Hideo Kojima is the video game industry’s big auteur. The Stanley Kubrick of games. The guy who somehow gets a big budget to make his strange experiments, even when they defy the industry best practice, and as we all know, the games industry is very best practice orientated. It’s all…
Read MoreEver found yourself looking at the state of video games and going: “Why are so many things becoming so simplified and streamlined?” RPGs are melding into big action games with pacy combat, rather than stats crunchers, strategy and simulation games are often so simplified that it’s impossible to actually lose…
Read More“Oh, great,” your little guide through the minigames of 100 in 1 Game Collection tells you as you unlock the next one. “A terrible puzzle game.” At least our little Dante is aware that you might not be enjoying your trip through hell. Look, I knew exactly what I was…
Read MoreYakuza 0 is in so many ways the finest game in a very fine series. The development team took full advantage of it as a prequel to not only tell the story of where series protagonist, Kiryu, and favourite frenemy/rival, Goro, got their start, but also capture a unique moment…
Read MoreThe survival game genre has exploded in recent years, with countless options flooding the market. Most of these titles hyper-focus on crafting mechanics – a design trend that became ubiquitous after Minecraft’s success, shoehorned into games where it doesn’t always make sense. As someone who cherished the original Survival Kids…
Read MoreRaidou Remastered: The Mystery of the Soulless Army was originally released before Persona 3. That was a very different time for Atlus as a company and this entire property. Before Persona 4 and, particularly Persona 5, took the broader Shin Megami Tensei name to the mainstream, SMT were these dark…
Read MoreThere is arguably no bigger name in the world of interactive films and FMV games than Paul Raschid, who directed The Complex (2020) and wrote and directed Five Dates (2020), The Gallery (2022), and Ten Dates (2023). And his games always drop at the best times; for example, online dating…
Read MoreAs I mentioned in my review of the Nintendo Switch 2 hardware, one of the most impressive features in the Switch 2 is the ability to use the right Joy-Con as a mouse pointer. I fully expected that to be a dinky, silly gimmick, but as it turns out, it’s…
Read MoreMario Kart didn’t need to go open world. It was a much-vaunted feature of Mario Kart World leading up to its launch, and the moments where you’re dropped into the open world and left to just cruise around and complete little missions are, frankly, boring. Thankfully, everything else about the…
Read MoreI’m a huge fan of Boyfriend Dungeon, a dungeon-crawling action adventure simulation game where you don’t just use your weapons in battle — you also form deep, meaningful relationships with them. When Date Everything! was announced, my brain immediately jumped to the idea of it being similar to Boyfriend Dungeon,…
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