Aran Suddi
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Writing For
TheSixthAxis Latest Reviews
Imagine a world where music was outlawed, where anyone found making or listening to music is thrown in prison. That is the world of UNBEATABLE where a concert that summoned entities that were given the name The Silence led to a pretty sudden change in the law. Since that day, all musical expression, even singing in the shower or whistling while you work, is banned as it draws The Silence. Yet main character Beat is a musician who finds herself on a mission to fill the world with song once again.
One thing that we all have in common is death. Through our lives we inevitably lose people we love, and then one day it will be our turn. A morbid thought, but one that came to mind a few times while playing Death Howl. This a game about a mother, Ro, who is overcome with grief after the death of her son. She is not ready to let death claim him, so she travels to the spirit realm to find him and bring him back to her.
There’s a deeply rooted part of the human psyche that plans and anticipates the worst things you can imagine. What if, while you’re stood in line waiting for the self checkout, or are sat in a cafe, a fight suddenly breaks out? What would you do?Suddenly you are daydreaming as you imagine the guy in front suddenly charging at you, but you move out of the way so he collides into the person behind you who was about to hit you with a stick. In your head, you can visualise these scenarios and outcomes as much as you want, but in reality you’d only have one shot. Forestrike takes that scenario of imagining fights and puts it in video game form.
Surreal, surprising, and a bit silly are the best ways to describe Keeper, but with this being a game from Double Fine none of that is unexpected. Keeper is narrative puzzle experience, casting you as a lighthouse exploring a world that is in the grip of The Wither, accompanied by your bird friend Twig who is trying to get back to their family. None of this overtly explained, as there is no dialogue in Keeper with Double Fine trusting you to put some of the pieces together.
Surreal, surprising, and a bit silly are the best ways to describe Keeper, but with this being a game from Double Fine none of that is unexpected. Keeper is narrative puzzle experience, casting you as a lighthouse exploring a world that is in the grip of The Wither, accompanied by your bird friend Twig who is trying to get back to their family. None of this overtly explained, as there is no dialogue in Keeper with Double Fine trusting you to put some of the pieces together.
A Nickelodeon dungeons and dragons style mash up sounds very good on paper, drawing on characters from across their many different IP to take up various roles from a tabletop fantasy RPG. That’s what Nicktoons & The Dice of Destiny does that well, as Timmy from Fairly Oddparents transforms into a wizard and SpongeBob becomes a knight, but outside of the cartoon mashup, this is quite a basic game.
EA heard all our complaints about FC 25. I and many others lamented that last year’s game was far too similar to FC 24 and was lacking major changes, and it certainly feels like EA took note of this. EA Sports FC 26, then, comes with some changes that do make it play differently to the previous FC games, though a lot of familiarity (and poor defending) remains.
I have spent 60 hours exploring Ezo in Ghost of Yōtei, experiencing Atsu’s story, hunting bounties, tackling side missions, searching out the side activities, and of hunting the forces of the Yōtei Six. After all of that time, I can say Ghost of Yōtei is a game that is engaging with a world that feels so natural to explore and it is a near perfect experience.
You would not necessarily think of skiing being a base for a rhythm game, but the team at Buffalo Buffalo have. The studio’s roguelike rhythm game Fresh Tracks takes up to the fictional location Norwyn, where you have been tasked by the Mythic Koda to reunite the rest of the Mythics to defeat Mar, the Mythic of Terror. To do that you need to complete the story songs of the Mythics, and defeat enemies while skiing to the rhythm.
When a developer chooses to take a long-running franchise and change its gameplay formula, it is a high-risk, high-reward situation. Taking Pac-Man and deciding to create a Metroidvania using the character is the risk Bandai Namco has taken to celebrate 45 years of the icon. Has that high risk come to fruition in Shadow Labyrinth? The answer is no.