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.
Nintendo’s decision to revive the Famicom Detective Club series seems to have kick-started a mild rush of new games that are, effectively, mystery visual novels, but have point-and-click elements and light puzzles to keep players interested and intrigued. That’s a good thing. This genre is excellent. And Aksys’ decision to localise Path of Mystery: A Brush with Death is a…
I am a firm believer that as many video games, be they popular, good, bad, and loathed, should be preserved as possible. All these retro collections that have been released by publishers to cash in on their classic properties (and undermine the value of emulation and the second-hand market) have…
Nintendo’s timing with its no-pressure comfort food games has been fortuitous. Animal…
For people who enjoyed the vibes of Monster Hunter, but found the…
Octopath Traveler broke some impressive ground back in 2018. As the first effort with the all-new HD-2D visual engine, it presented us with a new vision of what sprite-based games could look like. It backed that up with a wonderful fusion of the kind of turn-based gameplay that had been…
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If you’ve got access to Netflix, then you’ve probably seen the Rilakkuma animated series. Rilakkuma and Kaoru launched back in 2019, and a second season: Rilakkuma’s Theme Park Adventure, finally landed, after some delays, in late 2022. As stop-motion animations, each of the short, generally sweet episodes across both seasons…
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Brave’s Rage is fine. It’s a new entry in a very over-saturated genre, and doesn’t do nearly enough to stand out, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with the game itself. It’s just disappointing that there seems to be a shrinking pool of gameplay structures that indies work with, at a…
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A high-profile and very controversial game released this week. I’ve been loathe to mention it by name, because we made the decision very early on that we wouldn’t be covering it, but Hogwarts Legacy has created a lot of discourse this week, and there is something of tangential relevance to…
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In the grand scheme of things, Yasuke wasn’t the most significant, nor celebrated samurai of the Sengoku era. He wasn’t one of the three great unifiers: Nobunaga Oda, Hideyoshi Toyotomi, or Iyeasu Tokugawa. He also wasn’t one of their powerful rivals. Yasuke wasn’t even credited with a battle win. And…
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There are so many games based on the classic Chinese novel, Journey to the West, that it’s almost impossible to count them. That’s not a complaint, of course, because it is a book that lends itself to video games nicely, and Journey to the West is perhaps the most global…
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“Stream Deck does nothing but controls everything.” That’s the way Elgato like to talk up this esoteric little device, and it’s actually pretty apt. It’s a very dumb device, and quite difficult to get started with. After picking up the most recent Stream Deck+, I honestly didn’t think I’d get…
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Last weekend, I did an in-depth stream of Easy Come Easy Golf. The game’s a few months old on Switch at this point, but as I haven’t been able to stop playing it in all this time, I figured that it would make for a fun stream. If you haven’t…
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I’m a big fan of itch.io for the freedom and open platform that it allows for developers to be creative, experimental, and directly canvas the audience for feedback for games that are not yet ready for primetime on Steam and its ilk. In addition, itch.io allows you to be transgressive,…
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It’s easy to understand why One Thousand and One Nights – also known as 1001 Nights and Arabian Nights – has fallen out of vogue in modern culture and has rarely been touched in video games. There are dozens of games produced based on Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Grimm’s…
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