I don’t often write about films these days, but I recently saw something at the Japan Film Festival in Australia that was powerful, profound, and haunting enough that it has since occupied all my thinking. Kokuho, directed by one of Japan’s most noteworthy art film directors, Lee Sang-il, is, as we enter an era where AI is undermining the very…
DigitallyDownloaded.net wouldn’t be the website it is without its mascots. Dee Dee, Nettie, Lorin and Amelia don’t just appear in our visual novels (don’t forget to check out the free demo for the upcoming A Week on the Water if you haven’t yet!). They also appear across the website, representing…
Read MoreRelayer is God Wars, but located in space. That comparison isn’t going to help you if you were one of the many people that unfortunately overlooked God Wars (and therefore missed one of the finest tactics JRPGs ever), but if you imagine a heavily narrative-driven fantasy adventure, backed by traditional…
Read MoreBack in 2015 (seven years ago!), in my review of the original Submerged, I wrote: “Submerged is at its core a deeply frustrated warning against humanity ignoring the 97-odd per cent of climate scientists that insist we’re set for a bad time if we don’t hurry up and start dealing…
Read MoreIdea Factory International announced at the New Game+ Expo that it will bring us a brace of new visual novels, and is taking on the publishing duties for the sequel to the well-regarded Dusk Diver. Dusk Diver 2 Dusk Diver 2 is a direct sequel to the original, as an…
Read MoreNew Game+ Expo happened recently, and as usual, the Japanese publishers were there in force to make their announcements. NISA has always been one of the most proactive, and it has a bevvy of interesting new titles on the way. Prinny Presents NIS Classics Volume 3 As with the previous…
Read MoreI should love Dark Deity more than I do. The developers clearly have passion for what they’re doing, and the thing that they’re doing is copying one of my favourite games of all time. In its entirety, Dark Deity aims to clone the two Fire Emblem titles that were released…
Read MoreIn this video (the third part of this month’s podcast, see below), Harvard, Trent and I talk about the game canon. We often assume that a game becomes canon when it sells well (that’s not it) or even that it reviews well (not that either). You only need to look…
Read MoreOnce upon a time, before BioWare announced itself to the world with Baldur’s Gate, and long before Atari got the rights to Dungeons & Dragons and then all but buried the iconic property (in terms of video games, at least), there was a company called SSI. SSI was perhaps better…
Read MoreOvernight Sony unveiled the much-expected competitor to Microsoft’s Game Pass – an upgrade to PlayStation Plus that would see it now split across three “tiers” of service, and the most expensive tier (a little over $100/year, depending on local pricing) will have over 700 games, including titles from the original…
Read MoreIn this video (the second part of this month’s podcast, see below), Harvard, Trent and I talk about Stranger of Paradise – the new Final Fantasy game that we just can’t stop thinking about – and why it is so smart and represents such a good thing for the games…
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