SLEEP AWAKE Review
How often do you embrace the irresistible lull of slumber? How frequently do you wish, bleary-eyed, that you could stay awake? Exhaustion. Tiredness. Sleep eventually comes for us all. But what if falling asleep meant you were suddenly blotted out of existence? SLEEP AWAKE posits a cataclysmic phenomenon where humans are able to sleep but if they do, a worse fate than merely not waking up befalls ...[Read More]
MARVEL Cosmic Invasion Review
Tribute Games has proved their beat ’em up chops with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge. Evoking years’ worth of Turtles content from cartoons, comics, and games, Shredder’s Revenge was a near pitch-perfect beat ’em up. Tribute Games has a knack for crafting games that feel, well, like tributes to a classic style. It makes sense considering the team wor...[Read More]
A.I.L.A Review
Moments into A.I.L.A, the player is put through a harrowing escape nightmare. A monstrous madman chops through your hand with an axe, flesh no match for the sharp instrument. A shard of glass is wedged out of your foot, spurting blood. And, once you finally escape through a sewage line into daylight, a bomb goes off in the distant city that looked to be a place of refuge. And then A.I.L.A transiti...[Read More]
Constance Review
One cannot play Constance and absolutely ignore the rather large elephant in the room. Hollow Knight: Silksong was a dominant force upon its release in September. A game that had been anticipated for years and is currently absorbed in Game of the Year conversations en masse. For any similar game, being in the ripple of Silksong likely feels intimidating. The same will be said in November 2026 when...[Read More]
The Berlin Apartment Review
For 15 minutes straight, The Berlin Apartment had me in tears. The game had completely disarmed me, transforming a World War II story from mildly touching to gut-wrenching. After 30 years of narratives about one of mankind’s most pivotal periods, it feels like I’ve seen or played it all. But apparently The Berlin Apartment had a trick up its sleeve. But that moment in 1945 is but one s...[Read More]
Sektori Review
Back in 2017 I spent a handful of weeks attached to Housemarque’s Nex Machina. Released a month before the developer’s other game Matterfall, Nex Machina was a culmination of Housemarque’s mission statement of bringing the feel of classic arcades to modern consoles. Housemarque even went so far as to bring Eugene Jarvis–designer behind Defender, Robotron: 2084, and Smash TV...[Read More]
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 Review
My greatest fear with Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 was that it would become another Modern Warfare III. Modern Warfare III was haunted by the omnipresence of Call of Duty: Warzone. While Activision’s battle royale cash cow and Fortnite rival has proven to be successful, it was never meant to sustain the foundation of Call of Duty‘s other pillars. Swiftly into Modern Warfare III‘s ca...[Read More]
ARC Raiders Review
In June of 2020 The Last of Us Part II released in a fundamentally tumultuous time. Society was ravaged by a global pandemic that threatened to topple the precarious balance of all aspects of our life. In the United States our broken and incompetent political infrastructure constantly fumbled the well-being of millions of people. The Black Lives Matter protests were in full swing after police call...[Read More]
Painkiller Review
After putting in almost 20 hours with Painkiller, I had seen everything the game had to offer dozens of times over. Yet I still had the itch to play. For a game as sparse and repetitive as Painkiller is, such a time investment when I had numerous other games to play should be an indictment to its quality. And while I had played its multiple arenas several times over and over again to the point I h...[Read More]
Once Upon a Jester Review
At the beginning of the year I played a small microcosm of a game called Techno Banter released by publisher Crunching Koalas. Who would of thought a game about an anthropomorphic bouncer at a nightclub in a dystopian metropolis would have resonated so much with me? And yet it did. Techno Banter is not wholly profound by any stretch of the imagination. But its concept is so different. It has fleck...[Read More]
Godbreakers Review
Godbreakers doesn’t truly get hard until after players beat a complete run for the first time. And as a player relatively well-versed in roguelikes, that’s a surprising twist in the formula. After felling my first raucous, multi-stage boss I had burned through my limited-use healing coils. A combination of unfamiliarity with a new game, an accidental heal, and a decent difficulty curve...[Read More]
Battlefield 6 Review
If I love a good mil-sim, why have I not played more Battlefield? The only two entries in the series I’ve touched have been Battlefield 1 and Battlefield V, the recent games not set in modern day but in World Wars of the past. Gaming had, at least for a few years, seemingly exhausted its taste for first-person shooters set in the wake of 9/11 and the never-ending war in the Middle East. The ...[Read More]