Despite their low-key tone and slice-of-life settings, many games in Gust’s Atelier series can be surprisingly impenetrable. Older games, in particular, confined players to rigid time-management systems that asked players to carefully manage how they spend their time between fighting monsters, gathering materials, synthesising items, and resting. Even more recent …
Nintendo Switch
Over the past decade, Mario and Sonic have become synonymous with the Olympic Games, at least where videogames are concerned. With the exception of the PyeongChang 2018 winter games (due to licensing reasons), every Olympics since 2008 has seen a Mario & Sonic tie in, each one delivering a collection …
The ending of Mary Skelter: Nightmares didn’t really leave much room for a direct sequel, but its unique world left so much potential for more stories to tell and ideas to explore. Where many a game would simply try to shoehorn in some contrivance to allow a follow-up to a …
I can’t think of a better game to ring in Halloween than Luigi’s Mansion 3. Sure, there are scarier games out there, and that’s what a lot of people look for at this time of year, but growing up on the likes of The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Addams …
The original Root Letter is a remarkable game. I said as much when I reviewed it back in 2017, and everything I said then remains true today. It’s a stunning piece of digital tourism that takes players to a meticulous re-creation of a part of Japan that most foreign visitors …
Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age was one of the real highlights of last year. In a time when many JRPGs seem to be either trying to aggressively “modernise” or deliberately channeling nostalgia, here was a game that felt timeless right out of the gate. It stayed true …
I’m glad that Final Fantasy VIII is finally getting the recognition it always deserved. It was the black sheep of the series for a while thanks to some of its more experimental elements, but it seems to have grown on people in the years since (or, perhaps, I just follow …
“Surrealism” isn’t generally the first thing to come to mind when I think of The Legend Zelda as a series, but it’s certainly been a defining element of Link’s Awakening ever since it’s original release for Game Boy in 1993. Where your typical Zelda game sees Link trying save Princess …
Rightly or wrongly, almost all of the discussion around Omega Labyrinth Life has been focused on its controversial approach to sexual content. After all, the whole premise of the series is about exploring dungeons with women whose breasts get bigger and bigger as they accumulate “omega power” and get stronger. …
Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden was, I think, one of the most overlooked games of last year. A lot of those who played it rave about it, and it reviewed well, but it seems to have been little more than a blip on the radar for the majority of …