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Feature: The Year 2000 Problem
YIIK: A Postmodern RPG ought to be a mixed experience. There are elements of the game, particularly the music, that are excellent. There are those, like the combat, that are not so good. I expected to be talking here about how I am a child who was born in 1994, and whether that affected my enjoyment of the game’s pervasive nostalgia bait, and other such…
Feature: Dead baby foxes
There is a fine line a lot of introspective indie games are walking, between a careful exploration of memories and events, and solipsism. For me, The First Tree leaps over that line with a clumsily implemented, wildly incongruous double-jump. Sanctimonious from the opening moments, this is a mediocre third-person exploration game made nauseating by the most self-obsessed narration I've ever encountered. It makes Dear Esther…
Feature: Selfies, emojis and refugees
"A game about Syrian refugees" has certain connotations, at least if you are not yourself a Syrian refugee. I expected sustained suffering, a maudlin and desperate tone, confusing cultural differences and a great deal of poetic misery. Which, well, probably says a few uncomfortable things about me, doesn't it? Because Bury Me, My Love, which plays out as a quasi-real-time text message conversation documenting one…
Feature: A chili reception
On one hand, there's the excruciatingly bad poetry. On the other hand, poo jokes. This is the dilemma I face when attempting a coherent position on my opinions of The Pepper Prince: Seasoning 1, the first in an episodic adventure series created entirely from ASCII art. Oh, OK, and the fact that despite being very cute, it's 45 minutes long and without challenge.
Feature: It was all a dream
I’ve never played Catherine before. I heard a bit about it from friends and fellow journalists: the stylish interface, the intriguing story that often fumbled gender stereotypes, and, of course, the trans character. But if you sat me down before launching Catherine Classic on Steam and asked me what I expected the gameplay to be like, well… fast-paced puzzle platformer with a heavy emphasis on…
Feature: Curse the darkness
A weird thing happened after I’d been playing Below for a few hours. See, the thing about Below, which I spose is a basic feature of all underground things, is that it’s dark. Your little adventurer has some species of magic lantern, but it’s powered by crystals collected from dead enemies, and upon your death it’s left with your body for the next you to…
Feature: Cold to the bone
Sorry to make this quick, but Christmas is coming toward me at thirty thousand miles per hour, and frankly we're running out of time. I've not managed to play through both chapters of the redux version of The Long Dark's story mode, Wintermute, but I don't want to wait until the new year to tell you that - OH HOORAY - it's sooooo much better…
Feature: For it is in gibbing that we receive
DUSK rather undersells itself when it declares it's "straight outta the '90s". While absolutely going for that Doom/Hexen vibe, with outstandingly fast movement, gorgeous chunky pixel enemies, and big meaty guns that pack a punch, it also has a really quite fantastic amount of good sense where not to be faithful to those mid-90s gibby times. If anything, DUSK feels like the FPS that id,…
Feature: Obvious beauty
Matthew played a preview of Gris and loved it, and John played a longer preview build of Gris and found it beautiful but empty. And after playing the full review build, wot I think is that it is empty, but I don’t mind that. It’s so beautiful that it functions as a thing just to be looked at, and that works even in the empty…
Feature: Big Mike is doing business
Poor old Fallout 76. In the weeks since its release, reviewers have piled on it like a pack of football hooligans who’ve just seen the opposing side’s mascot waddle desperately past their pub. By the time I picked it up, it felt unsporting - cruel, even - to run in and deliver a sharp kick to a man already dying inside a foam owl costume.…
Feature: Poor A.I.M.
In Jagged Alliance: Rage, I pause before taking the final shot in each mission. If you were to examine my face during these moments, noting the hollow look in my eyes as my cursor hovers over a button labelled ‘Do it’, you might suspect some crisis of conscience. Perhaps I’ve started to doubt the cause my small team of mercenaries has been fighting for? Maybe…
Feature: Everything and nothing
I could, I suspect, dash myself against Kenshi's wind-bleached rocks for a full year and still feel ill-qualified to pass judgement upon it. You might as well ask me to review atmospheric pressure, or continental drift. Kenshi is everything. Kenshi is nothing. Kenshi just is.
Feature: Girls who like swamps
For the purposes of brevity I’m going to refer to Porpentine’s new game as “Almanac”, rather than its full title of “Almanac of Girlswampwar Territory & The _girls Who Swim As Fertilizer Through The Warm Soil Cloaking The Roots of The Glorious Tree of Eugenics”. But just so you know, that is the full title of this weird lil' adventure romp. Having never played one…
Feature: We are made of star-stuff
There's a reasonably good chance you don't need me to explain Katamari Damacy. Although, like me you may never have played the original game in the series fourteen years ago. Now 2004's sleeper hit, in which you roll a ball around gathering up stuff, has been refreshed, and for the first time is coming to PC. And it's still absolutely bloody marvellous.
Feature: It's very card
There’s part of me that wants to champion Artifact as a step forward for digital card games. I want to celebrate how it bottles the essence of Dota 2 into turn-based ‘take that-ing’, to enthuse, misty-eyed, about the new avenues of thought that it has me gallivanting down. I will do all that. But with some pretty big reservations.
Feature: Under The Weather
Let me try to capture the feeling of Just Cause 4 in an anecdote: I'm currently attaching tethers to the side of a giant warship to drag it from the hill on which it is perched. I'm aiming to get it back into the water where it would much prefer to be. And it's working! Slowly but surely, with enough tethers, the boat is inching…
Feature: Turn-based Stalker, with ducks
There are at least 99 ways this could have gone horribly wrong. XCOM-ish turn-based action in an apparently shameless borrow from STALKER’s setting, but starring a talking pig and duck? An overwhelmingly nihilistic tone, but also endless use of the ‘duck sounds a bit like another, naughtier word’ gag? Even the name, Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden, has that algorithmically-generated SEO jank vibe to…
Feature: Going freelance
Flashpoint, the first expansion for wonkily-explained, slow-burn stomp-o-strategy gem BattleTech, does exactly what I wanted it to: gives me a cast-iron reason to keep playing indefinitely.
Feature: Reviewing Cyberpunk 1-2076 is going to take a while
In the build-up to the release of Fallout 76, we felt it was important to put the game in its proper context. With that in mind, we commissioned games historian Nate Crowley - aka @FrogCroakley - to write capsure reviews of Fallouts 5 through 75. We've been posting those reviews five-a-day on Twitter ever since, until the work was completed last night. You can still…
Feature: Two (dark)sides of the same coin
"Practice and penance!" snarls Susan Dark Souls, slamming a gnarled first into the table. Kevin Diablo rolls his bleary eyes and leans back in his chair. "Nah, man, just like, have a good time all the time." Susan and Kevin are both dear friends of mine, but boy, oh boy do they not get on. Darksiders III often plays like a valiant attempt to create…
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