The House in Fata Morgana is a masterpiece on every level, and a game that truly pushes the artistic boundaries of the medium. Few things are quite as bizarre to me as the never-ending arguments about whether visual novels are “real” videogames, about whether they’re something you play or something …
There’s a lot more to a good roguelike than just permanent death and randomised dungeons. What makes the best of the genre work so well is the way they encourage experimentation with different weapons, different items, different builds—driven in part by necessity and in part by a game loop that …
Content warning: The Missing—and, by extension, this review—deals extensively with themes of self-harm, suicide, bullying, and discrimination against queer people. “This game was made with the belief that nobody is wrong for being what they are.” This message is one of the first things you see when you load up …
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 …
I have a lot of great comics on my pull list at the moment, but few have me quite as enamoured as Jem and the Holograms by Kelly Thompson and Sophie Campbell. Usually, I’m content to wait however many weeks it takes for my orders to arrive in New Zealand, and with …
Update 28 April 2017: Even almost two years since posting it, this article still seems to get a lot of traffic. Since then, the English version of Fire Emblem Fates has come out, and it improves on some stuff, but also falls flat in other ways. I just want to clarify that all …
