Review by Lindsay M.I can’t tell you the last time I sat down and played a straight-up, old-school visual novel. I’ve gotten used to visual novels with branching narratives, or that include point-and-click components. The Mysteries of Ranko Togawa: Murder on the Marine Express promises to be that classic experience.…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. I really like the concept of Prinny Presents NIS Classics Volume 1. Nippon Ichi has dipped into its deep history to dust off two of its games that would be a tough sell as separate releases without a massive project behind them to remake them. Bundled…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Pretty Girls Panic! by Zoo Corporation is basically the same game as Bishoujo Battle Cyber Panic!, a previous title that it (via publisher EastAsiaSoft) has already released on the Nintendo Switch. It is, basically, Qix, but rather than clearing blank or generic backgrounds, you’re instead revealing…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. On its surface, you would never suspect that Rune Factory world work. Taking the tranquility of Harvest Moon and mashing it together with the inherent violence of RPGs seems counter-intuitive, and yet the developers of Rune Factory and various associated homages and pastiches have somehow refined…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. One of the first things that I realised when I started playing Nostalgic Train was that I haven’t actually played any Japanese “walking simulators” before. Not that I can remember having played, at any rate. It’s a genre that seems to have either spoken to western…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Auteur theory, and whether it should be applied to video games, is one of those more interesting debates that we can have about this medium. Most of the time it’s difficult to identify a single person as being responsible for the creativity in a game; the…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. When you hear the term “Eurojank,” you might well assume that it’s being said as a pejorative, but no. That’s not the case at all. “Eurojank” games are, as the name suggests, titles that come out of Europe from the B-tier developers. Developers that can’t match…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Developers; if you’re going to give players a map, but not tell them where they are on the map, that in itself is fine. I actually appreciate the commitment to the “old school” there, and the lack of hand-holding. However. If making sense of the map then…
Read MoreReview by Lindsay M.If you’re like me, you’ve seen Groundhog Day more times than you can count and it has become the basis of comparison for every form of media ever created around the subject of time loops repeating until the protagonist can get it “right.” Twelve Minutes is one…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Unfortunately, WitchSpring3 [Re:Fine] is simply not a good game. There’s the germ of a good idea in there, and as someone that loves Atelier and JRPGs that respect your time, I loved that this one was a brief experience of a few dozen hours (at most),…
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