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…
CASCHA Games’ Concealed caught my attention for several reasons. The game has gorgeous art direction for one thing, and the promise of a horror visual novel set in a school is always a good way to catch my attention. Those two things go together beautifully. Unfortunately, this is going to…
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“505 Games lays off 30% of staff, will focus on sequels and “previously successful” games because that’s what works.” It’s the latest headline in what has been a bloodbath year in the games industry as developers and publishers, large and small, have hemorrhaged staff and slashed their plans. Earlier this…
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Super Mario RPG is an all-time classic. Ask people to list the top 20 SNES games of all time and you’re almost certain to see this one in the mix somewhere. A quirky collaboration between Nintendo and Square Enix to apply some light Final Fantasy qualities to the iconic plumber,…
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I’ll just get this warning out of the way up-front: There’s an explicit depiction of an apparent suicide in the first ten minutes of Virche Evermore -ErroR: Salvation-. It’s by no means the only content warning found in this incredibly dark visual novel. I overview some of the (many) other…
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I recently got my hands on the Analogue Pocket, after two years of missing every hardware allocation the company released. In the end, I was fortunate that I had a pal on social media was looking to offload theirs, because I sincerely doubt Analogue will have enough stock to meet…
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You would think fashion was an easy concept for video games. I mean, sure there won’t be visceral bloodletting (though a catwalk fighting game would be amazing…), but fashion lends itself to collectability, which is how many games keep players invested, and who doesn’t like playing dress-up with pretty characters?…
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It is interesting to compare the recently-released remake of Star Ocean The Second Story R with the upcoming Super Mario RPG remake. Both games are undeniably classics, and highly influential – Without Super Mario RPG proving that Mario works as an RPG hero we would never have had Paper Mario…
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It was inevitable that Yakuza 6 would not be the end of Kazuma Kiryu. It should have been, since it finished the series in spectacular fashion. However, this is the video game industry, and when you’ve got a bankable star, you keep returning to that well until enough people get…
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In among all the big games releasing in November (seriously, just check out the “games of the month” list), we found some time to muse on what to expect from the Nintendo Switch successor this month. Surely the console is reaching the end of its life, and surely Nintendo is…
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Most annual sporting properties have a reputation for each year’s edition offering little more than a new roster over the top of the base game. Sometimes that’s fair. Often it is not. Football Manager is the one series where “roster update” is actually one of the critical features that you…
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