As brain training games go, Big Brain Academy: Brain vs Brain is rather playful. The likes of Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training treat everything like a workout: a structured daily routine, with a focus on tracking progress and measuring those gains; Big Brain Academy is more an assortment of brain training-style …
Playing Monster Rancher in 2021 is a surreal experience, to say the least. On one hand, it’s a ’90s game through and through, when CDs were still the standard music format and the relative novelty of a disc-based game console made a fun gimmick out of putting your music into …
Before going into detailed thoughts about my experience, allow me to get this out of the way: Death Stranding: Director’s Cut looks stunning on the PlayStation 5. Admittedly, this isn’t a feature exclusive to the PS5 as even on weaker machines like the base PS4, the game’s terrain, models and …
The Kids We Were was a hard game for me to get through. Not because of any tricky puzzles or skill demands—it’s a “walking sim”, at heart—but because of something far more challenging: its raw, unflinching honesty. It’s a game that deals with some heavy themes, handled with care but …
Even among Experience Inc’s impressive stable of dungeon RPGs, Undernauts: Labyrinth of Yomi is a game that truly stands out. If the stunning promotional artwork for it above doesn’t immediately grab your attention, consider the setting: a dystopian ‘70s Tokyo in which a mysterious structure suddenly appeared out of nowhere …
I write a lot about game preservation when reviewing re-releases, remasters, and the like. I’d say that’s arguably more important than the nostalgia or simple entertainment value—in an industry that’s so bad at preserving its own history, these kinds of releases are one of the better options we have for …
I don’t envy anyone tasked with making a new Metroid game in 2021. Reviving a series that’s so fiercely beloved comes with a heavy burden of expectations that often contradict: to recapture everything that we loved about those classics 20 years ago, but also to carry the series forward into …
Gynoug is far from the first retro re-release to augment an authentic port with handy modern conveniences like save states and rewind tools, but it’s easily one of the better examples I’ve encountered. Amid the endless debate about preserving old classics exactly as they were and making their more dated …
Space Moth DX was already an accomplished CAVE-style shoot-’em-up that put a unique risk/reward twist on the familiar dichotomy of the rapid-fire spread shot and a high-power, focused laser. With a remixed scoring system and new mechanics, Space Moth: Lunar Edition —1CC Games’ answer to CAVE’s Black Labels—takes those same …
There’s a part in George Alec Effinger’s seminal cyberpunk novel When Gravity Fails where the protagonist likens himself to a catalyst: he acts on the world, but is never acted upon himself. That is until—in classic hardboiled fashion—he gets in too deep, and things get very messy and very bloody, …
