For reasons unknown to anyone, my final moments with Splatter saw me facing off against Cthulhu and his many rocket launching penises as I danced around acid pits trying to chop off his alarmingly phallic artillery.
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There’s a sad irony to how Polarity succeeds at being both bloated with ideas and creatively bankrupt.
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It’s just an immensely unenjoyable experience all around, and one that seems intentionally so but without anything interesting with which to fill the black hole that seems to have enveloped Bermuda to ensure nothing joyful or humorous finds its way in. And so Bermuda comes and goes, full of drama yet lacking any presence and leaving me grasping for even the tiniest justification of the hour I just lost.
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Though Broken Age acts as a return to Double Fine’s earliest adventure game roots, it’s also their largest and most ambitious project in years. But if anything, the added scope and possibility that exploded out of their hugely successful Kickstarter has only amplified their talents as a developer, giving birth to what seems easily capable of becoming the game that defines them as a studio.
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It's rare that I've ever seen games be retroactively improved by the release of new ones, yet I find myself appreciating Horrorshow's work more and more as her gallery of strange and intriguing worlds to explore continues to grow.
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As I walked out of the theater it was like I had gone momentarily numb, still lost in what I’d just seen and my body was rapidly attempting to process. When I finally came to my only thought was “when can I see it again?”
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I’m often cautious about getting too hyped up for new releases in case I come away that much more disappointed if they fall short, but I’m feeling pretty safe with Jenny LeClue and now need to distract myself before I get too enthusiastic and this post turns to gibberish.
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I think a lot of games could learn from Persona 4 in how sometimes lightening the mood and giving players time to catch their breath can have a far bigger impact than rolling dead ahead as ferociously as possible before the game wraps up.
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Nihilumbra is such a exquisite game to look at, that it’s disheartening to see such lovely artwork was wasted on an experience that only manages to dull the senses.
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There are so many things I love about Rain, and yet when I think back to it all I can remember is how much I wish it had held itself back. There is a wonderful, touching experience at the base of Rain, but I can’t help but begin to question what part of my feelings were legitimate, and which were due to the game telling me how I should feel when it so continually outlines those feelings for you.
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It got me thinking about things I never even recognize in most games, and though it didn’t quite go all the way, it started a discussion and even managed to have a lot of fun in the process. Odd praise to be sure, but it’s a rather odd game itself isn’t it.
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Woolfe: The Red Hood Diaries feels confused. It wants to reimagine the Red Riding Hood fairy tale into a darker, Victorian gothic tale (bearing no small resemblance to the similar idea applied to Alice: Madness Returns) but it doesn’t know how. Ideas bubble around on the surface but always seem to pop before they’ve been explored, and looking deeper only exposes a bigger jumble of incompatible objectives that refuse to settle down as they pull the game in different directions. Pull hard enough, and pretty soon it’s all collapsed at your feet.
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There’s something untraditionally appealing about Out There Somewhere’s insubstantiality. It’s a very brief, straightforward experience, but rather than feeling shallow it uses its brevity to subvert the players expectations in interesting ways.
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At this point you may be wondering if I’ve accidentally published the wrong review, but I feel it important to talk about my feelings toward Sonic before I can discuss Freedom Planet. I try to stay away from relying on direct comparisons between games in my reviews, but Freedom Planet is such a direct response to the cries of Sonic fans for Sega to bring him back to the 16-bit era that it would be almost disingenuous not to mention how it relates. It’s also important because it’s the first time I’ve been able to see what it is about this formula that people love, and for a moment make me sad it’s been underserved for so long.
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Stories at the dawn is only a few minutes long. It’s unclear to me right now if it’s finished or will potentially be something entirely different by the time you play it. The developer might have an entirely different vision for it than what I saw tonight, but that’s what I love about the space within art. With the absence of distinction what people see in it can take on a life of its own.
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