Tove Jansson’s Moomin characters long ago stepped outside the pure world of just their books; even when Jansson was alive she was experimenting with different forms such as comic strips and limited merchandise. That has extended into video games in the past with very mixed results, though I did rather adore 2024’s Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley. Hyper Games, the developers…
Did you know that, while mazes are designed to confuse and confound you by messing with your sense of direction and location, there’s actually a very simple way to escape from any of them? Put your hand on the left side wall and don’t take it off. Eventually, you’re going…
After playing (and largely enjoying) the second Greedfall game in early access…
The Run is the latest FMV game written and directed by Paul…
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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Love & Country, a World War 1 period piece visual novel by a rookie studio, is both very surprising and also inspiring. It’s almost certainly going to fly right under the radar, but it’s a tightly-written, smart little thing… and also very, very steamy. Dear lord is this game sexy…
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What if you were playing a JRPG where the combat system was actually a puzzle? That’s the best way to think of Thistlemine. On the surface, it looks like a simple indie JRPG, but you’ll realise that there’s something different about this one by the time you’ve run into your…
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