At some point, someone sat down and decided to make an RPG which would be narrative-heavy, but it would be almost entirely emergent narrative. Where every plot direction and key moment was a consequence of the player’s actions. Where characters and their personalities would be entirely defined by player decisions,…
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The best thing about Flintlock is the setting. It’s a hodgepodge of historical influences – the opening sequence focuses on trench warfare and sappers that could be straight out of a World War 1 drama, before the game settles back to a more colonial era affair, set against a horde…
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It is genuinely impressive that Xuan-Yuan Sword VII has come to the Switch. This is one of the more technically detailed games to have come out of Taiwan, and concessions did need to be made to make it work on the Switch. If all that matters to you is the…
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One of my favourite things about Broken Roads is that every second sentence there’s a word that’s highlighted, and you can press a button to see a little pop-up explaining what that word means. That word is inevitably a piece of Australian English, and the developers felt the need to…
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I’m playing through Broken Roads right now. It’s basically “if Fallout was set in Australia,” or “if Mad Max was made into a game that actually respected Mad Max as a concept,” and I’m loving it. I’ll have a full review later on this week, but I wanted to use…
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King Arthur: Knight’s Tale is simultaneously a very fun game to play, and also one of the most irritating things I have ever had to review. Game developers really need to learn that source texts – be that history, literature, or legend, should not be seen as content to use…
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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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Have you ever been to a comedy routine where, for whatever reason, the person at the mic just can’t land a joke? And as the crowd becomes more and more restless they try harder and harder? Sadly, that’s Born of Bread. Related reading: Just released, the Super Mario RPG remake…
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While I wasn’t a big fan of the port of Gothic to the Nintendo Switch, I do remain a big fan of the developer, Piranha Bytes, and more generally the “Eurojank” RPGs that Piranha Bytes has been such a cornerstone of. The Switch port of Gothic II has been a…
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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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