Serial Cleaners
After wrapping up Serial Cleaners I decided to dust off my digital copy of Serial Cleaner, a game I had bought years ago on sale and never played. “How does the original compare to the sequel?” I wondered. I considered hopping into the first game before playing Serial Cleaners so I could speak on how the two compared and contrasted. But instead, I decided a completely fresh perspective...[Read More]
No Place for Bravery
“Sing, oh Muse, the folly of Thorn, son of Dewr, who lived by the blade.” No Place for Bravery opens with this line, a throaty chant and booming drums accompany the text crawl. It instills an ancient sense of power into the player’s subconscious. Our main character is named Thorn and this introduction heavily implies that all will not be right, his folly worthwhile enough to be a...[Read More]
The Tomorrow Children: Phoenix Edition
When The Tomorrow Children released sometime in 2016 I never played it. However, before the game’s full release I spent hours with game’s beta. In my vast library of PlayStation avatars, I treasure the one I received for participation in Q-Games’ newest experiment. There was something so oddly inviting about The Tomorrow Children to me. Its Soviet-inspired world and writing added...[Read More]
Metal: Hellsinger Review
Is it the profound hope of most game developers to allow their players to embody a specific avatar? The common “joke” with Marvel’s Spider-Man was that it let players “feel like Spider-Man” in one form or another. And you know what? It’s true. I’m never going to web sling through New York City and Insomniac’s blockbuster allowed me to live out that p...[Read More]
Wayward Strand
During the three in-game days players spend on Wayward Strand‘s airborne nursing home, time does not stop. Much like the characters main character Casey interacts with, time is a valuable commodity. Miss a moment and it is gone forever… at least until you start a new game. Wayward Strand treats the passage of time as an unflinching force that constantly moves forward with no regard for...[Read More]
Broken Pieces
Broken Pieces evokes numerous other games during its opening hours–an often endearing quality when eventually those inspirations manifest into something wholly original. Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Alan Wake, Control, Gone Home, Alone in the Dark. Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft began to rapidly trickle in as did a number of avant-garde thrillers. If anything, Broken Pieces cements itself in...[Read More]
The Last of Us Part 1
The Last of Us has defined the past nine years of Sony and the PlayStation. Released days after Sony’s legendary 2013 E3 conference, The Last of Us was an expression of years of work mastering how to craft games for a console. Three massively influential Uncharted games acted as the catalyst to Naughty Dog’s gritty, post-apocalyptic vision. Joel’s path towards redemption through ...[Read More]
Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course
The Delicious Last Course is, simply put, more Cuphead. Players should be able to judge their desires based on that statement alone. Plenty of games possess infuriatingly challenging boss battles, ones that border on sadistic with their flurry of projectiles and screen-sweeping attacks. But I personally feel that the boss battle has fluctuated in quality and consideration over the years. In the 8-...[Read More]
Loopmancer
After dying nine times I finally beat Loopmancer‘s first boss. The crawl to get to him was grueling. I had savaged dozens of rank-and-file enemies with a bar stool and a fire axe and a pistol. Often their bodies would comically fly in all directions and spray blood once their health bar was empty. I’d been hit by a few cars, fallen off platforms, or didn’t connect with a jump. At...[Read More]
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge pretends as if the last twenty years of gaming hasn’t existed. It imagines a world where Konami did not stop churning out sequels to Turtles in Time and licensed titles were still told by way of beat ’em ups. Tribute Games, a stalwart developer of classic-inspired titles, has lived up to its name with Shredder’s Revenge. Desp...[Read More]
Silt
Silt is a tremendously evocative adventure, taking players into the furthest mysterious depths of the ocean. It’s just a damn shame the journey is over so swiftly. Denying the allure of Silt‘s aesthetic and atmosphere is an impossible task. Nearly every screen of the game grabs at the player’s attention with inky black animations and the grey tones of underwater horror spilling f...[Read More]
Souldiers
For developer Retro Forge, Souldiers is an extremely safe bet for a first game. Studios can throw all the money in the world at a game and there will still be a large pocket of players that constantly gravitate towards any game looking like it could be played on a plastic cartridge. Since Souldiers crept its way onto my radar I’ve been intrigued at how this “retro-inspired Soulslike Me...[Read More]