There was a time when visual novels were a rare thing in the West, particularly on consoles. Steins;Gate, from 2009, was one of the pioneers in changing that. Brought to the West on PS3 and Vita, it turned heads by proving to a wide and mainstream audience that it was possible for a game to be compelling while being almost…
Heroes of Might and Magic is finally back, and I couldn’t be happier. This is one of my favourite franchises of all – I even have the entire, expanded board game adaptation of Heroes of Might and Magic 3 thanks to a very generous brother who bought the whole damn…
Tove Jansson’s Moomin characters long ago stepped outside the pure world of…
Did you know that, while mazes are designed to confuse and confound…
It’s such a tough gig to be an indie VN developer. It’s a niche genre at the best of times, and the resources that you have to dedicate to it are going to be limited. It’s a question of what you throw money into to try to make your project…
Read More
It’s easy to wonder why Square Enix would go to such great effort to remake one of the oldest Dragon Quest titles. After all, the HD-2D engine they’ve applied to Dragon Quest III would have made the SNES trilogy positively sparkle, and those titles are far more renowned for their…
Read More
Writing horror is a tough gig. It’s challenging for writers to create and maintain fear and tension. Horror needs to be character-driven and it needs to make the audience care about the horrible things that are happening to those characters. Meanwhile, it’s difficult for visual artists because even the slightest…
Read More
Crayon Shin Chan has been around since 1990, and I’ve been aware of his existence for nearly that long. However, being honest, I’ve largely steered clear of his adventures, mostly because the pitch here is for a younger audience that will appreciate his mix of youthful naivety mixed with a…
Read More
Dance is a difficult subject to tackle, for many reasons. These challenges are, fundamentally, why it’s not a topic that video game developers typically touch (or filmmakers, or novelists, or painters, or most other art forms). The Ukrainian developer behind Light de Deux has given a ballet-themed visual novel a…
Read More
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Once upon a time… oh, you have heard that one? That’ll be because it’s an absolute standard fantasy trope, setting for a countless number of simple children’s stories told for centuries now. The Plucky Squire absolutely revels in tropes, not only relating…
Read More
I’ll never pass up an opportunity to play with Tohka. She is, of course, the very best of best girls, there’s no saying otherwise (unless you want to be wrong) and I won’t hear anything else of it. The point is that Date A Live: Ren Dystopia is an opportunity…
Read More
I would be excellent at Survivor. I’m fully convinced of that. The people that go on that show are idiots. I’d go on there, get a little clique “alliance” together, play them off one another like they’re chess pieces, own that I was a total sociopath about it at that…
Read More
Shinto is one of those things that most people who know anything about Japan have some vague concept of, but don’t really know anything about. From experience, they’re also rarely interested and that’s depressing. Tourists in Japan do cheerfully visit Shinto shrines, before mistaking them for Buddhist temples (and vice…
Read More
The best thing about Flintlock is the setting. It’s a hodgepodge of historical influences – the opening sequence focuses on trench warfare and sappers that could be straight out of a World War 1 drama, before the game settles back to a more colonial era affair, set against a horde…
Read More