Touhou Genso Rondo: Bullet Ballet has the unenviable position of being the first game in the Touhou Project series to see an official Western release. As a fan-made spin-off of a franchise with a rather niche following, especially outside Japan, it’s an odd candidate for localisation. It was the first …
For me, the premiere of Batman: A Telltale Series last month was a shaky start. It showed potential, especially in its nifty detective sequences and its exploration of Batman’s violence, but the plotline, obsessed with taking every turn to remind players that Bruce Wayne’s parents are dead and he is …
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 …
Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night might be one of the most famous paintings in the world, but it is, objectively, not very good. Let’s start with the obvious: The Starry Night is only 73.7 by 92.1 cm. This is fairly standard, so it’s not bad per se, but there are also much bigger paintings out there. The …
I thought I knew what I was getting into with Gal Gun: Double Peace. I was expecting a silly, pervy rail shooter that didn’t take itself too seriously at all, and while that’s certainly what I got, I wasn’t expecting a game that was so clever and subversive in its …
When The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing first came out a few years ago, it was a bit of a surprise. A robust, if technically flawed, action RPG with an interesting plot and some thoroughly entertaining writing, it went a long way to clearing some of the stink from a …
I imported I Am Setsuna earlier this year when it first came out in Japan, though I never got around to playing more than the first couple of hours. Having now played the English version, I’m glad I didn’t play much of the import, because with my cursory understanding of …
Playing Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was playing a completely different game to other reviewers. Maybe the lukewarm reception tempered my own expectations somewhat, but what I played was a good game—a great game, even. There are a lot of minor annoyances that …
LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens is the best LEGO game to date. Aside from using the best Star Wars film (yes, I went there) as its source material, it’s managed to breath new life into the LEGO game formula. The combination of action, adventure, LEGO-based puzzles, and oodles of …
The tactical RPG genre is one that is, for the most part, fairly rigid. That’s no bad thing, of course, but it means I thought I knew what to expect from Grand Kingdom going in. I did not. This is a game that’s taken a well-established genre and turned it …
