Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords is an enormously important game – arguably, you could trace the lineage of so many puzzle blend RPGs back to Puzzle Quest (Puzzle & Dragons, for example). The game itself, released way back in 2007 on the PSP and Nintendo DS by the same guy behind the Warlords series (an Aussie, Steve Fawkner!) was…
Lego Party is a Mario Party clone. Let’s not beat around the bush about that. It is what it is, and the development team at SMG isn’t for a second trying to claim otherwise. The problem is that Mario Party is a pretty challenging formula to get right, and… well,…
Let’s get this out of the way up front: Varlet very badly…
Of all the many golf properties out there, Everybody’s Golf has reliably…
We, long-suffering SaGa fans, have been utterly inundated with the franchise over the past 12 months or so. First, there was SaGa: Emerald Beyond. Then there was the remake of Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven (and arguably the finest SaGa game of all). And now we have the…
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In a world that is as toxic, complex, and fundamentally unpleasant as the one we now live, whimsical, wholesome little things like Tempopo are the escapism we need. It’s a simple puzzle game in many ways, but the sweet, buoyant presentation, and the brilliant way it integrates music into the…
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It’s been quite the year for fans of niche JRPG properties. First, there was the Suikoden collection a month ago, and now it’s Lunar’s turn. Originally released for the Sega Mega CD, the first two titles in the series were pioneering and beloved titles that somehow never converted into something…
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Danganronpa-style aesthetics and humour combined with Texas Hold ‘Em poker? Why yes, I did jump into All in Abyss: Judge the Fake without a second thought. Short of adding in strip poker mechanics (oh the nostalgia for the days when PC gaming was inundated with those), this, right here, is…
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What if Harry Potter was an otome love game and not written by a horrible woman who seems obsessed with being a one-person “can you separate art from artists” talking point? Battlefield Waltz is a bit like that. It’s a story about a bunch of teens in a special, magical…
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Xenoblade Chronicles X was arguably the most ambitious game to land on the Nintendo Wii U (you could argue that Breath of the Wild was, but then most people see that as a Switch game and forget that there was a Wii U version as well… and all this is…
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Horror is such a difficult genre for artists to work with. People think it’s easy because they have memories of more-comedy-than-scary slashers and B-grade films, bad acting and all. There’s also the perception that it’s not a particularly subtle genre, and therefore must be quite easy to work with. But…
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Back in 2019, Koei Tecmo hit it big with Atelier Ryza, and the long-running series went from being one of the most beloved niche properties to being something that suddenly had upward mobility in sales and prominence. Not quite in the leagues of Final Fantasy, Tales, Dragon Quest or Persona,…
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Suikoden might not have quite the same profile as Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, but this is a beloved cult JRPG franchise, stretching back to the original PlayStation. And I really do mean beloved. Many who have played it list Suikoden 2, in particular, list it as one of the…
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I guess, given the success of Azur Lane, Girls und Panzer, KanColle and whatever else, it would be inevitable that at some point someone saw warplanes and thought “yeah, you sexy thing, what if you were an anime girl?” And so we have Kamikaze Lassplanes, a visual novel/SHMUP combination by…
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