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.
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 exactly the kind of poker game I want to play.…
There is a very fine line between homage and something that is just outright theft of an idea. A good example of the former is Wargroove, which is clearly inspired by Intelligent Systems’ Advance Wars, but has its own identity through storytelling, unit design, features, presentation and so on. On…
What if Harry Potter was an otome love game and not written…
I wrote this article for an arts publication – unfortunately, at the…
So, I’ve finally found a bit of time to play Silent Hill: The Short Message. Yes I know I’m behind but I’ve been working through a massive, seemingly unending parade of RPGs, and there are only so many hours in the day. Additionally, as far as a horror fix goes,…
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Don’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…
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Last year at TGS, one of the games that I enjoyed playing the most was a Mario Party-style Demon Slayer board game. I thought there was about a 50/50 chance that it would get a western release and, luckily, it is. Now we have a new trailer for Demon Slayer:…
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Death 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…
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Well, 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…
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They 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…
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Stargate: 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…
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In the first episode of 2024, we start by looking at all the upcoming game releases for February 2024. This year has been off to an incredible start, and the momentum continues this month. Big time. Enhancing Gaming with Accessibility From Final Fantasy to Sony games, we investigate the strides…
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The 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…
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Originally released back in 2017 on PlayStation 4, Tokyo Xanadu eX+ was a JRPG that was unfairly overlooked… including by me. Looking back at my review, I scored it 3.5/5, but in hindsight I was probably unfair to it, as the game has stuck with me much more than that.…
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