Lucas White
Game industry critic and reviewer
Writing For
ShackNews 
TheGamer 
Playstation Lifestyle Latest Reviews
There’s a lurch in Unbeatable, the debut work from developer D-Cell Games, finally out after a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2021. Pink-haired and surly protagonist Beat and her soon-to-be bandmates are locked up in a prison, with no choice but to get through the doldrums of inmate life before the inevitable escape. You have to run back and forth across a drab environment, repeat a boring “minigame,” win small combat encounters that don’t do the rhythm gameplay justice, and then get through a sewer maze like you’re playing the worst part of Xenogears reborn. I was worried this would color the whole experience, alongside some general jankiness and fumbly writing. But a few hours later the story was over, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.
I know what it feels like to desperately want to sleep. A medication mishap left me unable to sleep for three or four days. I laid in bed each night trying to make it happen, then drifted through the following days struggling to focus on things like work. It started being painful after a couple days, and by the end of it I was scared to take those meds again. Sleep Awake, a horror-themed narrative adventure from Eyes Out and Blumhouse Games, showed me a situation in which that painful experience, stretched out and compounded over days, months, or even years, would be aligned with survival. In this scenario, sleep, something your mind and body will beg and scream for after only days of neglect, is explicitly deadly. With a premise so horrible, who needs monsters? Well, Sleep Awake also has monsters. They’re less scary.
Here at Shacknews, I’ve talked about Atelier a few times. GUST and Koei Tecmo’s item synthesis and cozy vibes RPG series has had a lot of ups and downs over the past few decades. If you’ve read my previous reviews, you might have a skewed perspective, as the most recent outing was a big down, and the one before was, excuse the cliche, a mixed bag. But dial the clock back just a bit more, and you have the current peak of Atelier mountain: Ryza. This time, we get to talk about Ryza.
Sometimes you see a game when you’re just scrolling through the eShop and you see the potential for a life-changing experience. Sometimes it doesn’t pan out the way you’d hoped, but you still have a few laughs along the way. That’s what happened when I tried Full Metal Schoolgirl, the second game to come out in October 2025 from former WWE developer and sometimes Earth Defense Force developer Yuke’s. While this game has a lot of energy and a dynamite sense of humor, the actual gameplay is deeply undercooked and fails to stand out in an oversaturated genre.
Unless you’re sitting in the ludicrously small mid-section of a Venn Diagram comparing “Katamari Damacy fans” and “Apple Arcade subscribers,” you’ve probably been waiting upwards of 14 years for a new Katamari game that isn’t a remaster or wacky spin-off. And Touch my Katamari was a PS Vita game, so that’s a barely deeper pool than the Apple one. Once Upon a Katamari is the series’ return to the “main” platforms, bringing a brand-new Katamari experience to consoles and PC. The goal here seems to be packing as much gosh-darned Katamari gameplay into this bad boy as possible, for better or worse. Yeah!
I find myself growing more and more tired of roguelikes lately, and I don’t really believe in “guilty pleasure” as a concept. But if you held a gun to my head and asked me to identify my gaming guilty pleasure, I’d probably answer with Vampire Survivors. It’s the perfect combination of brainless dopamine and just-thoughtful-enough build-crafting that makes me dump hours into something that isn’t up to my usual tastes. So when another game in the “like Vampire Survivors, but with Specific Twist” pool floats up to the surface, I’ll gladly check it out.
Playtonic Games’ Yooka-Laylee was one of many Kickstarter successes of its time, in an era in which spiritual successors for classic games were an easy hit. The 2017 original was a clear callback to Banjo-Kazooie, a Nintendo 64 platformer known for its googly eyes, wealth of collectibles, and complex platforming moveset. Nearly a decade later Playtonic has returned to the project with Yooka-Replayee, a “re-imagining” that uses the original almost like a blueprint to make something that feels like an entirely different game. It’s a fascinating approach that feels great to play, but loses some of its identity in the process.
King of Meat is an action-packed, multiplayer dungeon crawler developed by Glowmade and published by Amazon Games. It’s kind of a mix of goofy vibes, from Adult Swim-like edgy cartoon humor to Ninja Warrior and Most Extreme Elimination Challenge. Imagine a fantasy-flavored challenge of carnage, spikes, and skeletons, televised to god knows who and where with color commentary and massive display screens. I had a lot of fun with its cute-but-crass tone, long list of unlockables, and novel mix of platforming and combo-driven combat. I do feel, however, that I reached my capacity for what King of Meat has to offer much sooner than intended.
Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth, a janky, low budget PlayStation Vita RPG from 2015, is one of my favorite games of all time. I’m not even that much of a Digimon person, but that’s a game I’ve dumped a few hundred hours into over multiple playthroughs, something I’m rarely capable of doing. A literal decade later, that team has finally produced a follow-up, Digimon Story Time Stranger. It’s a big, bold, and beautiful sequel to one of the most fulfilling RPGs of its kind, succeeding in nearly every attempt to improve upon what came before.
Mine is a Mario Party household. Over the years my wife and child have enjoyed many nights of minigame-fueled board game chaos. Things always got heated, especially as we taught our young one to handle things not going his way. The grown-ups needed a refresher on those lessons as well, let’s be honest. Even so, we’ve always come back to that series and had a blast. So it made sense that, when LEGO Party! came across my desk, we made a weekend of it. I’ve come away from the experience with the dreaded Mixed Feelings, a combination of being impressed with the overall presentation while not loving the nuts-and-bolts gameplay nearly as much as Nintendo’s competition.