Review by Alex Kidman. Lost in Random loves a fantasy storytelling trope. Utterly adores them, in fact, because so very much of its narrative attraction lies in the way it tells what is otherwise a pretty standard tale. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Evil queen. Dark magics…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Making a game that is critical of what we take for granted in capitalism seems like a Sisyphean effort, given that, more than any other art form, the entire industry is slavishly and unquestioningly devoted to capitalism. This same week people are out there buying a…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. I find the framing of the PlayStation 5 extended edition of Death Stranding intolerable. The concept of a “Director’s Cut” comes from cinema, and it represents the uncompressed creative vision of the director. Oftentimes a film has studio and producer meddling that results in a cinematic…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. One of the benefits of publishing a review a little later after release is that you can check against some of the other reviews to see how your own take on the various themes and ideas expressed by the game were taken by others. Having checked…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Do you remember that episode of The Simpsons where Homer ends up in the dictionary, and “to pull a Homer” means “to succeed despite idiocy?” Well, I reckon SkateBIRD should get a dictionary entry too: “to completely and utterly fail despite having an infallible concept.” SkateBIRD…
Read MoreReview by Lindsay M.It’s been six years since the original Sheltered launched. The game came out around the same time as Fallout Shelter, and shares enough superficial similarities as to be comparable, although with a premium price rather than a free-to-play model. I was worried it wouldn’t be successful, but…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Nexomon’s console releases have come in an odd order. Last year, at around this time, PQube released Nexomon: Extinction on various platforms. I think it was a surprising success for the publisher (and it did rightfully deserve to be a success since it is excellent), and…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. In many ways, I prefer Judgment to Yakuza. This is by no means a slight directed towards my beloved Yakuza, but the mobster film tradition that that series taps into is just not as interesting to me as the noirish thriller that was Judgment. Now that…
Read MoreReview by Matt R. Ask any fan what they like about Dishonored, Deus Ex, Thief, and the like—”immersive sims”, as they’re often referred to, because the game industry has a weird obsession with genre descriptors that are vague to the point of being meaningless unless you’re already familiar with them—and…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. I barely remember the BloodRayne Betrayal I played back on the PlayStation 3. When I heard that there was going to be a remaster of it, just two things came to mind: firstly that it was brutally difficult and that it was one of the most…
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