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,…
In The Wandering Village, you build a small community for survivors of an apocalypse to live on. The world has been ravaged and left effectively uninhabitable, but there is a giant dinosaur-like beast that has enough room and resources on its back to sustain some people. Your goal is to…
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The third in the now-trilogy that started with AI: The Somnium Files is the first that Kotaro Uchikoshi took a back seat to. He still had a supervisory role, but it’s one of Uchikoshi’s mentees, Kazuya Yamada, who gets the creative credit for this one. The good news is that…
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Before I played Bustafellows, if you had told me that you could take the narrative qualities of noir fiction and pair it with the otome genre, I wouldn’t have believed you. As a genre, otome isn’t quite the “doe-eyed romance and frivolity for girls” genre that those who haven’t played…
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One of the quieter events that piggybacked off the Nintendo Switch 2 launch was the release of the first in Hamster’s Arcade Archives 2 series. Ridge Racer launched with the console, and now there’s already a second title, with the arcade dogfighting sim, Air Combat 22 (don’t be surprised that…
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Tamagotchi are one of those iconic things that you just hope hands around forever. The little devices that you pin to your backpack or carry around in your pocket for micro-distractions throughout the day are wholesome and charming. You’d be lucky if you spent more than five minutes with your…
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Hideo Kojima is the video game industry’s big auteur. The Stanley Kubrick of games. The guy who somehow gets a big budget to make his strange experiments, even when they defy the industry best practice, and as we all know, the games industry is very best practice orientated. It’s all…
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How do you “guarantee” 60 million clicks on a mouse? I get that’s an impressive number, but a guarantee is a legal term, and so does that mean that if you can somehow prove that you’ve only got 59,999,999 clicks on your mouse before it craps out, you’re entitled to…
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Ever found yourself looking at the state of video games and going: “Why are so many things becoming so simplified and streamlined?” RPGs are melding into big action games with pacy combat, rather than stats crunchers, strategy and simulation games are often so simplified that it’s impossible to actually lose…
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“Oh, great,” your little guide through the minigames of 100 in 1 Game Collection tells you as you unlock the next one. “A terrible puzzle game.” At least our little Dante is aware that you might not be enjoying your trip through hell. Look, I knew exactly what I was…
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Yakuza 0 is in so many ways the finest game in a very fine series. The development team took full advantage of it as a prequel to not only tell the story of where series protagonist, Kiryu, and favourite frenemy/rival, Goro, got their start, but also capture a unique moment…
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