Bree Maybe
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I’ve been a big fan of Tamagotchi since I was a kid. I even still have all of my original Tamagotchi’s lying around my house, even though these days most of them are in varying stages of deceased. These digital pets have been having a bit of a comeback with the releases of newer, smaller Tamagotchi models and the announcement of tie-in games like Tamagotchi Plaza.
The Hundred Line – Last Defense Academy is an interesting beast of a game. Headed by Kotaro Uchikoshi and Kazutaka Kodaka, the lead writers on the Zero Escape and Danganronpa series respectively, it takes a lot of cues from these games but deviates almost completely in the gameplay. Instead of being a visual novel story broken up by characters attempting to survive some sort of killing game, the meat of the gameplay is instead tactical turn-based combat. A completely different kind of exper...
The survival city-building genre is generally considered to be quite intimidating with high hour counts for even just one scenario and incredibly in-depth mechanics that will take multiple attempts even to begin grasping. This is where Dawnfolk makes an effort to differ from the usual fare, making use of familiar mechanics and easily comprehensible visual design to make a survival game that is still difficult but not so unapproachable.
We’ve seen a lot of new half-farming sim, half-something-else games in recent years. Rune Factory is one of the original examples, and a few years ago I had the pleasure of reviewing Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin a game that was half farming sim and half side-scrolling beat ‘em up. Farmagia, on the other hand, is a real-time action game where monster tamers, known as Farmagia can control monsters in battle.
I’ve never been all that good at gardening, despite being a person who loves plants and wants a home full of them. So Botany Manor sounded like a bit of a dream to me, a game where being good at puzzle-solving makes you good at growing plants. Developed by Balloon Studios, Botany Manor is a puzzle game that doesn’t put too much stress on its players, designed to be more relaxing and therapeutic than challenging.
It can often be difficult to make characters feel instantly real and relatable. Sometimes it takes hours of gameplay to begin to emotionally connect with a character, so it’s always impressive when a game manages to do it in less than two. Published by Annapurna and from much of the team who brought us Gone Home, Open Roads is a road trip game following mother and daughter duo, Tess and Opal, as they follow a path of mystery starting in the attic of their house.
It’s been a long time since we’ve had a Prince of Persia game – 14 years in fact – and it’s been even longer since we’ve had a 2D entry in the long-running series. So quite understandably, a lot of people were excited by the announcement of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown back in June of last year.
Dress-up games are a genre that goes wildly unappreciated, these days mostly being relegated to Picrews or as a small element in much bigger games. I have often jokingly called huge RPGs that include armor customisation of any sort ‘dress-up games’ because I need to find somewhere to get my dress-up fix. If that place happens to be Bloodborne, then that’s just how it is going to be. So I was very excited to hear about a new entry in the genre coming to Switch so I could finally start ma...
After accomplishing the utterly daunting task of reviewing The Lord of the Rings: Gollum earlier this year, I was itching to play a game set in the universe of Middle Earth that isn’t a potential contender for the worst game of the year. The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria was already on my radar, so it seemed like the best bet.
As an enjoyer of tasks that most people consider menial and boring, I have always been a major supporter of the farming sim genre. I’m always raptly waiting for the next release in the Rune Factory or Harvest Moon series and blatantly ignoring every open-world AAA experience unless it includes a cooking minigame as a bare minimum.