Lached Up Games serves a very specific niche with its quirky and colourful visual novels. Is there much of an audience for fanservicey visual novels filled with Australian humour about genderswapping (and now, with Help! I’m Turning Into A Mermaid!, species swapping)? Probably not. But for the people who do appreciate something that takes “oddball” to a truly surreal place,…
The movie tie-in game is something of a dying art, but in many ways you would have to rule it death by way of suicide. The very model for movie games ensured that they would die out. This was never terribly surprising; classically speaking, lots of money got spent getting…
Bubble Bobble is one of the greatest games ever made, and it’s…
Tetris Effect (by the same developer as Lumines Arise) was a breakthrough…
Typing isn’t entertaining. I write 100,000 words in a typical week. The idea of playing a game with typing as the central mechanic doesn’t scream “entertaining downtime” to me, on the face of things. Yet actually sitting down to play one of these things is an oddly compelling experience. The…
Read MoreThe “Loathing” property occupies a very distinct part of gaming and Internet culture. Kingdom of Loathing is 20 years old now (and still going strong!), and one of the pioneers in Web-based, massively online role-playing gaming. Thanks to hugely entertaining stickman character artwork and ridiculously entertaining nerd humour, it was…
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For years now Zeboyd has been the indie JRPG developer for delivering true love letters to the genre in a way that fans of the genre love. Cthulhu Saves The World and Cosmic Star Heroine are both magnificent, highly entertaining “retro” JRPGs that respect the player’s time and provide a…
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Self-described “cozy” games are all the rage right now. Often they’re life sims, sometimes other genres, but there is nothing quite like Riley & Rochelle. I’d describe it as cozy because it is an intimate look at two young lives, and it creates a swirling warmth sensation around you while…
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As anyone that follows me on Twitter knows, it’s not just that I just have an interest in politics, but I’m also quite certain that politics in the world is fundamentally broken. In most countries around the world, the political sphere is dominated by two or three neoliberal parties that…
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I’m going to start this by being very upfront: before playing Wylde Flowers for PC, I played it through on Apple Arcade. Twice. I legitimately spent dozens of hours in the cozy world created by Studio Drydock. Despite that, after booting the new Switch version up and seeing the camera…
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Dating is hard. First you have to meet someone you’re at least vaguely attracted to in some sense. Then there’s the awkward first date, the one where neither party knows whether or not they should kiss if it goes well so they just make weird eyes at each other before…
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The content warnings for Immortality are plenty. It includes everything from swearing and blasphemy to incest and murder. No content warnings would scare me off this game, let alone ones that basically contain the features of any V.C. Andrews novel. Immortality may have only been announced last year, but it…
Read MoreReligion is one of those topics you’re never meant to discuss in polite society. When it comes to video games, it’s one that’s historically either been airbrushed out of games to avoid offence, or dealt with in very broad brush strokes to define it away from existing real-world religious groups.…
Read MoreOne of the challenges I have with Koei Tecmo’s Warriors franchise is determining the pecking order of the various games within the series. If you asked me to rank the Final Fantasy series, for example, there’s a clear upper echelon (Final Fantasy XII, Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy VIII), but…
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