I must admit: aside from DuckTales, I can’t remember ever playing any of the games in The Disney Afternoon Collection. I didn’t have a NES as a kid, and when I discovered the joys of retro gaming as a teen, I was much more interested in games like Final Fantasy and …
A fifteen-minute pre-alpha demo of Black Hive’s upcoming side-scrolling action RPG Kova is enough to make me very excited about the full game. The first thing that hit me was the beauty of the world, as my character woke up from a crash landing on deserted, icy planet. With it’s …
If you want to make your indie pixel art platformer stand out, you might give it some ridiculous premise: a cat-owned company’s teleporters keep breaking down, so it’s up to a the firm’s master of Custodial Sciences (who is a frog) to investigate. You might do something even more radical, …
Alwa’s Awakening isn’t just a “retro-inspired” game, but one that combines a modern design sense with the technical limitations (and creativity) of the NES. In a sea of increasingly wearisome “retro-inspired” indie platformers, it’s refreshing to play a game like Alwa’s Awakening. At a glance, it looks much like any …
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 …
Double Fine has a way of breathing new life into old genres. They weave weird, wonderful stories through familiar mechanics to create experiences unlike anything else. Psychonauts twisted the 3D platformer by having you quite literally exploring people’s psyches. Costume Quest drew a story of childhood adventure around a Japanese-style …
These days, it takes a lot for a retro-inspired roguelike platformer to stand out. Bard’s Gold does nothing of the sort. If anything, it’s more simplistic than its peers, but I nonetheless found it to be one of the more enjoyable games to come out of this obsession with pixel …
There’s a moment not long into Shantae: Half-Genie Hero that gave me chills. As usual, Half-Genie Hero opened with Shantae’s longtime arch-nemesis Risky Boots attacking Scuttle Town. I was running through Main Street, hair-whipping Tinkerbats left and right, enjoying the pumping soundtrack, when suddenly… vocals. This is the first Shantae …
It’s been a long time since I’ve done a Now Playing post. What better time than with the holidays kicking off? Here’s what I am playing, and will be playing, over the break. Shantae: Half-Genie Hero (PS4) I was a latecomer to the Shantae phenomenon, so I didn’t get a chance to back Shantae: …
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 …
