Lowell Bell
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Writing For
Nintendo Life
The EscapistLatest Reviews
In the end, our review is that Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn isn’t a must play for narrative-driven action RPG fans or the Soulslike-obsessed looking for their next fix. It is, however, an enjoyable enough way to spend a couple weekends with a good combat system verging on great and a beautiful world to explore. If you go in fully capable of looking past some disappointing enemy variety and a bland overarching narrative, you’ll come away happy enough with Nor and Enki’s quest.
While the first part of Animal Well was a clever puzzle adventure with Metroidvania mechanics that just about anyone could work through without too much difficulty, working together with peers to uncover these truly esoteric secrets quickly enshrined Animal Well as one of my favorite gaming experiences in recent memory. That said, as the mysteries grow more complex and the discussions more intense, I’ve decided to bow out lest I melt my brain further.Perhaps I’ll return one day to solve these mysteries for myself or hop back in with a friend who is simultaneously playing to see if we can’t crack the many codes together. Either way, Animal Well was a wonderfully unique experience full of neat little ideas that drip-fed me dopamine derived from a constantly satiated sense of discovery, made all the more impressive as it was created by a single developer. It deserves to stand among legendary puzzle-oriented indie titles such as Braid, FEZ, and Tunic, and I cannot wait to see what Shared Memory does next.
We still have a lot of adventuring left to do in New Wirral, and we’re in no way upset about it. More monsters to record and remaster, a few more mysteries to uncover, characters to grow fond of, and about 13,970 more fusions to see. Some (hopefully pre-launch-only) performance issues, wonky balance, and overly complex battle mechanics did little to affect how much we enjoyed Cassette Beasts. In fact, it’s one of the better monster-battling games not starring a little electric rodent that you can enjoy on your Nintendo Switch.
While we did grow a little weary of the overwhelming amount to explore and backtrack through in Afterimage, we didn’t grow tired of whacking its wide range of enemies, nor did its gorgeously hand-drawn environments — which Switch unfortunately struggles to do justice to when docked — ever disappoint. It's best experienced elsewhere if you're playing on a television, but if you primarily play your Switch handheld, Afterimage offers a lengthy, lovely-looking Metroidvania adventure.
We wholly recommend Arcade Paradise if you enjoy either simulation-style games or spent the '90s with a pocketful of quarters down at the local arcade. The narrative centred on a lazy young adult proving to their father they can run a successful business will never really grip you, and – believe it or not – laundering clothes and peeling gum off the machines becomes a bit tiresome. Yet the arcade games themselves and the sheer creativity and charm Nosebleed Interactive has packed into them more than makes up for the monotony. If we stumbled upon these games in the back of our local laundromat, we’d spend actual money there. But since that seems rather unlikely, we’re sure to boot up Arcade Paradise to try for some global rankings long after we’re done with laundering clothes.