Review by Matt S. Talisman is one of the most well-regarded board games out there. First released way back in 1983, the game was clearly designed to capitalise on the love of pulp fantasy that was washing through board gamedom back then, thanks to the success of Dungeons & Dragons…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. It was easy to look at the original Toukiden and dismiss it as a clone of Monster Hunter. Easy, but inaccurate. Toukiden took some of the ideas that drove Monster Hunter, yes. It featured protracted battles with very large monsters, loot grinding to improve your character’s…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. We live in a world where very serious questions are being asked of western interventionism and imperialism, colonialist attitudes, and the nationalism of western powers. With ISIS and Syria, we’re finally starting to realise that over a century of meddling, king making, and warring in places…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Thanks to NISA, the Touhou Genso franchise out of Japan is starting to get some real traction in the west. These games range across a wide variety of genres now, but what remains consistent to them is their slavish loyalty to what inspires them, and while…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. When I first played Malicious, back when it was a cheap PlayStation 3 downloadable game, I really didn’t like it much. Fast forward a couple of years to Malicious Fallen, and I’ve about-faced on that. I really like this game. I don’t know if there have…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. One of the greatest narrative game experiences you could ever hope to play is Planescape: Torment. At a time when most RPG narratives weren’t much more than excuses to funnel players from one battle to the next (you could say that not a lot has changed…
Read MoreReview by Brad L. All of the cool kids these days are making some form of pixelated game intended as a throwback to the glory days of the 80’s. More often than not, the difficulty spike of the 80’s rears its ugly head as well. 8Days is no exception, and…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. To be honest, there’s not much more I can say about the games Danganronpa 1 and 2 that I haven’t already covered in my reviews. They’re visual novels, and I find them to be utterly brilliant. Bringing the two games together into a single package on…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. In a delightfully odd way, Atelier Firis: The Alchemist and the Mysterious Journey is simultaneously the biggest step forward for the series, and, after the Dusk trilogy took the Atelier series down some more serious thematic roads, also its biggest step back towards tradition. Having been…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. The opening line of dialogue in NieR: Automata could have been pulled directly from Nietzsche or Kierkegaard, if those men were militant androids about to go to war with an army of genocidal robots. Related reading: On why NieR: Automata’s predecessor was the best game of…
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