Tales from the Borderlands was a quality game. The set pieces were brilliant and the characters were magnetically charismatic. It highlighted the exact strengths a narrative-driven experience needed to succeed and, crucially, established the tone needed to satisfy existing Borderlands fans as well as newcomers. This new sequel is devoid …
I appreciate where Memories of East Coast is coming from. I’ll always admire the DIY spirit it takes to just get stuck in as a solo developer, and I welcome, on principle, any effort to earnestly explore questions of guilt and grief. But actually delivering is another challenge entirely, and …
Last month, The Pokemon Company continued its tradition of remaking earlier Pokemon games with Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl. Fifteen years after their original release, these remakes of Pokemon’s fourth generation seek to catch the zoomer nostalgia wave and re-establish the Sinnoh region ahead of Pokemon Legends: Arceus. But do …
As brain training games go, Big Brain Academy: Brain vs Brain is rather playful. The likes of Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training treat everything like a workout: a structured daily routine, with a focus on tracking progress and measuring those gains; Big Brain Academy is more an assortment of brain training-style …
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 …
Gynoug is far from the first retro re-release to augment an authentic port with handy modern conveniences like save states and rewind tools, but it’s easily one of the better examples I’ve encountered. Amid the endless debate about preserving old classics exactly as they were and making their more dated …
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, …
