters (Final Fantasy I-III)

So, the first of the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters are out. And it is impossible to review the whole product just yet, because the whole product isn’t available right now. We haven’t yet played the Final Fantasy IV through Final Fantasy VI remasters. They’re simply not available to be experienced yet. At the same time,
26 Jul 2021
0

Review: NEO: The World Ends With You

So here it is, the sequel. It’s not exactly a mystery that The World Ends With You became a cult hit on its release, and with good cause. It wasn’t just that it had a very different setting than normal, setting itself in the beating heart of a stylized version of Shibuya with a cast
14 Apr 2021
0

Review: Deiland: Pocket Planet Edition

Sometimes, it feels almost wrong to really criticize a game for what it’s trying to be, even though there’s absolutely stuff to be critical about with regards to its design. For example, take the time-honored tradition of the mobile gacha game. It’s clear that there are some major issues with these games in terms of
13 Apr 2021
0

Review: Another Eden

Let me tell you, there’s nothing that gets me to give something side-eye faster than when it doesn’t want to be up-front about what it’s trying to sell me. Maybe a given store is trying to tell me moldy hot dogs. I don’t want moldy hot dogs. No one should ever be trying to sell
29 Mar 2021
0

Review: Undermine (PS4)

There’s a very delicate balance to be struck when making a game that expects the player to walk in and die on a regular basis. Roguelikes and their kissing cousins, roguelites, have kind of exploded in popularity in the past few years. At the core level, they’re pretty easy games to make. You give players
26 Feb 2021
0

Review: Natsuki Chronicles

For a while there, it really looked like we were done with side-scrolling shoot-em-ups for good. I say that without any particular joy at that fact, obviously, because I really like this genre. But it seemed like the spark had gone out, the genre had been pushed as far as it could go, and without