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Latest Reviews
Littlewood is charming and bright, and wears its “indie spirit” on its sleeve. The developer has created something highly playable that also acts as a lovely homage to the Harvest Moon tradition. By all accounts, Littlewood has been a commercial success, too, on its prior release on PC. That success...
Exactly. Maquette allows a good chunk of its potency as a narrative experience be undermined by the quality of its puzzles. I don’t think the developers have done a poor job with either. I just don’t think the two distinct elements at play in this game come together in a...
Over the last few years, the last vestiges of “the console wars” being anything more than pathetic capitalist sycophancy have washed away. The various players within the industry work together with increasing frequency, and where once there was a point to having a preferred console (because they would end up...
Once again, here, too, Bravely Default II shows itself to be equal parts homage and deconstruction of the genre roots. These characters are, in broad strokes, traditional to the genre. But they’re all given twists and quirks that pull them very far out of those typecasts and encourages you to...
So there are some very clear positives and very clear negatives to Little Nightmares II. The narrative is quite good, solid with lots of meaning flowing beneath the surface. The gameplay is mostly simple enough, the settings are ugly-pretty, the music enhances everything. Basically, it does wrap into a neat...
While Curse of the Dead Gods isn’t overly narrative-driven, it is intriguing, and the randomised dungeon levels all have their own stories to tell. Enemies might cover off the who’s who of generic Dungeons & Dragons beasties, with snake-men, undead and so on, and traps are all the standard trigger-plates...
– Matt S. Editor-in-Chief Find me on Twitter: @mattsainsb
Whereas for its 2018 PC release, PUSS! played with the mouse to deliver an experience akin to a digitalised version of Operation!, the Switch port is best played with the joysticks, similarly to a bullet hell shmup. The left stick handles small movement and pressing the right accelerates the player...
Bowser’s Fury, meanwhile, shifts that perspective to a behind-the-player one, more like Super Mario 64, Sunshine, or Galaxy. That shift in perspective allows players to directly compare two very different approaches to Mario platforming, side-by-side, and with the takeaway that a change in perspective can mean a big change to...
The defining quality of any of the titles in the Persona series is the characters. The turn-based combat is engaging enough, as is the dungeon crawling, but it’s the cast, their relationships, and the dramas – both hilarious and tragic – that really draws the player into the experience and...
If you hadn’t played the Nioh games previously – perhaps concerned over their difficulty – then don’t let it miss you the second time. They are difficult, but that was essential in setting the desperate, nightmare tone and atmosphere. One other key takeaway that I’ve had from replaying both games...
There are other little subtle ways that the game continues to undermine what Gal*Gun is supposedly famous for. There are four “main” girls that you can woo, and each of them has a different narrative, within which there are special event variations on the base railgun action. One of these...
