What if Harry Potter was an otome love game and not written by a horrible woman who seems obsessed with being a one-person “can you separate art from artists” talking point? Battlefield Waltz is a bit like that. It’s a story about a bunch of teens in a special, magical academy and you play as the one with a particularly…
COVID lockdowns broke us all a little bit (or, at least, those of us who endured actual lockdowns). Huddled in our little spaces while we waited for the government to assure us that the threat was passed and we could, again, go out and experience the world. At its core,…
I remain very impressed with any developer that takes a swing at…
My personal experience with prolific (VERY prolific) Japanese developer, Tamsoft, is mostly…
Touken Ranbu is a game about pretty boys. Who are swords. And travel around time, Quantum Leap-style. I’ve got to be honest with you, if you had told me that at some point in my life I’d be playing an anime boys game whose closest direct comparison is an ‘80s…
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Before there was Bubble Bobble, there was Snow Bros., and the original remains the best. I should explain. Bubble Bobble did actually come first chronologically, but Snow Bros. (the “clone”) was the first single-screen platformer I personally played. Way back on the Game Boy, there was a shrunk-down version of…
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And today’s eShop nasty is… Beach Girls: Don’t Lie In Summer! Like Hentai Uni and Waifu Impact before it, Beach Girls landed on the Switch eShop with a minimum of fanfare and little but the promise of sexy fan service. Its goal? To flog it off to a few people…
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Otoko Cross is basically a reskin of the Pretty Girls Mahjong Solitaire. There’s a Mahjong Solitaire grid there on the screen, and you match pieces to clear the board. Then, after a few rounds, you also see the character on the left-hand side of the screen change into something skimpier.…
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Big Bad Wolf, the developer behind 2018’s The Council, was the right developer to tackle Vampire: The Masquerade. The execution of Swansong isn’t perfect, but the effort to recreate the pen-and-paper experience is spot-on, and so, the team at Big Bad Wolf have achieved something that’s increasingly rare in video…
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Seven Pirates H has hit my limit. I am more than happy to whip out Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, Gal*Gun, Hyperdimesnion Neptunia, Nekopara, or any other fanservicey Switch game that you can think of on the train or any other public space. I just don’t care if people look…
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Nippon Ichi is at its best when it is at its most inscrutable and inaccessible. The more heavily a NIS game’s humour leans into a surrealistic anime-style over-the-top tone (whether for comic effect or otherwise), and the more numbers the game can throw at players, the more they tend to…
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Before the film that Tim Burton and Johnny Depp had way too much fun with, and before even the Stephen Sondheim musical that more people should see a production of, Sweeny Todd was a Penny Dreadful. People don’t really know what these are anymore, but they were once wildly popular…
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Leonard Menchiari (RIOT: Civil Unrest, The Eternal Castle), is quickly becoming one of my favourite independent game auteurs. His work – regardless of who he is working with – has a kind of intensity and focus that is almost overwhelming and that makes it hard to tear your attention away…
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I’ve played loads of farming sims (Harvest Moon, Story of Seasons, Stardew Valley) so when I learned I was going to review Farm Manager 2022 I was pretty excited. I figured it would be like those games but seriously amped up, and I wasn’t wrong there. It’s an incredibly in-depth…
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