Writing horror is a tough gig. It’s challenging for writers to create and maintain fear and tension. Horror needs to be character-driven and it needs to make the audience care about the horrible things that are happening to those characters. Meanwhile, it’s difficult for visual artists because even the slightest…
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Crayon Shin Chan has been around since 1990, and I’ve been aware of his existence for nearly that long. However, being honest, I’ve largely steered clear of his adventures, mostly because the pitch here is for a younger audience that will appreciate his mix of youthful naivety mixed with a…
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Dance is a difficult subject to tackle, for many reasons. These challenges are, fundamentally, why it’s not a topic that video game developers typically touch (or filmmakers, or novelists, or painters, or most other art forms). The Ukrainian developer behind Light de Deux has given a ballet-themed visual novel a…
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I’m not usually one to get invested in Early Access games. I’d much rather just experience the finished product, when I can experience the full extent of the vision of the developers. However, Spiders’ GreedFall had a particularly powerful effect on me (I actually ended up buying it three times…
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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Once upon a time… oh, you have heard that one? That’ll be because it’s an absolute standard fantasy trope, setting for a countless number of simple children’s stories told for centuries now. The Plucky Squire absolutely revels in tropes, not only relating…
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Caravan SandWitch first caught my eye because it was colourful and filled with places to explore. But the story and the gameplay loop is what got me hooked! The game is nearly stress-free: there is no timer, death, or combat. In the game, Sauge has lived away from her home…
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I’ll never pass up an opportunity to play with Tohka. She is, of course, the very best of best girls, there’s no saying otherwise (unless you want to be wrong) and I won’t hear anything else of it. The point is that Date A Live: Ren Dystopia is an opportunity…
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I would be excellent at Survivor. I’m fully convinced of that. The people that go on that show are idiots. I’d go on there, get a little clique “alliance” together, play them off one another like they’re chess pieces, own that I was a total sociopath about it at that…
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Shinto is one of those things that most people who know anything about Japan have some vague concept of, but don’t really know anything about. From experience, they’re also rarely interested and that’s depressing. Tourists in Japan do cheerfully visit Shinto shrines, before mistaking them for Buddhist temples (and vice…
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Love & Country, a World War 1 period piece visual novel by a rookie studio, is both very surprising and also inspiring. It’s almost certainly going to fly right under the radar, but it’s a tightly-written, smart little thing… and also very, very steamy. Dear lord is this game sexy…
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