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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Granblue Fantasy turns ten this year – yes, time really does fly – and it is one of the all-time most successful mobile games. It has soared to over 25 million downloads in its home country alone – and that means about one in five Japanese people have played this…
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Persona 3 occupies an interesting role within the broader Persona series. Unlike Personas 4 and 5, there is less of an emphasis on the “J-Pop” bubbly quality that significantly lightened the mood of those two titles (however serious the underlying message of each was). Unlike Persona 1 and 2, Persona…
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What do tornadoes, a cult, and a man in a trunk have in common? You’ll be surprised. Bahnsen Knights is the third in LCB Game Studio’s Pixel Pulp series. The series takes pulp fiction, gives it a paranormal twist, and turns it into a video game. To date, it has…
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Reigns has become a substantial little platform that the developers, Nerial, and publisher, Devolver Digital, never thought would extend as far as it has. Yet it has, and now it seems like there’s no end to what the developers can do next, now that they’re tapping into everything from popular…
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Every time it seems like the extended Yakuza franchise might be pushing its luck just a little too far, the development team at Ryu ga Gotoku find some way of reminding us all why it’s such a fine series. Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth shouldn’t have worked. Pulling Kazuma Kiryu…
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It was deeply funny to me to load up Tekken 8 and see that the big philosophical theme around this game is “aggression.” A fighting game promising a new “aggressive combat system,” is surely redundant, I thought to myself, since what is any fighting game if it is not “aggressive?”…
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