A few years ago, I tried a demo of Ikaruga. I liked the concept of the game, and I had fond childhood memories of other shoot ‘em ups like Raptor: Call of the Shadows and TwinBee, so I thought for sure that Ikaruga would be a game I would like. …
Action
Dex is a game I wanted to like, and for the first hour or two, I really did like it. It’s a cyberpunk action RPG reminiscent of Deus Ex and Shadowrun, but that plays out as a sidescroller with some gorgeous 2D artwork. The combination of action RPG staples, light …
Playing a preview build of Tanzia reminded me of days long gone, spent whiling away the hours in vanilla World of Warcraft. Indeed – and I say this as a compliment – Tanzia is like a single-player take on the humble beginnings of Blizzard’s powerhouse MMO. It’s an action RPG …
I went into Valley expecting a beautiful game of exploration and interactive fiction—a “walking simulator”, if you like. There are certainly elements of that, but at its heart, Valley is a first-person platformer, and a great one at that. It brings together jumping puzzles, free-running, Metroid-like upgrades, light combat, and …
We need more Māori stories in the mainstream. We need more Māori films, Māori video games, Māori books, Māori comics, Māori TV shows. There’s so much untapped potential in Māori history, culture, and folklore for stories across all media and spanning all sorts of genres, and The Dead Lands is …
Disclosure: I previously worked with eastasiasoft in a freelance capacity on Rainbow Moon. I have had no involvement in the development of Lost Sea. Lost Sea is the sort of game that reminds me why I don’t really like roguelikes all that much – because of both what it does well …
With the indie scene’s obsession with “retro-inspired” games, we’re seeing a lot of throwbacks to the 8-bit era. Some, like Shovel Knight, commit fully to the idea; for others, it’s a vague reference to a pixelated art style. But one things remains constant: “retro” and “8-bit” seem to be almost …
One of the best things about the recent surge in indie game development is the chance to hear stories from so many different voices; voices that are all but locked out from the traditional, AAA route. The relative accessibility of game creation tools, running the gamut of complexity from Twine to …
To say that Mad Max: Fury Road has shaken up the pop cultural sphere would be an understatement. Here is a film that is a blatant, unapologetic summer (or winter, depending on where you’re from) blockbuster, and yet has sparked so much interesting philosophical, sociological discussion. While we’re talking about …
We haven’t had a new IGAvania in six and a half years, but finally, Koji “IGA” Igarashi has come out of the shadows with a new project: a “A gothic, exploration-focused action platformer” called Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. His is probably not a household name, but as the person …