A decade since the last new game in a series with a dedicated fanbase—and with the bankruptcy of one studio and formation of another in the meantime—there’s some weight on the shoulders of Rune Factory 5. With expectations riding high, it’d be easy to get overly ambitious, to try to …
I am loving this new subversive streak from Tetsuya Nomura and Kazushige Nojima. They’ve worked together plenty as a creative director/scenario writer duo and often push the bounds of creativity (whatever jokes you want to make about what Kingdom Hearts has become, it remains a fascinating concept). But more recent …
Content warning: Central to Martha is Dead are themes of child abuse, mutilation of dead bodies, self-harm, torture, and mental distress. By extension, this review touches on those same topics. Martha is Dead is a tricky game to review, at least on Xbox One, because there are two very different …
The original Submerged was a remarkable game, if a divisive one. It set out with the singular goal of crafting a relaxed yet thought-provoking experience, as you explored the submerged ruins of a climate change-affected city and played witness to a bittersweet story of survival and togetherness. Some found it …
Pure adrenaline and meditative calm might seem like polar opposites, but—as anyone who’s ever tried their hand at an extreme sport will know well—they can be different sides of the same coin. It’s not a balance that videogames are great at finding, generally speaking. Not Grand Mountain Adventure: Wonderlands, though—this …
Welcome to Elk is a wild ride. In the few hours it runs, it manages to be both funny and dramatic, creepy and uplifting, shocking and heartfelt, downright weird. But such is the nature of stories, and that’s ultimately what this game is: an anthology of stories—all true, apparently!—but more …
Primordia — originally released on PC in 2012, and now landing on Nintendo Switch — isn’t your typical post-apocalyptic adventure. Sure, it stays true to the genre’s bleak atmosphere and cataclysmic set design, it’s not really interested in questions about how the world died and the struggles of people continuing …
The first ten hours of Dying Light 2 are rough. The player is restricted to the Old Villedor section of the map, a run-down shantytown whose human inhabitants are barely holding on due to the effects of “The Fall”, the catastrophic event that is responsible for the hordes of undead …
Ah, good old Eurojank. They’re a curious thing, those games that are unwieldy, unpolished, even slightly broken, yet fascinating in the depth of their systems and creative ideas they entertain. Nobody does Eurojank quite like Piranha Bytes—after all, the pretty much invented the style with Gothic. The studio has come …
It’s funny, how things come around full circle. The earliest JRPGs were inspired by early computer RPGs, which were in turn inspired by tabletop RPGs, each taking the essence of what came before and adapting it to a different format. With Voice of Cards – first The Isle Dragon Roars …
