Resident Evil Village is more than just a bold new gothic horror-influenced direction for the series; it’s a reflection on horror as a whole. Resident Evil has traversed a few different horror subgenres over its years. What started as a B-movie survival horror turned into high-energy, science fiction-infused action horror, …
There’s too much stock put into “polish” as a metric of quality in a videogame. The assumption is that “polish” is an inherently good thing: that an unpolished game can only ever be good in spite of its rough edges, and never because of them; that high production values and …
Don’t Forget Me, the debut outing from The Moon Pirates, is an intriguing premise. A “new breed of puzzle game” that combines adventure game puzzles with keyword-driven exploration of people’s memories, it’s a unique take on cyberpunk and complex moral thought experiment on individuality and freedom—if one that feels a …
The House in Fata Morgana is a masterpiece on every level, and a game that truly pushes the artistic boundaries of the medium. Few things are quite as bizarre to me as the never-ending arguments about whether visual novels are “real” videogames, about whether they’re something you play or something …
Returnal should not be a roguelike, and I say this as someone who rather enjoys that genre. It’s a remarkable game in so many ways: full of the sort of frantic yet precise action that Housemarque is unrivalled at creating, but on a whole new level of scale and ambition, …
A new console generation brings a lot of promise, especially when it comes to sports sims—I don’t think any other genre quite benefits as much from advances in graphical fidelity and realism as sports sims do. That puts a lot of expectation on the shoulders of MLB The Show 21, …
With Atelier Mysterious Trilogy Deluxe Pack, you can now get every main-series Atelier game since the PS2 days on Nintendo Switch (and PS4 and PC). Having a few generations’ worth of games all in one place, readily available to dive into, is wonderful—especially when you think about how many new …
Like a lot of people, NieR Automata was my introduction to the world of NieR and the works of Yoko Taro. It’s no exaggeration to say that it quickly earned its place as my favourite game of all time, with its beautiful, heartbreaking story, its sense of humour, its subversive …
There’s a lot to be said about the comfort of a daily routine. When life gets chaotic, routine can keep you grounded, give you something solid to hold on to in the middle of a storm. The more enjoyable and less demanding, the better: reading a few pages of a …
From LittleBigPlanet and Kirby’s Epic Yarn to Yoshi’s Woolly World and Sackboy: A Big Adventure, it seems like “textile-themed platformers” are becoming a genre of their own—as oddly specific as that may seem. It’s this trend that Where’s Samantha? jumps on, and while it lacks the budget and refinement of …
