It’s easy to overlook just how crucial level design is to Monster Hunter. It’s the way little details in each map vibe together—the landscape, the topography, the way different sectors connect to one another—that allows everything else to click into place, even if the tense showdown with whatever massive beast …
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: farming life sims are a perfect way to just chill out. There’s something cathartic and incredibly relaxing about having lots of little tasks to focus your energy on, but with little in the way of time constraints or pressure. In the …
In a surreal land without a past, frozen in time, a lone birch sapling sits on a pedestal, its roots dangling into the water below. When a strange creature gives you a set of test tubes and informs you that the fate of the world is tied to that of …
Let’s get something straight from the outset: Gal*Gun Returns isn’t the perverted game that so many people seem to think it is. It’s not, as often assumed, some bargain bin thing that exists solely for the purpose of titillation. It’s crass and cringeworthy, absolutely—but that’s a very deliberate and pointed …
There’s no shortage of metroidvanias these days. Whether or not that’s a good thing depends on your perspective: I know plenty of people who get exasperated at the sheer volume of them, but I still get a flutter of excitement whenever I see the telltale Metroid-style map in a screenshot …
With Hitman 3, IO Interactive’s “World of Assassination” trilogy comes to a close. The whole series started out being released as individual episodes, and though its since moved to a more typical “full game” release cycle, it still maintains an episodic approach to storytelling that gives it the feeling of …
On the surface, Persona 5 and Warriors don’t seem like an obvious mix. One is an RPG that’s about as turn-based as you can get, with dungeons designed to labyrinthine and laden with puzzles; the other is a series noted for frantic action combat and huge battlefields that encourage strategic …
It’s hard to find a concise description that does Loop Hero justice. It’s a mash-up of a whole bunch of different genres—roguelike, RPG, strategy, city-builder, tower defence, deck-building game, auto-battler—but the ways all these different things come together make it so much more than the sum of those parts. To …
Room to Grow is the sort of puzzle game that will, almost at the same time, make you feel both incredibly stupid and like some sort of genius. Building of a deceptively simple concept, it doesn’t take long at all to reach the point where each new puzzle seems genuinely …
“Don’t try to do everything in one day.” – Misaki, Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town A few hours into Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town, one of the most striking things about it is just how much stuff there is to do. It’s almost overwhelming at first— …
