Whether it’s the verdant jungles of Crysis, moss poking through the pebbled shores of Dear Ester’s Hebridean islands, or the snow-shrouded pines in The Long Dark, games routinely provide fascinating recreations of flora. With the ...
Read More »Black Future ’88 review
Time limits are quite common in games. But when Black Future ’88 provides you with a scant eighteen minutes to scale up its procedurally generated tower and exterminate its architect, you’ll undoubtedly feel an upwelling ...
Read More »The Princess, the Stray Cat, and Matters of the Heart 2 review
Romantic comedies are often like pillowy gobs of cotton candy. Syrupy sweet and sublimely insubstantial, they routinely leave you yearning for another taste. That comparison certainly held true for last year’s English-language release of The ...
Read More »Sparklite review
Indie developers have learned that layering roguelike elements into gameplay modeled after the classics can yield remarkable results. 20XX’s injection of procedurally generated stages separated the title from a crowd of more straightforward Mega Man ...
Read More »Incredible Mandy review
Putting the word “Incredible” in the title of your game kindles lofty expectations. With the release of Incredible Mandy for the Nintendo Switch, Tianjin-based Dotoyou Games almost makes good on that pledge, at least during ...
Read More »Mononoke Slashdown review
What is the concept? Mononoke Slashdown puts you in the role of Kagemaru, a roaming ninja who returns home to find his rural village besieged by masses of mythical creatures. Favoring action over exposition, the ...
Read More »Gun Gun Pixies review
If someone ever created a softcore send up of Toy Story, it might be a lot like Gun Gun Pixies. Here, the banter between protagonists Buzz and Woody is recreated in the oft-uneasy pairing of ...
Read More »How to Raise a Wolf Girl review
Global folklore is filled with instances of humans endowed with animalistic features. From the Scottish selkies, who shifted between seal and person by shedding their skin, the sailor-ensnaring sirens of Greek mythology, to the swan ...
Read More »Xeno Crisis review
Bitmap Bureau’s Xeno Crisis is available on PC and Switch, but more remarkably, the title is also releasing on long-dormant consoles like the Genesis/Mega Drive, Dreamcast and Neo Geo. The unusual undertaking undoubtedly helped draw ...
Read More »Conception Plus: Maidens of the Twelve Stars review
Originally released as a PSP game in 2012, Conception tackled the kind of epistemological issues you might face on a college exam. From reflecting on inter-generational efforts that help advance civilization to exploring how relational ...
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