Review by Matt S. Earlier this year we reviewed Vampire: The Masquerade – Coteries of New York. It was a decent attempt to bring White Wolf’s modern gothic pen-and-paper vision to video game consoles via the visual novel medium. The developers are on to something with this license and property,…
Read MoreReview by Harvard L. I loved re-learning how to drive with Level 91 Entertainment’s latest title, Inertial Drift. It’s a stylish racing game with twin-stick controls – the left stick steers and the right stick shifts the back wheel for a drift – and the relative unfamiliarity combined with the…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. RPG Maker MV might share a name, features and toolset with its PC counterpart, but they’re very different pieces of software. RPG Maker on the PC is a reasonably serious tool that you can use to create commercial software. RPG Maker on Nintendo Switch is more…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Here Be Dragons wants to be a satirical turn-based strategy game. What it is, though, is a deeply unfunny board game with an lovely (but pointless) art style. It’s fine for what it is, but it should have been so much more. Let’s start with the…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. On the grand scale of disappointments in video games, I do think that Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Remastered Edition will rank highly. The original, released way back on the GameCube, was a delightful little game. It was a homage to everything people loved about Final Fantasy,…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Let me tell you a story. A story about Ravenloft. Ravenloft was a big influence on me from a very early age (in retrospect, probably a little too early to be into gothic horror). It was a Dungeons & Dragons setting in which an otherworldy “continent”…
Read MoreReview by Harvard L. The survival genre is interesting to write about critically, since many design choices which would feel grating or exhausting in any other genre are, instead, the survival game’s calling card. Things like permadeath, repetition, disempowerment, unsatisfying combat, even at times tedium – normally we don’t value…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Pokémon is a hard thing to “clone.” Think about it – you’ve got to balance out hundreds (and hundreds) of collectible critters, and make sure there’s a steady flow of them to collect throughout a full-length JRPG. Then you’ve also got to make sure they’re all…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. In the grand scheme of things, you’re not going to remember Giraffe and Annika. It doesn’t do anything particularly eye-opening with its design and gameplay, and it’s not a substantial contribution to any particular kind of discourse. What it is, however, is blissfully sweet and good-natured,…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Dear game developers and publishers: if you’ve got a visual novel that needs localisation, you really need to consider the process of finding a quality localiser to be an essential step in the publishing process. Your game exists exclusively for that story, and if you can’t…
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