Matt S. is the Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of DDNet. He's been writing about games for over 20 years, including a book, but is perhaps best-known for being the high priest of the Church of Hatsune Miku.
The release of Virtue and a Sledgehammer, the latest from Selkie Harbour, Deconstructeam, and Devolver Digital, is right around the corner. We’re going to have a review of what is a pretty provocative and powerful entry into the “games as art” genre, and we certainly had some questions for the developers about it. For those who haven’t been following along:…
Here’s the thing: I find that a lot of gaming-focused mice don’t put ergonomics particularly high on the list of priorities. That’s not to say they can’t be comfortable, but the focus is very clearly on the design and the features that will give the user a competitive edge. And…
Well, fellow Final Fantasy fans, here’s our chance. For years now we’ve…
A persistent issue I have with video game adaptations of stories from…
I’m not the world’s biggest fan of first-person shooters, but People Can Fly’s Painkiller is one of the exceptions to that rule, thanks to its grim, gothic theme, great monster design, and furious pacing. It was like the developers blended Hexen (another of my small list of beloved shooters) and…
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George A Romero’s Dawn of the Dead is considered one of the finest horror films of all time for the clever way that it blends B-grade cinema tradition with some sharp themes – most notably, a criticism of consumerism and capitalism. Now I’m not going to sit here and argue…
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Game Freak can’t do anything without pissing off a good chunk of one of the most aggressively negative “fanbases” in video games. I still have to delete the occasional abuse-filled comment for having the audacity to write a positive review for the last Pokémon game. Something I still play regularly…
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In all the ways that really matter, Persona 3 Reload on the Nintendo Switch 2 is exactly the same as Persona 3 Reload on other platforms. By that I mean it offers the same narrative (with Reload itself not really touching the narrative of the original game). Ultimately, if you’re…
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I was very hesitant to review Ghost of Yotei, as my experience reviewing its predecessor was… less than great. Applying even a rudimentary critical analysis to the artistic side of a major blockbuster game is asking for the fanbase to take it as a personal affront and then proceed to…
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Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords is an enormously important game – arguably, you could trace the lineage of so many puzzle blend RPGs back to Puzzle Quest (Puzzle & Dragons, for example). The game itself, released way back in 2007 on the PSP and Nintendo DS by the same…
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I would argue that Silent Hill f is the finest game in a series that has produced some classics, if not masterpieces. A big part of that comes down to it simply having a setting and protagonist that resonates better with me, of course, and it’s certainly no slight on…
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You can always trust Devolver Digital to back interesting, quirky and different projects. One recent example of this is Minos, which is a dungeon-building roguelike from one of its own studios, Artificer. As a fan of Dungeons and Dungeon Keeper, my interest in this was immediately piqued, so we sat…
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Lego Party is a Mario Party clone. Let’s not beat around the bush about that. It is what it is, and the development team at SMG isn’t for a second trying to claim otherwise. The problem is that Mario Party is a pretty challenging formula to get right, and… well,…
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The AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES series is inseparable from the creative identity of Kotaro Uchikoshi. Known beyond AI for the cult-classic Zero Escape trilogy, Uchikoshi is the sort of auteur whose style feels irreplaceable. Which makes No Sleep for Kaname Date, a spin-off produced largely without him, a fascinating experiment.…
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