Grizzly Man is the fourth title in LCB Game Studio’s Pixel Pulps series, beginning a second trilogy titled “Pixel Pulps DTV Collection.” (DTV is short for direct-to-video.) It is a psychedelic slasher game about a former MIB agent who was severely injured in a mysterious attack, waking up with full amnesia. Ten years later, he is working as a field…
Game collections are all the rage these days, and are becoming increasingly something that goes beyond just the game. Retro collections aim to be museums as much as things you play, with Digital Eclipse in particular mastering the “interactive museum” format. Riki 8Bit Game Collection isn’t really a “retro collection,”…
Xuan-Yuan Sword: The Gate of Firmament is actually an older title, being…
Koei Tecmo’s JRPG house, Gust, is a factory for the genre. It’s…
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
I’ve been playing hidden object games to chill out for twenty years. They may soothe my mind, but they don’t remain there — everything blurs together over the years. A few titles in the genre have stood out recently (such as Crime O’Clock), but Hidden in my Paradise raises the…
Read More
Ys isn’t the oldest JRPG property out there, but it’s one of them, and it’s also one of the most prolific. If you ignore all the re-releases and just concentrate on the main series, there is just one period where there was a substantial hiatus (1996-2002). Otherwise, the longest fans…
Read More
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,…
Read More
On the one hand, the people behind I*CHU: Chibi Edition have done the world a big favour. The developers and publishers (PQube in the West) have taken a mobile gacha game that was effectively killed a half-decade ago and given players the opportunity to enjoy it in its full glory…
Read More
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…
Read More
Remaking strategy games comes across as an odd decision, because strategy games are principally defined and remembered through their mechanics, and that is something that typically improves over time. Take Civilization 2 as an example. It’s my single favourite strategy game of all time, but it would be downright strange…
Read More
There has already been a remake of Romancing SaGa 2. We have a review of it on DigitallyDownloaded.net and everything. But that was a relatively simple effort, in that the developers modernised the sprites and art so the SNES original was then in “HD,” and otherwise left it at that.…
Read More
Otomate can always be trusted to find some way to repurpose the established otome formula for a visual novel that at least feels a little different, even if functionally it’s not. 9 R.I.P. lands at the perfect time for Halloween, and even though it’s Otomate playing it safe with the…
Read More