Few game developers have quite the mastery of psychological horror as Bloober Team. Layers of Fear 2, originally released for other platforms in 2019, and now making its way to Switch, is an especially potent case study in how the a surreal, eerie atmosphere and the fractured, tragic story of …
Essays on Empathy is so much more than just an anthology of games; it’s a candid reflection on Deconstructeam’s history and creative process. There’s no other developer quite like Deconstructeam. Even if you only look at their commercial releases, Gods Will Be Watching and The Red Strings Club show a …
I didn’t know a Crazy Taxi mode is the thing that Days Gone was missing, but here we are. I didn’t bother with the free DLC that came out for the PlayStation 4 version, so playing again on PC—which comes with all DLC included out of the box—is my first …
In 1999, Pokemon Snap made quite the splash. It was a huge departure from the RPGs that came before it, at a time when Pokemon hadn’t really branched out into different genre territories. It was also an interesting twist on the rail shooter genre—though mechanically similar to games like Star …
In 1988, Nintendo released Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir upon the Famicom Disk System. Though the lack of global release meant it’s long been an obscurity outside its home country, it made quite the splash in Japan. For one thing, it gave Yoshio Sakamoto—best known for his work on …
It’s hard to separate The Settlers-style city-building strategy games from the colonialism embedded in them—after all, this is a whole genre built around the idea of settling unfamiliar land and creating a thriving community there. But Before We Leave, from Dunedin-based Balancing Monkey Games, looks at it through a different …
I don’t think a week goes by without at least a dozen new releases on Nintendo Switch, and almost always with at least a few real gems among them. April was no exception, with headline acts like Atelier Mysterious Trilogy Deluxe Pack, New Pokemon Snap (review incoming!), and SaGa Frontier …
I really want to like Breathedge. It’s a game that, on paper, sounds like it should be a riot: a survival game set in space, with the unique challenges and opportunities that come with that, dressed up in irreverent humour and with more of a narrative push than your typical …
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 …
