It’s tough to review a game that’s only distinguishable by the pieces it borrows from its contemporaries. I don’t mean to simply say that Light brings nothing new to the table, but that it actively feels like a collage of other games stitched together in the hopes of success by association.
Read MoreI'm not sure exactly why or when it started, but I've become completely obsessed with Titan Souls and its imminent release. Despite having watched little gameplay, only knowing basic details on how it works, and having yet to read through an actual preview of the game, there's just been something about it that I can't describe which makes me feel it's going to be something special. After sitting down with the current demo build I can only say that whatever excitement I previously had is now monumentally higher, making the game almost certainly my most anticipated release this year so far.
Read MoreGo Go Nippon is a special kind of torture. Writing this, I’ve not quite gotten over the shock of the sheer abhorrency of its dialogue, the dryness with which random geographical trivia spills out of its characters mouths, and the painful lengths it goes to pander to its audience.
Read MoreAttempting to learn Cloudbuilt is like scaling the face of a cliff with your bare hands. It offers no assistance, no guidance, and relentlessly beats you down to where the game can begin to feel almost hostile. There’s so much going on within a given level moving so fast and incomprehensibly, that getting your bearings can seem an impossible task in a game designed for a higher class of player. But Cloudbuilt’s most apparent problem is also one that’s almost entirely frontloaded, and once I made it over that wall and could peer over the whole of the game, Cloudbuilt evolved into one of the most endlessly satisfying and expanding games I’ve played in a very long time.
Read Moreob Lozenge feels like a digital replication of this perpetual working grind. Crates drop in from the sky, which are then to be dropped into the abyss on the other side of your small village. There to ensure your cooperation and ability to perform your task is a bossy observer, showering you with praise when you finally finish your job but always with the assurance that there will be more crates the following day.
Read MoreFew games are as happy to be here as Super Splatters.
Read MoreFragile Soft Machines asks a lot from the player. It asks that they buy into the plight of a butterfly crippled by its broken wing, to guide it through the dangerous garden it’s fallen in and attempt to make it a better place. It asks for the player to fill in much of the plot themselves, through text boxes and choices for which the outcome is often difficult to discern. And it asks that they accept their fate with little in the way of closure.
Read MoreDuet is a dance. Two heavenly bodies entwined, moving in perfect unison to become one whole, inseparable and immaculate in their symmetry and differences. Duet is also a song. Somber, longing, broken and difficult. It’s a song pulled from outside the game, calling at my darker urges and insecurities. Duet isn’t a game about me, or maybe about anyone, but I was inarguably a part of it, and in its darkness and traces of beauty it found me and spoke to me in ways no other game ever has.
Read MoreTrace Vector begins with a soundtrack. Well, to be exact it begins with a line. Lines upon lines purposefully arranged into perfectly angular designs, burning neon star charts and spacecraft into an empty galaxy. It’s the soundtrack though which sets the tone, one which the game then eagerly joins in a chorus of 80’s sci-fi nostalgia.
Read MoreBlue Revolver is like a checklist of bullet hell staples, remixed into its own uniquely handcrafted mayhem.
Read MoreIt’s like a lost classic brawler gem that’s been hidden in the back of an arcade for years. It plays like a hyperactive beat-em-up with the sensibilities of a saturday morning shonen anime. At its core it’s a fairly simple button masher, but it moves so fast and has such a ludicrous amount of style that its basic mechanics never stuck out to me, at least at first.
Read MoreMussel’s outrageous, self-destructive style is so in your face that I almost forgot I was even playing a game, which is fine as as a shooter Mussel is perfectly enjoyable if not especially deep. Every card has been played into the game’s digital rampage of flickering pixels, and in this case it’s a single trick well worth investigating, putting fellow would-be CRT replicants to shame with its unfiltered ode to image degradation.
Read MorePerhaps The Blackwell Unbound's biggest contribution to the series, is giving it a far larger scope and nuance than what was only hinted at in the first game.
Read MoreDavid. is what happens when biblical theology is applied to an abstract arcade game.
Read MoreYou can probably relate to the scenario: it's your birthday, you're throwing an awesome party with all your coolest friends. Everything is going great but then...oh, it's your mom coming to check on you and RUINING EVERYTHING.
Read MoreThe sad irony of Dysfunctional Systems: Learning to Manage Chaos, is it comes so very close to standing alone but in a last-minute effort, fully commits to setting up more episodes we’re all but certain never to see.
Read MoreClose your eyes and think of what the word “game” first brings to mind. For myself and I imagine a lot of people born before 1995, that image was something 8 or 16-bit. Maybe Mario, of MegaMan, or one of the early Final Fantasy games. In my eyes, pixel art is the defacto aesthetic of games. It’s where they began and an art style they created, yet beginning around the release of the Playstation, there’s been a trend in games to abandon the style in favor of attempting as high a level of realism as possible with a game’s graphics. Only in recent years has the style been revisited, mostly by indie developers, and yet the response I so often see toward it is not one of appreciation but accusations of developers being “lazy”, “incompetent”, or “unimaginative”.
Read MoreDo you like clicking? No, do you derive intense pleasure from pressing a mouse button and watching numbers go up, for the sake of then being able to click a few more things and have those same numbers go up even faster?
Read MoreIf Nintendo and Sega hadn’t been engaged in a dirty console war during the time Crazy Taxi was kicking off, 4-Color Taxi is what I imagine the series might have looked and played like if ported to the original GameBoy.
Read MoreCadence is still a fair ways off, but already it's showing a ton of potential. Even if the editor doesn't pan out like I hope, the puzzles alone are such an ingenious mix of musical experimentation and systemic efficiency (I swear it's cooler than that sounds) that at the very least it will end up as one of the better puzzle games I've played in years, and certainly among the best sounding.
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