Games often struggle with the apparent rift between “casual” and “hardcore” audiences, and there are few genres where this challenge is as apparent as in city management sims. At one extreme, you’ve got the intense micromanagement of competing priorities and complex systems that are interconnected but also fundamentally at odds …
In the early 2000s, French developer Microids released Syberia and Syberia II to much acclaim. Long before the resurgence of adventure games that we’ve seen in the last 5-odd years, here was a pair of games that combined that old point-and-click cell with graphics that were state-of-the-art (for their time), …
Troll and I tries to channel both Tomb Raider and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, and ends up living up to neither of those inspirations. Troll and I feels like two very different games rolled into one. On the one hand, it’s a “single-player co-op” game in the vein …
Rise and Shine is beautiful, funny, and surprisingly thought-provoking, but a dated approach to difficulty makes it more frustrating than it should be. A lot of people seem to look back on NES games and their infamous difficulty with rose-tinted glasses. They remember hours and hours spent sorting in front …
If you enjoy picross (or nonograms, or whatever other name you may know these pixel-art logic puzzles), Pictopix is a game you need to buy. Until now, Jupiter Corporation – creators of Mario’s Picross and Picross e, among others – is the only developer that’s really done this puzzle form justice. …
Cross-post from DigitallyDownloaded.net. “Joe’s Diner is scary.” That’s a message I sent to DigitallyDownloaded.net’s editor-in-chief not long after starting up the game. It was late at night, I was home alone, and there was a weather bomb outside making all kinds of ghoulish noises. A brief opening had introduced me …
Note: This post includes some NSFW screenshots from Ladykiller in a Bind. We need more games about sex. It’s odd (but not really surprising) that an medium so rife with titillation and sexualisation is so reluctant to actually explore sex as a theme. That’s part of what makes Ladykiller in a …
Masquerada: Songs and Shadows is a timely reminder of the power that fantasy stories can have to explore real-world issues. Fantasy and science-fiction have a long history of taking on things like class conflict and racism through metaphor, but it seems to often fall short, especially in video games. I …
A little while ago, an animation popped up in my Twitter feed that captivated me. It was a simple loop, showing a group of fireflies flitting around a shrine in the forest, but it was mesmerising. I soon learned about the game it came from: Miyamori, an action-adventure platformer that aims to …
Rose of Winter is one of the cutest games I’ve played. It’s a simple, short, no-frills otome visual novel, but with its lovely art style, fantastic writing, and absolutely frickin’ adorable characters, it filled me with a giddy joyfulness to a degree that’s rare, even within the realm of dating …
