Pure adrenaline and meditative calm might seem like polar opposites, but—as anyone who’s ever tried their hand at an extreme sport will know well—they can be different sides of the same coin. It’s not a balance that videogames are great at finding, generally speaking. Not Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderlands, though—this …
Welcome to Elk is a wild ride. In the few hours it runs, it manages to be both funny and dramatic, creepy and uplifting, shocking and heartfelt, downright weird. But such is the nature of stories, and that’s ultimately what this game is: an anthology of stories—all true, apparently!—but more …
Primordia — originally released on PC in 2012, and now landing on Nintendo Switch — isn’t your typical post-apocalyptic adventure. Sure, it stays true to the genre’s bleak atmosphere and cataclysmic set design, it’s not really interested in questions about how the world died and the struggles of people continuing …
The first ten hours of Dying Light 2 are rough. The player is restricted to the Old Villedor section of the map, a run-down shantytown whose human inhabitants are barely holding on due to the effects of “The Fall”, the catastrophic event that is responsible for the hordes of undead …
I don’t think anyone anywhere loves anything as much as Kazunori “Kaz” Yamauchi loves cars. The opening credits for Gran Turismo 7 is a 10 minute montage that runs through the history of car culture, produced with the kind of overwhelming love with which a parent produces a slideshow to …
Ah, good old Eurojank. They’re a curious thing, those games that are unwieldy, unpolished, even slightly broken, yet fascinating in the depth of their systems and creative ideas they entertain. Nobody does Eurojank quite like Piranha Bytes—after all, the pretty much invented the style with Gothic. The studio has come …
The mashup of golf and 2D action RPG sounds like an odd one. Sports RPGs certainly aren’t unusual, and Golf Story (to which RPGolf Legends will inevitably be compared) is a great example of that. But we’re talking about a mash-up in the more literal sense: a Zelda-esque action RPG …
It’s funny, how things come around full circle. The earliest JRPGs were inspired by early computer RPGs, which were in turn inspired by tabletop RPGs, each taking the essence of what came before and adapting it to a different format. With Voice of Cards – first The Isle Dragon Roars …
Pokemon Legends Arceus is, in a word, surprising. The latest entry into this storied and occasionally controversial series better embodies the fantasy of catching Pokemon than any other game to date, but falls just short of brilliance. This semi-open world adventure presents a promising new direction for its stagnant franchise, …
Every time I review an Atelier game, I always seem to wind up talking about their laid-back charm and how wonderfully uplifting they are. That may be partially due to a lack of creativity on my part, but it’s most just because… well, it’s consistently true. Gust has spent decades …
