Review by Matt S. One of the first things that I realised when I started playing Nostalgic Train was that I haven’t actually played any Japanese “walking simulators” before. Not that I can remember having played, at any rate. It’s a genre that seems to have either spoken to western…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Auteur theory, and whether it should be applied to video games, is one of those more interesting debates that we can have about this medium. Most of the time it’s difficult to identify a single person as being responsible for the creativity in a game; the…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. When you hear the term “Eurojank,” you might well assume that it’s being said as a pejorative, but no. That’s not the case at all. “Eurojank” games are, as the name suggests, titles that come out of Europe from the B-tier developers. Developers that can’t match…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Unfortunately, WitchSpring3 [Re:Fine] is simply not a good game. There’s the germ of a good idea in there, and as someone that loves Atelier and JRPGs that respect your time, I loved that this one was a brief experience of a few dozen hours (at most),…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. I never did review the original Curious Expedition. But I did do a video on it. In that video, I called it a “cracking roguelike.” Given that Curious Expedition 2 is better than the original, I guess that makes this game “cracking+”. It could have gone…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Heroes of Might & Magic is a dead franchise. As beloved as it is, Ubisoft now owns it, and has absolutely no interest, whatsoever, in indulging niche strategy RPG things (unless the execs can ruin it by turning it into a live service). What that means…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Shadowverse: Champions Battle is a game that I have been waiting a very long time for. To be precise, 21 years. It was 21 years ago that the Pokémon Trading Card Game was released on the Game Boy Color, and as far as I’m concerned Champions…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Hades has ruined me. Zengeon is a perfectly competent roguelike action game, but it’s not the kind of genre-transformative experience that Hades is, and that leaves it feeling a (very) distant second in 2021. The first issue is the narrative itself. Zengeon has a perfectly adequate…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. My favourite Dungeons & Dragons setting has always been Ravenloft, where heroes get trapped within pockets of gothic nightmares, and need to figure out the mystery behind the “domain” in order to escape it. Crimson Spires is like that. Just with romance. Dark, sexy, dangerous romance.…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Dragon Star Varnir is one of Idea Factory’s deeper and more intelligent titles. Belonging to the same experimental series (unrelated to one another, but conceptually similar) as Fairy Fencer F and Death end re:Quest, Varnir is certainly dark and brooding, and subversively feminist in a way…
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