I’ve been making my way through the surprise-dropped Tomb Raider Definitive Edition that landed on the Switch a few weeks ago, and with two new Tomb Raider games just announced (albeit with a new publisher), that turns out to have been good timing to remind myself of the direction that Crystal Dynamics has been taking the character and her adventures.…
Octopath Traveler 0 isn’t really Octopath Traveler. It’s good. It’s even excellent, frequently and for long stretches of time. But it’s not Octopath Traveler for this very simple reason: Both the original Octopath Traveler and its sequel told the stories of eight (“Octo”) different people, who would eventually come together…
Bubble Bobble is one of the greatest games ever made, and it’s…
I first heard of Demonschool about three and a half years ago,…
At the risk of irritating a certain group of fans to the point that I need to lock down the comments box for my own sanity: I have an issue with how a lot of games handle the Warhammer 40K license. Not that I want to get into this debate…
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It’s been a while since I’ve thought about Popcap’s classic Peggle – and that’s not helped by the series being dormant since 2013 – but I’m willing to bet that back when I did, I never once considered that what Peggle, that classic and relaxing mix of Pachinko and bagatelle…
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Doraemon is one of the most iconic, influential cultural icons in Japanese entertainment history. It’s a blue robot cat with a pocket that contains everything, and he and his human pals (Nobi and co) have gone on so many adventures that it’s almost impossible to count. The manga came first…
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What if Harry Potter was something that you could enjoy without the knowledge that every word you read came from someone who is deeply, aggressively hateful? What if you could jump into the body of a student of magic and fall in love with all the characters? That’s essentially where…
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Visions of Mana is Secret of Mana, 20 years later. I said as much in my preview, and the deeper I played the more the game seems exclusively interested in tapping into my nostalgia for that SNES classic. Given that the Mana series has been otherwise highly experimental in recent…
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Spike Chunsoft is onto a particular theme right now. A few weeks ago it released a game designed to evoke a very specific cultural nostalgia that is core to a lot of aesthetics and narrative themes over there. Now, with Bakeru, it is tapping into something very different in terms…
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Tennis is a difficult sport to bring into video game form. It’s not because the sport itself is mechanically challenging. Compared to the likes of football it is limited both in terms of the number of players competing and the expansive flow of the game. And compared to something like…
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Without trying to be too controversially political about a game that is really little more than a philosophical manifesto with some gameplay bits and comic book graphics squished in between the lecture, there’s an ugly superficiality about what passes for mainstream left-wing politics in America. Dustborn is a textbook case…
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Schools are excellent locations for horror. They’re a shared experience for most of us, so developers benefit from the familiarity and can play on that to set up unease. Attending school is also a highly emotional experience that covers the full gamut thanks to a combination of societal pressure and…
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Ticket To Ride is, along with Catan, on the way to be our generation’s Monopoly and Risk. First released back in 2004, is has sold 18 million copies, been translated into most major languages, and has had innumerable expansions added to it. There have also been multiple video game adaptations,…
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