Mark Steighner
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COGConnectedLatest Reviews
Chernobylite
Thanks to the lack of Soviet transparency, there was, and still is a great deal of mystery around the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Was the fatality count accurate? What about the subsequent cases of radiation sickness or birth defects or weird natural anomalies? Did the meltdown create a rift in...
If interviews are to be believed, when members of the development team at Norsefell were planning their game, they looked into their trend-predicting crystal ball and deduced that the biggest things were, or would be, co-op games and Viking games.
Boomerang X
We’ve all played games that have one or two elements that are strong enough to carry the entire experience and possibly make us forget about the missing stuff. Sometimes it’s graphics, or memorable characters, hair-raising atmosphere, or precisely tuned combat. In the case of Boomerang X, an arena/wave-based shooter from...
Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights has been described as a “Soulslike” game, a Metroidvania game, and an action platformer heavy on atmosphere and light on complex combat. Those things are all sort of true, but they fail to capture the essence of what makes Ender Lilies memorable. Coupled with...
I know, I know, they’re bad guys, and maybe it’s just the fact that the game never makes the missions particularly personal, but every time I watch my high-velocity round make its slow-motion journey towards the cranium of my target, I can’t help but feel a little bad. Some poor,...
When it was released six years ago, Techland’s Dying Light went out of its way to add some new gameplay elements and mechanics to an already very crowded zombie survival genre. Taking place in the fictional Middle Eastern metropolis of Harran, the first-person game was the story of undercover spy...
Wreckfest
I suspect that at some point while playing Forza or Gran Turismo or one of those other snooty racing sims with their car-porn focus on slippery reflective metal and engineered curves, you’ve had the urge to turn the race into a cacophony of screaming tires twisted metal. You know, to...
It has been a pretty good last few years for fans of both CRPGs and the Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition rules, with games like Baldur’s Gate 3, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and now Solasta: Crown of the Magister all doing an excellent job of simulating the tabletop experience. In many ways,...
Whether it’s The Chronicles of Narnia, Where the Wild Things Are or Hansel and Gretel, tales of young people stumbling into or inventing an alternate reality in order to escape a troubling real world is one of the core conceits of children’s literature, and the theme certainly hasn’t been ignored...
