The dungeon crawl has been one of the most enduring genres of all. The original Wizardry – the game that essentially launched and popularised the genre, turns 45 next year. It’ll be well and truly ready for a mid-life crisis. In the years since we have seen so many classics – Might & Magic, Etrian Odyssey, Eye of the Beholder,…
I’m starting to get a little peeved at Nintendo for not remaking Fire Emblem (as in the first Fire Emblem to be released in the West; the one with Lyn). Not only is there a game there that would desperately benefit from modern production values (Lyn and her lovely dress…
Read MoreMy only experience of Tomb Raider (before the reboot) was a demo of the first game. I’m about to show my age here, but remember gaming magazines that had demo discs you could load up and play? One of those had a snip of Tomb Raider 1 to play. I…
Read MoreDon’t Nod has, traditionally, done storytelling well, but struggled to pair it up with gameplay that people could love. Life Is Strange was the breakout title for the company, and it worked well enough because it was a point-and-click adventure that wasn’t testing the player’s button-pressing skills, but Vampyr, on…
Read MoreDeath Mark deserves better recognition than it gets. The first two games in the series (Death Mark itself, and then Spirit Hunter: Ng) are both incredible horror visual novels, through which Experience Inc. has given us some of the finest art and suspense narratives that we’ve seen. And yet to…
Read MoreWell, Konosuba: Love for These Clothes of Desire certainly has its eye-opening moments. This is a game that likes to get downright dirty in places, and embraces (with gusto) every possible sexualisation trope you can imagine in anime. It has a ball doing so, and as long as isekai-style narratives…
Read MoreThey don’t really make that many games like Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs The Thrilling Steamy Maze Kiwami any more. Anime fan service games complete with bath scenes, destructible clothing and school uniform costumes are few and far between (in part because of the spectre of consoles and/or Steam…
Read MoreStargate: Timekeepers is not a great attempt at bringing Stargate to video games. I say this with all due respect to the developer and publisher in Slitherine, and in isolation, divorced from its license, Timekeepers is good fun. It’s just a very strange project and I’m not sure who it’s…
Read MoreThe Atelier franchise has long been one that suits the gatcha “free-to-play” genre. Thanks to the over-20 games that have been developed across two decades, there are an almost unlimited number of characters to draw on, and the core alchemy system that sits at the centre of Atelier lends itself…
Read MoreGranblue Fantasy turns ten this year – yes, time really does fly – and it is one of the all-time most successful mobile games. It has soared to over 25 million downloads in its home country alone – and that means about one in five Japanese people have played this…
Read MoreWhat do tornadoes, a cult, and a man in a trunk have in common? You’ll be surprised. Bahnsen Knights is the third in LCB Game Studio’s Pixel Pulp series. The series takes pulp fiction, gives it a paranormal twist, and turns it into a video game. To date, it has…
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