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Feature: Twofer Mario
In the streets of a not so distant future, between the public onanism booth, and the bouncer employed ironically by a nightclub's post-millennial owners, stands an enormous phone display encased in concrete. Squint into the solar flare brightness of its 20-foot screen, and you can just about make out some of the messages as they scroll by. Local youths are voting on whether Ben and…
Feature: Snow joke
If you couldn't tell from the title, The Suicide Of Rachel Foster makes sure you know it's about proper issues with one of them big content warning screens up front. Normally these feel a bit like grandstanding. There are sensible ways to deliver content warnings, and a game signposting that it is extremely serious business in massive white letters on a black background usually means…
Feature: Sounds good
So, let’s be real up front: I was dreading playing Tales From Off-Peak City Volume 1.. For whatever reason, my brain has barely any appetite for unlocking locked doors, solving mysteries, unravelling conspiracies or piecing together intricately implied backstories. A lot of adventure games just ain’t for me, because I’m a brute and a philistine. Added to that, I’ve got an abiding fear of being…
Feature: Hell of a commute
For good or ill, it feels like puzzle platformers are a dime a dozen these days. Stand on a thing, jump up to another thing, bounce off a trampoline - oh whoops, there was a circular saw in the way. Try doing the jump slightly differently this time, idiot. They're like the kind of fitness benchmark tests that all PE teachers secretly dream they could…
Feature: Let slip the crafts of war
Warcraft III was an immensely important game for a lot of people. A fantasy RTS that lead right into the start of World Of Warcraft, it left a big, war-booted footprint on the landscape of games. Odds are, you will have felt its impact even if you never played RTS games, since the original Dota grew out of a mod for Warcraft III's multiplayer mode.…
Feature: Starch contrast
Some games are like chips. Sin imparted these wise and useful words as I stared at this empty intro, struggling to convey the mildly-satisfying beigeness of Zombie Army 4: Dead War. It's about shooting many zombies, in a way that you may have done many times before. The zombies pop and crumble, as they should. The guns have punch and the punch has gumption, and…
Feature: Banner banner
When you send your Renoir nude off to the restorer for a spruce-up there's no danger it will return with the nipples painted out because the restorer thought they might cause offence or arousal. Things work a little differently with computer games it seems. Much-loved isometric sneak-em-up Commandos 2 has come back from refurbishment missing a few aesthetic details. German flags have shed their swastikas,…
Feature: No logo on the foam
Mellow. I see little value in reducing games to a single word, but here that word is inescapable. Coffee Talk is a light visual novel with a drink mixing system, that lets you gently nudge its subplots towards good or bad outcomes. I can't tell you it was a particularly gripping, dramatic or funny story. But it was very mellow. That may sound like faint…
Feature: Just because it's over doesn't mean it's really over
This is the story of a journey’s end. But no homecoming can have meaning in isolation from the voyage that preceded it. This is why offering some critical judgement upon the fifth and (as far as we know) final Act of the interstate dream odyssey that is Kentucky Route Zero is an exercise in absurdity. It cannot be separated from what came before, nor from…
Feature: Praetorians Delenda Est
Ave, citizens! Although October (the month of Ghoastus) is still far off, a game about Romans has been released, which means that, as per the terms of my binding, Nate has been forced to summon me to review it. When I heard about Praetorians - HD Remaster, I couldn’t wait to enter Nate’s PC via the floppy disc drive and haunt it for the weekend.…
Feature: Wait for more toppings
I'm used to autobattlers giving me a headache. They're a swirl of intense decision-making - puzzle boxes you've got to pry open and reassemble, while your opponents do the same thing. My first dozen hours with Teamfight Tactics and Dota Underlords were painful, but rewarding. I remember hacking away at an edifice of shifting understanding, slowly mastering the nuances of gold and wizard management. It…
Feature: Bug-eyed moansters
My clone wakes up in the hell pod for the dozenth time, and I am immediately desperate to leave. Martin Tweed, proud president of the universe's 4th best space exploration company, yells at me from inside a cheesy company FMV memo. The ship's computer lectures me about our dwindling supplies of resurrection goop. The Grob machine will not stop bleeting. Fortunately, there's a planet out…
Feature: Rite of passengers
It was day two when I finally contracted transport fever, with the classic symptoms: the aching posterior, the swelling of the pride. I’d built a circular railway, like the kind you see in children’s sets, to connect the mines and factories along the shore of Lake Baikal in Siberia. Then I’d asked my drivers to load their gondolas only halfway with coal, leaving space for…
Feature: I swear it's not Fire Emblem.
Look, do you like Fire Emblem? If so, do you believe the series peaked with the release of Thracia 776, twenty years ago? Well, if that's you, then great. You're gonna adore Vestaria Saga I: War of the Scions. On the other hand, if you've never played a tactical RPG of this broad type (think Disgaea or Banner Saga) before, it might be wiser to…
Feature: Wattave I just played?
There's a certain degree of weirdness you'd expect from a Keita Takahashi game. Whether it's creating planets by rolling up the world's detritus (with the occasional screeching human and puzzled animal in tow) in Katamari Damacy, or using an LED controller to get naked while brushing your teeth in Tenya Wanya Teens, Takahashi's games have always baffled and bemused me in equal measure. They also…
Feature: The machine stumbles
"I have ninety minutes to stop a nuclear bomb from going off, so I've given up on arresting and just started throwing people off buildings," I told the RPS hivemind. This was a half truth. I'd been trying to figure out how to throw people off buildings all day. That is the problem with MiniLAW: Ministry of Law, the hectic dystopian action game from Lasso…
Feature: It's the court that counts
Dennis Brawl was crap at tennis. She could barely tell her flats from her tennis elbow, which she had not played nearly enough to develop, but nevertheless felt afflicted by on a deeper, more spiritual level. Shots sailed passed her unwitting eyeballs. Lobs confused her, spin perplexed. Nobody would explain what an Inside Out was. I wish I could tell you she got better. That…
Feature: Get out of my dreams, get onto my cool motorbike
Sayonara Wild Hearts is a sort of rhythm action arcade game, and as I played I kept getting flavours of different things. In terms of video games I felt Thumper, then (less obviously) Fe, plus SuperHot and Persona 5. Oh, and that mine cart level in the first Harry Potter game. But Sayonara wild hearts is also the drag race scene in Grease, the "Get…
Feature: Bestest Beasts
First things first: you need to be Hunter Rank 16 to access Monster Hunter World: Iceborne, which basically means you need to have beaten the base game’s final story boss before you pick it up. I know this is an incredibly dry way to start, but I asked myself what the first thing I’d hope to learn from an Iceborne review would be, and that…
Feature: Keep Hope alive
It's probably difficult to know exactly how to do a Vampire: The Masquerade game. What proportion of your audience will come from the original tabletop game? How many are only familiar with Bloodlines? What if people only picked it up for the genre? On top of this, Vampire: The Masquerade - Coteries of New York is a visual novel too, so who even knows what…
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