The Sorrowvirus: A Faceless Short Story is a frustrating game. Part of that is the sort of deliberate, atmosphere-building user-unfriendliness that you often find in horror games; part of that is puzzles that are more tedious than brain-bending. But most of all, Sorrowvirus is frustrating because it’s an intriguing, original …
Shibuya is a place that a lot of videogames have taken us to over the years—in fact, I think we might be close to running out of three-digit numbers for fictional versions of the Shibuya 109 building. Of all the interpretations of it, few leave the mark that Ghostwire: Tokyo …
Content warning: Central to Martha is Dead are themes of child abuse, mutilation of dead bodies, self-harm, torture, and mental distress. By extension, this review touches on those same topics. Martha is Dead is a tricky game to review, at least on Xbox One, because there are two very different …
Ghostrunner’s blend of free-running and action is refreshing because the latter is incorporated into the former. It’s a platformer first and foremost but the action itself remains exciting due to two reasons: most enemies die from a slash of your sword and ALL enemies kill you in one hit. By …
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 …
Kholat, an indie horror game inspired by true events and narrated by Sean Bean, is getting a limited-edition physical release on Switch thanks to Red Art Games. Developed by IMGN.PRO, Kholat is an atmospheric first-person horror adventure that sees players exploring the cold, inhospitable Ural Mountains to try to find …
It’s so refreshing to play a horror game like Layers of Fear 2. When so many games are trying to be the next viral hit by hitting streamers with jump scares, it’s a rare treat to play something that’s more interested in getting under the skin and embedding a feeling …
One of the most memorable things about Metro: 2033 and Metro: Last Light was their sense of place. Both games are claustrophobic and constricting, sometimes to the point of frustration, but that was in keeping with the very ideas that the games (and the books they’re based on) wanted to …
Leaving Lyndow is a teaser for the forthcoming Eastshade, but it’s also a delightful game in its own right, about the complex feelings of leaving home. It’s hard to describe Leaving Lyndow, because I’m still not sure what, exactly, it is. I know what it is in reductive mechanical terms, …
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 …
