Review by Matt S. Conan Chop Chop wants to sit somewhere between Gauntlet and Hades. It wants to be an action roguelike with a moreish loot system, but also being orientated heavily towards bringing four friends together for some button-mashing chaos. Unfortunately, it’s much too inconsistent to reach the heights…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. The Hyakki Yagyō – Night Parade Of 100 Demons – might be my favourite piece of Japanese folkloric storytelling. A “monster manual” of sorts, featuring some of the most bemusing, weird, wild, and entertaining spirit monsters, Hyakki Yagyō speaks deeply about the Shinto view of the…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. In 2022, I do hope developers learn to properly pair narrative genres with gameplay mechanics. Horror is a difficult genre to get right; it’s not just about having ugly monsters and creepy houses. It requires a carefully creative hand to guide players on a journey. It…
Read MoreInterview by Matt S. We haven’t had the time or bandwidth to review roguelike deckbuilding experience, Inscryption, but this game has all the hallmarks of becoming a cult classic. Harvard absolutely loved his time with it in preview stage and, once we start to clear out the backlog, we do…
Read MoreReview by Lindsay M.I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect when I picked up a controller to play The Eternal Cylinder for the first time. The trailers show a weird and wonderful world that is also quite scary because, well, a giant rolling cylinder is about to crush you unless…
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 absolutely love this game and I’m not sure why it’s not getting reviewed anywhere,” writes a user on Metacritic about Monster Train First Class. I can tell you (and them) why: Because it’s so painfully easy to overlook. I very nearly did. I’m glad I…
Read MoreNews by Matt S. Ever-prolific publisher, NISA, is at it again, having announced two games this week. We’re getting a new horror game with a deeply Japanese aesthetic as well as a new roguelike. The horror game is called Shadow Corridor, and it sounds like it might be a bit…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. I never did review the original Curious Expedition. But I did do a video on it. In that video, I called it a “cracking roguelike.” Given that Curious Expedition 2 is better than the original, I guess that makes this game “cracking+”. It could have gone…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Hades has ruined me. Zengeon is a perfectly competent roguelike action game, but it’s not the kind of genre-transformative experience that Hades is, and that leaves it feeling a (very) distant second in 2021. The first issue is the narrative itself. Zengeon has a perfectly adequate…
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