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,…
In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have played ArcRunner. While it looks the part of a cyberpunk dystopia, the game itself was clearly only ever going to be a roguelike shooter drenched in neon. While it’s easy to say that you shouldn’t criticise a game for not being something it never…
Once upon a time Kemco was a developer and publisher of a…
With the same creative team behind it as Olympia Soiree, Tengoku Struggle:…
Seven Pirates H has hit my limit. I am more than happy to whip out Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, Gal*Gun, Hyperdimesnion Neptunia, Nekopara, or any other fanservicey Switch game that you can think of on the train or any other public space. I just don’t care if people look…
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Nippon Ichi is at its best when it is at its most inscrutable and inaccessible. The more heavily a NIS game’s humour leans into a surrealistic anime-style over-the-top tone (whether for comic effect or otherwise), and the more numbers the game can throw at players, the more they tend to…
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Before the film that Tim Burton and Johnny Depp had way too much fun with, and before even the Stephen Sondheim musical that more people should see a production of, Sweeny Todd was a Penny Dreadful. People don’t really know what these are anymore, but they were once wildly popular…
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It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that “Waifu Impact” was a play on Genshin Impact. That’s the most interesting thing about this game, though I must admit that in the hand of competent developers this concept could have been spun into something good. The basic concept is…
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Samurai Bringer is Samurai Warriors: The Roguelike. If that doesn’t have you rushing to the eShop to buy it right now, then you’re probably not a regular reader of DigitallyDownloaded.net. This game is an excellent, clever, interesting and entertaining take on the roguelike, and while I’m getting increasingly burned out…
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I knew what I was getting when I stepped into Legend of Ixtona. It is a Kemco game, after all, and that means Z-grade storytelling and the cheapest of presentational standards. However, as a life-long fan of tactics JRPGs, I wasn’t going to pass up on this one either. I…
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13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim did to me what all good science fiction does – it made me, just for a little bit, question my perception of reality. Vanillaware’s latest title deviates from its gorgeous 2D fantasy brawlers to deliver a visual-novel-RTS hybrid that’s heavily focused on character interaction. The strategy…
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Trust Richard Garfield to reinvigorate my interest in deckbuilding roguelikes. I thought I was done with them. 2017’s Slay the Spire is excellent, but didn’t need to spawn an entire genre over the course of just five years, and we’ve already reached the point where the likes of Monster Train,…
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I’m going to simply copy in a big chunk of my original review of Neptunia X Senran Kagura: Ninja Wars on PlayStation 4 for this review of the new Nintendo Switch edition. I almost wasn’t going to play this version at all, as the updates that were being trumpeted in…
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A game… where you might learn something?!?! Perish the thought! That is what Chinatown Detective Agency is, though. It’s inspired by the classic Carmen Sandiago (the only game we were allowed to play on school computers when I was in primary school), and it’s a puzzle-based adventure game where the…
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