For as much as I like roguelike games – you know, the ones that have you traverse randomly generated levels and that punish you severely if you happen to die by sending you all the way back to the beginning – they’re extremely hard to get right. That’s even more evident when it comes to…
“Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me.” The first line from a lyrical poem written by Emily Dickinson may sum up the final battle from the recently released Reaper of Souls expansion, far more elegantly and with outstanding accuracy, given that it was first published in 1890. In truth, Diablo III’s journey…
Styx: Master of Shadows, from Cyanide Studio, feels at odds with itself. It’s a stealth game that tries to court two different schools of stealth design: the modern open-ended approach and the classic rigidness of trial and error. For a while, it strikes a fine balance between the two, giving you plenty of room to…
Like a good mystery novel, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter drops you in deep from the very beginning. You fill in the shoes of supernatural detective Paul Prospero, who’s apparently hot on the trail of a missing kid, the titular Ethan Carter. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter shares some of the same characteristics that highlighted…
With a wide array of memorable music, adorable characters, and easy to pick up and play gameplay, Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call strikes the perfect chord between accessibility and challenge in a genre where complexity and uneven difficulty too often dictate the tempo. “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They…
There’s been an unsettling amount of silence from most videogame publications regarding #gamergate, a massive hate-mob that is actively abusing and threatening women across the industry under the guise of exposing poor ethics in game journalism. (Read about it here and here if you haven’t heard of it by some miracle.) Mainstream news sites have…
The word “Miami” conjures many thoughts in the mind. Many will immediately think of Miami Vice, the 1980’s, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Hotline Miami and all that jazz. But before it all, there was just a small sleepy town in the Everglades. Then, in the early 1920s and has happened in our recent past,…
For as much as I talk about and praise the recent resurgence of adventure games under a more modern design philosophy, whenever there’s a release that sticks to the roots of the genre, somewhere deep in my mind, my twelve year old self smiles and rubs his hands, gingerly. As a fan of adventure games…
2014 has seen its share of high definition remakes. Although most of these re-releases are ultimately unnecessary, there’s something to be said about The Last of Us Remastered. Released around the one year mark of the original Playstation 3 release, Remastered takes the base game and all of its season pass content that includes the…
The problem with most competitive puzzle games I’ve played is that they feel like they all boil down to who can make matches faster. And due to the random distribution of blocks, it makes competition a matter of luck rather than skill. Games like Tetris try to fix that by allowing you to hold blocks…
