Latest Reviews
Cairn
A video game has never made my palms this sweaty. The majority of my Cairn playthrough saw me on the edge of my seat, utterly breathless, hands slipping on my controller as I edged Aava up a series of increasingly sketchy pitches. This is one of those special games we...
The dichotomy of the Metroidvania as a genre is an interesting one. Its world is always ruined, cruel, hostile, perhaps once beautiful, now broken, but the genre asks you to imagine that it wasn’t always that way. That it was beautiful, once, worthwhile, and that no matter how hostile it...
Mario Kart World
The Mario Kart franchise sat an an interesting crossroads at the end of the Nintendo Switch generation. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was the best-selling game on the platform, and it was pretty much the ultimate celebration of the kart racing series. The game featured remakes of tons of tracks from...
Routine
An easy comparison to make with Routine is Alien Isolation, due to its green-tinted, chunky technology, and invincible, free-roaming (ish) antagonist forces. While the actual timeline suggests Routine was in development early enough for some of those similarities to be coincidental rather than derivative, there’s no denying the aesthetic comparison...
Where Winds Meet
Marriage, sumo wrestling, becoming a doctor and healing other players, going to prison, player housing, multiplayer raids, and a single-player campaign are all things present in Where Winds Meet. In other words, Where Winds Meet has a lot of different gameplay elements crammed into it. It’s the most “let’s put...
Unbeatable
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...
Skate Story
Skate Story is a striking game at first glance, but players will see that its true beauty lies deep beneath its protagonist’s glassy veneer. The game masterfully celebrates skater culture, offers a tip of the fedora to counterculture life in metropolises like Manhattan, and puts together a fresh gameplay experience...
With the Octopath Traveler series, Square Enix went in a different direction than its previous RPGs. Rather than focus on a single main protagonist, the idea was to focus on eight of them. They'd come from different walks of life, but fate would bring them together to fight alongside each...
Sleep Awake
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...
Metroid Prime 4 has finally arrived after eight years of anticipation. Now subtitled “Beyond,” the latest chapter in Samus’ journey takes her to a mysterious new planet where she comes face-to-face with dangerous enemies both new and old. It’s a grand FPS experience that highlights all of the Switch 2’s...
ARC Raiders
The extraction shooter genre is analogous to itself. Many extraction shooter games enter the fray, attempt to scoop up as much loot (players) as possible and survive long enough to be successful (extract). It’s certainly not often a new one comes along and even when it does, much like the...
Tribute Games has been doing cool things for quite a long time, but the studio won a tidal wave of love with its 2022 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2D co-op beat-‘em-up, Shredder’s Revenge. It should have come as no surprise that with such a stellar release, Tribute would be tapped...