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Feature: Top of the blocks
Kine! What a wonderfully opaque, wide-ranging word. It apparently means “cattle” or “excellent” in Hawaiian Pidgin English, but I'm guessing the nod here is to “kinematics” as in “abstract, mechanical motion”. That explains about half of Gwen Frey's swish, challenging puzzler -- her solo debut, after leaving Flame in the Flood developer The Molasses Flood and founding new studio Chump Squad. At its most elementary,…
Feature: My uncle told me "disco biscuits" is slang for bad drugs
So, then. Disco Elysium, like Planescape: Torment, or even Fallout or Arcanum, is an isometric RPG with a lot of text. You, an alcoholic, probably drug-addicted cop in early middle age, wake up to face a new partner, a lynching that needs solving, and an apocalyptic hangover that has wiped your memory. So, you start the work of learning... well, everything. I managed to stumble…
Feature: Danse Macabre
Felix The Reaper is a master of distraction. Instead of making him rush to move shadows about so he can set up elaborately fatal traps, all I want to do is watch this chubby lil' reaper bust endless moves to the beat of his Walkman. and I mean moves: it would be ridiculous to call these "idle animations", because this groovin' dealer of death simply…
Feature: Moon's still haunted.
To be a Destiny player is to consume. To voraciously devour great wads of Content, like one of its giant inter-dimensional space worm gods gorging on a planetoid, and then, never sated, moving on to the next. The newest feast is Shadowkeep. It’s as beautifully crafted as ever. We get to eat the Moon! It looks stunning and it’s fun and weird and I love…
Feature: Wicky Wicky Wild Wild Hex
You don’t play as John Wick in John Wick Hex. Not really. Instead, you play as Keanu Reeves’ choreographer, in close negotiation with the great man’s agent. Want Wick to dash behind cover while throatslamming a goon, then toss them to the floor, grab their gun and shoot a second goon’s ear off before yeeting the empty pistol at a third? That is absolutely within…
Feature: The Disgaea of action platformers
This here is a game with one of those plots. You know how it goes: our hero — a hot-headed girl called Ajna, in our case — lives in a peaceful fantasy village. One day, the forces of evil arrive, destroy everything, and kill the hero's beloved mentor figure. The hero then sets out for revenge. During their journey they unlock hidden powers, learn shocking…
Feature: Bash the fash
As your tree trunk-limbed mechanic, his oaken legs rippling under his dungarees, sets a row of sunken-cheeked, hollow-eyed Nazis on fire with a makeshift flamethrower, and your lab-coated doctor follows up by yeeting a vial of debilitating probably-not-piss-but-I-like-to-think-it’s-piss at an SS officer’s forehead, a thought may occur. Considering history is a design constraint here, brutal but poignant turn-based tactical RPG Warsaw does a fantastic job…
Feature: Le Bocage aux Folles
Anyone who has poured hundreds - thousands - of hours of hard work into Close Combat: The Bloody First and has the skin of an Opel Blitz rather than a Jagdtiger risks taking a substantial morale hit if they read beyond paragraph ten of this review. After telling you about the ways CCTBF is superior to its august ancestors, I'm going to tell you about the…
Feature: Droning on
As I flew our helicopter towards yet another near-identical slice of Ghost Recon Breakpoint’s drone-infested, “libertarian utopia” turned hellhole, RPS vidbud Matthew pointed out something much more interesting than anything in the game. There was a time, he observed, when Breakpoint’s vast, meticulously-crafted jungles and mountains would have been gob-smacking. We’d have rejoiced in the possibilities offered by a seamless open world, merrily meandering between…
Feature: Just drive
We're having a bit of a cyberpunk moment. I've seen and played and received emails about loads of games that include the word somewhere. Lots of dystopian megacorp skyscrapers. But I can't remember seeing a game that's set in the liminal stage before, the time between the now and when the mass surveillance, holograms and AR implants take root. Neo Cab is set in that…
Feature: Played their cards right
Even though there’s been a digital version of Magic: The Gathering in some form for more than seventeen years, it’s not the game that I, a casual but long-term devotee of the physical game, am recommended on a near-monthly basis. By now, I’ve lost count of the number of friends who have approached me with wide-eyed enthusiasm and told me ‘mate, you need to play…
Feature: Give it a breast
Code Vein is a sexist action RPG about post-apocalyptic vampires that borrows liberally from Dark Souls, while speeding up and complicating its combat in ways that I really like. The plot's a bit rubbish. *Dusts hands*.
Feature: And Honkers
You can't sprint in Knights And Bikes without making a noise. Demelza and Nessa, the two player characters in Foam Sword's optionally co-operative adventure, insist on it. Demelza goes all in with dopplering 'vrmmmms' and 'nyeeoows', while Nessa, older but no less playful, exaggerates the swoosh of the wind. The kids swoop about Demelza's island home, between caravan parks and scrapyards and the struggles of…
Feature: Resurgent
Ten hours into The Surge 2 I was still finding new shortcuts back to the cybernetic medical bay I called home. This to me is what makes a good Soulslike. I'm now 30 hours deep and have uncovered tons of unlockable gates, hidden paths, magnetic lifts, and zoomy zipwires, all criss-crossing one another like the pastry pattern on a nice, hot pie. The desolated sci-fi…
Feature: Meta-narrativú
All my way through playing Jenny LeClue: Detectivú, and increasingly as the game went on, I was certain my overriding opinion of the game would be heavily influenced by how it ended. So much of what the game is about, in terms of its narrative, its meta-narrative and its meta-meta-narrative, leans on its potential resolutions, and your expectations about what those might be. So it…
Feature: Road worrier
I spent a non-zero amount of time over the weekend imagining a dark future where the incredible popularity of Twitter account Can You Pet The Dog? led scores of indie developers to include ill-fitting snozzle-scratching mechanics in their games. Should this dark time of Very Good Boys come to pass, a game you couldn’t accuse of jumping on the dog wagon is Finji’s Overland, since…
Feature: A wild goose chase
What's the deal with geese? It's a question I've been asking myself for the better part of a decade. Admittedly, it's a rather odd question to have been mulling over for so many years, but for my whole time at university I lived in extreme proximity to them, and it had an impact. My campus was stuffed with the things. As I'd fall asleep at…
Feature: An early Halloween
The thing about Misfortune Ramirez Hernandez, the titular protagonist of Little Misfortune, is that she only has a few animations, and one of them is falling flat on her face. That’s part of the lot she’s been handed in life, and as her thematically appropriate name might suggest, the rest of it isn’t great either. But for every time she takes a spill, she also…
Feature: We hate the technology
Eliza is a visual novel about Evelyn, a woman starting work as a 'proxy' for the eponymous service. The service is counselling by algorithm. The proxies sit and listen, while clients say whatever they have to say, and the system takes measurements of things like heart rate, vocal stress and such, before analysing keywords used and delivering a reply. You read the script it generates,…
Feature: Grow, baby, grow
Nate was talking to me the other day about how weird it is that games are considered, like, one single form of art, because he reviewed Wilmot's Warehouse and then went straight into Borderlands 3. And similarly, while he and Matthew were shnorting 30 hours of a big bombastic looter-shooter like that one kid at school who used to huff entire pixie sticks up his…
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