Review by Matt S. Operation Babel: New Tokyo Legacy faces the unfortunate reality that it has been released onto a console that has, over the years, absolutely nailed the dungeon crawler genre. Whether it’s Demon Gaze or Stranger of Sword City, the creative (and different) Ray Gigant, through to the…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. I have played – and loved – a lot of visual novels over the years. There are the VNs that mix with other genres, such as Danganronpa, 999, Eiyuu Senki and Tears to Tiara, and I love them all. Then there are the “true” VNs, where…
Read MoreReview by Harvard L. Sometimes the indie scene catches you by surprise. Whether by novel gameplay mechanic, unexpected plot twist or affecting graphical style, the best indie games manage to make the player stop and say “well, I’ve never seen that before”. In Polish indie duo Lichthund’s Lichtspeer, that moment…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Nippon Ichi has already demonstrated that it has a Grimm-like fascination with taking pure innocence and exposing it to corruption or utter horror. Last year’s Yomawari, and The Firefly Diary from the year before it, were very different games, but the common thread between them was…
Read MoreReview by Clark A. Detractors of dungeon crawlers often claim these games are all too similar, but perhaps that’s also why the titles under that umbrella are so endearing. From traditional mystery dungeon games like Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja to more classical Wizardry clones in the vein of…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Years after the PlayStation Vita has finally been laid to rest, and even the Japanese developers and publishers who are still supporting it have stopped, I’m going to continue playing it for many years to come. The main reasons for that are twofold: on the one…
Read MoreReview by Britta S. “I fart therefore I am.” Thus speaks our hero – or rather anti-hero – Bjorn Thonen, a Parisian antiques dealer whose shop is stocked with what can only be described as secondhand cast-offs of dubious value. He is the archetypal thirty-something man-child: a slob with questionable…
Read MoreReview by Clark A. Sword Art Online’s video game adaptations should be applauded for bringing a storied concept from the source material to life. That concept is of course the titular world of Sword Art Online, a fictional virtual reality-based multiplayer game (or, to use the inelegant acronym, a VRMMORPG).…
Read MoreReview by Matt C. Exist Archive: The Other Side of the Sky is a very good game, but it’s also a game that takes a really long time to get to that point. It’s a given that it might take an hour or two for a game to find its…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. In Japan, horror is a summer activity. For centuries the Japanese have flocked to exhibitions of ghost paintings, haunted houses, and the cinema in the hottest months of the year in order to experience scares and chills. They do this precisely because that chilling effect of…
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