Before going into detailed thoughts about my experience, allow me to get this out of the way: Death Stranding: Director’s Cut looks stunning on the PlayStation 5. Admittedly, this isn’t a feature exclusive to the PS5 as even on weaker machines like the base PS4, the game’s terrain, models and …
The Kids We Were was a hard game for me to get through. Not because of any tricky puzzles or skill demands—it’s a “walking sim”, at heart—but because of something far more challenging: its raw, unflinching honesty. It’s a game that deals with some heavy themes, handled with care but …
Even among Experience Inc’s impressive stable of dungeon RPGs, Undernauts: Labyrinth of Yomi is a game that truly stands out. If the stunning promotional artwork for it above doesn’t immediately grab your attention, consider the setting: a dystopian ‘70s Tokyo in which a mysterious structure suddenly appeared out of nowhere …
I write a lot about game preservation when reviewing re-releases, remasters, and the like. I’d say that’s arguably more important than the nostalgia or simple entertainment value—in an industry that’s so bad at preserving its own history, these kinds of releases are one of the better options we have for …
I don’t envy anyone tasked with making a new Metroid game in 2021. Reviving a series that’s so fiercely beloved comes with a heavy burden of expectations that often contradict: to recapture everything that we loved about those classics 20 years ago, but also to carry the series forward into …
While everyone else was getting excited about what a FromSoftware / George R. R. Martin mashup could bring, the announcement of Elden Ring honestly just made me feel tired. What could the Game of Thrones author bring to the table that Hidetaka Miyazaki and his team don’t already do better? …
There’s a part in George Alec Effinger’s seminal cyberpunk novel When Gravity Fails where the protagonist likens himself to a catalyst: he acts on the world, but is never acted upon himself. That is until—in classic hardboiled fashion—he gets in too deep, and things get very messy and very bloody, …
Don’t be fooled by the cute anthropomorphic cats and dogs or the soft, colourful art style: Fuga: Melodies of Steel is a dark, confronting game. Telling a story about the human cost of war through the eyes of some of a group of children as they fight for survival and …
When I played the original release of Project Zero: Maiden of Black Water on Wii U, I really didn’t like it. It was a game that, on paper, sounded exactly like my kind of thing, but all I found was squandered potential. In reviewing it (for another site that’s no …
There’s a lot going on in Life is Strange: True Colors. On one level, it’s a murder investigation with a supernatural twist thanks to a young woman’s ability to read the minds and memories of people during moments of intense emotion. On another, it’s a small-town slice of life, focused …
