Matt S. is the Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of DDNet. He's been writing about games for over 20 years, including a book, but is perhaps best-known for being the high priest of the Church of Hatsune Miku.
It’s such a tough gig to be an indie VN developer. It’s a niche genre at the best of times, and the resources that you have to dedicate to it are going to be limited. It’s a question of what you throw money into to try to make your project stand out. In the case of The Devil’s Whisper, the…
Planet Coaster 2 is good. But then Planet Coaster was good, and this is really just an iteration of that. Frontier Developments has found its niche and is now focused on driving that nail home over and over again. With Planet Coaster 2 you get lots of new toys to…
I’ve not seen the controversial Goblin Slayer anime or read the light…
SINce Memories: Off the Starry Sky is a spin-off of an incredibly…
Just in time for the Game Boy’s 35th anniversary, Nintendo has quietly dropped three more classics on to the Game Boy app on the Switch Online service. The headline of the three is Super Mario Land, the first time Mario appeared on the console. Today, this game comes across as…
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Schools are creepy places, and it doesn’t seem to matter which country you’re talking about, they’re going to be one of the most common settings for horror stories. The Bridge Curse 2: The Extraction is Taiwan’s turn to haunt a place of learning (in this case, a university), and it’s…
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One of the things I’ve learned in making my own visual novel is that scope can very easily blow out. Every new scene, character, idea, and story beat that you add in means more backgrounds, CGs, character costumes and music. Then it all becomes very expensive. And so, in most…
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On the one hand, the extended Hyperdimension Neptunia property, which has been kicking around since 2010 and the PlayStation 3, has become a familiar comfort. With more than one game released every year (some are remakes, yes, but this is release #26 bearing the Neptunia name), you will by now…
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Kogado Studio, one of the veterans of the Japanese industry, will be releasing its next game in a week, and it looks like it’ll be a good one. One-Inch Tactics promises a streamlined, elegant, and yet challenging board game-like tactical experience. There will be a wide range of tactical mechanics…
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4X strategy is a particularly challenging genre, given the number of dynamics at play. It’s not just that you need to give players a good military strategy experience. You also need to make the economic system interesting and strategic in its own right, implement a diplomacy system that isn’t easy…
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Earlier this week Apple shared a promotional video for its new iPad Pro. The “thinnest product we’ve ever created,” Tim Cook boasted. “The most advanced display we’ve ever produced, with the incredible power of the M4 chip!” This should have been slam dunk hype train bait. The iPad is a…
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Atlus is gearing up for something special to celebrate its 35th anniversary. Metaphor: ReFantazio is an all-new game from the company’s Persona veterans, and the more that gets revealed about this game, the more exciting it seems. Just look at the new key art above! We now have a release…
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One of the finest examples that I can think of that highlight the differences between Western and Eastern game development, and some of the weaknesses that we as a collective industry have in critiquing video games, is to look at Dante’s Inferno and El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron side-by-side.…
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You’ve got to feel sorry for anyone working on Nintendo’s social media accounts right now. Just imagine the number of “Switch 2 announcement when?” comments you’d have to read every time you logged into the company account. Apparently Nintendo as a collective has had enough of the rumours, heresay, lies…
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