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.
Omen of Sorrow is something that 18-year-old me would have found so totally cool. Drenched in gothic grim darkness, it’s an effort to bring together vampires, werewolves, dark angels, succubi, mummies and… well, Elizabeth Bathory, into a game that looks and feels like an emo kid’s “black-as-their-soul” poetry. While I’d like to think that my sense of aesthetics is a…
Transport Fever 2 is a celebration of the value that transport networks bring populations. It is a “builder” simulator, but similar to the likes of the classic Transport Tycoon and A-Train, you don’t build the building directly. You build the road, train, ship and air transport networks that the cities…
I haven’t played an Anno game since Anno: Create A New World…
I worry that the wonderful folk at the developer, Gust, have lost…
Relayer 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 More
Back 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 More
Idea 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 More
New 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 More
I 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 More
In 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 More
Once 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 More
Overnight 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 More
In 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…
Read More
Nintendo is a versatile company. Over the many years that it has been around, it has produced everything from experimental artsy experiences to blockbuster trend-setters, and lengthy single-player journeys to pure multiplayer joy. There’s little Nintendo can’t do, but if I was to pick out one thing within the oeuvre…
Read More