mento's Articles

The end of another season means new anime is upon us as well as plenty of recent and less-recent video games to talk about. Discussion topics: N64 platformers, a shelf-fulfilling prophecy, two Indies with gorgeous retro-futuristic aesthetics, and the horrors of the Super Mario Galaxy RetroAchievements subset.

It's Indie Game time again and with this first-person adventure game adaptation of the Stanislaw Lem novel, Mento makes the unfortunate discovery that "hard" sci-fi doesn't mean what he thought it means.

Time to stick the N64 in mothballs again as we wrap up this season of 64 in 64, but I did manage to find two more 3D platformers (sorta) behind the back of the couch. Here they are. Sorry? "Sorry" seems the correct response for these two.

The Picrossalypse has happened and now the world has been torn asunder, with portals to nowhere opening all over the place. No fear, though, since all it takes to revive everyone and everything in Piczle Cross Adventure (Score Studios, 2020) is to be good at nonograms. No pressure, right?

It's time for an angry tongue-lashing on this episode of 64 in 64, or at least there would be if the two games featured this time weren't actually great. Sometimes it's easy to forget doing a feature like this that the N64 had some bangers.

The only true way to escape the dog days of summer is to shrink yourself down and enter a dog, where it's probably a perfectly reasonable temperature. BioGun is a shooter style exploraction game where your enemies are viruses and pathogens and your power-ups are enzymes and antibiotics. Just try not to think too much about where you're walking around.

We're back once again with another two N64 platformers to critique after spending a mere (though it certainly felt like plenty) sixty-four minutes with each, and Episode 54 proves true the old adage that you should never work with children or animals.

Neo neo noir abounds in this first-person detective adventure set in a dystopian future where no-one ever dies, at least not without the government's permission. I had a joke about taking umbrage with the title but I'll save the rough chuckles for the more thematically apropos winter months.

This "Oops, All Platformers" season of 64 in 64 (the internet's favorite N64 game ranking show in my mind) continues with Episode 53, in which the early bear and bird get the worm. Or at least I wish they did. Someone needs to get that thing before it can cause any more mental anguish.

Did you know? The month of August was so named because after one long and humid summer that offered no relief the first cool breezes of autumn would arrive, leading the luminary figures of the time to exclaim "ahh, gust." More true facts like these can be found in this month's appraisal of all things games and anime.

As we get older our tastes in media invariably change, maturing to befit our many years of experiences on this planet while we leave behind the cool and edgy frivolities of our childhood. So this week I'm playing a game called Doomblade because it lets me swing a big doomblade around and it makes all the bad guys go "splorch!" and "kablaow!".

Summer's coming to an end, so what better time to go on a vacation to a beautiful tropical island in the South Pacific with this week's game Call of the Sea? Just look out for sharks, jellyfish, and Cthulhus. Oh, and sunburns.

Game OVA Reversal ends with... wow, it's more Falcom, huh? Really keeping all the readers guessing, aren't we? Anyway, the Legend of Heroes got a huge glow up with the Trails games but what's the first one like? Or its anime adaptation, for that matter? Can I fit any more questions up here?

Indie games have long since become a truly global scene where the next big hit could from come anywhere around the world. Instead of covering any of those, though, Mento barely had to leave the house to bump into the paean to North Englishness that is Thank Goodness You're Here!.

We're close to the end of the 2026 season of Game OVA Reversal and, like many video game and anime enjoyers, we've immersed ourselves in Sin this time.

It's been a while since I last checked in with ACE Team, so let's see what's going on with their latest entry in the bumpy monster brawler series that is Zeno Clash. Wait... these mechanics look kinda familiar...

So far this season of Game OVA Reversal we've covered cyber ninja, mystical ninja, and Adol Christin (who is cooler than any ninja). Probably about time we had some actual ninja here. So... here's a ninja guy, then.

Along with the humidity of a rainforest, July also included plenty of treats by way of a new anime season, more Indies, and the return of a (somewhat) beloved feature. I also conceived of an excuse to play an Ys game this month so... not a wash by any stretch.

A platformer full of eggs? Sadly, it's not the Indie reboot of Dizzy the Adventurer but rather Cavern of Dreams: a 3D platformer very attuned to the Nintendo 64 salad days of the genre. Am I not already playing enough of those this year? No. The answer is no.

Struggling to stay cool, Mento has decided that staying underneath an alien ocean surrounded by highly-strung weirdos is probably the best way to beat the heat. Harold Halibut, the stop-motion-inspired underwater adventure from Slow Bros, is the Indie Game of the Week this time.

Game OVA's jacking into the information superhighway as it explores the cyberpunk TG16 shoot 'em ups Download and Download 2 and the unusually prestigious OVA from Studio Madhouse that they inspired.

Sorta-Pinkish Mento Writes Review for Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom, a taxicab 3D platformer that douses you in the gasoline that is its vibrant Sega-style visuals before tossing the lit match that is multiple layers of clandestine tech reveals to seal the deal. I should not be allowed near inflammable materials, is probably what this metaphor is reaching for.

Goemon's getting his time in the sun again thanks to a recent lavish compilation by Konami, so what better occasion to check out the few times Konami managed to turn him into anime? Game OVA Reversal continues apace with Ganbare Goemon's two official OVAs, along with a brief look at the first of his many PlayStation adventures.

Some weeks you just want to take things easy, relax in the summer heat, and hope your cat doesn't run off with your magic wand and cause reality to fall apart at the seams. Because that sounds like way too much to deal with and it's like 90 degrees outside.

We're switching things up on Game OVA this year: Rather than watching old-school anime and playing games based on same, we're looking at anime inspired by games instead. Since I can't help myself, this premiere will cover the first season of Ys OVAs from 1989.

When choosing what to play next it's important to embrace new genres and new ideas whenever possible, especially with the precarious state the industry is currently in, which is why this week Mento's playing something that feels like a DOS game from 1989 (positive).

When I wasn't boiling in my britches this June (not an euphemism; it's been an uncomfortably warm month) I managed to squeeze in plenty of Indie games, N64 platformers, Eurotrash NES tapes, Renaissance Minesweeper, Goon Souls, seasonal anime, far more Tingle than I would've preferred, and (gasp!) the end of an epochal Dark Cloud 2 playthrough.

When I was contemplating the future of this series, I did consider making a big change. A reset? Nah, if anything I was thinking of covering even more exploraction games. Can't have too many of those. Here's another one, from Croatian team Today's Games.

This special season of 64 in 64 has one last pair of N64 games to tide you over until autumn: we're looking at the deceptively clever Chameleon Twist and yet another Looney Tunes tie-in, Duck Dodgers Starring Daffy Duck.

Mento puts his light switch rave on hold just long enough to check out the new Dangeresque adventure game mini-series, introducing the most hard-hitting and legally accurate point-and-click police procedurals since Sam & Max.

We got another couple of retro reviews for N64 games here, since that's suddenly become the hot new thing on Giant Bomb. No need to thank me all at once; I know how much of a tastemaker I am around these par- wait, come back! We're doing Looney Tunes: Taz Express and Doraemon 2: Nobita to Hikari no Shinden this time! Two games everyone loves and have definitely heard of before!

Hey, hey, check it out: Mento's reviewing another exploraction game. It must be a day with a Y in it. Well, this one's got a steampunk pixel aesthetic and an RPG skilltree so that's a little out of the norm. Worth playing? Don't ask me, I'm just the excerpt; click the dang link already.

Part Two of this season of 64 in 64, examining most (some?) of the N64's best and less best one hour (and change) at a time, continues its mission to try out every 3D platformer it has. This time it's Gex 3: We Didn't Even Give Dana a Script This Time, He Just Rattled Off Every Movie Quote He Could Think Of and Doraemon: Nobita to 3 Tsu no Seireiseki, the first of several JP-only Doraemon games.

Mento once again finds himself unable to resist opening boxes, though at least this time it doesn't result in an angry crowd of neighbors yelling about their Amazon shipments. Look, building a box fort requires sacrifices, all right?

The internet's favorite N64 ranking show is back, just in time for the system's 30th anniversary. We'll be focusing entirely on the remaining 3D platformers for the system throughout this season, with the inauspicious opening duo of maligned ball-tamperer Glover and the incomplete tie-in Carnivale: Cenzo's Adventure.

May 2026 was a month that saw unexpected heat waves, eventful industry news and rising prices, several releases of what might prove to be the year's best games, and plenty of other notable happenstances, none of which will be covered here. Instead it's more retro gaming and anime bullshit. Don't say I didn't warn you. (Am I even allowed to say "shit" in one of these excerpts? Feels like something I should've asked about first.)

A great man lays dying and as his son, it's imperative for to go against type and do something nice for once so that he won't cut you out of the will out of pure disgust. When the entire world is a chaotic mishmash of Renaissance paintings full of jerks, though, how nice can you feasibly be? Heck, this dog just handed me a pistol. What am I going to do, NOT point it at people?

Another trio of reviews for fan-translated beauties, albeit a very tenuous definition of the term "beauty", that jumped the queue ahead of a hundred other backlog games I should probably be getting around to instead. This update includes: the other half of that King's Field review, the SFC port of the oddly-subtitled proxYs Xak: The Art of Visual Stage, and (sigh) Ripened Tingle's Balloon Trip of Love for DS. Yes, they made a second Tingle adventure game.

Armed with little more than a stack of quarters and a total disregard for the man, Mento checks out this '90s arcade parlor business simulator where success hinges entirely on the capriciousness of teenagers. We might already be doomed.

Everyone's favorite(?) May-centric exploration of semi-obscure fan-translated games returns for another season. This entry looks at the Saturn game Linkle Liver Story, the PC Engine CD-ROM title Galaxy Fräulein Yuna, and the original King's Field for PlayStation.

Between Reverie Under the Moonlight and Moonlit Farewell, the Momodora developers put out a one-off polygonal exploraction game called Minoria and, in the name of Cartographia the Roman muse of maps, Mento's never the type to leave one of these things unplayed for long.

There's no kitten around or pussyfooting this week as we take on the second Cat Quest and... agh, I said all that without even thinking. They should put some damn warning labels on this. "Warning: This game will pun-fry your mind."

It's another round-up of games, anime, and at least one anime-adjacent game. Probably should expand my number of interests, but that's a problem for Future Mento to figure out.

Mento learns how to write haiku in binary (1011/10101/010?) for this cute but bleak exploraction game set in a world made of circuitry where he ends up meeting a lot of resistors and therefore diodes quite often.

Mento checks out the Blossom Tales sequel, wondering if this Zelda homage will finally give Six the chance to slay Joey Russo with the Master Sword. Whoa! (Topical humor? What's that?)

Mento gets ready to crisp some souls and quaff some deutoplasm in this perfectly normal turn-based Indie RPG sequel from Mason Lindroth.

The 17th annual celebration of apes in video games is finally upon us here at Giant Bomb, so to do my part here's some deep dives on three retro games featuring simiiformes in their simmiest forms. In fact, just so I avoid the whole clickbait rebuttal thing, we're covering Ape Escape, Donkey Kong '94, and (perhaps the most obvious of all) Bazaru de Gozaru no Game de Gozaru.

We're taking another walk in the Darkside for this sequel in a spooky, silly series of superstitious surmisals. There may even be Cthulhus in this one.

Another month means more video game and anime musings from this guy over here, the guy whose name is attached to this article. That one. Forgotten my own username? Pfft, that'd be crazy. You're crazy. Crazy for not clicking this link and reading this already. Get to it.

After sending a fax to Canada due to some unclear instructions, Mento then checked out (for the first time!) the classic NES RPG for his never-satiated need for achievements of the retro kind.

This week's vertiginous platformer Youropa (2018, frecle) has Mento not only walking on the walls but hitting his head against them as the levels get ever trickier to navigate.

Part of the email may have been cut off but Mento's pretty sure his doctor recommended planning more colonies per year from here on out. So that's what's happening on this edition of IGotW with the sci-fi management sim, Mercury Fallen. (Not to be confused with Uranus Broken, which was the subject line of the doctor's follow-up email.)

"Gamers incensed as Zelda goes Wind Woke!" Mento writes for a headline, as he turns a big dial that says "SEO" on it while constantly looking back at the audience for approval.

Mento puts his Super Mario 64 skills to use in Analgesic's 2022 3D platformer Sephonie, only to find himself playing Tetris with molluscs instead. S'all good.

This week on IGotW, Mento climbs another video game allusion to the Tower of Babel and discovers una aventura emocionante espera. Sacre bleu! Es ist wieder passiert!

With the announcement of a new Ganbare Goemon compilation, it's a fine time for RetroPiece Theater to find out what the fourth and final Goemon game for SFC is like. Ikou!

The shortest month gets a not-particularly-short rundown full of discussion on games old and new, lukewarm anime recs, and the most convenient gathering of links outside of a Four Swords Adventures. (Incidentally I will not be talking about Four Swords Adventures this month.)

In space, no-one can hear you scream for better map tech in the 457th entry for Indie Game of the Week: the retro FPS/exploraction hybrid Exophobia (Zarc Attack, 2024).

In this edition of Indie Game of the Week, Mento takes some weird kid in a green tunic aside and informs him "My boy, an Indie game inspired by those Zelda CD-i abominations is what all true warriors strive for."

Proving that not all AI is malevolent (if still somewhat invasive), Chibi-Robo is here to bring a sparkle to your eye and living spaces alike in one of the GameCube's most novel and underappreciated highlights.

Putting the Mass in massacre, Mento ventures into the nightmarish Catholicism-tinged world of exploraction sequel Blasphemous II (The Game Kitchen, 2023) for the 455th Indie Game of the Week.

Mento looks at a photograph that always makes him laugh (in confusion?) with Indie Game of the Week #454: the first-person puzzle game Viewfinder (Sad Owl Studios, 2023).

This time on RetroPiece Theater, Mento endlessly farms monster pelvises in a fan-translated, otome-inspired, DS exploraction game he happened to come across. As you might.

We're running, leaping, and flipping our way through Colorgrave's 2022 GBC-inspired platformer Curse Crackers: For Whom the Belle Toils on IGotW this time around. Send not to know for whom reviews the Belle toils, because I, it... uh, well... it's me. I reviewed it. Right here. (Excerpt game is strong this week, dang.)

The saga of one man's heroic journey to survive January 2026 by any means necessary, if "by any means necessary" actually meant "mostly curled up inside their duvet trying to stay warm while playing video games and watching anime in a dark room". Like I said, heroic.

Mento wanders into the enchanting if unforgiving world of spirits and little furry whoosits in this week's Indie Game review for Kena: Bridge of Spirits (Ember Lab, 2021).

The first IGotW of 2026 covers Laika: Aged Through Blood (Brainwash Gang, 2023). Trials? In my Mad Max-inspired exploraction game?

The first RetroPiece Theater, wherein I (Mento) check out some older games in the context of their longevity and RetroAchievements sets. A Link to the Past is already perhaps the greatest game on SNES, so how much more can RA improve on perfection?

Three more reviews from GOTY season that I didn't feel like publishing individually (because I have to share this community article feed with others, aPpArEnTlY): Compulsion Games's South of Midnight, Tribute Games's Marvel Cosmic Invasion, and Double Fine's Keeper. If you're finalizing your GOTY list in January like a sane person, perhaps consider adding any of these to your deliberations.

2025's final monthly round-up of reviews, articles, lists, anime musings, and other miscellany by Mento, the gaming internet's favorite son. I can just write that in an excerpt and it magically becomes true.

For the last IGotW of 2025, we're checking out Lunar Software's Routine: a sci-fi survival horror game that's anything but routine! (Kill me.)

I'm just digging a hole for myself on Indie Game of the Week for its 449th entry, only literally on this occasion rather than the usual figuratively. [Game featured: "A Game About Digging a Hole" (DoubleBee, 2025).]

The 448th Edition of Indie Game of the Week covers the new action-adventure game from Keita Takahashi: To a T (Uvula, 2025). (I swear I'll figure out how to use excerpts more effectively.)

I swear, this habit of finding intriguing Indie games on Game Pass and then discovering that they're yet another run-based thing is starting to wear me down a sukoshi. I realize that's just how the Indie scene is right now, while still gratefully also being vast enough to provide plenty of alternatives, but I'm ready for a different fad to strike (3D collectathon platformers? Please?). Well, th...

If I'm being truly honest with myself, my reluctance to get started on any run-based games (I've been batting around a few preferred genre names for this sort of thing that won't make it sound like a stealth simulator to anyone unversed in ancient DOS game history, but no dice so far beyond "resetter", which sounds like some sort of dog breed; I'll keep at it ) isn't actually due to the whole "...

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 , otherwise known as the second most daring thing to happen to the French art world this year, is a turn-based RPG created by Sandfall Interactive , a new studio founded by ex-Ubi people. It presents a dystopian vision of late 19th century Paris after it was destroyed and twisted by some cataclysmic event and left behind survivors that are getting picked off in drove...

We're a few weeks out from Halloween but that's no reason not to contemplate the afterlife and all the suffering and regret that irrevocably led us there from birth. Heck, it's my go-to thought whenever I'm at a stop light or a YouTube video is buffering for too long. It was only a few months back that I played a game that had its own distinctive concept of what awaits past the great beyond, th...

In what has to be one of the fastest release-to-IGotW coverage periods in recorded IGotW history (which I hope someone out there is doing because I keep forgetting to back anything up) we have PowerWash Simulator 2 : the long-awaited sequel to the superlative scrub 'em up PowerWash Simulator , in which you take on a series of splashjobs across the somehow simultaneously American and British ber...

I've been playing horror games all throughout October and, while I recognize it's the reason for the season and such, I'm starting to get a little burnt out. I'm not made of scares, after all. Maid of Sker , however, looked to be just the nerve tonic to see out Spooky Season on IGotW: a short but eventful stealthy first-person adventure game with the usual horror accoutrements of eerie dudes pa...

(*sometimes Wednesdays) I intimated when I covered Sweet Home a fortnight ago that it was popularly considered the first "survival horror" game as we understand the subgenre—restrictive item limits, high risk encounters, and adventure game puzzles that had you following a circuitous route around a haunted location for the maximum amount of spooks—but really that designation better belongs to th...

Continuing our spooky month here on IGotW—if somewhat incidentally—we have the western (sort of; the developers are Australian) visual novel Necrobarista from Route 59 Games , concerning a Melbourne coffee house that serves not only the living but the recently departed on their way to whatever awaits them next. The story focuses around a number of staff and customers to this coffee house, named...

(*sometimes Wednesdays) The Sony PlayStation was home to a great many firsts, owing to the capabilities of the 32-bit hardware and the near-limitless (at least comparatively) space of the CD-ROM format, and in no genre was that more the case than the fledgling survival horror . Populated at that time by furtive experiments in conveying that style of genre fiction through the video game medium l...

It's the spookiest time of the year which also means it's time to get out of our comfort zones and into our discomfort zones, which is why I'm playing a game about exploring the Korean underworld and fighting all manner of specters and spirits that refuse to participate in the great cycle of purification and reincarnation that this spin on the afterlife is apparently built around. Sure, yes, th...

(*sometimes Wednesdays) Welcome to another Tuesday of Terror, or Wednesday of Whooooooo (like a ghost noise) in some timezones, as we once again enter a creepy cursed mansion with no real escape plan in mind. However, rather than last Tuesday's haunted house survey which preceded an age of FMV adventure games full of interminable transitions and rudimentary brainteasers, this week's preceded th...

One thing I enjoy in video games are stories about vagrants that are actually action-RPGs about a single hard-ass warrior marching into a cursed land to lay the smack down on contemporary conspirators and the long dead alike. The Vagrant (also known as Sword of the Vagrant) is mostly that: released by O.T.K. Games (not the streamer-led Indie game expo people) in either 2017 or 2018, the Steam p...

(*Sometimes Wednesdays.) Here it is, my mid-effort blogging feature for October, a.k.a. scary season, a.k.a. the time of the year when my birthday happens if anyone felt inclined to buy a gift off my Steam wis- oh god, what depths I've sunk to already? Well, speaking of descending to the darkest of depths, that is what we're here to explore with this feature, figuratively and sometimes literall...

If there's one thing I love besides exploraction games, Zeldersatzes, and subgenre names that'll never catch on, it's nonograms . If you follow my monthly rundowns at all you'll probably be familiar with how often I'm tinkering away on a bunch of numbers and grids during idle moments and continuing to rack up masteries in RetroAchievements for ancient picross games that, due to how easy it is t...

Our last week of SNES spelunking is a truncated one, owing to some very in-character miscalculations on my part, but I still managed to squeeze in three more great (or at least distinctive) games that successfully brought my "Best Of" list total over 100... with perhaps a slightly dodgy 92-100 range. I'll be publishing said Top 100 "Ranking of SNES" as a bulletpoint list at the end—with a more...

It's Exploraction Time once again on IGotW and this was one I was very excited to check out, because it comes to us courtesy of Seafloor Games : the creators of Vision Soft Reset , a visually rudimentary exploraction game with a killer gimmick. In that game, you were capable of time-travel (or really a type of precognition) with an elaborate timeline system full of nodes that you could hop betw...

We're back again with the third week of SNES highlights, including some pretty esoteric stuff from such obscure wallflowers as, uh, Capcom, Konami, and Hudson Soft. My original intent with this series—which you can learn more about by perusing the first and second parts by clicking where the text went all orange for a sec—was to fill in a few more blanks in my 16-bit Nintendo consciouSNESs but...

Back when I was a wee tyke in, oh, let's say the Late Triassic I was very fond of an unusual shoot 'em up called Wizball . The main goal of this game was to re-saturate a monochrome world by finding colors in different RGB values (which is also where I learned about RGB and additive colors, since I wondered how you managed to get yellow out of them) and the effect of having these worlds slowly...

Welcome to the second week of Supertember, the September where I play Super Nintendo Entertainment System games. Here's the first week for some context. Back in the '90s that was almost every September but, hey, we don't need to get into how we're all beholden to the linear progression of time again; I already did that whole spiel a week from now. Since I was a little disappointed by how I bega...

Duck Detective is the latest to join the Indie league of funny animal crimesolvers, walking the same gumshoe beat as Inspector Waffles or the Frog Detective in his indefatigable pursuit of justice and answers. However, while Inspector Waffles hearkened back to classic LucasFilm adventure games and Frog Detective to... fucking around and doing nothing simulators, I guess? Duck Detective is inste...

Welcome to Supertember! The idea here is that, every week, I'm going to try to complete as many SNES games as possible. These are games I've never played before, or only briefly to grab screenshots for our wiki, that I've been compiling over the years to turn into a blogging project. I did do something similar a few years back with a feature that attempted to fantasy-book the next SNES Classic...

It's not every day when the entire internet is in an exploraction mood, so how else was I meant to approach IGotW this time around but with one of the many such games I have in reserve for emergencies? (Or really just any possible excuse I might have?) After Death is a macabre spin on the formula as it drops you in a nightmarish world of bone, sinew, and decay as you piece together who or what...

Shadows of Adam is a throwback 16-bit RPG, of the type that typically use the tools of the RPG Maker software as a foundation and builds something semi-original on top of it. It follows a group of youths from the titular town of Adam, which is at its wit's end due to the encroachment of an enchanted forest of thorns it calls The Tangle, as they embark on a journey to investigate the source of a...

When you're the greatest courier in the world it's easy to get complacent, but when mafiosos abduct your estranged wife—the love of your life that you neglected so you could get really, really good at taking a thing from one place to another place—and demand nothing short but the shipment of a rock that weighs 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons and is floating around 240,000 miles away, well,...

A hound is an endless font of unconditional love and they frequently if inadvertently perform the important job of keeping their owner(s) sane in an increasingly insane world. But when your human is suffering the unbearable weight that comes from the soul-crushing travails of adulthood, of mounting regrets and failures, of desires unrequited and dreams out of reach and bad news around every cor...

I got tired of trying to get full RetroAchievements sets for Mario games so we're making a lateral switch to Zelda. As with Mario, these are such well-loved and super scrutinized games that you can't help but assume the achievements conceived for any given Zelda, and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time especially, would be both insane and exciting to chase after. Like, something that would con...

One of my more expensive recent game purchases was a Steam bundle of acclaimed Indies from 2024 and despite the usual buyer's remorse that comes from spending more than you intended to on a game (or several, in this case) I can't help but feel it was money well spent in retrospect. That bundle included previous IGotW entries Minishoot' Adventures ( #412 ), Dread Delusion ( #418 ), 1000xResist (...

I feel like trivia games have become a dying breed over the past few generations of consoles: not even the You Don't Know Jack guys want much to do with general knowledge quizzes of late. I grew up with Trivia Pursuit games long before I was old enough to figure out what any of them were asking so having something like Majotori come along, which is 80% video game and anime questions, played rig...

One of my favorite subsubgenres in the increasingly broad Adventure space is what I call the "aftermath purveyor"—no pithy portmanteaus from me this time—which typically sees you introduced to a crime scene or a mystery after its players have already departed (either the area or from this mortal coil) and it's your task to decipher what happened when, why, and to whom. Many of these have a sci-...

Last week's Mouthwashing only gestured towards the involvement of mind-melting cosmic horror, so let's take a big ol' bong rip of the real thing here with the trippy sci-fi exploraction game Ultros from Swedish development team Hadoque . In Ultros, you awake as a nameless warrior from a damaged stasis pod in a spacefaring vessel that appears to have completely given over to nature. From a small...

You can feel the derision dripping from this thing. We're in a new silver age of JRPGs and homages to same right now, with Clair Obscur , Like a Dragon , Metaphor , Trails , and so many others representing that turn-based grind to critical and financial success, that it's easy how often it's struggled to be relevant. No game better represents that struggle than Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest , a.k...

In retrospect, the choice to delay this playthrough because of anxiety around an upcoming piece of dental surgery was perhaps premature. Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of PS1-era lo-poly visceral body horror to enjoy (along with several other flavors of yikes), but not a whole lot of mouth stuff relatively speaking. Mouthwashing is, reductively, the 1979 movie Alien if humans were the real...

Happy United States Independence Day! And what's more American than... getting lost in Antarctica, bashing up robot scorpions. We're here with one of the very few high-profile Indie explormers —or an exploraction game if you will, might give that a spin for a while to see if it gets more (explor)traction—that I haven't covered yet. That is to say, we're playing Thomas Happ 's Axiom Verge 2 this...

As we dwell once again with the grim reality that the site's blogging and other user creation tools are about to disappear (albeit perhaps only temporarily) I find myself once again struggling to summon any motivation for my continued writing here. Good thing I gave myself a total softball this week to assuage any stress I might otherwise be feeling (recovering from some dental surgery earlier...

Full disclosure, I was going to look at the viscerally perturbing Mouthwashing this week but, seeing as I'm about to undergo some unpleasant and invasive dental surgery of my own after the weekend and that title suggests it might hit a bit close to home, I've decided to assuage my anxious heart (i.e. chicken out) with a nice, chill game about solving little diorama puzzles. Tiny Room Stories: T...

Always been curious what Yoshi looked so smug about. Like he wasn't about to get dropped down a pit at any moment if it meant Mario would survive. Hey all, trying not to burn out too fast on anime this summer so I'm going to be interweaving this estival season of Game OVA with some Tuesday one-shots, starting with a frank exploration (that might also be a secret chance to brag) of the RetroAchi...

Couple months back I looked at a survival horror game called Redo! which was presented in an explormer format and then became fascinated with the idea of the "explorror" game: one that capably marries the thematic genre of horror with the structural genre of explormers in a way that didn't necessarily detract from either side of the equation. Was it possible to maintain a significant degree of...

Whenever the temperatures rise my IQ seems to drop, so in order to retain my remarkable sapience for a few more weeks at least I find myself once again in Croteam 's post-apoc world of lasers 'n' forcefields. The Talos Principle II takes place some considerable amount of time after the first , during which—and pardon the spoilers but you know how it is with sequential games sometimes, they just...

Tiny Terry farting around the city of Sprankelwater last week was just a tad too cerebral for my liking so for a change this time I'm instead exploring a deeply metaphorical, metaphysical, and achronological sci-fi adventure game that saw many accolades last year for its bold narrative choices. 1000xResist is set some time after the world's human population has been wiped out by a disease sprea...

The May Marathon this year is all about fan translated games! Which is perhaps another way of admitting that my time spent learning Japanese on Duolingo didn't quite go anywhere. For more details on the choices being made and what's going on with the post-script, be sure to check out Part One first. Policenauts ( Konami , 1994 (1996 PS1)) The Bombcast, or perhaps a certain someone on it, won't...

It's episode 420 so what better time for some turbo tripping? Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip from, uh, developer " snekflat " is our tiny topic this time: an open-world messing around simulator that owes as much to Grand Theft Auto and its multitudinous progeny as it does Goat Simulator 's very particular brand of child-delighting arbitrary mayhem. The titular troublemaking tot Tiny Terry has been str...

The May Marathon this year is all about fan translated games! Which is perhaps another way of admitting that my time spent learning Japanese on Duolingo didn't quite go anywhere. For more details on the choices being made and what's going on with the post-script, be sure to check out Part One first. Dungeon Master Nexus ( Victor Interactive Software , 1998) The Sega Saturn is a rich vein of les...

I think I'm just a sucker for a cyberpunk aesthetic. Palm Pioneer 's Tales of the Neon Sea has been a middling adventure game so far, not to get too ahead of myself here, but its visuals are definitely on point. Set in the fading glory of Starlight City, long since supplanted culturally and economically by the fancy floating majesty of Sky City, it follows the cyborg P.I. Rex as he takes on a s...

It's May again. Right after April, as expected. So what are we doing for the usual May Mayrathon this year? Besides maybe never using "Mayrathon" again? Well, last year (2024) it was May Mightiness : a series wherein I could transparently show off my newish mid-range PC's chops with a bunch of expensive Indies and mid-tier budget games I had zero hope of running on my previous system without it...

Aw yeah, aw yeah! It’s been so long, you thought I left you—but I was in Nintendo jail with my nephew. I'm still not entirely sure what the future plans are for the newly independent Giant Bomb and whether they can afford to keep the lights on for a site this large, but all the same I'm going to keep on keepin' on for a while longer (though with some serious consideration for an alternative dum...

Well, we still have a website for the time being so I'm going to keep posting game reviews on it. You're welcome and/or apologies to all affected, whichever you feel is most applicable to you. I wasn't quite sure what to make of this game's name—maybe the movie star Ernest and his oft-mentioned-but-heretofore-unseen friend Vern are taking their relationship to the next level?—but I was, at leas...

The Dredge is back! 2021's hottest 2017-themed blogging feature returns for a single month of additional catch-up gaming from one of this industry's most legendary years, all in the service of fine-tuning the internet's largest and greatest 2017 GOTY list . Be sure to check Part One here for a more thorough explanation of whatever this nonsense is all about. Dishonored: Death of the Outsider (...

Crocodilia is an order well-represented in games between Indies like Lil Gator Game or major releases like the beloved (by someone, presumably, if they thought to remaster it) 3D platformer series Croc . Something about those long snouts or their crafty smiles evokes the idea of them being little stinkers with a rich inner life of silly thoughts and goofing around when they're not clamping down...

The Dredge is back! 2021's hottest 2017-themed blogging feature returns for a single month of additional catch-up gaming from one of this industry's most legendary years, all in the service of fine-tuning the internet's largest and greatest 2017 GOTY list . Be sure to check Part One here for a more thorough explanation of whatever this nonsense is all about. Metroid: Samus Returns ( MercuryStea...

Throw those crosses and save those animals because it's exploration platformer time once again here on the IG of the W for April 11th. On this occasion, the map-scouring marvel we have to peruse is Robson Paiva 's Redo! : a post-apocalyptic variant where a survivor fights past waves of misshapen mutants across a dilapidated city to find what might possibly be the only other living human being a...

Still floored Dan chose to play this of own volition. All that cooking really has given him an improved sense of taste. Though we've arguably seen many equally strong years for games since, I still find myself holding a candle for the superlative release schedule of 2017 and its particular focus on many of my favorite game series, including Ys , Xenoblade , Yakuza/Like a Dragon , Nier , Trails...

The Dredge is soon upon us! That's right, for April '25 I'm bringing back the fan-favorite and world-renowned retro gaming (or close enough) feature The Dredge of Seventeen , wherein I continue to see what other hidden treasures were lost in the hustle and bustle that was 2017. If you recall, 2017 was a year when we were all bracing ourselves for the many economically devastating antics that th...

From Triforces to Trifox es, I'm moving on from Zeldersatzes this week to play... a top-down action-adventure game. Oh. Well, this one has a few significant differences from everyone's favorite Elf Boy in Trouble series (that you can play in public anyway) by instead sitting somewhere between a Crash Bandicoot and Ratchet & Clank in the great pantheon of anthro platformers. The... panthroeon. I...

Hey all, we're back once again with the Teen Magical Girl Squad as we rampage acr- uh, heroically save the land of Enroth from its demon invasion problem one home invasion massacre at a time. We're back once again with Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven and even though we're some 20+ hours in the ladies haven't dated a single man yet, let alone a heavenly one. This will be the last of th...

I've played many explormers for this feature (some might say too many) but this week sees the debut of the first explooter. Very excited. This delicious auspiciousness comes to us courtesy of SoulGame 's Minishoot' Adventures —they're French, so I'll forgive them for not knowing how apostrophes work—which was one of the big Indie surprises from last year that I intended on covering sooner rathe...

Enroth awaits, my friends, and so we're back with part two of this quasi-LP/excuse to post terrible MS Paint comics, as was my whole thing on here in what felt like another lifetime ago. Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven has proven to be exactly what I anticipated it would be: a game fundamentally the same as MMVII (which is to say Might and Magic VII, not "2,007"), which I've played th...

Me and my boy Euclid go way back, like twenty-three centuries back, but even though the dude is a bona fide power gamer—calculating those FPS kill angles in real-time like a monster—there are the occasional games I'll play where I just don't think they're going to be his scene. 2019's Manifold Garden by William Chyr is one such "non-Euclidean" game, taking after the abstract and minimalist like...

Because I don't really value my free time as much as I should, and I've reinforced the frame that's just about holding my backlog at bay, I've decided to spend a chunk of March filling a classic CRPG blindspot of mine: the sixth in New World Computing 's venerable Might and Magic series, Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven . Released in 1998, and fitting between what was the "expert" camp...

As a subtle(?) appreciator of explormers (don't worry, this week's game is not one of those) I've always held a lot of respect for the amount of thought that goes into each of those respective games' map tech. This equally applies to RPGs (especially dungeon-crawlers) and the open-world format in general too, of course, as we depend on these little cartographical conveniences to help us stay or...

Rounding out the month of February, in very much the same style I started it, we have another explormer I'd like to share with you all. Mercifully, this one's much briefer than Afterimage though the adage "short but sweet" might not necessarily apply in this case. Teslagrad 2 is the long-awaited (by someone, somewhere, presumably) sequel to the first Teslagrad , released over a decade ago now,...

Around this time last year I embarked upon the figurative spectral jog that was the first Ghostrunner which, despite being hard as balls, had a very encouraging "one more attempt" masocore approach to its diabolical one-hit, one-kill combat and traversal scenarios in conjunction with its picturesque (if that's the word; certainly shiny) cyberpunk dystopian environments and storytelling. I decid...

I figure in a year that's shaping up to be as challenging as this one, Indies are going to be our best source of escapism: not only in the sense of having something else occupy our thoughts for a while, but also in how the more throwback types take us back to a simpler and more peaceful time (hey, as a Millennial, I feel my generation is uniquely qualified to say "things were better in my day")...

As I step out onto the sandy beaches and sip some papaya juice in this, uh, seasonably cold -4° February weather I'm once again faced with the consequences of my own actions, starting this little quest of mine figuring that I'd have some fun sweeping up the easy achievements in the first half of the game without it somehow crossing my mind that I'd eventually have to navigate my way through Nok...

We're already into the second month of this year and I haven't played and blogged about an explormer yet. It feels like I'm losing my sense of self; that regulars are reading my 2025 blogs and wondering who this new Mento is. Was he replaced by one of those billion-dollar AI that keeps repeating itself? Is this a misguided attempt at recreating himself in the manner of some New Year's Resolutio...

After the frenzied Retro Achievements sweeps of Super Mario 64 and Donkey Kong 64 there was one obvious next port of call: the pristine sands and less pristine structural stability of everyone's favorite tropicollectathon: 2002's Super Mario Sunshine . Now, I'm very much aware of this site's own checkered history with this GameCube nonpareil but I'll go to my lei-festooned grave in proclaiming...

Here I go, an entire review where I quiet my inner Archer fan and won't mention a "Danger Zone" even once. Wishfully 's Planet of Lana is a 2D puzzle-platformer game in what is increasingly the Chahi fication of that Indie genre: a mostly wordless, vibes-based experience full of cinematic ambition that balances its time with platforming, environmental puzzles usually involving moving boxes arou...

You know what happens when you get a 404 error, right? It means a computer messed up somewhere (or you did, but play along with the bit here). That's also what happened in Creative Bytes Studios 's Return to Grace , a first-person narrative-driven adventure game—a genre typically referred to by its fondness for leisurely ambulation—about a supercomputer AI that once ushered a future spacefaring...

Game: Ninja Theory 's Senua's Saga: Hellblade II Release Month: May Started: 21/01 Completed: 23/01 Fine, I guess I'll take on Senua's Saga: Hellblade II since we've only a few days left of GOTY season (and, crucially, my free Game Pass period) and I sincerely doubt I'll be able to squeeze Eiyuden Chronicle or Octopath Traveler II in that short a frame for as much as I'd like to try. I need to...

Game: Moonloop Games 's Hauntii Release Month: May Started: 15/01 Completed: 20/01 The last two games on my GOTY docket for this (OK, last) year are both downers but then that feels thematically apropos given, well, *gestures vaguely around*. Hauntii at least provides a very memorable treatise about what it means to be deceased and how that we might, were our existence to persist somehow after...

If there's one thing I can say about Januaries it's that they often feel like a giant black hole, from which nothing—not even light—can escape. Just a gaping void in the game release schedule as you huddle under a blanket for warmth and wait out the cold (or very hot, in certain parts of the world) weather to pass. It's in that saturnine atmosphere that I find myself playing Solar Ash , the mos...

Game : A44 's Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn Release Month : July Started : 08/01 Completed : 14/01 Still on my 2024 bullshit, at least until the end of this month (well, as far as this feature is concerned anyway), our next port of call is yet another Souls ian action-RPG: Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn by A44, the Kiwi developers who got their elongated beaks wet in this particular stylistic genr...

Playing The Case of the Golden Idol last month has given me a craving for more abductive reasoning logic games and it just so happened Game Pass had another one on there by way of 2023's Chants of Sennaar by French studio Rundisc. Biblical scholars might recognize Sennaar, or Shinar, as a location featured a few times in the Old Testament as the southern part of Mesopotamia where the city of Ba...

Game : Skaule 's Magical Delicacy Release Month: July Started: 05/01 Completed: N/A Magical Delicacy is a combination explormer , of the traditional 2D variety with traversal upgrades and a map that slowly fills out as you continue to investigate, with that of a professional mercantile crafting game akin to Gust 's Atelier franchise where you split most of your time between farming the ingredie...

I probably still have enough Indie games left over to sate me in my retirement and beyond, so my 401 plan instead will be to tell you all about Awaceb 's Tchia . The ambitious next project from the developers of Fossil Echo (which I reviewed around this time last year ) sees the studio once again lean on its native New Caledonia roots—a French-owned Pacific island just off the east coast of Aus...

Game : Microbird Games 's Dungeons of Hinterberg Release Month : July Started : 28/12 Completed : 30/12 January, when most rational people start putting together their GOTY lists for the previous year, is nigh upon us and yet I couldn't help but want to squeeze in one more review before December (and 2024) was over. In this case, I don't think I've heard anyone talk about Dungeons of Hinterberg...

Game : The Chinese Room 's Still Wakes the Deep Release Month : June Started : 24/12 Completed : 25/12 MerRig Christmas to oil, and to oil a good fright! So yeah, Still Wakes the Deep is a survival horror game set on an oil rig. The Chinese Room, they of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs (neither of which I cared much for but hey, I figure they're due), is behind t...

Game : Red Candle 's Nine Sols Release Month : May Started : 16/12 Completed : 23/12 Nine Sols is the newest game from Red Candle and, as a combat-heavy explormer , a bit of a departure for them, seeing as their last two were survival horror—the excellent Detention and perennial wishlist item Devotion —which is a genre usually a little less demanding in terms of battles and platforming. It foll...

Developed by Geometric Interactive , a studio founded by Jeppe Carlsen and Jakob Schmid formerly of Playdead (they of Limbo and Inside fame), Cocoon has you jumping in and out of other universes to follow its breadcrumb trail without a lick of dialogue or text, leaving you occasionally stupefied but, owing to its linear nature, never lost for long. As another big number rolls around for the Ind...

Game : Double Dagger Studio 's Little Kitty, Big City Release Month : May Started : 16/12 Completed : 16/12 Time for something low-key to squeeze between two bigger games, and what better animal is there to fit through a tight gap than a cat? Besides maybe a snake, or a mouse, or an octopus, or... well, analogies were never my thing. I was always more into similes, like that... one guy... who.....

Game : MachineGames 's Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Release Month : December Started : 10/12 Completed : 15/12 In retrospect, I think the moment Indiana Jones and the Great Circle hooked me like I was a convenient whip grappling point sticking out the side of a building was seeing the subtitle "(fascistic whistling)" pop up for one of its many ambient enemy guard noises. MachineGames is d...

Game : Snoozy Kazoo 's Turnip Boy Robs a Bank Release Month : January Started : 08/12 Completed : 09/12 I played the first chapter in the sinister saga of Turnip Boy's misadventures across a post-apocalyptic Earth ruled by sapient food earlier this March (though it was released back in 2021) and when I noticed its sequel was on Game Pass this month, I figured I'd add it to this GOTY itinerary a...

Game : Aggro Crab 's Another Crab's Treasure Release Month : April Started : 03/12 Completed : 08/12 Developers are cottoning on to the fact that " Souls like" isn't so much a genre but a style; more a condiment than a meal. It's a saturnine tone and aesthetic married to a few crucial mechanics and tempered with a higher-than-average difficulty curve; however, it doesn't necessarily have to be...

It's been a real strong season for golden idols, between The Rise of the Golden Idol from last month and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle later this month (not that the Raiders statuette is likely to feature prominently but I know licensed video games love their dumb reference cameos), so I figured it was due time to head back to the distant year of 2022 and boot up that Golden Idol original....

Game : Balloon Studios ' Botany Manor Release Month : April. Started : 01/12. Completed : 02/12. A nice, breezy game to start us off this December. Botany Manor is a first-person adventure game all about horticultural studies and nurturing plants with the tools and information provided within the grounds of the titular manse. Your protagonist is the as-yet-unpublished botanist Arabella Greene,...

In what looked like a damn fine year for RPGs, this is my Most Wanted at present. Here's hoping 2025 provides some good RPG sales and not too much in the way of apocalyptic BS to intrude on the time spent enjoying them. Well, here we are at the starting line of December, and I've procured two free months of Game Pass Ultimate in which to play through as many 2024 games for January's GOTY season...

Well Vinny, I finally did it. I picked up Pepper Grinder . Ahr Ech 's Pepper Grinder is a drillformer (OK, enough portmanteaus from me for a while) that has the titular adventurer Pepper run afoul of her pirate rival Mint who, despite being a breath of fresh air, immediately earns the heroine's contempt by appropriating her box of treasure and departing with it along with her army of teal-skinn...

It's another episode of Indie Game of the Week here to remind you all to look where you sit at a barbeque, or else you might get your anus charred. (Sorry, I had like a dozen different intro sentences sitting in my editor and somehow that was the best one?) Anyway, Anuchard . It's an action-RPG, or maybe just an action-adventure, from Indonesia's stellarNull . It tells the story of the Bellwiel...

Hey. Look. I promise this will be the last explormer review for 2024. Not that I'm practicing any self-restraint; I'm genuinely running out of the things. Maybe that's something to ask from Santa. This week's subliminal cry for help is Sheepo , the first (Steam-published) game from Kyle Thompson . He was the one behind semi-recent IGotW subject Islets ( #373 )... and will probably appear here a...

Later this month, I intend to finally get started on my GOTY list by playing my first (serious) game from 2024: The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom . However, that doesn't mean I'll be putting away the many Zeldersatzes I still have in my Indie backlog out of concerns for repetition (I think I've played thirteen explormer s so far this year?) so here we are with an interesting little game cal...

Well, here we are, the final Sega CD games of 1993 and the very last Mega Archive to cover that same year—something I started on back in 2021 . Preliminary plans to cover 1994 are... well, demoralizing is probably the way I'd put it. My favorite part of exploring the libraries of older systems is seeing the way trends shift based on trailblazing headliners like Sonic the Hedgehog and how there'...

It's November 1st, y'all, which means the Christmas season is upon us. That's right, I'm one of those crazies that starts celebrating the moment the Halloween decorations go down, and by "celebrate" I mean "dread with every fiber of my being" as seasonal affective disorder descends upon us like a tidal wave of anti-depressant pill bottles. That's why Cthulhu Saves Christmas 's idea of linking C...

We're getting ever closer to Halloween and what's scarier than genies? Y'all seen Wishmaster , right? Those greedy fools didn't get anything close to what they bargained for. OK, fine, so I'm just playing another Shantae game from WayForward because I guess this has ballooned into a full-blown addiction to explormers now. Last time I was here it was with Half-Genie Hero for IGotW #106 , but I'v...

Pull on your hoverboots and don those green tunics because we're back in Zeldersatz territory with this spooky October Indie Game of the Week: Arietta of Spirits by Third Spirit Games , released back in 2021. Arietta follows its eponymous preteen heroine as she vacations to a remote island retreat with her family, specifically to a cabin once occupied by her recently deceased and much loved gra...

Remember when adventure games got real weird around the mid-to-late '90s? Not just explicitly horror-themed stuff like Phantasmagoria , Dark Seed , or Bad Mojo but in the way every other graphic adventure game became "whimsically dark" like Toonstruck , The Neverhood , or Normality . The makers of 2021's Strangeland sure do remember that era; they'd better, as Wormwood Studios is one of many de...

Just a mini-revisit of The Kobayashi Mario feature to yap more about the fun Shotgun Mario 64 hack (created by Dan_GPTV) I mentioned back in the previous Mento's Month (which you've all read of course but I'll relink it just in case you misplaced your bookmarks) and its equally intriguing achievement set over on RetroAchievements (devised by RA user MaddieKittyTV). There's no real metaphorical...

Light Fairytale Episode 1 is the opening chapter of a multi-episode narrative project that seeks to revisit the creatively ambitious PlayStation 1 era of RPGs, notably taking after Final Fantasy VII in its presentation and setting but also bits and pieces from Wild Arms and others. Another Indie throwback, in so many words, though at least that period of 32-bit RPGs taking their first steps int...

Earlier this year I checked out a graphic adventure game called The Procession to Calvary , named for the 1564 painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The game, created by Joe Richardson , co-opted (which I learned recently is a nice way of saying you nicked something) both its namesake and various other Renaissance era paintings in order to create a historically-confused point-and-click adventur...

James Clavell's 1975 novel Shogun saw its second groundbreaking TV adaptation just recently with Hiroyuki Sanada playing the Tokugawa Ieyasu stand-in Lord Toranaga (the titular shogun) and Cosmo Jarvis starring as Blackthorne, a British sailor based on the real-life historical figure of William Adams (also the protagonist of the first Nioh game; William, not Cosmo). While both adaptations are r...

Hard to believe we're almost eight years out from 2017, still one of the best years for gaming in recent-ish memory, and I'm sure it won't be too much longer now until that year's output will be considered retro gaming. Before that happens and I completely turn into dust and drift away on the winds of time, I'm still determined to track down any remaining standouts released across those twelve...

September heralds the arrival of a new autumnal season and with it some welcome changes (cooler temperatures, longer nights) as the year lurches towards its conclusion, so to me it's always a benevolent turning point in the year that provides ample opportunity to switch things up and try a whole new approach to life. So it is with no small amount of excitement that I'm announcing that Indie Gam...

Welcome back to another edition of the Mega Archive, a chronological journey through the library of the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis as I continue to gussy up their Giant Bomb wiki pages for posterity's sake. Be assured that I treat every wiki page as sacrosanct, no matter how forgettable its subject matter might be to the broader video game fanbase. Of course, the more obscure it is the more work I...

We're back to socking bizarre chimeras on the snoot in Zeno Clash II , the hit (in more ways than one) Indie game from... 2013? How long have I been sitting on this review? All right, so full disclosure here: I had ACE Team 's first-person brawler sequel on my list for the May feature I did this year , which saw me return to many games I had to put down over the years because my then-current sy...

Taking a break from exploration platformers for a while, and you better believe it'll be a short one, I've decided to return to what I've always felt is the grandfather of the modern Indie game movement: puzzle-platformers. Beautifully rendered worlds, melancholic story delivery, pretentiousness thankfully optional: the humble puzzle-platformer usually creates a novel set of mechanics and an in...

You might be asking "how will he justify choosing yet another explormer for Indie Game of the Week this time?" and my answer is... I won't. I can't. I refuse to. People keep making these things and my impulse control is trash. Speaking of trash, but in a mostly positive tacky John Waters sort of way, we have the semi-recent Cookie Cutter : a cyberpunk story about a vengeful and murderously powe...

After our sojourn to the futuristic, prismatic land of compact discs we come back down to earth on ol' cartridge land for some more ossified Sega Tapes, freshly exhumed from the dirt of yesteryear. (I swear my opening metaphors are getting worse.) It's now December 1993 and the end of what has been a very exciting year for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive , living its life at the peak of its popular...

I think I've brought up how I've played a disproportionate amount of horror-themed games this summer so what better response to that could there be than to play another one? It's the only way I'll learn. A couple years back I played an Indie horror adventure game called Red Bow : it sort of took after a few popular cult doujin horror games made with the RPG Maker toolset, such as Yume Nikki , C...

I figured it was prudent that, before August ended, I actually played one of these cozy summer vacation vibe games instead of the current unseasonal mix of horror games and my usual explormer bullshit. Toem is very much in the same wheelhouse as A Short Hike or an Alba: A Wildlife Adventure , setting your little Moomin-esque protagonist off on an adventure to photograph the elusive titular "Toe...

Woop woop, that's the sound of the explormer police. But they can never catch me, not without finding the double-jump and air-dash first. Yes, it's another entry in our Explormer of the Week feature here on Giant Bomb dot com and we have a special treat in the form of a GOG freebie. I so rarely cover GOG games on here—I should really patronize that storefront more often, seeing as its DRM-free...

Over the many years that Giant Bomb's been covering E3 (or the Keighley-based substitute, I Can't Believe It's Not E3) my fellow moderator and stats nerd Marino has been tracking how often certain regulars have been appearing in the post-conference evening interviews, seen here with his " GB@Nite 5 Timer's Club " forum thread. I've been half-tempted to do the same with frequently-appearing deve...

Summertime, when we aren't melting in our seats, is a period of relaxation and good vibes so to keep things in that spirit of sunny lightness here's a monochrome game about pain, loss, and crushing depression. Lithuanian studio Hidden Layer Games 's Inmost is a 2D pixel art puzzle-platformer that, rather than heavily invest in tough platforming sequences or acquiring traversal upgrades or prete...

Welcome back to Mega Archive CD, the pearlescent partner to the cart-clarifying Giant Bomb Wiki companion project that is the Mega Archive. Since we've just entered December and the final push for the Mega Drive/Genesis, we'll now have this penultimate check-in with the Sega CD/Mega-CD to put it in the final month of 1993 in parity. After this, we won't be revisiting the Sega CD again until tow...

Let me just check the clock over here and... yep, it's Explormer O'Clock. Actually, we went ahead an hour in March so it's supposed to be Explormer O'Clock +1 right now. When was the last time I set this thing? Regardless and/or irrespective of all that, our non-linear jumpy-slashy game for this week is Phoenotopia Awakening from Cape Cosmic : a game that's a little (or a lot) more involved tha...

Maaaaail. Everyone loves getting mail. Or not, depending on how many enemies you have with a copious supply of ricin. Either way, something surprising is coming through that letterbox and what is life without the occasional shock to the system, central nervous or otherwise? We're talking about postal terrorism on this occasion because this week's Indie Game that is of this week is none other th...

Continuing our "Juneween" summer horror season from last week's Gylt , this time I'm back in familiar stomping grounds (but not that familiar; the explormer s are taking a few more weeks off) with the spooky boomer shooter Hands of Necromancy from Frechou Games . Or, given it's a rare gothic horror medieval variant, a forsoother shooter (a forshoother? Wow, that just plain feels bad to say out...

If there's a popular genre for Indies that I very rarely cover on here, especially in June, it's games that focus on horror and delivering scares and spooks to what is almost assuredly an audience of YouTubers looking to delight their audiences with their genuinely terrified reactions. As such, I don't tend to put a lot of stock in the genre outside of a few that catch my eye either because the...

You know what I haven't written about in a while? Explormers . Those games where there's a big map to check out and a bunch of upgrades to help you get around. Whatever happened to those games? Feels like you barely hear a thing about them these days. When I'm not gaslighting my audience like a fiend I tend to partake of these things whenever and however I can and this week felt like another ti...

Welcome back to another wintry edition of the Mega Archive, still plugging away through the remnants of November 1993 as we head into the final month and the final stretch of this "arc" of the feature. In contrast to the misery so far this November, this entry's actually pretty promising: there's a number of games here which I'd consider worth checking out and even many of the ones that aren't...

Game of the Month: Zilcho Nope, no GOTM this time. I mean, of the many games I played in May one of them is theoretically going to be better than the rest, but this section was intended for deep dives on the big AAA stuff and long-term RPGs I'd normally be playing in-between all the retro games and Indies I was already blogging about elsewhere. This month's been a bit too busy for any of that t...

Welcome to a seasonally festive Hallowmay with Pumpkin Jack , a linear 3D platformer with a sort of MediEvil meets Ghost Rider theme as the titular Stingy Jack, a notorious crook and trickster, is resurrected by the Devil into a scarecrow body in order to defeat humanity's last best hope, the Wizard, in their war against Hell. For as metal as this all sounds, the game is very much geared toward...

Last week you might recall that I broke my streak of endless explormer s on this feature by playing Tangle Tower , a delightful whodunnit adventure game, so I want to assure all those unsettled by this recent development that we are fully back into exploring big maps for traversal abilities with this week's game Carrion from Phobia Game Studio . I know, it was a scary and uncertain time on Indi...

Shocker of shockers, I'm not playing an explormer this week. I still have plenty of them on standby, don't doubt that for a moment, but even I have to admit that everything's better in moderation. Or maybe that's just my Moderator bias talking. Either way, I've switched tracks to another old favorite of mine—the classic point-and-click adventure game—with this week's Tangle Tower , originally f...

Hey there and welcome back to another enormous map for Indie Explormer of the Week to uncover one traversal upgrade at a time. Our non-linear search action selection this time is Supraland: Six Inches Under , a standalone expansion for the inestimable Supraland (covered back in IGotW #297 ). As with its predecessor, it follows a civilization of sapient plasticine people in some kid's backyard a...

I know, you didn't think I'd realize that 40 is XL and not XXXX, didn't you? I'm not as look as I dumb, turns out. Anyway, after passing that incredibly low bar, I'm back once again for more delicious Sega Genesis/Mega Drive tapes. Well, at least that's what I'd like to report but we're still neck-deep in the holiday shovelware rush of November '93 and that means more licensed tie-ins. Five of...

Hey team, we're back with another explormer on Indie Explormer of the Week, but wait! Put down those rotten fruits, dear sirs and madams, as there's a significant change-up this time: this explormer's a 3D explormer ! Quite the novel shift to the staid formula around here, right? Pseudoregalia kinda feels like... if the Klonoa team at Namco played Team Ico's Ico , was inspired to whip up a plat...

Welcome back to Indie Game of the Week, where we'll be reviewing an Indie explormer . Look, I know. I've been stuck on this one gear for quite some time. It's just... whenever a new explormer comes out and hits the zeitgeist, like it has recently for Tales of Kenzera: Zau and that Prince of Persia thing , I feel my status around here as The Explormer King start to slip all the while the demon k...

Continuing this trend of being incidentally relevant—this IGotW's game was, until yesterday, also the weekly freebie for the Epic Games Store —we have the extremely slick first-person "acrobatic kill" simulator Ghostrunner from studios One More Level and Slipgate Ironworks , a game with high enough production values that I'll probably get figuratively slapped by those who take umbrage at anythi...

Swannichiwa, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Anyway, Here's WonderSwan. Like all ugly ducklings, I've always regarded swans with a sense of wonderment but could never be one (I think that's how the story goes) so getting up and close with (a virtual approximation of) Bandai's WonderSwan has been nothing if not eye-opening. We're three entries into this feature now and I've plenty of...

Welcome to an unprecedented episode of Indie Game of the Week. The unprecedented part isn't the genre—it's another 2D explormer RPG, sure, but I'll say the tone is very different to last week's Salt and Sacrifice —but rather that I managed to actually get the stars to align for once: I'd been putting off Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising for a while due to my usual procrastinating over RPGs but then I...

Welcome back, all you Sega crazies and CDs nuts, to another update to Mega Archive CD: a chronological look at the Sega CD/Mega-CD library as I work on sprucing up their Giant Bomb wiki pages. We've passed Halloween '93 in the standard Mega Archive series so now it's time to do the same for our reflective friends in Mega Archive CD. This group of nine has everything you've come to expect from t...

Welcome all to another edition of Indie Game of the Week where we dare to go far, far outside of our gaming comfort zones in pursuit of the unknown and the untested. My daring choice this time is an explormer that has Souls tendencies; not something I tend to cover all the time on here, nope. This goof really kinda hinges on the assumption that I have regular readers and aren't just being rando...

Welcome back to another Indie Game of the Week where this time we're taking a break in the ol' Casual Corner with the wholesome organizational puzzle game A Little to the Left . Now, if you were to ask me which game best served as a paean to one's OCD tendencies I'd probably point to Donkey Kong 64 and its vast pile of banana-flavored junk to collect—and I'm not comfortable with how many times...

Hello, I Am Mento, and I Am Reviewer for I Am Fish . It's a 3D platformer, sorta, wherein you help four superpowered fish escape from human bondage (not that kind) and reach the ocean so they can continue to, uh, bro out I guess. Fishbro out. Pretty much if someone turned that one aquarium part of Finding Nemo into a whole video game with a lot of dramatic twists and turns, albeit of the mostly...

Welcome back to another brief glance—the briefer the better for some of these—through the game library of the Bandai WonderSwan , an ill-fated portable system that nonetheless found some success dwelling in the chronological gap between the Game Boy Color and the Game Boy Advance . When it wasn't being sandwiched between two boys, the WonderSwan managed to produce a surprising number of games t...

Man, it's good to be back with another Zeboyd joint. Last time I took on one of their delightfully compact JRPG throwbacks was way back in 2017 with Cosmic Star Heroine ( IGotW #32 )—an uncharacteristically current IGotW subject at the time—and I keep missing Cthulhu Saves Christmas whenever it goes on sale (oh wait, it's on sale right now. £2? Sold!) so here we are some scant seven years later...

If there's two things I enjoy, it's Zelder satzes and not having to pay anyone money. Fortunately, Snoozy Kazoo 's Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion —a title so literal it makes the Japanese light novel industry sigh and wonder aloud how and when the art of subtlety up and died (though if it did, I doubt it'd tell anyone)—is a game that delivers on both of those beloved pastimes. As Turnip Boy, th...

Welcome everyone to another episode of Mega Archive, your monthly examination of the best (and the rest) of what the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive had to offer the world. 1993 continues apace with another mix of, and let's be honest here, mostly trash. Well, that's perhaps too harsh, but my god do we have a continued downward incline of quality with some of the "highlights" this episode. That said, w...

Welcome once again to Explormer of the Week: a feature wherein I play explormers and nothing but explormers. Well, that's probably how it appears by this point—I'm not going to argue that coming up with a new spin on reviewing these things isn't getting as challenging as the developers themselves coming up with new variations. The aquatic, submarine-based Depths of Sanity would appear to be a n...

I wonder how common it is to have developers where you're a fan of their whole style and maybe a few of the people who work there, but mostly only just tolerate the games they put out. Like you appreciate their moxie, or their adherence to a perhaps archaic way of doing things that appeals to your sense of nostalgia, or they're someone you followed over from game journalism and are rooting for...

Way back in the mid-'90s, British comedy group Monty Python —or maybe just the one of them that felt like getting involved—worked with American developers 7th Level to create what they felt would be the most apposite video game experiences for their particular surreal brand of humor. What they landed on was a trio of classic graphic adventure games that were packed with FMV clips and Terry Gill...

Like many occidental folks I've little to zero experience with Bandai 's WonderSwan : a handheld console released in the late '90s to compete with Nintendo's iron grip over the market as a smaller-budget, longer-battery-life alternative. It was co-created by Koto Laboratory and its founder Gunpei Yokoi , a major figure in the development of the original Game Boy (as well as Metroid and a few ot...

It seems I'm not sufficiently "Mario'd out" after completing Super Mario Bros. Wonder earlier this month so here I am instead playing Suzy Cube , the "we have Super Mario 3D Land at home" of Indie 3D platformers. All right, I'm being a little unkind here: it's rare to see someone take on the throne so brazenly like this and, all else aside, it's remarkable the developers managed to make this ga...

After the FMV-fueled forays of January we're back to classic flavor Mega Archive this month, checking out ten more Sega Genesis/Mega Drive games from the autumn of 1993 as I ensure the Giant Bomb Wiki pages for them are up to snuff. What's odd about this quixotic little project I've embarked on is how nostalgic it's been, not just for the gilded age that these games hailed from but also wheneve...

If I ever make an exception for sports games on this feature, it's usually because they've got something else going on. Like an abstraction in its premise, or a heavier emphasis on story, or some kind of ridiculous fantastical gimmick to hang some non-standard sports game mechanics upon. In that sense, Golf Club Nostalgia (formerly Golf Club Wasteland) from Demagog Studio —where you're playing...

Hey all, trying out a not-particularly-novel new feature where I wrap up a month of gaming, blogging, and other miscellaneous activities of a mostly lawful nature. This'll give me all the excuse I need to deep dive on some of the non-Indie stuff I've played this month as well as sprinkle in a few other surprises. Game of the Month: The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero Oh look it's Falcom Boy...

If there's one thing I can admire in games, especially Indie games with all their limitations, it's ambition. The ambition to shoot for the moon and create something well above your weight class, if only because you have this firm idea for a project in your head and all the gumption and confidence (misplaced as it may be) to get it done by hook or by crook. That moxie is what I see reflected ba...

Bless the baby angel that is in charge of producing 3D platformers. Well, it's more the work of small teams of passionate developers around the world, but regardless of the providence that has allowed it I've had another opportunity to partake in running around 3D environments picking up random junk for hours and boy is that just peachy . This particular opportunity was The Spirit and the Mouse...

I'll admit to being all poised to put the Mega Archive on hiatus again—these updates take a lot out of me, especially when it's almost wall-to-wall trash like this episode—but I can't just abandon it in the fourth quarter of 1993 so close to the finish line like this. It will take most of this year to ensure the Mega Archive has covered everything 1993-related but I'm determined to do so regard...

Now that I've made good on a longstanding obligation to a fellow GB blogger with last week's Tower of Time , it's business as usual for the Indie Game of the Week. That is, I'm reviewing another explormer . Quelle surprise. Well, I say "explormer": it has maps and traversal abilities, but it's light on collectibles and very linear so I'm not sure it necessarily counts. Either way, I just picked...

Welcome to OoT OoT—which is to say, Over the Top Ocarina of Time, in case you thought I suddenly turned into Pingu—which involves another look at the severely cursed randomizer tools for that one N64 Zelda game lots of people like , rather than the one lots of people are weirded out by . I actually took on a rather tough configuration a few years back in this LP blog , where I opted for both Ke...

One week into January is a good time for contrition I've found, since most of us have already broken any and all New Year's Resolutions we'd optimistically set ourselves. In my case, having long since abandoned any pretensions towards self-improvement, this sheepishness is instead aimed squarely at a fellow Bomblogger: one Mr. @arbitrarywater . See, the stand-up duder in question gifted me this...

It's the final IGotW of the year so let's go out with a bang with the acclaimed time-looping adventure game The Forgotten City back from 2021. Now, I'm a big fan of any game that takes on the whole time-looping device—where the player's "mistakes" are quickly forgiven and forgotten by having the events of the game repeat themselves ad nauseam until the true path is gleaned, Groundhog Day -style...

Welcome to the second half of what might be the most cursed blog feature I've written since... well, there's probably several others this year alone. This perhaps warrants a closer psychological examination but not right now, as I've got thousands of multi-colored fruit to find first. That's right, I'm still gunning for 100% completion of the RetroAchievement set for Donkey Kong 64 —the 3D plat...

Another week, another IGotW covering an explormer . You can set your clocks to it by this point. But hey, I can't help but be drawn to what I like. Not that Grime qualifies just yet, but I suppose it still has time to right the ship. Grime is one of those Souls ian-adjacent 2D explormers that have picked up speed in recent years with the likes of Salt and Sanctuary , Hollow Knight , Blasphemous...

Welcome to the very last Mega Archive of 2023! It's not the last one for 1993, however, as we have only just reached the end of September and will be poised to start its fourth quarter whenever we next resume. A sobering thought: If I carry this feature into 2024 and maintain the current rate of ten Sega Mega Drive / Sega CD games per monthly update (give or take with the CD games) I'll only be...

Hey guys, remember Q.U.B.E. ? It's back. Well, OK, so this sequel is already five years old at this point so it's not a recent resurgence, but if there's something I'll always have a soft spot for in this feature—besides the usual RPGs, 3D collectathons, and explormer s—it's the humble Portal -alikes, a.k.a. (by no-one) the Dopportalganger . The first Q.U.B.E. was assuredly that, launching in 2...

Mercantile-minded folks are out celebrating Black Friday, but here I am celebrating Black Eye Friday instead. That's right, this week we'll be covering a brawler, a genre I don't dip into much (and for good reason, outlined further below): WayForward 's River City Girls , published/licensed by Arc System Works . Anime fighter peddlers ASW acquired the Kunio-kun license from Technos Japan (or, w...

Sometimes you want to stick a game on that offers layers upon layers of deep mechanics to dig into or some equally deep storytelling that'll keep you immersed for an unhealthy length of time. On other occasions, you probably just want some basic-ass Where's Waldo? game with a sci-fi/UFO theme because you're busy enough already. Looking for Aliens belongs to that most underappreciated of genres:...

...And if you think that title is bad, wait until you see what game I'm playing. Much like General Custer at the Battle of the Tiny-Huge Island, I have allowed myself to grow overconfident after demolishing Super Mario 64 by mastering its Retro Achievement set and have now set my sights on something even less attainable (and, dare I say, less palatable as well). That's right, I'm playing Donkey...

I did not anticipate that I would enjoy Mike Bithell 's 2017 adventure game short Subsurface Circular as much as I did ( IGotW #97 ), about a group of robots riding the subway and having discussions about the events and politics happening topside. That early apprehension had nothing to do with my opinions on Bithell's previous works, which have always been excellently written with a professiona...

Welcome back once again to another Mega Archive CD, the glossy, reflective younger brother of the Mega Archive archival/research wiki project. Most Sega fans are celebrating this month by playing the new Like a Dragon spin-off, The Man Who Erased His Name , but I'm too cool for all that. I'm instead poring over the data for early CD-ROM experiments released thirty years ago, many of which have...

¡Hola amigos y amigas! Mi nombre es Mento. ¿Dónde está la biblioteca? But that's enough of my powerful command over the Spanish language for now, as this week we're featuring a Mexican-themed game to celebrate the Day of the Dead in a fashionably late manner. It's Guacamelee! 2 , the second in the luchador explormer series from Drinkbox Studios , a developer from the Mexico-adjacent country of...

This Halloween month's seen killer sharks, demons, and ghosts on IGotW so what better way to end than with, uh, more demons? Demon Turf is a 3D platformer from Fabraz and Playtonic Friends with a sorta Doom -ish aesthetic by way of PaRappa the Rapper . It uses 2D sprites against 3D environments, possibly as a means to keep the game running as fluidly as possible as that would be paramount for t...

I polished off this Souls run about a day after posting the last entry, so the choice was either dropping this month's 64 in 64 episode now and putting off this finale for two weeks or, well, not doing that. Like a few of the corpses in the Painted World of Ariamis, I figured it was best to not leave people hanging when I could be cutting them down and robbing their bodies instead. (Maybe I'll...

This October on IGotW we've had ghosts and demons, so how about a creature feature? Maneater is a shark RPG, or a shaRkPG, or a JRPG if the J stood for Jaws, that has you becoming the apex aquatic predator of the Louisianan tourist resort-slash-seedy bayou Port Clovis. A celebrity shark hunter named Scaly Pete fished out a ferocious bullshark and pulled her newborn out of her dying carcass, sca...

Welcome back to another episode of my misadventures in a randomized Dark Souls . I've swapped around both the enemies (including bosses) and the items, leaving everything to chance by even throwing in items critical to completing the game, the Lordvessel and the Lord Souls, into the random item pool as well. No idea where they could be. Maybe I've already missed them? Wouldn't that be a fun thi...

I should eventually rename this feature "3D platformers, adventure games, RPGs, and explormers " (or some punchier equivalent) because that's pretty much all I'm interested in covering. I'll expand the menu occasionally if something highly acclaimed or otherwise noteworthy appears in my lesser-explored genres, but for the most part I have my creature comforts and I could probably be of more ser...

Lo there, scaleless dukes and furtive pygmies alike. If there's anything I like to write about way too often, besides just " everything ", it's randomizer hacks. For as much as I tend to steer clear of roguelike games and those that prominently feature procedural generation due to how creatively stifling it can be to rely too much on algorithms, there's something about randomizer hacks in parti...

Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryas, I wrote a small piece on a game called Stick It to the Man! : an adventure game with some mild platforming that was notable for both its Klasky Csupo-like endearingly grotesque visuals and an equally endearing script by a veritable Tyrannosaur of the webcomic world, Ryan North . Conversely, it also suffered from...

Hey SeGuys and SeGals to another edition of the Mega Archive : the only place on the internet that still remembers the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive . Actually, that's not even remotely true, but if I keep on this obsequious path maybe Sega will send over some review copies of the half-dozen Like a Dragon games they're developing to your hardworking boy. Fingers crossed, yes? Regardless, we have anot...

It's your weekly serving of Indie Games, and for this occasion we have yet another emotional puzzle-platformer. Whee. I only just covered Evergate a little while back but these particular types of games sprout like weeds. Well, perhaps that's too ungenerous an analogy; there's a reason I keep playing these things, after all, and the way they tend to weave storytelling with apposite game mechani...

I've been looking for something to help me through the hot 'n' humid summer months and what better way to beat the heat than to stay indoors watching questionable anime and playing questionable games based on said anime? For a rundown of this little project, check out the first episode . The Property Dirty Pair is a sci-fi action series about a duo of female "trouble consultant" agents of the f...

What's this, you ask? "A game released this year on Indie Game of the Week? Will wonders never cease?" Well, jerk , sometimes I find my way to a Steam sale and pick up a few games that have captured my attention, and that was such a case for the third Glass Masquerade game from our friends at Onyx Lute . Though these games are essentially jigsaw puzzles with a veneer of class owing to their use...

Something reassuring to know that, long after I die, long after the sun fizzles out, and long after the universe reaches its final anticlimactic heat death, there'll still be Indie puzzle-platformers being released on a semi-regular basis. Back in the Indie sphere's XBLA heyday, Braid led a whole crowd of these chill, ruminative platformers that sometimes demanded (but not in any insistent way)...

Welcome all to The Room 4: The Revenge of the Oh Hai Doggy . Honestly, I don't know why Fireproof hasn't renamed this series to "The Rooms" since there's been multiple of the things in several entries now, just to avoid the usual jokes from hacky game reviewers. But, yes, we're back once again twiddling around with our Victorian knobs and edifices until something pops for another chapter of sli...

The Mega Archive is now entering the dog days of summer just as we in the present are mercifully leaving same (though it certainly doesn't feel that way right now), with this entry jumping into what I've pejoratively dubbed "Electronic Artsgust". EA was never a wallflower when it came to the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis , but being responsible for four of the ten games featured in part XXXV (or 35,...

A couple years back , I took on a fairly intense challenge to play through as many games released in 2017 as I could to pad out what was an already beefy GOTY list into one with a hundred items on it: a testament to the exceptional output of that year (and one that has not been matched since, though 2023 is certainly making a strong push for that crown). While planning that feature, Splasher wa...

Part of me thinks I've enough RPGs on my plate already without jamming them into my Indie Game of the Week slot (ew, phrasing) as well—and 2023 isn't exactly an "agile" year for new RPGs either, to use Electronic Arts's parlance —but I'll admit to long being curious about Cris Tales since its head-turning trailers first hit E3 and the like, and then possibly more so still once I'd heard that it...

Given the milestone I was so tempted to just blog about Threes this week, but who and their grandmother hasn't already played that thing to death? So instead, we're back in 2D platformer territory for an unprecedented second week for Kaze and the Wild Masks , a gorgeous platformer that carefully straddles the line between unpleasantly hard and tolerably hard. Developed by Brazilian team PixelHi...

I can't speak for duels, but this is probably the 3000th explormer we've featured on Indie Game of the Week. What can I say? I have a type. 3000th Duel , from South Korean studio Neopopcorn, is an explormer-RPG hybrid that, as is almost customary at this point, has a few Souls ian affectations to its mechanics and world design. Dropped into a misty forest with amnesia and an unremovable mask, t...

Welcome to another action-packed installment of the Mega Archive: a chronological exploration of the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive as I continue to work on its representation in our Wiki. This Mega Archive pushes us past the halfway point of 1993 and into the latter half of that year, and largely focuses on western games released across July. In fact, it's probably the case that most of the entries m...

At first blush, Ostrich Island seems like an elaborate joke game. Visually it's kind of a mess, your directives are not clear beyond some open-world tomfoolery, collectibles are called things like "Statuette of Egbert", it's very easy to accidentally take five steps into the water and drown, and the sheer number of minor visual and physics glitches intimates that the developers had too much on...

If there's two things I find scary, it's creepy monsters hiding in the shadows that defy rational explanation and having to think. Unfold Games 's Darq is the rare game that caters to both those fears. The game follows a bald kid (or maybe a teen; it's hard to tell without the hair) as he finds himself stuck in a loop of falling asleep, waking up in some nightmare factory, and then narrowly esc...

I've yet to dabble in this new wave of Sinocentric games to hit Steam over the past few years, the world's most populous country having joined the global video game industry in earnest just semi-recently, but if the likes of Sword and Fairy or Gujian are as charming as this adventure game (from a Canadian development team, but still kinda counts) set in 7th/8th century China I might find myself...

As I said I few months back, the Sega CD 's fortunes are going to be picking up in 1993 and so we'll be seeing many more of these Mega Archive CD "gaiden" entries between the core Mega Archive installments. I'm totally cool with this new development: the Mega/Sega CD has been a fascinating platform to research due to how both sides of the Atlantic approached CD-ROM gaming completely differently...

Since I bothered to invent a stupid name for them, I've been more eager of late to check out some more Indie Zeldersatzes : those that take after Nintendo's most wanderlust-y of tentpole franchises, The Legend of Zelda . Since Zelda flipped the script lately with Breath of the Wild (and Tears of the Kingdom , suggesting this current style is here to stay) there's been a number of Indies as insp...

My principle with run-based games is that I have to be making forward progress on a semi-consistent basis, even as incremental as it may be; it's an intriguing framework that uses RNG in place of a considerable amount of level design work, one of the first instances of AI algorithms taking over what would normally be a human's job (see how you like it now, artists and musicians), but one that c...

Well, here we are at the end. Our goal today is nothing short of 100% completion of the Retro Achievements set for Super Mario 64 . Once we hit all 132 achievements (Part 3 left us with 23 to go) I'll be moving onto a bonus section and then wrapping up this feature for some other retro-gaming shenanigans. For those just joining us at the conclusion here, the Kobayashi Mario is this potentially...

Adventure games have gone through many evolutions since the Indie market more or less completely took them over from the apathetic AAA industry, but the old point-and-clicks still have their proponents, myself included. Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit initially felt like one of those tourist information type games—where a country with very limited representation in the video game industry m...

Do you kids like your Mega Man s? I know I sure do. I don't generally play a whole lot of Indie games imitating the Blue Bomber's numerous quirks, despite the fact they're almost as popular as all the Metroid s and Castlevania s understudies out there. Mostly it's because they tend to be on the tougher side (I swear I'll give RosenkreuzStilette Freudenstachel another go one of these days, and I...

We like to joke around here with our silly made-up names for genres, like Zeldersatzes and explormers , but it's really hard to narrow down which of those two perfectly cromulent words best encapsulates what Studio Pixel Punk has made here with Unsighted . Waking up in an underground laboratory, you play as Alma, a dexterous combat automaton built to resist the human incursion on your city. A m...

Welcome back to the Mega Archive, still chronologically displaced thirty years to the day as we cover the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis 's release schedule for June 1993 in its entirety. A remarkable rarity for this Mega Archive is that we have almost zero crossover with the SNES: it's all going to be system exclusives and PC/Amiga/Arcade ports this time around, with just one exception. The genre bre...

If I'd been paying more attention I could've been crafting some ironclad rules of IGotW all this time, one of which would undoubtably be "if there's an Indie Souls borne or explormer out there, I'm playing it eventually". Mortal Shell is a case of the former, fully immersing itself in the choking fog of mechanical obfuscation and grimdark subtextual storytelling that is FromSoft 's "dread and b...

Hey, we're back again, Doing the Mario. That is, doing a particularly arduous playthrough of Super Mario 64 in which I attempt to earn all 132 of its Retro Achievements . I've since cooled down on achievements as a target in video gaming in general, no longer chasing the things as an excuse to make my numbers go up but carefully studying them before starting a game (excepting the spoiler story...

2023's kind of upended tradition by packing its first summer month with a lion's share of big releases, when really the summer's meant to be peak time for backlog-clearing and beating the heat with some chill "podcast gaming" a la long RPGs and open-world collectathons. Not that I particularly mind a busy release month but I'm not letting that change my usual schedule here; my first Indie Game...

You know what's nutty? I update the current year's " Games Beaten " list every month and usually average about five or six additions (mostly Indies for IGotW ) along with a summary mini-review and score. This month I'll be updating the list with 28 new entries. I'll also have to go back and add wiki pages for a lot of these, obscure as they are. My intent, of course, was never to pad out my gam...

May has a lot of days in it, turns out, and so I've been filling it with as many playthroughs of smallish (1-4 hour) Itch.io Indie games as I can manage. This is all in service of honoring the huge charity bundles Itch.io and its power users started curating around this time three years ago, though really it's an excuse to cut some of my Itch.io backlog down to something could be laughably desc...

Something I've noticed after doing some three hundred of these Indie game reviews is that I've become attached to certain oeuvres: if I cover one game from a developer or a specific franchise of theirs for IGotW and enjoyed it, I'm more likely to eventually include everything else they've done for a vague sense of completion (excepting those that I'd already played/reviewed prior to starting th...

Hey all and welcome back to Week 3 of May Magnanimity, looking at the smaller games from Itch.io charity bundles that may have slipped everyone's notice, as they evidently did mine if I'm only playing them now many months (or years) later. Truth be told I'm stoked to be reviewing tiny Indies en masse again, as I'd often get through a good twenty or so of these bite-sized beauties in a single Ma...

It's been a hot minute since I last checked out a Swery game. In fact, I'm pretty sure the only other game of his I've played was Deadly Premonition , which I blogged about almost nine years ago . Dude's been busy since then, of course, focusing on smaller-scale Indie/doujin games since forming his own studio, White Owls , after leaving Access Games (with whom he made Deadly Premonition, D4 , a...

I'm still over here throwing darts at my sizeable (humblebrag?) Itch.io bundle backlog to see what gaming morsels I've been putting off for far too long, as a belated means of thanking those developers who put up their creative efforts to help with various charitable efforts over the past few years (and also to clear out a whole bunch of Indies this month, which used to be how I spent most Mays...

I tell ya, nothing encourages you to check out a game in your backlog more than hearing about the release of its sequel. That said, Far: Changing Tides did come out more than a year ago, but then I never claimed to be particularly up-to-date with this feature's schedule. Far: Lone Sails is the predecessor of Changing Tides and the game we're checking out this week, developed by Swiss studio (ma...

It's New Zelda Week and what better way to honor Nintendo's efforts than by talking about decades-old games released on the system of their greatest rival? We're back with the next entry of the Mega Archive: a chronological look at the games released on the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis as their Giant Bomb Wiki pages are simultaneously polished up by this schlub over here. I'm still not entirely sure...

Every May I embark on a seasonally-germane cleaning session for one or more of my backlogs. Since starting Indie Game of the Week I've been making plenty of forward progress on my Indie backlog in particular, however I've found that I've been unable to stem the tide of late due to some very generous charity bundles put out by Itch.io over the past few years. They've so far included the Bundle f...

Around a month ago I played some Superhot and I'm continuing the trend of stylish parkour FPSes with minimalist aesthetics with the excellent Severed Steel . Beyond a few dialogue-free cutscenes, you're told very little about this cyberpunk world or your role in same as a one-armed woman left for dead by security forces, beyond that those same forces are now looking to destroy the rest of you a...

Last month I embarked on what might prove to be my final, merciful undoing: acquiring a full slate of Retro Achievements for Super Mario 64 , evidently designed by a team of contributors who know the game far better than I did or ever will. I've always held the N64 launch game in very high regard, of course, but it wasn't until I revisited it for the equally foolish undertaking that is 64 in 64...

Myst was an early PC gaming phenomenon I'll admit I completely missed out on; my priorities lied elsewhere in the mid-90s, being only yay high to a desktop tower back then. That first-person, mostly directionless format has certainly stood the test of time, seeing multiple remasters and imitations in the decades that followed, yet something about the leisurely pace, the hands-off approach to th...

This week I dug real deep and managed to find the one game from 2017 I haven't played yet . Mages of Mystralia starts as a by-the-books Zeldersatz but starts to emerge into something a little more interesting as it progresses. Created by Canadian studio Borealys Games , with financial assistance from a successful Kickstarter, Mages of Mystralia sees the young woman Zia suddenly burn down her co...

The GOAT(se) Hola muchachos and/or konnichiwa tomodachi to yet another blogging instance of me getting too deeply obsessed with a game's particulars and purging my own brain of the fine details so I can get some darn rest. This time our subject is the Ryu ga Gotoku Studio brawler-RPG Lost Judgment , the second of the spin-offs to retain the original Like a Dragon real-time combat system framed...

I realize everyone and their super hot moms have played Superhot or at least are aware of what it brings to the FPS table, but half the reason I do this feature is for an excuse to play the Indies I ought to have already played. In this case, I have tried Superhot before: according to my Steam achievements, I got about halfway through the story mode before bailing sometime in 2019 because even...

Ahhh, it's great to be back prowling the seedy streets of Sega CD City. Last one of these we did covered December 1992's octet of Sega CD games to finish off that year, and to get us caught up with where regular Mega Archive is presently on hold we're going to push through and examine all twelve Sega CD games that released in the first four months of 1993. The next Mega Archive CD will pop up s...

There are developers that stretch their wings and try a bunch of different projects, as if they feel too restless settling in one genre or franchise for too long. Then you have developers like Frictional Games , which make the same game over and over again but get really good at it. For as dismissive as I sound, I can't begrudge finding one's niche and continuing to grow and enhance it every wh...

Super Mario 64 is one of my favorite games. I've covered it on this site several times, including this stage-by-stage deep dive into its world design, a peek at its randomizer hack , and most recently as the vanguard of my ongoing, self-destructive 64 in 64 feature. It's a game into which I've poured countless hours, to an extent that I had allowed myself to believe I had some level of mastery...

There are some games where a bunch of flaws aren't enough to tarnish a shining core of imaginative storytelling and game design. I felt this way about Outer Wilds , and to a similar extent towards this week's game, Cradle , released all the way back in 2015 by the oddly-named Flying Cafe for Semianimals . In Cradle you wake up in a Mongolian yurt in the year 2076, having no memory of who you ar...

I forget the context, but I was asked fairly recently about XCOM -likes. That is to say, tactical RPGs that have a focus on cover and stealth and careful judgment as integral mechanics for survival, and a generally higher difficulty all-around so as to make those features more a logical inclusion (otherwise you could just "go loud" for every battle and neglect them). I've personally never been...

Something I planned to do in the new year once my Game Pass had expired was to revisit a bunch of games I'd previously disqualified for having specs too high for what was, and let's be kind here, a distressed piece of cardboard someone had drawn a crude facsimile of a laptop onto with that someone being me. The original Yooka-Laylee ran just fine on that laptop but its 2019 sequel not so much,...

It is a little surreal, looking at where the Mega Archive is presently at in Sega Genesis/Mega Drive history and realizing it was almost exactly thirty years ago to the day that many of these games debuted. Not to go on a spiel about walking three miles in the snow uphill both ways to get to school and back, possibly because my diplodocus was in the shop, but it does highlight how video games h...

The Epic Game Store had a characteristically generous giveaway period over the holidays and, wouldn't you know it, one of those games was a well-regarded explormer named F.I.S.T.: Forged in Shadow Torch . I'm glad I skipped the resolutions this New Year's, because I'm very much a creature of habit. Speaking of creatures, I'm not sure where this trend started of putting cute animal anthro charac...

We're all about our creature comforts on Indie Game of the Week, or mine specifically, but you know one video game genre I love that rarely gets a look-in at any level of game development? Photography. Photo modes in open-world games like Ghost of Tsushima certainly allow us to explore our inner-Annie Leibovitzes (Leibovitzii?) if we need a creative break from running around collecting map icon...

In some deep corner of my brain there's a wheel of fortune with four quadrants that starts spinning whenever I sit down to assess what to cover here next. On the four quadrants are written: RPG throwback, 3D platformer, explormer, and adventure game. I have a type, or four in this case, and suffice it to say this week I'm once again firmly inside my wheelhouse after booting up New Super Lucky's...

I spent the first fifteen minutes of Prodeus trying to figure out how to play as the penguin or TwinBee, but I think something got lost in translation somewhere. Prodeus is a traditional-style FPS (or "boomer shooter" in today's parlance) and follows a similar evolutionary path of the 2016 Doom reboot, attempting to find a way to modernize 1993 Doom and its ilk for today's audience with a certa...

This week we'll be covering Eastward , by Chinese developers Pixpil . Not to be confused with Eastwood— the arcade maze game based on the ornery actor's life that I kept getting lost in, even after going any which way I could—Eastward is a game that feels stylistically and narratively inspired by Mother 3 but mechanically inspired by the Legend of Zelda games which, honestly, is a promising com...

Yuuuup, talkin' 'bout Bugsnax this week. The sophomore release from Young Horses , they of Octodad fame, Bugsnax puts you in the... well, the Grumpuses don't really wear shoes, but you occupy the role of a journalist fond of cryptids that is encouraged by a prominent explorer, Lizbert Megafig, to visit her expedition on Snaktooth Island: home to a miraculous menagerie of half-bug, half-snack cr...

Game : Matthias Linda 's Chained Echoes . Release Month : December. Quick Look : N/A. Started : 30/01. Completed : ???. I wish I could say I saved this one for last because I had the highest hopes for it or was intending to end on a showstopper, but really it's because there was no way I was going to finish a decently-sized RPG and still have room for all of the other nineteen games on the GOTY...

Game : Hiding Spot Games 's Beacon Pines . Release Month : September. Quick Look : N/A. Started : 28/01. Completed : 29/01. There's much about 2022's video game bona fides I've yet to discover for myself—my parsimonious nature rarely lets me buy games new—but I think it's safe to say that as far as adventure games go it was an exceptional year, whether your poison is for traditional point-and-c...

Game : Tribute Games 's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge . Release Month : June. Quick Look : Here (Jan, Grubb, Lucy, Tamoor, Jason, Rorie). Started : 25/01. Completed : 28/01. As an '80s kid, I absolutely adored the TMNT arcade game developed by Konami , to the extent that I fell for the same trap many kids my age did by asking for the home video game that turned out not to be...

In my ongoing mission to exhaust Game Pass of all the explormer s it currently has available before I'm forced to pay for it like a sucker, we come to the last one I could find: Phigames 's Recompile from 2021. The game has you explore the dilapidated infrastructure of a long-dormant super AI as a sapient program introduced to the system with the ultimate goal of repairing as much of its progra...

Game : Geography of Robots 's Norco . Release Month : March. Quick Look : N/A. Started : 23/01. Completed : 25/01. Man, what is with 2022 and weirdass narratives? First Signalis and now this. Norco is a traditional point-and-click game with a vaguely '90s pixel aesthetic but when I say traditional the general game mechanics are really the only thing to which that term applies. Set in the titula...

Game : Poncle 's Vampire Survivors . Release Month : October. Quick Look : Here (Unfinished with Jeff Gerstmann, Jan, and Rorie). Started : 17/01. Completed (Sorta?) : 21/01. I realize I'm late to the Monster Mash here but Vampire Survivors was one of those games I was putting off initially in part because I'd already satiated myself on the mechanically identical Vtuber fangame HoloCure but als...

The Gunk ! I feel like the internet had a great ol' time with that name when this game was announced at a 2020 Xbox Showcase but then the game itself kinda came and went back in December 2021, late enough that it missed GOTY for most outlets. I didn't peer too closely at The Gunk at the time either because I'd already made up my mind that I was going to see it for myself—it was the newest game...

Game : Coin Crew Games 's Escape Academy . Release Month : July. Quick Look : Here (Jess / Grubb). Started : 15/01. Completed : 16/01. I love escape rooms. Not the real thing of course as that would involve talking to and being in close proximity to other human beings. No, I'm talking about escape rooms in its purest form: the video game escape room, where so many components—like running around...

Continuing to plumb Game Pass of all its treasures before my free trial wears out, I was pleasantly surprised to find the third and (so far) final game in Sigono 's Opus (or OPUS) series of adventure games with what I'd call some relatively casual gameplay affectations to break up the dialogue and worldbuilding. I have, of course, covered both the previous games in this series albeit in reverse...

Game : DrinkBox Studios 's Nobody Saves the World . Release Month : January. Quick Look : N/A. Started : 03/01. Completed : 10/01. Nobody Saves the World is the latest from Canadian studio DrinkBox, who seems to be one of those restless studios that always wants to try new things. While they have made a couple sequels— Guacamelee 2 and Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack —their more recent ga...

Hey Bombarinos. You know what I miss? Caring about the Giant Bomb Wiki. Used to be around this time I'd be filling out or adding every page I could in preparation for AGDQ—no longer a concern of ours, as Twitch now uses a different game database—but it's been a while since I rolled up my sleeves and got to the prickly business of adding release data, snapping a few photogenic screenshots, and m...

I think this is probably the furthest I've stretched the definition of "Indie"— Psychonauts 2 is a moderately-budgeted game helped into being by Xbox Game Studios , a decidedly un-Indie publisher—but darn it I've been looking for an excuse to play some more Psychonauts ever since I activated this Game Pass trial. Following from the 2005 PS2 platformer , and also the 2017 VR half-sequel I'm not...

Game : Jump Over the Age 's Citizen Sleeper . Release Month : May. Quick Look : N/A. Started : 02/01. Completed : 03/01. Citizen Sleeper was a really pleasant surprise. Prior to playing it, the only things I managed to pick up about it from general cultural osmosis beyond the themes was that it was one of those "hard decisions" type of adventure games, so beloved of Telltale and the like, of a...

Game : Siactro 's Super Kiwi 64 . Release Month : December. Quick Look : Here (Grubb / Jess). Started : 30/12. Completed : 30/12. I first encountered this Marcus "Siactro" Horn character just a few months back when I decided to cover three of his commercially-released games for Indie Game of the Week ( IGotW #284 ). His big thing, as far as I can tell, is recreating the late-'90s golden era of...

Game : FuturLab 's PowerWash Simulator . Release Month : May. Quick Look : Here (not a QL; rather, it's the six-person PowerWash UPF stream). Started : 26/12. Completed : 01/01. 2022's other big Improbable Job Simulator, after the aforereviewed Hardspace: Shipbreaker , was PowerWash Simulator: a game about making things very wet very fast (and yes, I did delete a blue joke about making things w...

Game : Berzerk Studio 's Infernax . Release Month : February. Quick Look : N/A. Started : 24/12. Completed : 25/12. To me, nothing is more Christmassy than Satanic cults and copious bloodshed. Infernax, a 8-bit throwback explormer that seeks to locate the exact mid-point between Castlevania II: Simon's Quest and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link , is here to deliver what that jolly dude in the fl...

Game : Half Mermaid 's Immortality . Release Month : August. Quick Look : N/A. Started : 22/12. Completed : 22/12. Well, I'm a little mentally disoriented and woozy from this winter malady I managed to pick up along with the last groceries of the year, so that seemed like the perfect opportunity to go deep into the archives of Sam Barlow and Half Mermaid's latest abstruse FMV mystery. Immortali...

Game : Blackbird Interactive 's Hardspace: Shipbreaker . Release Month : May. Quick Look : Here (Vinny / Rorie [Unfinished]). Started : 17/12. Completed : 31/12. The reason I've never taken to job simulation games—the Farming Simulator s and Truck Simulator s of the world—is because their overly quotidian nature lulls me into a stupor before I've even had the chance to boot one up and find out...

300 is a very special number to me chiefly because if you turn your head 90 degrees to the left it kinda looks like a butt that is pooping. Hence, this entry calls for some necessary pomp and circumstance. Since I don't have anything quite that auspicious sitting in my backlog library right now, though, I've opted instead for the excellent perspective-shifting, first-person, puzzle-platforming...

Game : Old Moon 's Ghost Song . Release Month : November. Quick Look : N/A. Started : 13/12. Completed : 15/12. Turns out this free Game Pass I lucked into has more than a few explormers available on it, so you better believe I'm going to get through as many as I can before Microsoft's generosity wears out and I have to go back to buying games like a sucker. Ghost Song is an atmospheric (way mo...

Game : Terrible Toybox 's Return to Monkey Island . Release Month : September. Quick Look : Here (Grubb / Jess). Started : 10/12. Completed : 12/12. When I talk about my formative games, they're often those that went out of their way to be more streamlined and accessible to someone who, like myself at that age, was just getting used to the idea of game mechanics and controls and needed somethin...

In all the excitement of Game of the Year season I forgot I still had a regular column to maintain. Make sure to keep your columns regular, everyone, especially with all that high-in-carbs Christmas food. Anyway, Record of Lodoss War is something I've bumped into a few times over the years: like the many novels of Ed Greenword or R. A. Salvatore set in the Forgotten Realms D&D campaign setting,...

Game : Splashteam 's Tinykin . Release Month : August. Quick Look : Here (Dan / Grubb). Started : 07/12. Completed : 08/12. It's remarkable that in the 21 years since Pikmin was released on GameCube, it has only ever seen a handful of imitators and has only been bettered just once (its immediate sequel, Pikmin 2 ). There are certainly games that existed prior and since that have you herding lar...

Game : Rose-engine 's Signalis . Release Month : October. Quick Look : Here (Jess / Grubb). Started : 05/12. Completed : 06/12. Signalis is the type of game where you just have to sit back in your chair with your head in your hands once it's through to take in everything you just witnessed. I have other nuggets of approbation for the game too, but the first and foremost is just that wave of sty...

Going to have to punt this one into 2023, along with Trails from Zero. A month is not gonna be enough. It's that dreaded time again: Game of the Year season has descended upon us like so many enormous prehistoric locusts (man, was Jurassic World: Dominion not a great movie) and we can do naught but cover our heads and run indoors until the swarm has safely passed. As Giant Bomb is gearing up fo...

Game : Finji 's Tunic . Release Month : March. Quick Look : Here (Jan / Bakalar). Started : 02/12. Completed : 04/12. Man, if you asked me before 2022 started which, between an Indie Zelda -like with a cute little fox guy protagonist or the one Souls game from that year, was going to give me the most trouble with its boss fights, I probably would've lost money on that bet. Or maybe not, since I...

It's going to get a bit mainstream for the next few entries of Indie Game of the Week, as I've availed myself of Microsoft's PC Game Pass (they apparently give it away with new PCs, who knew?) for the sake of some GOTY catch-up this month. That also means catching up with some of the bigger Indies of the past couple years, including Witch Beam 's well-regarded Unpacking from 2021. Described as...

Ahhh, nothing like that new computer smell. And there's nothing like knowing that you can now play the dozens of Indie games you picked up in bundles, on sale, or the weekly freebie from EGS or sometimes sites like GOG whenever sales hit that you put in a special folder called "pfft, maybe someday" because your potato PC practically mashed itself looking at their specs. Suffice it to say, the I...

Excellent tidings, y'all. If you've been following this feature for any of its nearly six years in service you're probably used to seeing me add figurative asterisks after every perceived technical issue, with the caveat that my system might be comparatively less able to perform the task at hand constructed as it is out of twigs, berries, and tree sap. No longer! Thanks to the Black Friday sale...

One major gap in my video gaming history, which becomes all the more apparent with each passing episode of Arcade Pit, are the Mega Man X series and the Zero es and ZX s beyond. I was a huge fan of the NES originals and the Mega Man Legends quasi-RPG dungeon-crawlers, yet I've never taken the plunge into the longest and certainly most lore-intensive of the many Mega Man spin-offs. My goal is to...

Well, we're back in explormer land, at least somewhat. Greak: Memories of Azur is an action-adventure game with some mild explormer backtracking elements where you control three characters—though it takes a while before you assemble the full party—with some standard combat encounters and puzzles to solve. The multiple protagonists are controlled The Lost Vikings style: rather than vanish from t...

Last week we covered Stranga 's Red Bow , and this week we're covering Fran Bow from Swedish team Killmonday Games . That's right, b-words: Welcome to Octo-Bow! Ocbowter? Bowtober? At any rate, while both games share a number of similarities—adventure games with horror vibes, polite pre-teen female protagonists, general thematic weirdness—I would say the atmosphere is several degrees more pertu...

Well, 'tis the season. Not that season, the better one. The spooky one. I didn't make any big plans for horror games this month by way of last year's Itchy, Tasty Spooktathlon but I did have a couple of items I wanted to check out for when it was thematically apropos to do so. The first of those is Red Bow , a short narrative-focused horror game from one-person dev team Stranga (if you automati...

A selection that shouldn't surprise anyone who reads these things with any regularity, this Indie Game of the Week will cover LabsWorks 's Astalon: Tears of the Earth from 2021, an 8-bit style explormer from the development lead that released the equally-gruelling 8-bit style explormer Castle in the Darkness (dude has a type). Three heroes approach an ominous tower in the middle of a desert det...

There's a lot of genres I'm into, but relatively few that I'll voraciously consume whenever they appear. With so many games coming out all the time it's hard to stay up to date with something as broad and popular as, say, RPGs or adventure games; however, those few very specific genres that I do fixate on tend to be released in what I would consider to be a moderate rate: Explormers , Soulslike...

Sometimes the issue with an extremely codified genre like the humble explormer is that developers get a little too focused in ticking boxes rather than trying to expand its boundaries to an extent that their game becomes not only a distinct entity but one that finds its own reason for being. It's both nerve-wracking and difficult to avoid the simpler path of creating some by-the-numbers affair,...

With some indie throwbacks, it's obvious the developers had one specific franchise - maybe even one specific game within that franchise - in mind when crafting their homage. With others, it feels like the finished product is a Frankenstein of bits and pieces from a dozen different playthroughs from the developers' past, and their goal isn't so much to resurrect a single game than a whole era fo...

The PC platform has had many advantages over its console brethren in times past, but none more so than providing the choice between standard controllers or a keyboard and mouse combination. Beyond that one expensive peripheral for Dreamcast or that expensive and ridiculous one for GameCube there's no real keyboard equivalent on consoles, which puts them behind the pack when it comes to the few...

Indie games have come to mean so many things to so many people. For some, they're tiny-sized, tiny-budget games that you play between the big ones as palate cleansers; for others, they're the vanguard of the industry's most imaginative thinkers, relegated to working in a smaller tier of development where risks and experiments are still allowed to occur; for others still, they're a veritable zom...

It's dawning on me that, for as expansive as my love of adventure games has become in the past decade, one of my favorite archetypes remains the detective format for the way the clue-finding and interrogation aspects of the job integrate so well into the pre-existing point-and-click template. Deductions require physical evidence and information to make, after all, and this genre can afford to p...

Mixing things up a little this week by extending this feature beyond a single title, instead looking at the three games from small Indie developer Siactro that are currently available to buy on Steam and Itch (I was fortunate enough to grab all three in the semi-recent Ukraine Aid Itch bundle). All retro throwbacks, though to the comparatively less-explored late-'90s/32-bit era, we have Macbat...

I've developed a strong aversion over the years to run-based games, or the Rogue-esques as I believe they're called, half because they're too inconsiderate of one's time due to the regular progression-wipes that is part and parcel of their genetic make-up, and half because any one person's proc-gen experience is far too subjective to be of much value in the context of a review. That isn't to sa...

I'm not going to hit you all again with my usual spiel about how Indie adventure games have been a powerful force for change in a genre that was mostly all text parsers and walls of verbs like "smell" and "put in butt" before the '00s, as it could practically be a copy/pasted disclaimer at this point with the amount of times I've wheeled it out, but I will add a corollary to my pitch that the I...

Way, way back in ancient times when the Earth was still new, also known as the 1980s, there were three major CRPG franchises duking it out for supremacy on any early IBM PC with the processors to handle them: Ultima , Wizardry , and Might and Magic . All have since met with ignominious ends: Ultima vanished into space along with Richard Garriott 's rocket (which, I should clarify, did not actua...

If you were to ask me most days what single video game genre I couldn't live without, I'd probably answer "RPGs." I might be cheating the spirit of the inquiry by referring to RPGs in a general sense - western, eastern, tactical, action - as that versatility and variety are often the genre's greatest strengths. Few genres have escaped a stringent degree of codification the way RPGs have, except...

2022 is shaping up to be an excellent year for fans of FromSoftware 's challenging Souls action-RPGs, debuting one of its most highly-rated (and oddly mainstream-revered) hits with Elden Ring . However, it might surprise you to learn that this so-called "Souls" "franchise" has been inspiring smaller developers since its inception in 2009, and we've seen regular installments from the Indie circu...

Welcome to another episode of "Mento took way too many notes when playing a game and just dumps the whole .txt file on Giant Bomb's readership to sort out," also known as (by no-one) the Mento Discovery Series. La-Mulana 2 is the Kickstarter-funded 2018 sequel to fan-favorite explormer and sado-masochism simulator La-Mulana and very much follows in its footsteps as a deliberately tough, mean-sp...

Spiritfarer made quite a splash (boat jokez) during Giant Bomb's own 2020 GOTY but at the time I was determined to learn as little as possible about it; by the end of 2020 I was familiar with Thunder Lotus Games 's other projects ( Jotun , which was IGotW #31 , and Sundered , which was IGotW #174 ), and was curious enough about an upcoming narrative-focused adventure about the afterlife, which...

I like to think I'm an open-minded individual (and yes, I know how many alarm bells it sets off when starting a review with a sentence like that). I've long tolerated this very site's insistence in shoe-horning wrestling into every conversation, despite actively wanting to escape from the planet every time it pops up. I guess it's not just so much that I'm not into the whole tights and fights b...

I've been looking for something to help me through the hot 'n' humid summer months and what better way to beat the heat than to stay indoors watching questionable anime and playing questionable games based on said anime? For a rundown of this little project, check out the first episode . The Property This is more the sort of thing I was hoping to discover: an overall so-so yet still somehow fas...

Well, I had a few ideas for this week's Indie Game of the Week that fell through due to seriously needing to upgrade my old PC of mine - Tales of the Neon Sea seemed like a pretty neat adventure game from what little I could play of it, if that helps anyone - so instead entry 276 is going to cover a free fangame about anime Vtubers. My, how far we've fallen. HoloCure: Save the Fans! is based on...

You know me, I love my explormer s. The ever-reliable joys of 2D platforming married to a compelling sense of exploration and discovery, where taking notes like a goober is actually encouraged rather than considered overkill. Yet, sometimes you can have too much of a good thing: I never thought I'd get tired of hunting collectibles in 3D platformers, for instance, but even I have to admit that...

One of the more wholesome trends in Indie gaming of late has been handing over the figurative Lakitu camera to those who don't often get to tell their stories in their own words, at least not in the video game medium. I've taken to calling these games "anthropology games" or "folklorist games" in the past: those that come from countries that don't have much of an extant game industry, and have...

The big Wheel of Wheelhouses rolls around again only to stop on another familiar genre around these parts, albeit one that is certainly less represented than others: the sexy cyberpunk thriller visual novel. I've only covered two others previously - VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action ( IGotW #6 ) and Synergia ( IGotW #215 ) - but ever since Snatcher (or possibly Neuromancer for C64) there...

I feel like I should enshrine somewhere the handful of traits I get excited by when perusing my Steam library of all the curious Indies I've picked up. I'm not sure how many times I've opened an entry of this feature by talking about adventure games that figured out whole new ways to tell a story, or how my nostalgic love of 2D explormer s and dungeon-crawlers continues to be reflected by small...

For May 2022's "May Madness" feature I'm just playing a bunch of Sega Mega Drive / Genesis RPGs that caught my eye after researching for the Mega Archive blog series. You can see how well I'm doing by visiting the first entry, here . Another odd pick for today, but such is the result of my weird areas of interest. Madou Monogatari I is a first-person dungeon-crawler from erstwhile shoot 'em up...

I occasionally use this self-inflicted weekly writing exercise as an excuse to find and chronicle a game that sits a little outside of my comfort zone, perhaps one that offers a distinct gameplay model or takes on an underutilized thematic genre. Conversely, I might spend a whole month playing ancient Mega Drive RPGs and want something that's absolutely inside my comfort zone that I can curl up...

For May 2022's "May Madness" feature I'm just playing a bunch of Sega Mega Drive / Genesis RPGs that caught my eye after researching for the Mega Archive blog series. You can see how well I'm doing by visiting the first entry, here . So far we've covered a couple of Zelda clones and a Falcom game, but what if we were to really break away from tradition and instead cover a Falcom clone? Enter To...

For May 2022's "May Madness" feature I'm just playing a bunch of Sega Mega Drive / Genesis RPGs that caught my eye after researching for the Mega Archive blog series. You can see how well I'm doing by visiting the first entry, here . Returning to our original theme of Sega Mega Drive RPGs that probably aren't RPGs, we're taking a lateral move to the system's CD peripheral, the Sega CD, to check...

Major Mento to Ground Control, reporting in that I'm playing another adventure game based on outer space shenanigans. Floating over here in a most peculiar way this week is Morningstar: Descent to Deadrock , a 2015 (practically vintage!) point-and-click Indie from studio Red Herring Labs and released on Steam and mobile devices (I'm playing it on the former). For the longest time, I had this an...

For May 2022's "May Madness" feature I'm just playing a bunch of Sega Mega Drive / Genesis RPGs that caught my eye after researching for the Mega Archive blog series. You can see how well I'm doing by visiting the first entry, here . I'm not sure I've made it clear with my history writing on this site that I have an equal affinity for both "Western-style" RPGs and "Eastern-style" RPGs: I assure...

It's been... probably over a month since my last explormer ? So that means we're well overdue another map-filler on IGotW, and here's SuperEpic: The Entertainment War to come along to help fill that important gap in our schedule like a figurative exit I missed three rooms ago. Oddly enough, SuperEpic's name is only the second-most obnoxious thing about it, but we'll get to that in due time. I'l...

For May 2022's "May Madness" feature I'm just playing a bunch of Sega Mega Drive / Genesis RPGs that caught my eye after researching for the Mega Archive blog series. You can see how well I'm doing by visiting the first entry, here . Welcome to episode two of Mega May Madness, where the stated intent was to look into the best RPGs the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis had to muster in order to prove, if...

If there's three sub-genres I tend to focus on a little too frequently in this feature, it's my beloved explormer s, Indie RPGs with a whole lot of curious streamlining, and adventure games that break away from the traditional point-and-click structure. Alt-Frequencies definitely belongs to the last group, developed and published by Accidental Queens who are perhaps best known for their " Lost...

It's fair to say I've had the ol' Sega Mega Drive on my mind the past few months between the temporary conclusion of the Mega Archive series and a recent playthrough of Jupiter's Picross S: Mega Drive & Master System Edition . To recap, I'm not someone who grew up with the system: I enjoyed it, usually vicariously, at a friend's house and even then it was usually a Sonic or perhaps a Golden Axe...

If I were to tell you that it was a highly (*moderately) sophisticated AI who had written all these Indie game reviews over the years, with what were deliberate typos and bad jokes, would you believe it? How could you prove otherwise? Nothing about my profile here suggests I'm a real person after all; my designated country of origin is the obviously made-up sounding "United Kingdom". Like, a un...

Greetings fellow collected underworld figures of the Mentojo Clan to another piece on Yakuza's many extra-curricular activities. As someone who plays far too much of every Yakuza entry that passes my desk, I find myself wanting to wax lyrical about all the side content in the game: mini-games, substories, bonus objectives, and other features that - due to their non-prominence in the game's stor...

Video games. They're pretty cool. One such device that played video games was called the Nintendo 64 and it existed at a magical time for pop culture called the late-'90s and early-'00s, where the songs topping the charts included insightful ballads about sticking with your crappy girlfriend for the sex and being a wild wild west man and movies had CGI special effects that were practically indi...

Occasionally, my hunt for anything designated an explormer (which are very few games, given I'm the only one that actually uses that term) leads me down some very curious roads. Those include edge cases like today's game, Songbird Symphony , which follows the cute birb, Birb, as he attempts to locate his true family after realizing he's in an Ugly Ducking sort of scenario with his adoptive peaf...

No-one's quite sure what ol' Jiminy-C was doing in that cave for the three days it took for him to resurrect, but I'd like to imagine he carved out a little "me time" away from his bro-sciples for some Nintendo 64 goodness. N64 Goodness would also be the name of this feature if it actually highlighted nothing but good times, but alas thanks to the random chooser process a double-bill of bangers...

I've been reviewing Indie RPGs for quite some time here on the ol' Iggo-Tweh (that's how you pronounce "IGotW," probably) and a trait native to the format that I keep circling back around to are the ways these games use brevity - often necessitated by the relatively truncated cycles common to Indie development - to its utmost potential, trimming the fat while leaving the core of the genre's app...

The Nintendo 64 holds a place of honor in video game history for being the first to confidently bring many favorite franchises into the 3D era, creating a string of first-party classics for Nintendo's third major console and cementing "64" as every '90s kid's favorite number until they turned a couple years older and added five to it, as has been our trashy gender's wont for many a generation....

Some days I feel like I'm the only human being on the planet without a smartphone. Never really had the need or inclination to get one. In spite of this, I'm now playing my fourth adventure game that primarily uses a smartphone and its various apps as a window into its world and the means to untangle the knotted web of mysteries that need solving. If I ever did pick up a smartphone I don't thin...

Time. Time is the fire in which we burn. When we think of time we think of old men in cloaks holding hourglasses, or Doc Brown's modified DeLorean, or a blue anime girl that says " Gwak! " a lot. Whatever the perception, I clearly don't think highly enough of time to not waste my weekends playing bad Nintendo 64 games and then reviewing them for their suitability for the Nintendo Switch Online...

One mistake I keep making with puzzle games is conflating the presentation with its challenge level. Specifically, the way most puzzle games endeavor to swaddle its audience of mostly casual players in a warm and welcoming atmosphere and simple, intuitive UIs built for devices of any size and power, and how that's never any indication as to how much hair-pulling may or may not be involved as it...

We have a Man-crazy episode for you all this week on 64 in 64 , highlighting the best and less-best of the Nintendo 64 library as it enters a new age of appreciation via Nintendo Switch Online and its pricy Expansion Pack tier. Dropping a monthly sub on anything requires some proof of value, so I'm doing ol' Ninty-Tendy a favor by evaluating all the games that defined their divisive fogbox to n...

Prepare all your best Xbox Series X hardware jokes because we're gonna get vaporous this week. Vaporum: Lockdown is a sequel (or prequel, or interquel, or something) of 2017's Vaporum by Slovakian studio Fatbot Games , which I covered a couple of years back ( IGotW #155 ). A steampunk-themed, first-person, single-character dungeon-crawler with real-time combat and movement and an emphasis on us...

Spring is finally here and what better way to celebrate the season's promise of renewal and brighter days than spending hours cooped up in one's room playing twenty-year-old also-rans? That's just one aspect of what we do here on 64 in 64 , an episodic exploration of the library of the Nintendo 64 , but one that's particularly relevant today with its two clunkers. After all, if I don't evaluate...

I'd like to think I'm a video game polymath here at the Indie Game of the Week Institute for Weekly Indie Game Examinations but truth be told I have my handful of pet genres and the Indie industry, dutifully, never seems to stop working within them. This week the not-so-dubious-wheel has moved back around to "'90s humorous point-and-click adventure game" and, with it, Kelvin and the Infamous Ma...

Let's blow on some cartridges and hunt around for rumble paks as we once again revisit the Nintendo 64 and its library via what is probably one of the least flattering methods imaginable. As always with this feature we're giving these old games another spin to see if they're ready for Prime Time, which in this case means inclusion on the Nintendo Switch Online service and its special N64-enrich...

Somehow, either through good fortune or sheer coincidence, I ended up playing two games this week with a considerable amount of overlap. One is Respawn 's Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and the other is this week's Indie Game of the Week, Death's Door : both games feature a certain breezier variant of Souls combat where cautious strikes and situational awareness are key factors while also being o...

We return once again with 64 in 64's newer, slimmer form as we take on the best and more frequently worst the Nintendo 64 has to offer. Our goal, as always, is to critique these games in a modern context to see if they're something that should be added to the Nintendo Switch Online service, which is presently stuffing its premium subscription tier with whatever N64 games it can find at a glacia...

8-bit homages are nothing new, but what's perhaps a little less common than the NES throwbacks are those referencing 8-bit home computers that were a much bigger deal in Europe and in particular the Sinclair ZX Spectrum , perhaps due to its instantly recognizable neon-on-black color scheme. The brass ring of this particular sphere of nostalgia-mining would be Terry Cavanaugh's 2011 game VVVVVV...

Man, not to beat too often on the same drum here, but 2017 really was a trove of underappreciated delights. I obviously picked up on that message last year when I somehow completed forty-four games released in 2017 I'd never played before but that it still remains applicable months into 2022 just emphasizes it further. With the exception of a few minor technical bugs, I really enjoyed Paradigm...

Hey folks. I have a nasty habit of getting really invested in open-world games that offer many different gameplay modes and activities to potter around with, chiefly those of a more simulation-heavy bent like farming and construction sims. I'm talking games like Terraria where you can spend whole weeks building your own village of NPCs or Stardew Valley where you can get wrapped up in gathering...

Welcome to episode three of this scattershot examination of the Nintendo 64 , a console that has seen renewed nostalgic interest after its recent incorporation into Nintendo's Switch Online subscription service. As someone whose writerly pursuits err more towards the overly dramatic than the drily informative, I've decided my own exploration of Nintendo's foggiest system should have as much sel...

All right, we had a fun break talking about games that weren't released in 2017 - a whole week's break, even - so here we are back in the Golden Year for a game that probably wouldn't qualify as "Indie" by most metrics, Nippon Ichi Software 's A Rose in the Twilight . Most folks know NIS either from their many Disgaea strategy RPGs, or perhaps run-based RPGs like Z.H.P. Unlosing Ranger VS Darkd...

No, you didn't imagine it last week. I'm doing a weekly feature on the Nintendo 64 wherein I play a few games for just over an hour and journal my progress, or lack thereof, for the sake of determining whether it's something Nintendo should consider adding to their Switch Online library of retro titles. Last week was a struggle due to the randomly chosen selections and this one even more so. Th...

I'm through cannabalizing my leftover Dredge of Seventeen content for the time being, as I figured continuing to extend a 2021 feature into this year via Indie Game of the Week was getting a little rote and lazy. With that in mind, this week's game is one of the visual novels I didn't get to play for last year's VN-ese Waltz feature instead. I'll be the first to admit that a yuri romance VN isn...

I'm bringing back one of my older features because Ys IX: Monstrum Nox was robbed at GOTY consarnit deserves a closer look (hear?) at its exceptional soundtrack: a trademark of the Ys franchise and Falcom as a whole. Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana 's was slightly stronger overall, for the record, but coming out the same year as NieR: Automata , Persona 5 , Breath of the Wild , Yakuza 0 , Xenoblade...

This week's Indie Game (of the week) is yet another in this mini-series of "2017 games I didn't quite fit into last year's 2017 feature because I have poor time management skills," or "the leftovers" for short. It's also another Indie game where the "Indie" qualifier is disputed: Square Enix actually helped publish the game, providing yet another stark reminder if one was needed that we sorely...

I happened to catch a developer interview talking about this week's game, the run-based explormer A Robot Named Fight! and another 2017 game that didn't quite make last year's Dredge of Seventeen feature , and the developer highlighted Super Metroid and The Binding of Isaac as particular influences. That saves me from having to get too deep into how this game is the exact median point between t...

Game : Hyper Three Studio 's Tiny Lands . Release Month : January. Quick Look : None, but it was on an episode of UPF (Brad's pick, @ 1:27:00). Started : 24/01. Completed : 24/01. Something the "casual" gaming arena excels at is finding new twists on old classics. To some extent that's true of most Indie gaming, but specifically I'm talking about revitalizing pen-and-pencil puzzle formats that...

Game : Noio 's Cloud Gardens . Release Month : September. Quick Look : N/A. Started : 20/01. Completed : N/A. Moving right along, our next game for this (last) year's GOTY feature is Cloud Gardens: a "Zen" botanical puzzle game that came out of early access on Steam in September 2021. The goal of Cloud Gardens is to take in a diorama of our hubris at work - that is to say, a post-apocalyptic sc...

By a total coincidence, this week's game is another published by Toge Productions - a studio putting out the best the Indonesian Indie scene has to offer, including last week's MagiCat - and like many of the games covered in my concurrent January series, Go! Go! GOTY! , has something of an environmentalist theme. She and the Light Bearer is a fairytale adventure game about a firefly attempting...

Game : Humble Grove's No Longer Home . Release Month : July. Quick Look : N/A. Started : 19/01. Completed : 19/01. Becoming an adult is one of those difficult things that's foisted upon us all by the irritating phenomenon known as the inexorable march of time. I've played more than a few games about this process, with its young authors and designers naturally drawing from their own experiences...

Game : Toby Fox 's Deltarune (Chapter 2) Release Month : September. Quick Look : N/A. Started : 17/01. Completed : 18/01. Next on my list of Free Shit I Picked Up During 2021 we have the second chapter of Toby Fox's Undertale successor Deltarune, which quietly dropped sometime last September. With this chapter, the second of what looks to be seven, the structure and long-term goals of Deltarune...

Game : Four Quarters 's Loop Hero . Release Month : March. Quick Look : Here (Brad/Jan). Started : 10/01. Completed : ?/01. I've been on the outs with run-based games, otherwise known as roguelike s or roguelites, for some time now so I initially wasn't going to give Loop Hero a look in. However, since the Epic Game Store was generous enough to include the game as one of its recent giveaways, I...

The Dredge of Seventeen - my 2017-focused blog project for the previous year - is now done and dusted and mostly unread, and yet I find myself with a hard-drive full of smaller 2017 games that I couldn't quite get around to in time. That's going to be a mini-theme of sorts for the Indie Game of the Week for the foreseeable future; I'm almost hoping I don't find anything worthwhile since that'll...

Game : mrkdji's StarBoy . Release Month : May. Quick Look : N/A. Started : 09/01. Completed : 09/01. Whether it's due to game jam s or the developer having their attention split five different directions at any given moment, there's a huge number of tiny Indie projects out there that seem to be inspired by one great idea taken as far as it alone can go, like a "wouldn't it be cool if" notion cr...

Game : TrampolineTales's Luck Be a Landlord . Release Month : January. Quick Look : N/A. Started : 07/01. Completed : 07/01. And now, almost immediately, this (*last) year's Go! Go! GOTY! moves into the tiny, weird, obscure, Indie stage of its catch-up gaming mission. I'll be frank: ever since my backlog blossomed from a manageable pile to the continents-wide landfill Earth had become in WALL-E...

Welcome to Indie Game of the Week: 2022 Edition! January's going to be a busy month with all this GOTY business afoot so I've decided to start with something slow and gentle to ease us into the new year. I discovered Sigono's Opus franchise last September with the second game, Rocket of Whispers , and was charmed by its unusual but accessible gameplay mechanics focused around an emotional core...

Game : Adglobe and Live Wire 's Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights . Release Month : January. Quick Look : N/A. Started : 01/01. Completed : 06/01. Well, here we are, fashionably late, looking to review a whole stack of 2021 games in January 2022. I would've put this together in December but I was looking to finish up a couple of series ( VN-ese Waltz and The Dredge of Seventeen , check 'em o...

When it comes to game releases every year has its big headliners and hidden gems, but none were more packed than 2017. As my backlog-related project for this year I'm looking to build a list of a hundred great games that debuted at some point in 2017, making sure to hit all the important stops along the way. For more information and statistics on this project, be sure to check out this Intro bl...

Decided to spend the second half of 2021 checking out some renowned visual novels . Sometimes my ideas aren't any more elaborate than that. I've tried to discuss the following games in as spoiler-free a manner as possible, with a very spoilerish section at the end for my final thoughts on where the story goes. Yeah, I dunno what to tell you, but this is the third month in a row where I selected...

What better way to finish off a year of Indie game reviews, and especially this year in particular, than with something as relaxed and breezy as a slice-of-life-sim? My Time at Portia , originally released in 2019 by Chinese studio Pathea Games , takes the type of formula most recently championed by Stardew Valley (but has been around much longer) in that you operate your own business in a peac...

I thought about it, and I decided we needed one more explormer this year for Indie Game of the Week's penultimate 2021 entry. It's definitely been their year - Metroid Dread , Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Nights , Unsighted , F.I.S.T.: Forged in Shadow Torch , Grime , Astalon: Tears of the Earth , etc. - though I won't be discovering any of those until next year and beyond. This week's map-base...

When it comes to game releases every year has its big headliners and hidden gems, but none were more packed than 2017. As my backlog-related project for this year I'm looking to build a list of a hundred great games that debuted at some point in 2017, making sure to hit all the important stops along the way. For more information and statistics on this project, be sure to check out this Intro bl...

One of the mini-arcs I've had going on during the Indie Game of the Week's tenure is getting over my general aversion towards scrappy RPG Maker projects, especially those of a freeware nature and/or visually rough presentation. It's not so much that I'm putting on airs with regards to the high standards a game needs to pass before I deign to bless it with my insightful drivel, but rather that t...

Decided to spend the second half of 2021 checking out some renowned visual novels . Sometimes my ideas aren't any more elaborate than that. I've tried to discuss the following games in as spoiler-free a manner as possible, with a very spoilerish section at the end for my final thoughts on where the story goes. Welcome once again to the land of visual novels, where extreme violence and flagrant...

At the risk of losing what little credibility I have as a reviewer, I'm partial to the occasional food analogy to describe particular roles that the wide range of Indie games might have in my video gaming diet. Many are like Lunchables: miniature approximations of much larger meals that are sufficiently moreish despite their relative smallness and/or cheapness. Others are like sushi: delectable...

I realize I'm about two explormer reviews away from an intervention at this point, but nevertheless the Indie Game of the Week franchise finds itself with another exploratory action-platformer dealie on the docket, this time courtesy of Swedish studio Decemberborn Interactive. Cathedral 's a throwback that wears its inspirations on its sleeve - Shovel Knight , if the screenshots weren't enough...

The greatest strength of the Indie RPG, I've often believed, is in how it is able to truncate what is normally a 50-plus hour experience into something less than half that - usually out of necessity, due to the limited resources available to them and the importance of turnaround to a smaller studio - and still retain the core strengths; the elements that, for me at least, make the RPG genre so...

In a bid to finally join everyone in the present, I've finally embarked on my first playthrough of a 2021 game . Yaaay! Scarlet Nexus is the other big RPG to launch from Bandai Namco this year, some months before the seventeenth entry in their long running Tales franchise Tales of Arise (that's a "stay tuned"), and it immediately creates a strong impression with its psychokinetic action and unc...

After a few unsuccessful attempts to get a few other Indies running on this potato - I really need to upgrade soon; it's a thing when I can't even get pixel platformers to run at an acceptable framerate - I fall back to my usual lo-fi option: a picross game. Kinda hard to make a picross game that doesn't run on everything, unless it's 3D or something. Pixross was released in 2020 by Kenney, a D...

I've been knee-deep in horror games from 2017 for this month's Dredge of Seventeen entry, but one more couldn't hurt (my cardiologist might have a different take though). Creepy Tale reminds me of the Frog Detective games: not in the sense that they share an aesthetic or a sense of humor, but in how they seem to be propagating fairly quickly by being relatively brisk in size and reusing some of...

Decided to spend the second half of 2021 checking out some renowned visual novels . Sometimes my ideas aren't any more elaborate than that. I've tried to discuss the following games in as spoiler-free a manner as possible, with a very spoilerish section at the end for my final thoughts on where the story goes. Well, it's Halloween-adjacent, so I figured I should play the spookiest visual novel...

Looking back over 2021's many Indie Game of the Week entries I realize I've developed a bit of an explormer addiction over these months in quarantine, so what better way to rehabilitate myself than by playing eighteen of them at once, smoking the entire carton as it were? That's the insane deal you'll receive when you purchase Robot Wants It All , a compilation of all the Flash/browser-based ex...

It's Halloween month, which means it's time to revisit the moody puzzle-adventure series Forever Lost for one last spin around the perplexing, multi-symbolled block. I first tried this series back in August of last year with IGotW #183 after picking up the whole trilogy of episodes in that big Summer Itch.io charity bundle , moving onto the second episode in that same year's Halloween-themed fe...

So... I've been watching a lot of Hololive (a VTuber talent agency of sorts) clips of late and recently they've all been playing a lot of Minecraft after the servers for the Japanese and English-speaking members were combined. It's been cute seeing both sides struggle with the language barrier when encountering each other, but more than that I've been impressed by all the elaborate construction...

Sometimes you see free games while browsing Steam or GOG and your curiosity is every bit as piqued as your sense of parsimony. Symphonia , especially, intrigued me by its screenshots: this was an Indie platformer with a strikingly vivid artstyle of flowing contours and detailed backdrops, with an elaborate orchestral score; visually and aurally it's easily the match of a professional video game...

When it comes to game releases every year has its big headliners and hidden gems, but none were more packed than 2017. As my backlog-related project for this year I'm looking to build a list of a hundred great games that debuted at some point in 2017, making sure to hit all the important stops along the way. For more information and statistics on this project, be sure to check out this Intro bl...

Seeing the discourse around the recently released Axiom Verge 2 - surprise, surprise, I'm fascinated by yet another Indie explormer - reminded me of a Quick Look for a different Indie game with an interesting approach to subtly changing the game world by essentially hacking into its base code, from changing an enemy's health value to its core abilities and behavior. The Magic Circle , released...

Decided to spend the second half of 2021 checking out some renowned visual novels . Sometimes my ideas aren't any more elaborate than that. I've tried to discuss the following games in as spoiler-free a manner as possible, with a very spoilerish section at the end for my final thoughts on where the story goes. In retrospect, I've been pretty lucky with all the visual novels I've played so far,...

It's been almost two weeks since the last one, so here's another explormer review for you to closely examine top to bottom for secrets. (Here's one: I probably play too many of these games .) This time around we're taking a look at Batbarian: Testament of the Primordials from last year (2020), which is already scoring points for its pointlessly elaborate subtitle. It's also a rare explormer/RPG...

I know people said the Switch and its JoyCons looked like a puppy's face, but look at this little one-eyed stinker. As many of you are no doubt aware, Nintendo recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Nintendo GameCube by continuing to not acknowledge it much at all regarding rereleases and the like, and this period of retrospection has me considering its legacy and place in the Nintendo...

On the colonial planet of Novo Solo and its chief city-state Solo Nobre, the citizens have endured several years of rule under a statesman known only as the Great Leader. After emancipating the colony from its corporate overlords, the Solo Nobre Concern (or SNC), the Great Leader enacted numerous isolationist policies and worked on improving the general quality of life of the occupants of Solo...

Look. I know. I know I play a lot of these explormers . I know I have to keep linking the word explormer to the metroidvania page because no-one would know what I'm talking about otherwise. It's become a well practiced routine here in Indie Game of the Week Central. And yet, I couldn't help but find myself with a huge stack of these map-traversal types and I'm never not in the mood to play one....

I'm experimenting with the Mega Archive format, so this isn't necessarily a return to regularly scheduled Mega Drive/Genesis rundowns quite yet. Previous entries included these huge blocks of data that largely repeated information already available on the wiki pages they linked to, so I've truncated the format to just include observations about each game and a few technical notes about their wi...

Occasionally, I'll find pre-pandemic video games (and other popular culture) that so perfectly encapsulates our current era that I wonder if the creators retroactively feel a little weird about it. Opus: Rocket of Whispers follows Sigono 's previous work, Opus: The Day We Found Earth , in a thematic sense if not necessarily directly: with The Day We Found Earth, it was about rediscovering the c...

When it comes to game releases every year has its big headliners and hidden gems, but none were more packed than 2017. As my backlog-related project for this year I'm looking to build a list of a hundred great games that debuted at some point in 2017, making sure to hit all the important stops along the way. For more information and statistics on this project, be sure to check out this Intro bl...

Long-time followers of this little column of mine (phrasing) might know that I've trying to break into the Indie RPG scene a little more. RPGs remain my overall favorite genre, though I recognize that they're also massive timesinks - I am still chipping away at Underrail , a game started in late July (and reviewed as IGotW #229 ) - so I'm trying to be judicious. With that in mind, what I've com...

Decided to spend the second half of 2021 checking out some renowned visual novels . Sometimes my ideas aren't any more elaborate than that. I've tried to discuss the following games in as spoiler-free a manner as possible, with a very spoilerish section at the end for my final thoughts on where the story goes. This month's barely-interactive fiction is Raging Loop , a horror-themed survival sto...

That's right, I played that Cursed GeoCities game finally. Tendershoot's Hypnospace Outlaw is a game set at the end of the last millennium on an internet browser that operates while the user is asleep via a special headset. The player is a community member that has recently volunteered to be an Enforcer - a moderator that essentially performs hard graft for free, but what else is new - whose ta...

Total randomizer pick, this time selected from the other gigantic Itch.io bundle to come out recently (the Palestinian Aid one). Those two bundles are going to keep this feature well supplied for another year at least. Another Perspective is also another deeply nostalgic pick: not in the usual Indie sense that we're hearkening back to our misspent youths playing 2D platformers on 8-bit/16-bit s...

I'm not sure if it's a coincidence or it's just become my thing now, but I've been "enjoying" a lot of tough RPGs so far this year. Not just tough in the sense that the difficulty curve is a little more K2 than usual, but tough in how there are mechanical or narrative reasons to encourage you to go as hard as you can for the best rewards. I started the year with a little game called Operencia:...

Welcome back to Indie Game of the Week, Giant Bomb's longest running ongoing feature (that's wild, huh? Not that it's an official one or anything). I don't talk about my process in selecting new games here too often, but I'm sure I bring up my inadequate PC every chance I get: I actually had to dismiss several games this week simply because they're not optimized for a slightly(!) out-of-date PC...

When it comes to game releases every year has its big headliners and hidden gems, but none were more packed than 2017. As my backlog-related project for this year I'm looking to build a list of a hundred great games that debuted at some point in 2017, making sure to hit all the important stops along the way. For more information and statistics on this project, be sure to check out this Intro bl...

I'm not sure what it is about the grim dystopias and bright neon lights of cyberpunk fiction, since I'm certainly not computer literate enough to follow half of the hacking nonsense that accompanies the genre, but I find myself drawn to that aesthetic again and again. Clearly I'm not the only one who feels this way, if there's a robust industry of narratives - video game and otherwise - spun wi...

It's never too late for a mid-year check-in, that's what I always say. Though maybe in this case, it's a year which we don't so much check in but never check out, Hotel California style, since we're still all stuck indoors twiddling our thumbs while watching all the morally vacuous and scientifically disinclined people gallivant outside as they dance and sing and spit into each other's maskless...

Stop me if you've heard this one: after some unnamed cataclysmic event renders the surface unliveable, the survivors go underground to form subterranean societies built out of the bones of old world infrastructure like metro stations, tunnels, and bunkers. Then again Stygian Software 's UnderRail isn't all that focused on an original premise; rather, the game operates as an homage to bleak, cla...

Decided to spend the second half of 2021 checking out some renowned visual novels . Sometimes my ideas aren't any more elaborate than that. I've tried to discuss the following games in as spoiler-free a manner as possible, with a very spoilerish section at the end for my final thoughts on where the story goes. I'm just glad I picked a cheerful game for this inaugural entry. The House in Fata Mo...

I'm not sure I'm in any mood to argue whether or not Jupiter Corporation - which enjoys a close relationship with Nintendo , but is presently not owned by them as far as I am aware - counts as an Indie studio, as this insouciance is largely inspired by all this sweltering weather. Of course, being stuck in a high-humidity soup for a month straight is a far sight from the tragic floods of German...

I realize I'm playing a lot of explormers lately, even for me, but I think whomever suggested that present Indie developers are smitten with the format might've had a point. There's just more and more coming out every year than ever before; maybe the Unity developers recently came up with some effective map tech and everyone saw that as an opportunity to get their Metroid on. Whatever reasons o...

When it comes to game releases every year has its big headliners and hidden gems, but none were more packed than 2017. As my backlog-related project for this year I'm looking to build a list of a hundred great games that debuted at some point in 2017, making sure to hit all the important stops along the way. For more information and statistics on this project, be sure to check out this Intro bl...

I've used this organ of mine (I mean... the blog, this one) many times to talk about how adventure gaming has blossomed into this many branched thing thanks to the inventive storytellers in the Indie development tier, embracing many new and different approaches to designing a narrative-heavy game. Even with this veritable smorgasbord, I always find myself most drawn to the point and click genre...

There aren't a whole lot of games about Catholicism. It's not like you see Super Mariology or World of Warcraft: Catechism lining the shelves, and what few religious games there are tend to be the soft, no-fun Protestant kind where Jesus gracefully carries you over all the obstacles if you fail a level too many times (in case you were wondering why there was only one pair of footprints leading...

Clam Man is an adventure game created by Team Clam so even though it's available on Steam, it's still not "by Valve." If you thought that joke was bad, not to worry because most of the ones in Clam Man are much better. Nominally a graphic " point and click " adventure game Clam Man is relatively light on the genre's usual inventory puzzles - it has a handful later on, and a single incongruous l...

OK, look, I know it's yet another explormer (the fifth for IGotW this year, I believe?) but I have a couple of good reasons for this one's inclusion: the first is that Ori and the Will of the Wisps is the highest-profile game in this genre since 2019's Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night and worthy of a review by any standard, and the second is that I'm starting to feel like my explormer bona fid...

Man, what a busy month May was. Well, maybe not for most, since we're all still cooped up evading deadly pathogens as best we can for a little while longer yet, but certainly for my playing and blogging habits. A whole dumb feature on old-ass RPGs will do that to you. So for this week's Indie Game of the Week, I plucked a little puzzle game from my backlog that projects a superb (if a little on...

When it comes to game releases every year has its big headliners and hidden gems, but none were more packed than 2017. As my backlog-related project for this year I'm looking to build a list of a hundred great games that debuted at some point in 2017, making sure to hit all the important stops along the way. For more information and statistics on this project, be sure to check out this Intro bl...

I'm starting to suspect "HowLongToBeat" isn't always the most accurate source for average run-times. To wit, they suggested Atelier Rorona is somewhere in the region of a 30 hour runtime but I predict I'll need thrice that before I'm done. Of course, I am trying to utilize every day to its fullest - carpe diem, and whatnot - so maybe that's dragging the playthrough a little. At any rate, I've d...

For what felt like years I kept spotting The Way while browsing the Switch eShop sales and thinking of that stupid Knuckles meme, but the moment I decided to take a closer look it resembled something I thought I might find compelling: an Indie throwback to the Delphine adventure games of the early '90s, in particular Another World and Flashback . In fact, it has elements of both: Another World'...

Not to be confused with Atelier Rororie, which is about using social media accounts to create gold. I changed tracks on May Millennials just a tad, with my previous Eurojank CRPG plans falling through for one reason or another - Gothic 3 sounded like it would take over 100 hours, which I don't have to spare in what remains of May, and I got a few minutes into Drakensang before realizing it wasn...

The benefit of choosing a breezy action game like Painkiller for this feature is that it wasn't going to take a whole week to see everything I wanted to see. I completed the main story mode, defeating Lucifer in a very symbolic version of Hell, only to be greeted with the sucky "if you played on the hardest mode like a champ you'd get something better" downer ending. I've no real compulsion to...

I'm beginning to sound like a broken record I realize, but Indie explormers will always be a fascinating cottage industry as well as a game type that I'll never grow bored of playing. It's why I've probably dedicated about 25% of this feature's oeuvre, if not more, to this once-obscure format for 2D platformers looking to emphasize non-linear and more immersive world design. True to its more co...

It occurred to me last week while playing Enclave , which was a sort of action-RPG that was structured more like a shooter, that I could just play a shooter from the same era and see what a direct comparison is like. Turns out I've been sitting on 2004's Painkiller: Black Edition for quite some time and this seemed the perfect opportunity to pull it out of the Purgatory that is my Steam backlog...

I wasn't able to fully come to terms with Enclave 's issues - primarily how much combat is a crapshoot, given its weird ideas about what attacks should hit and which should not - but I still think on the whole that it was a bold attempt at an action-RPG during a time where there very few games like it coming out. When we think "action-RPG" we (depending on how far afield you want to go) tend to...

(Disclaimer: The Steam version of this game was gifted to me by fellow GB user @aloyalroyal . Thanks again!) A common thread connecting all good science fiction is that they have a kernel of truth about the present, if not based on any current events in particular than at least capturing the pulse of everyone's anxieties or hopes about where the future might be heading. Neo Cab is all about bei...

Enclave 's been another unexpected treat this month, though it's not without its faults. A third-person action-adventure game - that sort of is and isn't an RPG - Enclave was a 2002 release for a fledgling Starbreeze Studios, their second game after the sci-fi RTS The Outforce . Starbreeze is better known these days for the Riddick games, the first The Darkness , the Syndicate reboot that Jeff...

Man, it's going to be hard to put Tales of Graces F down for a spell while I move to other May Millennial games this month. Not only am I invested in the gameplay and story (which isn't too bad, if still a little generic) but the skill-based combat means I'm a little concerned that my ability to play the game will atrophy after too much time away. Fortunately, the other three games I've picked...

A bit of a somber time around these parts of late, and so what better fit for this week's Indie Game than a contemplative first-person puzzle game with its own ruminations on the meaning of life and the future? Before we start, I actually want to shout out a Giant Bomb buddy of mine, @omghisam , who actually gifted me the PC version of The Witness some five years back around the time when it fi...

This week's blast from the pastels. Yes, I'm back on my regressive May bullshit once again for another year. I have another four RPGs lined up for this year's May Millennials feature, though for the first time I'm also incorporating console games available on the PlayStation 3 : after all, even if its online store was granted a stay of execution, there's no telling how long it has left or how l...

Many years ago I played a little game called Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King for the Nintendo Wii. Like many WiiWare games, it was short and experimental and a little rudimentary, but the notion behind its structure proved unexpectedly compelling. As the sovereign of a small country beset by supernatural enemies, your tasks were split between developing your kingdom and prod...

When it comes to game releases every year has its big headliners and hidden gems, but none were more packed than 2017. As my backlog-related project for this year I'm looking to build a list of a hundred great games that debuted at some point in 2017, making sure to hit all the important stops along the way. For more information and statistics on this project, be sure to check out this Intro bl...

It's a day of the week that has a Y in it, which means it's time for another explormer for the Indie Game of the Week. This week's big map to navigate is Aggelos , a retro-styled throwback that - like a few others - doesn't so much follow the blueprint of any one game but combines a few together to create something paradoxically familiar but distinct. In this case, Aggelos looks to combine the...

Hey there, all you Kamurochochachos, to another redundant edition of "Why the Yakuza games are good, actually." I've poked around this thorny and divisive issue a number of times previously, as I've been slowly catching up to Sega and Ryu ga Gotoku Studio 's expansive open-world brawlers for the best part of a decade now: you can see previous efforts to delineate what makes these games so compe...

I've been making a conscious effort not only to play more visual novel s but to understand precisely what their definitional parameters are and whether a game can still qualify as a "true" visual novel even with a few interactive indulgences. Dating sims and traditional Japanese adventure games, for instance, have certain aesthetic similarities but are generally treated as their own separate en...

I created the last "A Minor Primer" because I wanted to elaborate on something I'd bumped into a few times while playing Japanese games and researching them for various Wiki Projects - specifically in that case the origins and evolutionary path of Japanese adventure games , and the way they've since branched out into mostly-passive visual novels and routine-micromanaging dating sims - and it wa...

Ah, throwback platformers, where would this feature be without you? We're jetting to Central America for this week's game, Sydney Hunter and the Curse of the Mayan , an 8-bit styled stage-based platformer with some mild explormer elements by way of upgrades and the occasional backtracking for collectibles. It seems CollectorVision started the Sydney Hunter franchise - each focusing on an Indian...

So long, PS3 PSN. You were like a candle in the wind: unreliable. Like many of you, I was disheartened to hear that Sony was closing the digital storefronts for the PlayStation 3 , PlayStation Portable , and PlayStation Vita . My chief source of distress is that it's yet another example of Sony disregarding its own history and defying long-standing game preservation efforts by making it harder...

I'm not sure what this says about my psychology, but whenever I complete a gigantic game that's taken my focus for several weeks if not months I always come away from it feeling this acute sense of withdrawal that momentarily prevents me from starting something new. Like a certain inertia to embarking on a similarly long journey after a small period of enervation from concluding the previous. T...

When it comes to game releases every year has its big headliners and hidden gems, but none were more packed than 2017. As my backlog-related project for this year I'm looking to build a list of a hundred great games that debuted at some point in 2017, making sure to hit all the important stops along the way. For more information and statistics on this project, be sure to check out this Intro bl...

Any good detective fiction should keep the audience guessing, placing the protagonist's power of deduction slightly ahead of everyone else's and allowing them to freely dispense the shocks and twists in the denouement of the adventure. However, with video games and the player's heightened role in same it's hard to pull that off: after all, if we're controlling the detective hero in question, sh...

I'm not sure if it's encroaching burnout or the ongoing national mood or what, but there's been some perfectly genial Indie games of the past few months that immediately started rubbing me the wrong way because of one asinine design quirk or another. Coldwood's first Unravel game, which stretches the definition of Indie given EA's involvement, is a 2D puzzle-platformer that revolves around its...

If I have to give props to Mobius's Outer Wilds for one thing in particular, it's for its atmosphere. Perhaps an ironic statement, given most of the game is set in a vacuum, but Outer Wilds fills each of its locations with so much personality and backstory that you really get a sense of each one's particular pitfalls and quirks after a few visits. In fact, the game handles atmosphere and tone s...

I suppose the theme of this edition of Indie Game of the Week is déjà vu. Not just in the sense that Mobius Digital 's award-winning, space-faring adventure game Outer Wilds operates on a repeating time loop Majora's Mask style, but that I originally covered it as part of a series of GOTY contenders towards the end of 2019 whereupon I crashed and burned spectacularly due to a save corruption gl...

I've been thoroughly enjoying my playthrough of Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age so far; the game's charming as hell and it's become something of an unfortunate rarity in this day and age to play a full-budget single-player Japanese RPG given the way priorities have shifted in that market (mostly towards MMOs, F2P, and mobile) so I intend to make it last throughout this unseasonably ch...

I like to keep things relatively fresh here on Indie Game of the Week, checking out any new developers or notable deviations to the usual formulae that fall into my lap, but some entries are as predictable as they are inevitable. After all, I've already covered the first two games in Basilisk Games 's series of throwback top-down, single-character RPGs with reviews for Eschalon: Book I ( IGotW...

When it comes to game releases every year has its big headliners and hidden gems, but none were more packed than 2017. As my backlog-related project for this year I'm looking to build a list of a hundred great games that debuted at some point in 2017, making sure to hit all the important stops along the way. For more information and statistics on this project, be sure to check out this Intro bl...

It's another German adventure game created in the classic point-n'-click style - similar Teutonic Indie throwbacks include King Art Games 's The Book of Unwritten Tales and Daedalic 's Deponia - but I picked this one out for a semi-cogent reason: it saw a sequel in 2017, and is therefore something I might want to look into as part of my other year-long project for 2021. Studio Fizbin 's The Inn...

The Mega Archive has gone into indefinite hiatus, but we still have one more update for its CD side-hustle before we can put the year of 1992 behind us. The Sega CD had only just debuted in North America so we're still in launch window territory for the time being, with a handful more games that hit the shelves around the same time as the console itself. That includes one more FMV game from Dig...

On the one hand, I'm torn about spoiling anything about what was eventually revealed to be the next chapter in the Frog Fractions saga for fear of denying its eventual players what they'll come there to enjoy, whether they yet realise it or not: the ubiquitous element of surprise. Per contra, this game has been out for five years and I think there's probably been enough "beating around the bush...

Another warm welcome to the Mega Archive, a chronological journey through the release library of the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive . Well, we finally got here. This is all that's left of 1992, and the end of the Mega Archive in its current form. That said, we will have one more Mega Archive CD coming sometime later this month before I put a cap on this whole endeavor for a long hiatus while I conside...

It's a day with a Y in it, so that means we're covering another explormer on Indie Game of the Week! To be specific, it's a rare case of an underwater explormer - Aquaria and Song of the Deep being the only other examples that come to mind - and one that balances the grimness of a watery post-apocalyptic Earth with the natural beauty of a vast sub-aquatic ecosystem. The Aquatic Adventure of the...

Welcome back to the Mega Archive, a chronological exploration of the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis , as it inches ever closer to the end of 1992 and the conclusion of a banner year for Sega's 16-bit champ. Have to admit, now that the western developers have all but taken over, it's become a lot less... I suppose "mysterious" is the word I'm looking for here. When I researched the SNES/SFC in a simila...

It's odd that it's taken me this long to acknowledge the hard work of Indie developers that have tried their own spin on a 16-bit/32-bit JRPG throwback. The Indie scene can sometimes feel like a zombie movie with the amount of antiques emerging from the grave stronger than ever, but this direction's been serving them well in getting some much needed attention from a general audience perhaps apa...

When it comes to game releases every year has its big headliners and hidden gems, but none were more packed than 2017. As my backlog-related project for this year I'm looking to build a list of a hundred great games that debuted at some point in 2017, making sure to hit all the important stops along the way. For more information and statistics on this project, be sure to check out this Intro bl...

One of the secret best games from the year. I hope to find more 'secrets' like it buried in my backlog. Friends, like many of you I was bowled over by 2017's bounty of video game offerings. It was a veritable cornucopia of video game delights that year, including many franchise peaks: The Legend of Zelda , Super Mario , Ys , NieR , Tales , Divinity , Yakuza , Assassin's Creed , Danganronpa , St...

Back when I reviewed the satirical Lair of the Clockwork God for a GOTY feature last year, I mentioned that no-one was really making the sort of pretty, poignant, largely subtext-driven puzzle-platformers that it was trying to mock. Turns out I forgot about Nomada Studio 's Gris ("Gray," but you knew that) from 2018: every bit the emotional and aesthetically-stunning puzzle-platformer its Indie...

Welcome to the Mega Archive CD, Mega Archive's younger and more reflective brother, as he continues to keep pace with his cartridge sibling in the final months of 1992. That means this entry contains games for November and December which (sigh) also means that we have to contend with the North American Sega CD launch and the dumptruck of FMV madness that accompanied it. I've been putting off th...

Like many nerds, my preferred direction when it comes to stories of the space opera genre tends towards the scientific. I've been watching the new season of The Expanse this past month, and between flights of fancy about glowy blue alien shit the show is often pretty grounded in the realities of space travel and the high-level academic terminology involved. Perihelions, albedos, Lagrange points...

For the past week, I've been enjoying Operencia: The Stolen Sun , a first-person retro dungeon-crawler RPG with turn-based combat encounters (think Might & Magic X Legacy , if anyone remembered that coming out). I say "enjoying," but there's times when the game will throw a curveball at you, producing a standard foe or boss who proves to be a particularly challenging roadblock because of their...

(I'm dedicating this one to my blogbud and fellow CRPG nut @arbitrarywater who gifted me a promising-looking RPG on Steam a few weeks back. This is not that game - I couldn't get that one to work, sadly - but blobbers like this seem up his alley also.) I sometimes worry after writing... one... ten... too many of these blogs, that I have a tendency to repeat myself. If so, you're going to hear f...

We're back with the Mega Archive, a feature that deep (well...) dives into every release on the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis in chronological order while simultaneously sprucing up their wiki pages. I may be retiring or retooling this series when I eventually hit 1993, but I couldn't just abandon it right at the end of 1992 like this. Especially when December 1992 is such a significant month for Seg...

If you were wondering how the next hundred Indie Games of the Week would resume, a random explormer plucked from my Steam backlog is about as apt an indicator as any of how I intend to go on. Catmaze is very much a traditional dyed-in-the-wool explormer with a handful of major influences - Cave Story and the Castlevania Sorrow games - and a particular focus on Slavic mythology as a narrative ba...

Bienvenido and be ready to present your passports as we enter the Principality of Technicality for this, the final Indie Game of the Week for 2020. Y'see, CrossCode is technically a 2020 game (its console debut), but it's also a 2015 game (early access on Steam) and a 2018 game (full release on Steam). I was wary about considering it for Game of the Year purposes, which is why it gets the honor...

Game : MiHoYo 's Genshin Impact Release Month : September. Quick Look : Here . Started : 18/12. Completed : ???. I'll preface this final entry in this year's Go! Go! GOTY! with two facts that everyone who's booted up this game on a whim already knows: Genshin Impact is both a lot , and it is far from finished . That isn't to say that it's filled with bugs or is terribly unstable (though it can...

Game : Size Five 's Lair of the Clockwork God Release Month : February. Quick Look : N/A. Started : 16/12. Completed : 17/12. I've had quite a bit of drama with this one: first I had to disqualify it from this feature because I couldn't get the PC version to run properly, tossing a mea culpa in the "Welcome to Go! Go! GOTY!" type staging area linked at the bottom there, and then it suddenly dro...

Game : Vanripper 's Helltaker Release Month : May. Quick Look : N/A. Started : 15/12. Completed : 15/12. There was a small stir on the gaming zones of the social media a few months back where everyone was suddenly getting thirsty for demon girls. It soon became apparent that the culprit at the center of it all was a freeware Steam game named Helltaker, following a similar set of circumstances t...

Game : Atmos Games 's Neversong Release Month : May*. Quick Look : N/A. Started : 14/12. Completed : 14/12. In the Devil's Kiss review , the second in this year's season of Go! Go! GOTY!, I talked about how veteran game parodiérs Dan Marshall and Ben Ward based their follow-up game Lair of the Clockwork God - temporarily removed from my itinerary, but recently added back in - on the premise tha...

Game : Bytten Studio 's Lenna's Inception Release Month : January. Quick Look : N/A. Started : 12/12. Completed : 12/12. I feel like whenever I talk about an Indie action-adventure game clearly and purposefully built on the framework of the Legend of Zelda , I always gravitate towards my pet theory that every Indie Zelda-like emphasizes or de-emphasizes portions of the trinity, or triforce if y...

Game : Kaizen Game Works 's Paradise Killer Release Month : September. Quick Look : N/A. Started : 10/12. Completed : 11/12. In my bad habits, I sometimes lead my reviews with something noncommittal and inconsequential like "this game was not what I expected"; I feel like such a sentiment would be too much of a facile understatement when it comes to Kaizen Game Works's Paradise Killer, however,...

Game : HAL Laboratory 's Part Time UFO Release Month : October. Quick Look : N/A. Started : 8/12. Completed : 9/12. Yeah, I'm technically breaking the rules again: Part Time UFO originally released on Android devices in 2017. However, this year saw its debut on a video game platform (the Switch) so it - along with Assemble With Care from earlier in this feature - qualifies for this year's GOTY,...

Game : Mediatonic 's Murder by Numbers Release Month : March. Quick Look : N/A. Started : 5/12. Completed : 8/12. My first serious Go! Go! GOTY! contender for the GOTY list, if not the top spot, Murder by Numbers by Mediatonic is a delightful merger of picross puzzle games and a '90s-set detective procedural visual novel made in a Japanese style, specifically modelled after the likes of the Ace...

I've got a busy month ahead with GOTY-related features, but nothing stops the Indie Game of the Week. I picked out HopFrog 's Forager because it's an excellent example of an undemanding podcast game: something I can half-heartedly chip away at while doing other things. An effective crystallization of survival games and idle clickers framed in a pleasantly anodyne top-down 16-bit pixel aesthetic...

Game : Size Five Games 's Devil's Kiss Release Month : February. Quick Look : N/A. Started : 03/12. Completed : 03/12. Devil's Kiss is a visual novel that is about twenty minutes long and has one achievement called "Basically Read a Book". It is not so much a commercial product (though you can buy it separately) but an elaborate Ren'Py joke included with the purchase of the actual next game on...

Game : USTWO 's Assemble with Care Release Month : March Quick Look : Here . Started : 02/12. Completed : 02/12. A gentle puzzle game to start off Go! Go! GOTY! this year. Created by the same team behind the chill Monument Valley , Assemble With Care was originally a launch game for the Apple Arcade service, and its design from top to bottom feels intended for a mobile device: everything is bui...

Feels like damn near everyone's planning to get as far through Cyberpunk as they can before it's time to nail down a 2020 list, but I'm putting it off until next year. I'm not here to talk about 2020. That's what therapists are for. However, I am here to talk to you about several games released in 2020 that perhaps slipped in under the radar, even during what was a relatively scant year for rel...

Welcome back to the Mega Archive, slowly working its way through the holiday season of 28 years ago. November 1992 has proven to be a busy month, not least of which is because of what's arriving at incredible speed on the 24th; the anniversary for which I saw plastered all over Twitter a week ago. That would be Sonic 2sday , the North American release date of the second Sonic the Hedgehog game....

Plucking yet another of the many gratis explormer s from the pile I received in the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality unexpectedly led to playing one of the most intriguing and genuinely cool examples of this genre since, well, Timespinner , with which it shares a focus on timeline manipulation. However, where Timespinner felt like it was designed with a historian or anthropologist...

I invite you all to go CDs nuts, as it's the return of the Mega Archive CD! 1992 saw an additional twenty-seven Sega/Mega-CD games, so I'm splitting them up into three groups of nine. (Multiplication tables, you haven't failed me yet.) After this batch we'll be all caught up with the Mega Archive, currently languishing in the November of 1992. I won't repeat the entire spiel about the Sega CD's...

I pencilled this playthrough in about a month ago, and since then two things have happened: the death of Sir Sean Connery, the original (movie) James Bond , and the news that IO Interactive of Hitman fame are working on a game adaptation of that same spy franchise. It's in both auspicious and inauspicious circumstances that I decided to boot up Yak & Co. 's superspy parody adventure game Agent...

Welcome back to the Mega Archive! We skipped another week, this time due to Giant Bomb XL charity streams and the careful moderation thereof, but now it's time to dig further into the November 1992 release catalogue of the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive. November 1992 was very dissimilar to the present November of course, as Democrats celebrate their candidate's electoral victory over a crappy one-ter...

Something I've encountered a few times of late is the "non-RPG RPG Maker game": a case of a resourceful developer taking software meant to help in the creation of turn-based RPGs in the Dragon Quest / Final Fantasy mold, and instead dropping the combat element entirely to tell a conflict-free story with the occasional adventure game puzzle. This week's entry OneShot is such a game, presenting t...

Throw up those horns, baby! \m/ \m/ I had to curtail my usual Tuesday rundowns of old-ass Genesis games this week due to being tied up (in a good way, but not in that kind of good way) by all the Giant Bomb Extra Life charity streaming last weekend. (Speaking of which, thanks to all those who got involved, either with your own streams or supporting others as donors and/or as an audience.) Inste...

A stressful Indie puzzle game during a stressful election week may not seem like the brightest of ideas, but Wilmot's Warehouse - the organizational puzzle game from Hollow Ponds , the creators of Loot Rascals , and Richard Hogg (who was not created by Hollow Ponds just to be clear) - has proven to be the right kind of stressful; that is to say, that once I'm in that game I am fully focused on...

Welcome back to the Mega Archive, which once again resumes after we took a little break for some Halloween festivities. I'm going to have to work on the next Mega Archive CD before too long and get that caught up, but until then we've still got (almost) the rest of the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive games released in October 1992 to process this entry. The good news is that there weren't any new sport...

To celebrate Halloween this year, I'm playing through a bunch of horror games that were included in the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality from a few months back. The goal is to play and blog one of these horror games every day until the 31st; I've deliberately picked shorter ones to make this work. Each will be rated on their overall quality and "spookosity" in what I'm sure will b...

To celebrate Halloween this year, I'm playing through a bunch of horror games that were included in the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality from a few months back. The goal is to play and blog one of these horror games every day until the 31st; I've deliberately picked shorter ones to make this work. Each will be rated on their overall quality and "spookosity" in what I'm sure will b...

I realize I'm doing a whole Halloween-themed daily series of late, but nothing stops the Indie Game of the Week. Nor does anything stop Ruth, the heroine of this storybook sci-fi tale about a Norwegian milkmaid who is forced to intervene when an alien spaceship attempts to make off with her beloved bovine one cold morn. This leads to a Space Quest -esque adventure of ingenuity and courage in th...

To celebrate Halloween this year, I'm playing through a bunch of horror games that were included in the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality from a few months back. The goal is to play and blog one of these horror games every day until the 31st; I've deliberately picked shorter ones to make this work. Each will be rated on their overall quality and "spookosity" in what I'm sure will b...

To celebrate Halloween this year, I'm playing through a bunch of horror games that were included in the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality from a few months back. The goal is to play and blog one of these horror games every day until the 31st; I've deliberately picked shorter ones to make this work. Each will be rated on their overall quality and "spookosity" in what I'm sure will b...

To celebrate Halloween this year, I'm playing through a bunch of horror games that were included in the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality from a few months back. The goal is to play and blog one of these horror games every day until the 31st; I've deliberately picked shorter ones to make this work. Each will be rated on their overall quality and "spookosity" in what I'm sure will b...

To celebrate Halloween this year, I'm playing through a bunch of horror games that were included in the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality from a few months back. The goal is to play and blog one of these horror games every day until the 31st; I've deliberately picked shorter ones to make this work. Each will be rated on their overall quality and "spookosity" in what I'm sure will b...

To celebrate Halloween this year, I'm playing through a bunch of horror games that were included in the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality from a few months back. The goal is to play and blog one of these horror games every day until the 31st; I've deliberately picked shorter ones to make this work. Each will be rated on their overall quality and "spookosity" in what I'm sure will b...

To celebrate Halloween this year, I'm playing through a bunch of horror games that were included in the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality from a few months back. The goal is to play and blog one of these horror games every day until the 31st; I've deliberately picked shorter ones to make this work. Each will be rated on their overall quality and "spookosity" in what I'm sure will b...

After the troubled development and lukewarm reception of Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power , I was slightly anxious that we wouldn't get any more games in this acrobatic puzzle-platformer series. That would be a shame, since while Trine tends to stick to its wheelhouse of box physics and character-switching mechanics this franchise always brings it when it comes to satisfying puzzles and a wonder...

Welcome once again to the Mega Archive, where we take a chronological look at the tinny MIDI wonder that is Sega's Mega Drive/Genesis one game at a time. Or ten games at a time, as is now the current system. What's been a great time-saver for me this week is that seven of the ten games featured on this list also came out on the SNES: a degree of overlap we'll be seeing more frequently now that...

When I reviewed Ludo Land's Four Sided Fantasy last month , I remarked that it spiritually embodies the frontier spirit of the presently ongoing era of Indie prominence, adapting a format similar to early darlings of the scene like Jonathan Blow's Braid and the soulful imitators that followed. However, I forgot that there was another genre, unique to the Indie development scene, that pre-empted...

Since we've hit two milestones of late on the Mega Archive - 20 entries and 300 games processed - I've decided to switch up the format a little to make these blogs both A) easier to write, and B) easier to read. To that effect, each entry will now comprise of ten games on average, with slightly deeper dives for each. I'm still going to struggle to say much of anything of value about some Japane...

Jokes and video games often have a tumultuous, challenging relationship with one another, frequently relying on internet memes and broad slapstick to maximize their placement on the ol' global humor relateability index. This tends to be more the case when the studio is foreign - this week's game comes to us courtesy of Pixelatto in Spain - because there's a built-in perception that cultural hum...

A third of my Indie Game of the Week itinerary are "huh, what is this?" impulse buys, a third are leftover bundle inclusions I naturally seem to accrue like a rock gathers moss (unless it's rolling, of course), and the third are purchases I attribute to the knowledgeable vox populi of this very site. Battle Chef Brigade , a game all about cooking monsters, was rated very highly by the Giant Bom...

Starting Four Sided Fantasy , it immediately hit me with a wave of nostalgia with its puzzle-platformer gameplay and slightly wistful and melancholy dialogue-free story; it felt like stepping back into 2010 when games of this type (both structurally and narratively) were the primary output of the Indie sphere, following the likes of Braid , Fez , and Limbo . I don't mean for this to sound like...

The Tenth Line is, I suspect, what happens when board game nerds are given the reins of a JRPG. If you haven't been playing board games for a while, or perhaps only the occasional Monopoly or Scrabble when family is over, they've embraced their largely grown-up proponents and have become vastly more complex and feature-rich over the years, demanding ever more mastery over Byzantine rulesets and...

In the many decades I've been kicking around this increasingly imperiled blue orb of ours, I've played through more than my fair share of role-playing games from Japan, or those rare games made in the west inspired by same. The boundaries between what counts as eastern and western in RPG design have become all the more obscured over time, but back in the early '90s when I was getting my foot in...

After shuffling things around last minute, I found myself dropping my usual random chooser process for this week's pick and just went with Timespinner , as one of the more acclaimed explormers from the past few years that was unfairly languishing in my backlog. Sometimes you don't even need an excuse. Timespinner is very much built from the Castlevania: Symphony of the Night blueprint (right do...

Guessing there won't be a randomizer mode for the new Switch remaster. Missed opportunity if so. Hey there, I'm still on my randomizer business. The latest one I felt like playing is a Super Mario 64 Randomizer , created by Andre Meyer . I don't know if it's the official one used by speedrunners, but it has all the features anyone could want from a Super Mario 64 jumbled up free-for-all: all th...

I have a tendency to stay away from "decision games"; those where you have to constantly make tough choices with consequences that only become apparent later, once you've become powerless to prevent them. Telltale's focus on binary decision matrices, beginning with The Walking Dead: Season 1 , is perhaps the most famous example of this format, but there have been many others in the Indie scene...

One of the many great 2017 games criminally lost in the shuffle. February 2021's English Ys IX release can't come soon enough. Hey friends. As you probably know, this year's been a bummer. A bummer for a great many reasons, but for the sake of our purposes here I'm specifically referring to the relative lack of new game releases and events, many of which were delayed or cancelled due to the Cov...

A mere twenty weeks after covering Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap , I've found myself back in Monster World for the legally distinct adventures of Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom . While both games directly homage the Westone series , which underwent many litigiously-motivated name changes of its own back in its time that ranged from Adventure Island to The Dynastic Hero to Bikkuriman World,...

This will probably be the last of these quintet round-ups. Truth be told, I'm not the greatest judge of how "substantial" any of these Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality Indie games might be: I've been going from my own impressions of the screenshots and trailers on their respective Itch/Steam pages, and whether or not they have any data on How Long to Beat (if not, good sign they'r...

Night in the Woods is one of those known quantities I'll sometimes work into this feature, like I'm spackling over a conspicuous gap in my own playing history than introducing something fairly obscure to what I'm hoping is a receptive audience of Indie-lovers. The brainchild of animator/illustrator Scott Benson and helped into video game reality by someone we probably don't need to name here, N...

It's that time of the year again, give or take a month to get a special COVID-enforced online-only version up and running: the Summer Games Done Quick charity livestream event! This is the biannual (that's twice in one year, not once in two years) week-long marathon event that the prolific speedrunning communities of Twitch and Speedrun.com host to celebrate completing games in ways they were o...

Another week of Indies, another occasion where I rushed to fill a void left by a game that was in no way optimized for weaker systems. Sorry to keep banging that drum, but it's astonishing that most Indies aren't looking any better but continue to require more and more horsepower to run with a framerate in the double digits. Not that it's a problem for this week's game, Forever Lost: Episode 1...

It's been almost two weeks, let's talk about explormers again. Mini Ghost comes to us courtesy of Barcelonan developer Francisco "franfistro" Téllez de Meneses, whom I last encountered with 2012's UnEpic . Franfistro developed Mini Ghost to be the Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon to Ghost 1.0 's Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night . To clarify: Mini Ghost is an 8-bit, bite-sized aperitif to the mu...

The Yakuza games are huge. For a while, each new iteration was even larger than the last, and packed to the gills with side-content, minigames, and "substories": the Yakuza franchise's name for those silly little sidequests where the main character might dress like a mascot, get targeted by ineffectual con artists, date Lady Gaga, meet national sports celebrities and somehow beat them at their...

I'm sort of tying up a thread I began at the start of this month with the blog entry for Ara Fell ( IGotW #177 ) where I ruefully reconsidered my stance on RPG Maker engine games and how I may have missed out by turning my nose up at them as a matter of course. The fodder of many a discount Indie bundle, most RPG Maker games are rudimentary facsimiles of JRPG classics back during the genre's 16...

Everyone's naturally abuzz about the upcoming localization of Yakuza: Like a Dragon , otherwise known as Yakuza 7, but after starting 2018's Yakuza 6: The Song of Life over the weekend I've noticed that even prior to Like a Dragon's paradigm-shifting absence of the Dragon of Dojima and the introduction of a whole new turn-based structure to combat, the series had already been undergoing some ma...

I'm going to have to come to terms with the fact that the greatest impediment to this feature - beyond my brain's fun little trick of making my own typos invisible to me - is that my system simply can't keep up with even the 2D pixel-art games coming out these days. That, along with my limited options for a system controller (currently the Steam controller, which might be one of the most poorly...

I've got some time between major backlog games right now, so how about another five hits of short and sweet delights from the mega-sized Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality ? I imagine I'll be chipping away at this enormous batch of games for many years to come, which is why I've been tossing several smaller games together so as to better highlight what the bundle has in store (and t...

I can't begin to imagine what reasons I might have for gravitating towards a lot of lighter stuff for this feature over the past few weeks, but I'm discovering there's less I'm able to tolerate from the more mentally-taxing fare available. There's a number of games I struck from my immediate Indie backlog after a few minutes of gameplay because I either wasn't feeling it or they took one look a...

That's right, I'm back on my randomizer bullshit. That chalupa-chomping fart connoisseur Dan Ryckert decided to start a fresh The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time playthrough on his Twitch channel and it's inspired me to investigate if the randomizer tools for Ocarina are as ingenious and rewarding as those available for A Link to the Past . The one downside I foresaw here was that Ocarina of T...

For years, I've been fascinated with the Steam icon for The Little Acre , with its vaguely Bluthian doggo and moppet staring at some unseen treasure, and I'd occasionally spot it whenever a Steam sale rolled around at some ridiculous discount. It belongs to my beloved old-school point-and-click adventure genre and seemed well-received enough, so I decided to slake my curiosity a few months back...

I'm going to be picking away at the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality for some time to come yet, having already appended my Indie Game of the Week backlog to account for some 70+ new games. However, the bundle has many more items of a smaller and/or freeware nature that I'd have trouble building a whole IGotW blog around but fits quite nicely in a group setting like this. So here's...

Whenever I see a 16-bit pixel JRPG on Steam I'm often hesitant to dig any further, knowing that every new edition of RPG Maker always brings with it a host of zero-budget games from well-meaning hobbyist developers that are looking for their start on the platform. The few exceptions tend to come from established developers like Zeboyd , who not only know how to modernize the genre but deliver o...

I figured it's high time I get started on all these Itch.io games that landed in my lap recently. For disclaimer's sake, I was going to look at Serenity Forge's The King's Bird this week but decided last second that I didn't want to be playing a very challenging platformer in 30 degree heat, and so made a lateral switch to Vertical Reach 's Tangrams Deluxe : a relaxing puzzle game that explores...

Like many of you, I was fortunate and privileged enough to drop down some money for Itch.io's recent Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality : not only a worthy cause in aid of those protesting the murder of George Floyd and several others, but a cause that attracted an unprecedented number of contributors from larger, well-known Indie teams to passionate hobbyists: 1,391 contributors to be exac...

Finally, a game emerges to answer the age-old question of "what if Zelda was a girl?". Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King is about as straightforward a Legend of Zelda clone as you could conceivably make, though without necessarily feeling all that stale or uninspired. This is opposed to games like Ittle Dew or The Binding of Isaac , which repurposed the iconic top-down dungeoneering format of th...

Sega's war on Nintendo in the 16-bit era was largely won by persuasive marketing, at least outside of Japan, but there was always an undercurrent of technological one-up-manship. The Sega Genesis came roaring out of the gate with a "does what Nintendon't" promotional campaign, highlighting the difference in power between itself and the NES when it released. After Nintendo answered with the much...

Continuing a mini-series within IGotW I could pragmatically name "free shit I got from the Epic Game Store," Sundered is one of the only games I'm aware of that defines itself as a "roguevania". That is, an explormer game that procedurally generates the majority of its map after every session (or, more accurately, every death). For the record, I've seen this specific hybrid a few times before,...

All right, I've seen this phenomenon often enough that it's time to come up with a terrible name for it. "Truncapable." There you go. An adjective that describes any Indie game inspired by big-budget RPGs that must truncate many aspects out of necessity due to less resources and a smaller development team, while still capably delivering on the layers of complexity and enjoyment those originals...

It wasn't that far past the previous blog when I remembered why I stopped playing loot RPGs. The constant influx of treasure and character progression micromanagement is a fetching enough Skinner box but the wafer-thin story and combat encounters can make these games drag on for infinity, and it doesn't help that there are systems in place to ensure it can keep going for another loop or twenty....

It's been a hot minute since I last checked in with Danish developers Die Gute Fabrik ("The Quality Factory", far as I can tell), having played their 2011 platformer Where Is My Heart? at some point in 2014 and forgetting to review or blog about it, a rare lapse on my part. I can tell you that Where Is My Heart? was largely about community and spirituality, and the more point-and-click focused...

Yep, Titan Quest . I had a few other very in-depth RPGs earmarked for the final May Millennials slot of 2020 - and believe me when I say I'll have zero problems finding another four '00s CRPGs for next year if I go this route again - but I opted instead for a well-regarded if a little antiquated (in several senses of the term) loot RPG just so I could mindlessly run around killing things and gr...

I reviewed the first Anodyne some... six years ago ? Damn. Well, some six years ago I encountered a game that was outwardly riffing on The Legend of Zelda , as many Indie games have before and since, but soaked in a surreal and deeply personal veneer that was at various points relatable and utterly foreign, like reading through a stranger's poetry of falling in and out of love with people you'v...

Well, it's taken two weeks, but I've finally brought Gothic II to a close. I make it sound like some immense Elder Scrolls style RPG with the amount of time I've sunk into it, but the game's design - and one's personal approach to a playthrough - can be very recursive. That is to say, there's two huge maps - one based on the previous game's setting, on which I'll go into more detail in just a m...

Bwahahahaha! Nothing like skirting one's own rules on a warm summer's evening. Or something. So yeah, I'm just going to play Gothic II for another week, determining its official expansion Night of the Raven as a separate release for the sake of this feature's stringent regulation on starting a new game every seven days. I'm not going to spend this whole intro talking about the same material as...

Gotta say, all of Jan's gallivanting around Yharham put me in the mood for another Soulslike, even though it wasn't that long ago I completed The Surge . Fortunately, Death's Gambit is a bit shorter and less intense than most games of its type, following Salt and Sanctuary and Hollow Knight 's approach of a side-scrolling 2D game that can throw in a few mechanics from the explormer sub-genre to...

I don't know what it is about these Gothic games I find so compelling. I suspect it's the excellent sense of structure and the character progression's perception of value in spite of or maybe even due to its 2003-era antiquated mechanics and high difficulty level. I've spent the better part of the last week traipsing across Gothic II 's island of Khorinis, probing into monster-infested areas to...

We're back with another early '00s CRPG banger from the archives. The banger archives. Also known as GOG. The game this time is Gothic II , the sequel to Gothic and the predecessor to Gothic III . Go ahead and check if you don't believe me. OK, so, there's this German development studio called Piranha Bytes (later Pluto 13 GmbH). Piranha Bytes likes making RPGs, but only in a very specific way:...

One of the threads I keep returning to with the Indie Game of the Week feature, mostly incidentally, is how Indie adventure games are always experimenting with storytelling techniques. In particular those that are better served with the interactivity that video games bring, if not necessarily with the same reflex-intensive focus that an action game might have. A popular route, as it were, is th...

I'll be frank with you all: this was an inauspicious start to May Millennials this year, even putting aside the quarantine troubles. It felt like Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magic Obscura fought me every step of the way as I attempted to at first enjoy its more subtle strengths of an unusual setting and unique mechanics before tolerating everything else long enough to see what the later game was...

May Millennials is back with a few more of the biggest CRPGs from the 2000s that I missed out on, starting with the last of the three major Troika releases I've yet to write about*: their fantasy steampunk-themed Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura . Like the other two Troika games, this was almost entirely resurrected by an accommodating community who saw what these overly ambitious deve...

Talk about your blasts from the past. Ms. 'Splosion Man was Twisted Pixel 's second 'Splosion Man game, which instead followed the equally insane distaff version in a riff on Ms. Pac-Man (and, like Ms. Pac-Man, plays more or less identically to her male counterpart). It will be celebrating its tenth anniversary sometime next year, so what better time to finally start playing it? Ms. 'Splosion M...

Ah, the dregs of summer. That's what we're looking at with Part XVIII: an uninspired gaggle of sports games and licensed games. I wish I could say there were some highlights, but... not so much. Well, not for me at least, but then I knew what I was getting myself into when I started this g-d project. Seriously, we have three basketball games in this entry alone. What gives? And golf, tennis, ba...

I hadn't encountered Faravid Interactive before starting Whispers of a Machine , a post-apocalyptic/sci-fi detective story released in 2019, but I am familiar with the game's other co-developers Clifftop Games : they created Kathy Rain , which I very much enjoyed when I reviewed it in 2018 for this feature . For that reason, I'd been keeping an eye on Whispers of a Machine - a spiritual follow-...

Hey there, we're back with the Mega Archive again this week. I was planning to write this whole thing on Deck13's The Surge instead, but once you start digging into Sega Genesis/Mega Drive games it's hard to stop, you know? As was the case with the Genesis in 1991 (and pretty much every year for any console), the release schedule of the first half of 1992 was a relatively barren place. In fact,...

I've talked at great length about my love of explormers on this feature and elsewhere, but a very specific subgenre I don't get to address nearly as often are what I've nebulously dubbed in the past as "hybrid RPGs". A hybrid RPG is in essence any game that has a major RPG component, usually the focus, and then any number of additional modes that ideally feed back into that main RPG progression...

Welcome back to the Mega Archive, Sega... heads! Segaheads! That's a term we all use to describe each other and have for years! We've now entered the interesting but not fascinating console battlefield that is 1992: the Super Nintendo Entertainment System is making a spirited counterattack on the market share that the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive was able to wrest away from the weaker NES in western...

It feels like a prudent thing to do in stressful and strange times is to keep to comfortable and familiar haunts, which in my case is playing no end of Indie explormers and writing about them. However, Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap is a rare case of an explormer remaster: there are so few cases of 20th century explormers outside of the requisite Metroid s and Castlevania s, and yet French devel...

Strap yourselves in, folks, because this one's gonna be a bummer. Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom is one of those not-uncommon cases of an overly ambitious Indie game project that went to Kickstarter for the extra funds needed to realize its vision. The vision, in this case, is a full-sized open-world RPG with an elaborate real-time combat system in a similar vein as Bandai Namco 's Tales franch...

With my second blog on Xenoblade Chronicles 2 , I figured I'd shine a light on the game's expansive number of side-quests, activities, development tools, bonus objectives, and other non-combat features through the lens of all the overly-fastidious note-taking I've been doing. Most note-takers I know tend to open Google Spreadsheet or Excel if they have it, if the current Twitter trend of record...

It's been a while since I last visited Daniel Mullins Games with Pony Island ( IGotW #10 ) and after playing his most recent game, 2018's The Hex , I have to wonder how draughty that dude's house is with every fourth wall missing. As in Pony Island, The Hex is predominantly a game about creating video games, and an imagined tumultuous relationship between a creator and his creations, with the p...

There have been certain games from which I've had to ween myself off because it was affecting my productivity, as limited as it already was, but given the current circumstances I find I have a little more free time to fritter away on an endless cycle of Skinner box mechanics and little dopamine kicks. What follows are some groupings of games I could happily play forever, or at least until I eve...

I think we all need to slow down, cool off, and chill with a pleasant stroll somewhere remote, and that's what A Short Hike both promises and delivers. As melon-headed bird-person Claire, A Short Hike is not too dissimilar from Animal Crossing beyond some parallels with the character design: it tasks you with doing as much or as little as you feel like doing on its easygoing island, either chas...

I realize there's been something of a lugubrious global mood of late, and I've gone on record before in saying that since games tend to be effective emotional metronomes I generally stay away from any that cause more depression than I can handle, but despite all this I've nonetheless found myself booting up another game from the delightfully twisted minds at Harvester Games, they behind the (mo...

There's a common apprehension against what are colloquially referred to as anime fighters for their surfeit of mechanical complexity, leading to a longer than usual learning curve, that will often have players - even seasoned fighter game pros - running for the hills after one air juggle super cancel tutorial or superfluous charge gauge explanation too many. It's not that these games are necess...

It might surprise you all to learn that I played another explormer this week. In my defense, however, it's the sequel to a game that was decidedly not exploration or platforming focused. Chronicles of Teddy: Harmony of Exidus (also known as Finding Teddy II) is a 2D explormer that, in addition to its genre roots, feels part Zelda II (the heroine can perform up-stabs and down-stabs), part Fez (t...

It's always exciting to have a leap year February, even if it is still the shortest and usually least interesting month, and the game industry has been busier backing out of commitments more than confirming same. That we're seeing 2020's first big releases come out towards the end of March doesn't inspire a lot of confidence, though you could argue that this is the tide going out before the big...

" Fuck it, that works. " These four little words, so frequently uttered while playing Tom Francis's excellent sci-fi action-roguelike Heat Signature , really get to the core of the whole experience. The best laid plans of mice and keyboards, after all, never stand up to scrutiny when you're in the thick of an increasingly FUBAR mission and have to think on your feet, or while flying through spa...

Norse mythology has always been a rich - and, more importantly, public domain - vein for a quick and easy fantasy universe to play around in, whether you're writing your own Viking epic based on actual Scandinavian sagas or just need a bunch of bearded gods and weird monsters to populate your mostly original fantasy RPG. Some games are more faithful than others to this source material: you have...

It's not often I double up an IGotW slot like this (in fact, this would be a first), but the Princess Remedy games - there's two, Princess Remedy in a World of Hurt (2014) and Princess Remedy in a Heap of Trouble (2016) - are bite-sized adventures by design and perfect as a twosome. A graduate of some nebulously anime "healing school" (and also a Princess I guess) Princess Remedy is sent out to...

Happy (and honestly a little melancholy) to report that I completed The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky: Second Chapter: As I Olivier And Breathe over the midweek (hence why this blog is so late). I've much to take away from the game, beyond the amusing chest messages of last week , but the thing I wanted to focus on today is the structure of both Trails in the Sky Second Chapter and its pr...

After the heaviness of last week, I was looking forward to something a bit lighter and a bit more concise that could serve as a brief hiatus between Trails in the Sky SC sessions (a game that I'm adoring so far, by the by). I found a perfect example of what I was looking for in Ben Esposito's cute little tale of a raccoon, his human friend Mira, and a magical moving hole that can swallow anythi...

(The "something" in this case is "sass.") This week I've been playing The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC , the second part of the sixth game in the LoH series (JRPG chronologies can be fascinating things), and while the game is remarkable by several metrics the most revered aspect - at least over here - is just how snappy and fun the localized script can be. These games aren't short and...

In 1964, pop artist and provocateur Andy Warhol produced a film named Empire , which featured an uninterrupted shot of the top of the Empire State Building for 485 minutes straight. Warhol actually demanded that the film footage be slowed down to 16 frames a second when shown to patrons, extending the original runtime to this new, almost eight hour long film length. It's considered a bold and p...

So, new year, new hopes and dreams for the future instantly dashed by the successful US Senate criminal cover-up and the inevitable passing of Brexit and the great purging of our socialized healthcare and civil rights to follow. It'll be weird to think that, although the 2010s didn't really see much change besides smaller phones and better sunbeams in games, the end of the 2020s could very well...

The Legend of Grimrock franchise may be on indefinite hiatus, but it's opened a few doors (by putting rocks down on the right pressure plates, naturally) for other cautious developers wondering if their idea for an old-school first-person tile-based dungeon crawler might find an audience. Then there's the way the Indie sphere has grown to the point now where any pre-existing genre (and many tha...

Space inspires an equal amount of wonder and terror alike, as an endless inky void that permeates and surrounds us all in every direction, and so there's no shortage of sci-fi space-faring horror fiction out there. However, I'd argue that The Brotherhood 's Stasis is less about the abyss of space but the abyss of the human soul, given several generations to let the march of technology bring us...

A cornerstone of any good RPG, oriental or occidental, is a strong sense of encounter design. Sometimes an RPG will relegate its clever encounters to boss fights, and leave you to cleave through mobs to get there. Others will take the time to carefully consider every combat scenario in the game, ensuring that there's always some new wrinkle or enemy type you've yet to meet before, or at least a...

Sometimes, when faced with a scary new decade, we look to the familiar comforts of the old. Avadon 2: The Corruption was originally released in 2013, but it looks and plays like a game released thirty years ago, not seven. That's by design, of course, and I'm not using the observation as a pejorative: for genre veteran Jeff Vogel (who has been making these specific types of turn-based CRPGs sin...

Another year of challenging myself with the most mechanically demanding Indies around resumes with a game I beat in forty minutes. Frog Detective is looking to be a longer series of bite-sized adventures featuring an amphibious investigator who always does his best in what I imagine is a series directed towards the young and young at heart. I dunno what it is about this latest spate of mine to...

Last month of the year. We all made it to the end somehow (and if you didn't, should I even ask how you're reading this...?) and while 2020 isn't exactly off to a great start there's no point losing hope just yet. For one, there's a new generation of video game consoles arriving soon and we'll getting a steady drip-feed of news throughout the year of what to expect from these new consoles games...

The first highlight of any brand new year is the annual Awesome Games Done Quick event: a week-long speedrunning charity drive where over a hundred of the world's best, worst, weirdest, rarest, and most broken games are played through as quickly and efficiently as possible by talented and dedicated speedrunners the world over to raise money for Doctors Without Borders and the Prevent Cancer Fou...

It's a new year, and a new spate of Indie Game of the Week blogs on some not-so-new Indie games. Smoke and Sacrifice is a middling introduction to the year, as I didn't anticipate how much survival mechanics played a factor in its action-RPG gameplay framework. The game's set in some kind of post-apocalyptic landscape where one of the few surface areas not affected by an endless winter is kept...

Welcome to the Bucketlog! It's going to be 2019's year-long blog series, focusing on games I've been meaning to play since forever. I've put together a list derived from a mix of systems, genres, and vintages because it's starting to look like 2019 might be the first "lean" year for games in a spell (though time will tell whether that pans out to be true) and I figured this would be a fine oppo...

While we're still just about in the festive season, I figured I'd pick something Christmassy and what's more Christmas than (EG) GNOG ? This diorama style point-and-click belongs to a certain subgenre evolved from the Windows 3.1/95 salad says of interactive screensavers and experimentation-based clickery. There are a number of Indie games doing this, and I think the intended age is probably se...

It's that time of the year again (the end part of it, specifically) where the pageantry of Game of the Year is in full swing and I'm left picking over a depressingly small list of games upon which to bestow accolades. 2019 was a buffer year in many respects; the entire industry and those that cover it have been holding their breath for next year's two new console debuts and any number of curren...

I figured winter was as good a time as any to review a game called Seasons After Fall . It's another explormer , though I might refer to it more as a "lite explormer", in that there's a significant reduction in the usual components that make up this ubiquitous sub-genre. For one, Seasons After Fall lacks combat and its large areas are connected in such a simple and straightforward way that an i...

Game : Two and Thirty Software 's Electronic Super Joy II Release Month : August Quick Look : N/A. Started : 13/12. Completed : 15/12. Remember Electronic Super Joy ? It's the one with the orgasmic checkpoints and that Quick Look where Jeff pretended to be the Franco-Hispanic-Russian game developer (the developers are Canadian, so that's like one-half out of three right). It was also a masocore...

Game : Yacht Club Games 's Shovel Knight: King of Cards Release Month : December Quick Look : Coming Soon? Started : 10/12. Completed : 12/12. I have to marvel at Yacht Club Games's business model. Three DLC campaigns, two of which are equally the length of the original game if not longer, and all of them free to anyone who bought the original game when it was still ostensibly in need of sales....

Game : Pavel Kostin 's Odysseus Kosmos and His Robot Quest Release Month : April (Episode 5). Quick Look : N/A. Started : 07/12. Completed : 08/12. For the sake of this series I was checking up on the status of Kentucky Route Zero - still no news about that fifth act, alas, despite a tentative and apparently way too optimistic 2019 release date - and instead discovered that another episodic adv...

Game : Mobius Games 's Outer Wilds (PS4) Release Month : May. Quick Look : Here . Started : 06/12. Completed : N/A. I was trying to keep this list of last-minute GOTY potentials somewhat low-key and under-the-radar, if only because I happened upon most of this feature's hit list while they were heavily discounted in the autumn sales (or free, in some cases), but Outer Wilds was the exception th...

Game : Sectordub 's Pikuniku Release Month : January. Quick Look : Here . Started : 05/12. Completed : 06/12. Pikuniku is a chill game perfect for those of a young age or who don't play a lot of games; however, even though I'm neither of those things, I found it to be a very personable piece of fluff. The game's designers seemed to draw from Keita Takahashi 's or Tsutomu Kouno 's works, especia...

Game : Paul Helman & Sean Scaplehorn's Horace . Release Month : July. Quick Look : Here . Started : 02/12. Completed : 04/12. My goodness, this game. It's hard to know where to start. What I can tell you is that this game is extremely British and extremely 30-something-year-old British at that. Rare that I feel so seen by a game; the last one steeped in this much '80s British gaming paraphernal...

Game : Arvi Teikari and Hempuli Oy 's Baba is You Release Month : March. Quick Look : Here . Started : 28/11. Completed : 01/12 (sorta - there are more stages but I've seen an ending). Review is Start. Baba is You is one of those deceptively complex puzzle games that beguiles you with its cutesy, child-like whimsy before locking the door, filling the room with a mysterious gas, and letting you...

People seem to like this one. Will I play it before the end of December? Maybe! (Pfft, I wish.) Season's greetings! What season is it? Why, it's the season of freezin' (my ass off) squeezin' in last-minute Games of the Year! On this auspicious page of the calendar, we've all collectively chosen to praise and distinguish the excellent games released over the past eleven months, as well as collec...

November's been a relatively quiet month of releases, which is perhaps for the best because everyone seems to be in catch-up mode right now. Myself included, of course, as three of the four Indie Games of the Week+ (see below) were 2019 explormers I was curious about. My list is coming together nicely, though I'm still short of the ten I need (plus maybe a few extras) to put together a top ten...

Before the December rush starts and I brute force my way through a stack of 2019 games for last minute GOTY entries, I wanted to take a brief break with something relaxing and contemplative. If Gorogoa is anything, it's unhurried; sometimes it pays to take things easy and look at the problem from a different angle. That's explicitly the crux of the game's puzzles too, as you work with perspecti...

Welcome to the Bucketlog! It's going to be 2019's year-long blog series, focusing on games I've been meaning to play since forever. I've put together a list derived from a mix of systems, genres, and vintages because it's starting to look like 2019 might be the first "lean" year for games in a spell (though time will tell whether that pans out to be true) and I figured this would be a fine oppo...

I realize the IGotW feature is in a little bit of a rut here, with yet another explormer with heavy RPG elements that spent a long time bouncing around Kickstarter. It's Indivisible from Lab Zero Games (the Skullgirls people); an RPG that is overtly riffing on tri-Ace 's Valkyrie Profile but also subtly on Konami 's Suikoden . Indivisible follows impetuous axe-girl Ajna as she chases after the...

I was struck when listening to the Beastcast conversation on Square Enix 's Kingdom Hearts III that, when prompted by Dan to explain what Kingdom Hearts was, Vinny never thought to compare the progression of Kingdom Hearts III - or any given KH game - to his beloved Mass Effect . In both franchises, the player spends their time pursuing smaller stories isolated to particular worlds - the Theria...

All right, all right, so it's another explormer . However, I would argue that Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is the most important explormer of this year, and it's therefore paramount that I cover it here instead of some minimal budget thing from 2016 (not that I mean to denigrate minimal budget things from 2016; plenty more of those coming in 2020). The big surprise return of Koji Igarashi...

Welcome to the Bucketlog! It's going to be 2019's year-long blog series, focusing on games I've been meaning to play since forever. I've put together a list derived from a mix of systems, genres, and vintages because it's starting to look like 2019 might be the first "lean" year for games in a spell (though time will tell whether that pans out to be true) and I figured this would be a fine oppo...

IGotW is entering GOTY mode for the final six entries of 2019, focusing only on games released this year as I desperately try to pad out my top ten. Despite all that, it's still business as usual this time with another quirky explormer, this time with a cat that controls a robot suit. Gato Roboto is a monochrome, 8-bit-styled (though the smooth animations belie its more modern roots) explormer...

October is and will always be my favorite month: it's where my birthday lands (the 25th, which was also the release date of The Outer Worlds , so it was a good day for a lot of other people also), everyone's all giddy about Halloween and a season of wholesome spooks and less wholesome getting sloshed at costume parties, and the weather's hit that right zone between cold but not too cold. The fa...

I suppose it was unavoidable that I'd pick a horror game on this particular date, given that Bonfire Night is only five days away with all its terrifying conflagrations and loud noises from the fireworks. Reveal the Deep might not be the scariest game I have in my Steam backlog, but it explores venues of the horror genre that few other games and media does: the suffocating claustrophobia of the...

Sam Esmail's tense cyber thriller Mr. Robot is back on our screens for its final season this autumn, and what better way to celebrate by playing the official game of the show? In a subtle nod to the hacking drama's prescience of a near-future world in the grip of a corporate dystopia, Mr. Robot The Game had the foresight of being released in 2007: a good eight years before the show itself aired...

The puzzle-platformer, though a rare genre before the '00s, has become something like the default Indie game over the years. I've no idea if there's copious amounts of tutorials for GameMaker and Unity out there for budding developers that begin and end with a 2D screen full of platforms and switches, or if everyone decided they wanted to make the next Braid , but it feels like I see more of th...

It's an even-numbered week, and so the mighty pendulum of IGotW has swung back towards adventures and away from platformers: the only two types of game I play. Oknytt is a classic point-and-click adventure game with a darker, nocturnal look that belies the wholesome (if still a bit scary) fairytale story at its core. At six years old, Oknytt's one of the older games on my shortlist, but it's on...

Finally, we're back to temperate weather and games regularly coming out again. All hail the end of summer's tyranny for another year. Of course, that just means everyone's now busier than ever. It's at this point where I start to think about what the year's been like in terms of game releases, as we edge ever closer to GOTY season. 2017 set a prohibitively high bar for the next few years to fol...

Welcome to this blog about Kingdom Hearts with me, King Dumbfarts (why'd I let my cousin proofread this?). My goal here is to see how much sense 2019's Kingdom Hearts III makes if you're coming to it directly from Kingdom Hearts (released 2002) and Kingdom Hearts II (2005). That means no side-games, no bonus "2.8" chapter added to later remasters to help bridge the lore, and an approximate four...

Since collectathons are de rigueur here on Giant Bomb dot com, I figured I myself might indulge in the time-honored practice of scouring giant platforming levels for hundreds of tchotchkes via Prospect Games 's 2016 Indie 3D platformer Unbox: Newbie's Adventure . A British studio clearly inspired by the likes of Rare (another hometown hero) and their N64 output, Prospect filled Unbox with the c...

Welcome to the Bucketlog! It's going to be 2019's year-long blog series, focusing on games I've been meaning to play since forever. I've put together a list derived from a mix of systems, genres, and vintages because it's starting to look like 2019 might be the first "lean" year for games in a spell (though time will tell whether that pans out to be true) and I figured this would be a fine oppo...

What's this? An Indie game actually released this year? Have I finally stopped cheaping out on you all? Well, yes and no. Glass Masquerade 2: Illusions is both light on the wallet and light on new features, in essence a rerun of the preceding 2016 game I reviewed for this feature last year . These games can be reductively boiled down to a series of jigsaw puzzles, albeit ones that use glass sha...

Oof, just gotta pop my joints back into place after reaching so hard for that title. Hey everyone. I've been playing Yakuza games for close to a decade now; I'm a relative Kiryu-come-lately, though I did the due diligence of at least playing all the preceding games leading up to 2017's prequel Yakuza 0 (Zero) . It's been remarkable seeing how much the series has changed with this special preque...

If I had my druthers and the Indie industry was even busier than it is already, I'd probably rename this feature "Indie explormer of the week" (in this alternative universe, people would also intuitively understand that explormers are exploration-platformers, like Castlevania or Metroid ) because I sure do play a lot of them. It's not so much the niche these days as the default. My theory is th...

Welcome to another edition of "Indie games are just like big boy games only streamlined in some intelligent ways". We've discussed this recurring phenomenon in countless IGotWs past, most recently with the moderately fun Heroes of the Monkey Tavern a fortnight prior , but the example I've covered in the past that comes to mind most readily for Victor Vran is Aarklash: Legacy . Both have formats...

As the video game industry continues to grow, it is thus required to seek out avenues of growth. You can't appeal to the same audience with the same whiz-bang action fare forever, and that's keenly understood by the indie market most of all who have been pitching to audiences from all walks of life (largely because indie developers themselves come from all walks of life also). Even before this...

Look. I try to give all games a fair shake. I'm the type of frugally irksome person who hates abandoning anything I've spent money on, whether that's leaving food on my plate or a well-regarded game that looked to be up my alley. Due to that sunk cost fallacy, I make an effort to understand them, from the nuts and bolts of the game mechanics to the broader and more elusive ways the total packag...

Welcome to the Bucketlog! It's going to be 2019's year-long blog series, focusing on games I've been meaning to play since forever. I've put together a list derived from a mix of systems, genres, and vintages because it's starting to look like 2019 might be the first "lean" year for games in a spell (though time will tell whether that pans out to be true) and I figured this would be a fine oppo...

As someone who has thrown together their fair share of creative projects, there's a certain irritating process that I tend to call "inspiration evaporation": those occasions when you're hit with a complete image for what your next endeavor will look like and in the process of getting from the conceptual stage to the finished product most of that creative energy has dissipated into the ether, le...

The Room Three : Lisa's Re-tear-apartening (maybe not a real subtitle) is the third episode in a series of adventure games that are part escape room and part tinkering with machines to see how they click. Each The Room has so far, invariably, involved exploring rooms in a vaguely early 19th century setting and looking over various devices of small and massive stature to see how they function, r...

The eleventh part of the Mega Archive moves into the August of 1991: a month that is a black mark for US Sega fans, as it heralded the retaliatory shot from Nintendo after so many "Does What Nintendon't" ads with the North American debut of their own even more powerful 16-bit system, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Up until now Sega had lorded over their technological superiority over...

You've crashed on an alien ocean planet, there's little chance of rescue, and you're in dire need of a reliable source of water and nourishment. Also, this planet is crawling with Space Ebola and now you have it. That's the stress-free and chill environment that Subnautica quickly introduces you to in its particular spin on the survival genre, augmented with a loose epistolary-style story that...

Segageeks, we're now living in a post-Sonic the Hedgeog world. Well, at least in the timeline of this particular Sega Mega Drive/Genesis feature we are, as we now get deeper into its eventful summer of 1991 following the June 23rd debut of everyone's favorite blue rodent. The launch of the SNES in North America is a mere month away but it's clear Sega isn't going down without a fight, and this...

And so continues my torrid love affair with Amanita Design and its output. A mainstay staple of my Indie peregrinations from way back, Czech studio Amanita are behind the Samorost trilogy, Machinarium , and Botanicula , a series of adventure games with a few recurring aspects: chiefly, an infectious sense of fun as the player explores their worlds with a simple point and click interface and ver...

We've passed the mid-point of the year, but we're still not quite out of the summer slump. That suits me fine (the slump part anyway, not the unpleasantly hot and humid summer part) as I invariably spend most of my time working through backlogs and picking blog feature ideas that interest me, rather than engender the interest of the ol' SEO feelers. There is an unparalleled freedom and degree o...

Ever have one of those games where you're not sure if you like it but you find yourself playing it hours later, still nominally ambivalent but also somehow fully invested? Sorta like having a bag of chips with a strange flavor that you're not certain you're into but find you've finished the whole bag five minutes later regardless. Rainbow Moon is that: it is an extremely grindy game, to the ext...

Welcome to the Bucketlog! It's going to be 2019's year-long blog series, focusing on games I've been meaning to play since forever. I've put together a list derived from a mix of systems, genres, and vintages because it's starting to look like 2019 might be the first "lean" year for games in a spell (though time will tell whether that pans out to be true) and I figured this would be a fine oppo...

If I'm not filling this digital space with spacewhipper s week after week, it's with the sometimes-contemplative, sometimes-comical adventure game genre in its many forms . One such breakout in recent years, that it seemed like everyone had somewhere in their top ten games for 2017, was the portentously named What Remains of Edith Finch . Created by Giant Sparrow , who already had something of...

I've been pretty enamoured by Larian's latest, 2017's Divinity: Original Sin II , and especially with its combat system for the sheer breadth of options and forms its encounters have taken. I figured I'd write something that focused on that aspect, hopefully conveying just how elaborate it is. Getting Started An innocuous subheader, but also a surprisingly difficult one to broach: where, indeed...

You may be happy to know that the recent Summer Steam Sale gave me plenty of ammunition for this feature for the foreseeable future. What you might be less stoked to hear is that I mostly bought more spacewhippers, which will not only produce many more reviews where I talk about how so-and-so ameliorates its backtracking or the adequacy of the in-game cartography but also many, many more instan...

One robot ninja's noble journey to see how far they can travel across this great cosmos of ours without spending any money or exerting too much effort. Part 7: Less is Moreframe I know, I know, everyone's talking about Empyrean this and Rapololyst that, but I'm never going to find out what are those are. Those, my friends, are raids and other activities for the discerning max-level, Mastery Rat...

Early last year , I decided to try out the first episode of Bear With Me : an adventure game eventually released in three parts. In retrospect, each of the three episodes are perhaps a little too short to require their own individual IGotW entries: you could probably get through one in an hour, contingent on how long the inventory puzzles stymied you. All the same, it didn't feel right to leave...

Look, I realize I play a lot of spacewhippers (which I'll be calling explormers for a change) for this piece, but that's only because people keep making them. What am I to do? Not explore the wonderful maps they've made and the particular flowchart they've designed for how each of the upgrades opens a path to the next? This particular phenomenon, which I don't just limit to platformers with thi...

It feels like I didn't get a whole lot done in June for several reasons: It was hot as hell, I spent every morning playing about 30 minutes to an hour of frickin' Warframe, and I spent a similar amount of time reviewing 5-10 E3 trailers. June's always a madhouse between E3 and SGDQ, or a madsauna with how the humidity's been around these parts, but I wouldn't trade it for the world. Actually, I...

Welcome to the Bucketlog! It's going to be 2019's year-long blog series, focusing on games I've been meaning to play since forever. I've put together a list derived from a mix of systems, genres, and vintages because it's starting to look like 2019 might be the first "lean" year for games in a spell (though time will tell whether that pans out to be true) and I figured this would be a fine oppo...

There is a quote, popularly attributed to Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens, that states that golf is "a good walk spoiled." I refute this: I would instead argue that it was a bad walk to begin with, as there's barely anything to see besides manicured grass and a remote though still possible chance of getting beaned on the dome by an errant slice. Suffice it to say my animosity towards golf also exte...

Here we are with another round-up of the good, the bad, and the weird of the games featured in this year's Summer Games Done Quick charity speedrun event, as well as the wiki pages that pertain to them. For those of you who are new to any of this, here's a quick primer: Summer Games Done Quick is a week-long streaming event on Twitch where various members of the speedrun community - those that...

Eh, Indie enough. Goetia is a 2016 horror-themed (or really just horror-adjacent, more on that in a moment) adventure/puzzle game published by Square Enix's "small games" division the Square Enix Collective , which also put out The Turing Test , Children of Zodiarcs , Tokyo Dark , and others. It is named for the Belgian-born singer best known for his 2011 single "Somebody I Used to... OK, wait,...

One robot ninja's noble journey to see how far they can travel across this great cosmos of ours without spending any money or exerting too much effort. Part 6: Warframe! I'm Gonna Live Forever! Welcome to another installment of my monthly Warframe check-in. Auspicious times, my friends, as my domination of the Solar System continues unabated. Mostly unabated. All right, so I'm having a bit of t...

I'm not sure what I was expecting from its sequel after playing the first Holy Potatoes! plate-spinner sim, but "annoying Faster Than Light clone" wasn't it. Holy Potatoes! is a lighthearted, genre-hopping franchise that isn't so much unified by what I thought were the specific type of sims where you have to split your attention between multiple active nodes at once - your classic Diner Dash sc...

E3 Day -1: Ys E3 Day 0: The Legend of Heroes E3 Day 1: Zwei E3 Day 2: Xanadu E3 Day 3: Everything Else For 2019's Alternative to E3 series, we're looking at a bunch of Falcom games! I've loved this RPG developer for a while and have been searching for an excuse to talk more about them, so that's what we're doing this year instead of poring over E3 trailers and news. Be sure to check Day -1 for...

E3 Day -1: Ys E3 Day 0: The Legend of Heroes E3 Day 1: Zwei E3 Day 2: Xanadu E3 Day 3: Everything Else For 2019's Alternative to E3 series, we're looking at a bunch of Falcom games! I've loved this RPG developer for a while and have been searching for an excuse to talk more about them, so that's what we're doing this year instead of poring over E3 trailers and news. Be sure to check Day -1 for...

E3 Day -1: Ys E3 Day 0: The Legend of Heroes E3 Day 1: Zwei E3 Day 2: Xanadu E3 Day 3: Everything Else For 2019's Alternative to E3 series, we're looking at a bunch of Falcom games! I've loved this RPG developer for a while and have been searching for an excuse to talk more about them, so that's what we're doing this year instead of poring over E3 trailers and news. Be sure to check Day -1 for...

E3 Day -1: Ys E3 Day 0: The Legend of Heroes E3 Day 1: Zwei E3 Day 2: Xanadu E3 Day 3: Everything Else For 2019's Alternative to E3 series, we're looking at a bunch of Falcom games! I've loved this RPG developer for a while and have been searching for an excuse to talk more about them, so that's what we're doing this year instead of poring over E3 trailers and news. Be sure to check Day -1 for...

E3 Day -1: Ys E3 Day 0: The Legend of Heroes E3 Day 1: Zwei E3 Day 2: Xanadu E3 Day 3: Everything Else Hey all, and welcome to another break away from the hectic E3 season. Most of the site wholeheartedly embraces the maelstrom of reveals and news during what is still currently the biggest event in gaming - no-one's more excited than our own moderator king Marino, who is already busy uploading...

A good video game environment is one that can balance breathless spectacle, deadly hazards for the requisite challenge, and a certain mutability that ensures the journey through is never too predictable - and no better environment provides all three of these traits than the human mind. I covered the first release from Bedtime Digital Games a few months ago - the isometric somnambulist puzzler B...

I wasn't quite sure what to write about this week, since I was preparing my soul and sanity for another hectic E3 schedule - which, if you're not familiar with my foolish predilections, also involves a daily blogging series and many trailer reviews in addition to moderating the chat - when I realized that there was a certain throughline with some of my Indie Game of the Week articles whenever a...

Another month, another round-up. May's always one of my busiest months for blogging due to my own stupid machinations; it's when I decide to embark on a month-long spring-cleaning of my backlog. I've been giving over May to these ridiculous missions for seven years now, and yet my list of games to play never seems to diminish. Strange. This will be a very blog-heavy update, focusing almost enti...

Welcome to the Bucketlog! It's going to be 2019's year-long blog series, focusing on games I've been meaning to play since forever. I've put together a list derived from a mix of systems, genres, and vintages because it's starting to look like 2019 might be the first "lean" year for games in a spell (though time will tell whether that pans out to be true) and I figured this would be a fine oppo...

I don't know if we have a concept page for this, but The Mooseman is another in a series of what I tend to call Anthropology Adventure games: those that exist in part to educate the world about the customs and folklore of the developers' distant ancestors. Other examples of this include Year Walk , which invoked an ancient Swedish legend, and Never Alone , which did the same for a traditional I...

Turns out there was a lot of information I either elided or flat out misinterpreted when writing the Arx Fatalis Intro , so let's start with that. Perhaps the most significant of omissions was the fact that Arx Fatalis was the inaugural game of the French developer Arkane Studios , better known these days for Dishonored and Prey - it's very evident after a few hours of Arx Fatalis where Arkane...

Unlike the other three games so far featured in May Millennials, I did at one point many years ago make some progress into Arx Fatalis (which I own both physically and digitally) before abandoning it for reasons I forget. I'd like to think, or hope, that I'm a more patient sort these days and that the added context that Arx Fatalis was explicitly built to be an Ultima Underworld spiritual succe...

Guess who's playing Indie spacewhipper s again? This guy. Can't get enough of 'em. Dandara 's another one that - perhaps recognizing the ubiquity of its chosen format - has opted for a divergent control scheme, not unlike similar contemporary Yoku's Island Express . Instead of pinball, however, Dandara has a distinctive movement scheme where the player can only jump from point to point, and onl...

What I admire most about Gothic , besides the usual moxie of European CRPGs that charmingly overreach, is how it feels constructed by those who understand how to build an RPG world, possibly from years spent poring over D&D rulebooks or reading a lot of fantasy fiction. Specifically, someone who puts story and characters ahead of mechanics and loot, which is so rarely the case even in a genre t...

One robot ninja's noble journey to see how far they can travel across this great cosmos of ours without spending any money or exerting too much effort. Part 5: Insane in the Warframe Expanding this feature from a weekly check-in to a monthly one has afforded me a certain amount of leeway in how and when I choose to consume Warframe , though I fear it's also made me a little more lackadaisical i...

I originally missed Piranha Bytes's seminal 3D action-RPG Gothic franchise, having only discovered the developer through Gothic's "sequel" series Risen . However, having played Gothic (the first one) for a few hours it's clear where most of the blueprint for Risen came from. Hailing from a genre I often refer to as "ERPGs" - the often janky RPG offerings from continental Europe, which make up f...

May 2019 will continue to be full of gigantic CRPGs, so I peppered the Indie Game of the Week schedule with games like The Tiny Bang Story : very chill, very short, very not at all violent and bloody. Sometimes Indie games work best because they're capable of taking risks and focusing on aspects like narration and atypical-to-AAA aesthetics (mostly pixels, granted, but also other distinctive ar...

Severance: Blade of Darkness is, on reflection, one of the more distinctive games released at a time when the semi-recent advent of 3D dungeon-crawling had opened many doors for inventive developers. While there were a number of RPGs figuring out how to explore a 3D space, in particular early panoramic games like The Elder Scrolls: Arena and Ultima Underworld from which the era of 3D RPGs origi...

I think it was fellow EuroMod @fisk0 that recommended this one, or perhaps aficionado of crusty CRPGs @arbitrarywater , but Severance: Blade of Darkness (known simply by its subtitle in the US) is an action-RPG I'd never encountered prior to this month and took a gamble on it based solely on word of mouth. While set in a vaguely "Tolkien by way of Conan the Barbarian " fantasy world of dwarves...

Due to the always busy May schedule, I appreciate when a game like Divide By Sheep drops into my lap - it is presently being given away for free on the Steam store, and will be for the remainder of this weekend (May 11-12). Divide By Sheep is a puzzle game I've had my eye on ever since I logged a bunch of wishlist items from one of those "highest rated Steam games with lowest amount of sales" c...

Welcome to the second of these monthly monstrosities, as I aggregate everything I've been writing, playing, and watching over the previous thirty days. At this point, I'm starting to realize I probably blog way too much, so think of this as like the Cliff's Notes version of what I've been up to. Lots of brief summaries and reviews with links to the original articles for those looking for more i...

Although we have another May feature in full bloom, that doesn't mean I can neglect my weekly Indie check-in. Daedalic 's point-and-click adventure games are a fine fit with the other retro happenings this month, though, as faithful as they are to the genre that reigned supreme in their home country of Germany for most of the 1990s. In particular, the Deponia series is beholden to the Simon the...

This one's really been a long time coming. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords is the sequel, sorta, to BioWare's original Knights of the Old Republic , which told the usual tale of Jedi and Sith and lightsabres some several thousand years before the canon that the movies cover. The Sith Lords has Obsidian pick up where BioWare left off, retaining most of the core gameplay...

Take out some avocado toast and LaCroix from the fridge and get ready to kill some industries because this year May's goin' Millennial! To be specific and to add a little context, every May I embark on some massive month-long spring cleaning ritual in one area of my backlog. For years I've been giving May over to older games - as it's traditionally a quiet month for new releases - that's meant...

Welcome to the Bucketlog! It's going to be 2019's year-long blog series, focusing on games I've been meaning to play since forever. I've put together a list derived from a mix of systems, genres, and vintages because it's starting to look like 2019 might be the first "lean" year for games in a spell (though time will tell whether that pans out to be true) and I figured this would be a fine oppo...

While I don't mean to drag Dex in particular, there's a certain familiarity to cyberpunk's conventions that makes it hard for any true-blue genre homage to really subvert or surprise any more. It almost always culminates in some manner of ghost in the machine twist, or a shadowy scientist villain that purports to move humanity to the next evolutionary level, or a massive corporation that seeks...

Hey there, welcome to Part 2 of this rundown of all the cameo appearances in Square Enix's crossover JRPG, World of Final Fantasy . ( Part 1 can be found here .) My goal with this feature is to look at how a crossover game, which often has to create new context and backgrounds for its many guest characters, takes the rich character development of those with an entire 60+ hour adventure to grow...

It's a quiet enough April, so what better time to get back into the old-school RPG spirit? Eschalon: Book II is a 2010 game from Basilisk Games and the sequel to Eschalon: Book I , which I covered... huh, this very day last year . Weird. Both games are vaguely Ultima -like CRPGs, in that time only passes when the hero moves or performs actions and they have a top-down, isometric perspective. Th...

Whenever a game studio decides to throw together a crossover RPG comprised of characters from multiple games or franchises, there's often this fascinating process where the writers have to figure out new backstories and story roles that allow them to co-exist in this new setting without compromising the original characterization at their core. Sometimes that means trying to figure out how a cha...

I figured it was time for something a little more contemporary for this feature, so here we are in 1807 trying to figure out what happened to the doomed crew of the Obra Dinn of the East India Trading Company. If you aren't familiar with how Return of the Obra Dinn works, the goal is to use a compass-like device called a Momento Mortum - "remember death" - to witness the moment of a person's de...

One robot ninja's noble journey to see how far they can travel across this great cosmos of ours without spending any money or exerting too much effort. Part 4: Warframe & Piece First off, I want to thank all those in the comments who volunteered their time and resources to boost me over Warframe 's notorious early-game wall. From what I can tell (and have been told), there's a point where you n...

Welcome to a new blog feature! Mento's Month is going to replace my weekly "Saturday Summaries", and instead of summarizing a week of blogging they will summarize all my activities for the entire month. This was prompted by several factors: the ongoing compacting process of Saturday Summaries, which had grown far too verbose and frequently ate up too much of my weekend; and the new release sche...

When I played the first Ittle Dew some... five years ago (?!) I thought at the time that its developers Ludosity cottoned onto a smart idea by taking the venerable The Legend of Zelda series and distilling what they liked most about those games - the dungeon puzzles, usually of the pushing blocks around and hitting switches variety - and built a whole game around that aspect rather than trying...

One robot ninja's noble journey to see how far they can travel across this great cosmos of ours without spending any money or exerting too much effort. Part 3: Warframe for the Stars, and Even If You Miss You'll Land on a Planet Full of Loot Well, we're still on Venus, moving our way through the nodes. This process of playing through random missions and unlocking more planets is, I've been reli...

Welcome to the Bucketlog! It's going to be 2019's year-long blog series, focusing on games I've been meaning to play since forever. I've put together a list derived from a mix of systems, genres, and vintages because it's starting to look like 2019 might be the first "lean" year for games in a spell (though time will tell whether that pans out to be true) and I figured this would be a fine oppo...

On this week's UPF, along with four hours of eventful buffoonery, it was brought up just how packed a year 2017 was. I think we all still have games from that year that we've yet to play and still want to, and even as someone who only usually focuses on about four or five different genres my own personal 2017 wishlist is still formidable some two years later. The fact is, while I've made a huge...

Occasionally, I remember that the purpose of this little column of mine (that's what she s- nope, let's stay on track) is not only an excuse to play all the Indies in my backlog that I've been meaning to try, but to experiment with a few outside my comfort zone that I might normally pass on. Simulacra is a horror-whodunnit adventure game told in a vaguely epistolary manner; specifically, you ha...

One robot ninja's noble journey to see how far they can travel across this great cosmos of ours without spending any money or exerting too much effort. Part 2: Picturin' a Warframe The first update chiefly covered Warframe 's onboarding process, which I'll admit was well designed to acclimatize new players to what might be one of the more complex action games out there. Now that the tutorial qu...

With Jeff streaming his MiSTer on Giant Bomb content more frequently these days, and his ever-insatiable curiosity about the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST range of 16-bit computers of the late-80s - the popularity of which was markedly higher outside of the US, particularly Europe - I always find myself wanting to weigh in with my recommendations, as someone who played plenty of both but predomi...

Ahh, this is just what the doctor ordered. I've spent most of this week figuring out "The Lament Configuration of Shlooters" that is Warframe and hitting several walls in Nioh (though not literally; you can never tell where a nurikabe is hiding). Odallus: The Dark Call is the sort of straightforward 8-bit throwback that provides a tonic to more trying gaming experiences. The product of JoyMashe...

One robot ninja's noble journey to see how far they can travel across this great cosmos of ours without spending any money or exerting too much effort. Intro: A Peculiar Warframe of Mind I'm not quite sure what possessed me to try Warframe , Digital Extremes's 2013 F2P third-person shooter that has - after years of incremental tweaks and content additions - become one of the hottest properties...

There comes a time every year when the winter snows have melted and the arrival of spring draws nigh that a young man's fancy turns to but one thing alone: the imminent 20th anniversary of Pokémon Snap . Now, I've already missed a lot of 20th birthdays this year - Super Smash Bros. (Jan 21st), Silent Hill (Jan 31st), my sister's, Final Fantasy VIII (Feb 11th), and EverQuest (March 16th, though...

Sometimes there comes a game that is so critically acclaimed that you're compelled to seek it out and try it despite having zero affection for or interest in its genre, theme, or central conceit. After all, if it's a once-in-a-lifetime paragon of the particular type of game it represents, what else has a chance of finally winning you over? I try to keep an open mind about every video game out t...

I may have erroneously given the impression in chat the other day that I have become enervated by Giant Bomb East's " This is The Run : Altered Beast " feature. Nothing could be further from the truth, however, as the bite-sized streams have been a fine way to sprinkle a little schadenfreude around to jazz up an otherwise dull afternoon. I wanted to do something a little more substantial than m...

Sometimes you see a game like Rabi-Ribi for sale on Steam with overwhelmingly positive reviews and pause to consider the kind of zealous fanbase it might have attracted and how that may have obfuscated the game's actual quality. The game's icon, on the left there, suggests a world of nubile anime bunnygirls and fanservice out the wazoo: the kind of aesthetic a certain subset of the internet gam...

Here we are at the third and final part of this mini-season of the Mega Archive, covering the remainder of the pre-Sonic library of the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis . We're seeing a lot more variety in 1991; not only in genre terms, but also from new third-party developers branching out to the system with ports of their computer or arcade games, and a few even creating games specifically for the 16-...

No intro this time, because I've been busy on this work-of-concept proof for a little checklist relating to Giant Bomb's Ranking of Fighters show. I noticed that they've been particularly focused on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System - a console I know very well, and very much the hard way - and wanted to chart their progress through the system's not-inconsiderable fighter library. Click t...

I may have made a slight tactical error with Thimbleweed Park . I've been playing it on the PS4, despite it clearly being a mouse-driven point-and-click game, and it was a mere month later (this month, in fact) that the game was released for free on the Epic Game Store. Whoops. All the same, I've been looking forward to getting into Ron Gilbert's latest attempt to recapture his past glory (man,...

Welcome to the Bucketlog! It's going to be 2019's year-long blog series, focusing on games I've been meaning to play since forever. I've put together a list derived from a mix of systems, genres, and vintages because it's starting to look like 2019 might be the first "lean" year for games in a spell (though time will tell whether that pans out to be true) and I figured this would be a fine oppo...

I thought I stopped last week 's 2019-02-13 Nintendo Direct rundown about halfway through, but I was way off the mark. For the sake of expediency I'm just going to give you one sentence appraisals based on what I saw in the Direct and my history with that franchise, if any. The Moogyo rating system is back too, of course. I can't even get rid of these fishcows now; they're spawning like nobody'...

Overdid it a little this week with other engagements, so what better way to wind down on a Friday than with a chill puzzle game about getting forty winks? Back to Bed is one of those small and unassuming games that never rises above its central conceit, nor does it really feel the need to. You have Bob, a narcoleptic somnambulist who frequently finds himself imperilled because of his condition,...

It's not generally in my nature to gush over extended commercials from major video game corporations - hence my usual indignation whenever E3 rolls around - but this week's (2019-02-13) Nintendo Direct was firing on all cylinders for someone who's always appreciated the more JRPG-heavy corners of Nintendo's first- and second-party output. There were a lot of surprise announcements too, so I mig...

The Western genre is oddly under-represented in the video game sphere, despite being such a major cultural touchstone in other media - movies and TV especially. However, there was one very important cowboy game that came out fairly recently that was packed to the gills with historical realism and an evident fond appreciation of that once-ubiquitous thematic genre, ensuring that cowboy games wou...

Giant Bomb doesn't have too many mainstays these days besides the Friday night/afternoon cornerstone that is Unprofessional Fridays , but one of my favorite long-time series continues to be Ranking of Fighters . Though couched in ostensibly scientific and deeply nerdy positioning and repositioning of various fighter game classics (and "classics"), it's really just an excuse for Jason, Jeff and...

I'm really not sure where I stand with Shantae . On the one hand, I love the level of presentation each game has between the cute (but oddly thirsty) visual style and music, and after enough of these IGotW entries you're probably very familiar with just how enamoured I am by Indie spacewhippers in spite of their ubiquity. On the other hand, Shantae games make very little effort to innovate beyo...

So yeah, you've probably all heard about the shuttering of Nintendo's Wii Shop , and with it any and all purchases you may have made on the digital storefront. Of course, it doesn't seem like it would be beyond the bounds of possibility to offer all those same games through the Switch eShop instead - it's not like that place has much of a sluice gate right now for new releases regardless - but...

You might recognize Strikey Sisters from a UPF segment a few months back. It was one of Jason's choices, which meant he was left to play it on his own while everyone else discussed sodas or wrestling or whatever. It was evident enough from the footage that it was another "one of those" like Wizorb ; an old-school "bat-and-ball" Breakout / Arkanoid type of game with a cute pixel art aesthetic an...

Welcome to the Bucketlog! It's going to be 2019's year-long blog series, focusing on games I've been meaning to play since forever. I've put together a list derived from a mix of systems, genres, and vintages because it's starting to look like 2019 might be the first "lean" year for games in a spell (though time will tell whether that pans out to be true) and I figured this would be a fine oppo...

Ben and Rorie hinted in the last episode of UPF that there might be a Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition Quick Look on the horizon. If so, it will be the first Giant Bomb video feature to acknowledge Bandai Namco's long-going Tales franchise. Given the average Giant Bomb visitor might not know too much about the series, I thought I'd throw together a little fact-list: Giant Bomb: The Home of...

The day after a tense and expensive dentist's visit you want something that will help you unwind. I don't think Neon Prism , which looked to be one of those chill action-puzzle games with an EDM soundtrack and a fluorescent abstract aesthetic, was what I was looking for. The game's easy enough to describe: you are some kind of blue neon space croissant, tasked with making it to a blue goal circ...

If you're unaware, Giant Bomb (well, Rorie) recently posted the community's top 500 games of 2018 . If nothing else it ably demonstrates that God of War was by far and away the most popular game of last year, doubly surprising for a system exclusive, but it also highlights what a diverse year of releases it was. According to Rorie, the poll they put forth to the community saw over 1100 unique g...

Whether by design or by coincidence, Fullbright brings us another detective ghost story as players are expected to piece together a mystery in an environment devoid of people but full of contextual clues. Tacoma is set on the space station of the same name - a relatively unimportant refuelling and cargo delivery waypoint to the other orbiting stations owned by the conglomerate Venturis Technolo...

It's fair to say I have a lot of fondness for RPGs, even if they tend to require the most time to complete out of everything else vying for attention in my backlog. I'm in the midst of two right now - Mass Effect Andromeda and Battle Chasers: Nightwar - and while there's no end in sight for either, I'm still in it for the long haul. I've tried to put into words before now what makes the appeal...

My favorite shared aspect of a number of Indie RPGs I've played in the recent past, this week's Battle Chasers: Nightwar included, is they're built with a certain degree of restraint borne partially of the developers' limited resources and time. Because every monster encounter and party member and dungeon location takes time to plan out and balance, the developers have to keep the game's design...

As you all may know, the annual charity speedrunning stream AGDQ (Awesome Games Done Quick) is currently underway . What I usually do before the start of each of these week-long events is ensure that our wiki is all up to date to make it easier on the stream organizers to coordinate their Twitch channel, as Twitch relies on our API for most of its game information. In the past, I've used this a...

Welcome to the newly condensed Saturday Summaries experience! For real, the older format was getting a little bloated and more frequently than not ate up most of my Saturday, or at least the part of it when the sun was up. From here on, I'm going to stick to a quickfire bulletpoint rundown of everything I've been writing, playing, and watching. I will still write some elaborate pre-amble if an...

Life is Strange: Before the Storm is a three-episode prequel story set a few years before Life is Strange and built with the same engine, focusing on Chloe Price's teen years in the period between when Max Caulfield was out of the picture and before she came back to Arcadia Bay and Chloe's life. Still dealing with the tragic loss of her father and bereft of confidants and outlets for her grief,...

That's right, H.O.Pals, I'm back on my concealed paraphernalia bullshit once again to close out the year! For those unfamiliar with this series, I began 2018 looking into what we genre experts have been calling H.O.P.A.s: Hidden Object Puzzle Adventures. A step or two above the usual hidden object fare, HOPAs supplement the traditional tableaus of assorted crap to pick through with some Layton...

Welcome, all, to the final Saturday Summaries of 2018! As is customary for the end of any quarter, I'm going to use my intro segment to talk about the games coming up in the near future. 2019, like 2018, looks to start strong and maybe peter out a little as we approach the summer months. There's still so much about the upcoming year that we don't yet know, however. The following is hardly an ex...

Well, we've all had fun here. Though I'm not personally done with the game, not by a long shot, this will be the last entry for "A Jazztronomical Score". From this point on I'm just gunning for the maps most likely to suit my inventory needs, rather than hopping into crazy/dumb maps that are fun to rag on. In a sense, the direction of the game has shifted from messing around to having concrete...

Man, 2018 huh? A year in which we came face-to-face with our stupidity and shortsightedness as a species as we edge ever closer to total environmental collapse and the final stages of capitalism, which will see us all thrown to the wolves in due time. But that's nothing to do with video games, right? Bless these little distractions and their soothing bleeps and bloops. (This is facetious politi...

Welcome, all, to the penultimate episode of Saturday Summaries for 2018. Next week's might prove to be a little light on content given that I'm taking the week off for family holiday stuff (like a wuss), but we should still have a few points of order. Next week I want to cover all I have in mind for 2019 - new blog features and upcoming game releases alike - but I'm dedicating this one last wee...

Yeah, I'm still at it. Still stealing stuff across many community-created Garry's Mod maps, and still having a ball if you must know. Turns out Jazztronauts is a game best placed in short sessions across many weeks. I won't argue that I'm also kinda eager to see the rest of its cutscenes and the final true ending so I can start 2019 with a fresh slate. If I want those cutscenes to happen, thoug...

Hey there, my sweet Summaries children, to another episode of the Saturday Summaries. We're getting down to the wire with this year's content, and a few of my ongoing series will be wrapping up this week and next. As such, the subsequent week will have a very different structure: Tuesday will see the finale of the SNES Classic Mk. II feature, breaking from my alternating Tuesday schedule, and T...

Here we are, the final Indie Game of the Week for 2018. It's Sabotage's The Messenger , a retro throwback side-scrolling action game heavily influenced by the original NES Ninja Gaiden and a little bit - though it's possible they were developed independently - by last year's Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment . A young ninja is chosen by a mysterious "western hero" to carry a scroll of utmost im...

The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as...

Welcome back, fellow corsairs covered in cats' hairs, to another episode of A Jazztronomical Score. We're still venerating the hard work and creativity of Garry's Mod level creators in the most respectful way possible: by purrloining them of their valuables and leaving nothing behind but destruction, desolation, and precious memories. Our present and only goal at this vaunted NG++ stage of Jazz...

Welcome, all, to my 100th episode of Saturday Summaries! Technically, it's only the 100th if you add together this year's Saturday Summaries and 2017's Sunday Summaries, which I am doing because they're the same feature that I just shifted a day. The big one-double-oh is a significant number for me in 2018: The Indie Game of the Week series is about to celebrate its own 100th episode, I'm on tr...

In my experience with these games, Indies tend to start one of two ways: working from something big, like the many AAA genres that have since fallen out of vogue, and shrinking it down to something bite-sized and manageable for a small team; or the opposite, where you have the smallest kernel of an idea - usually borne from game jams or a proof-of-concept demo after futzing around with game mak...

What up, cat accomplices? It's an odd week, so that means two Jazztronauts updates for the price of one! Yeah! We're still here at the Bar Samsara, sipping gin & tonics while reviewing the contents of our enormous sacks with dollar signs on them. However, you don't have to have an enormous sack to try out this game for yourself: just have a copy of Garry's Mod and download the free Jazztronauts...

Greetings! I am your host, Hugh Jazztronauts, and welcome to a blog. Now that I've demonstrated every facet of this wonderful game-slash-guided tour of half-baked Gmod maps in my previous updates, I've decided to truncate the heist journalizing process down to a handy set of bulletpoints. While I'm still aiming to complete a few fetch quests that my kitty hosts have provided me - namely: cars,...

Now that Giant Bomb is finishing up for the year - we might have one more week of regular features in early December depending on when GOTY recording wraps up and when it rolls out, but I don't see them starting anything new until January - I wanted to take the time to see how their ongoing features have been getting on and what they might look like when they come back. Alexy Quest This is, bar...

I went into Celeste with ambivalent feelings. It's one of the highest regarded games of this year, Indie or otherwise, but it's also one that proudly waves its masocore flag and wears its Super Meat Boy aspirations on its sleeves. I tend to lose my patience very quickly with difficult-for-the-sake-of-difficult games, in part due to the frustration-related "git gud" reasons you might expect, but...

The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as...

Greetings, fellow kleptomcats, to another episode of A Jazztronomical Score. If you're just joining us on our merry interdimensional crime spree soirée, this is a semi-regular feature of mine in which I detail my various heists in the Garry's Mod "prop hunter" game mode Jazztronauts. I have the first and second parts lying somewhere around here, so just click anything that looks like a link. To...

I've been a little out of it this week due to illness - my head feels like a bowling ball full of green soup where nobody bothered to plug up the holes - but that doesn't get in the way of my regular blogging. Fortunately, my writing has been carefully cultivated over time in such a way that it becomes indistinguishable from the rantings of a guy hopped up on cold medicine, so it should still b...

It's Thanksgiving today, and what could be more festive than a group of disaffected robots discussing transhumanism? That's more or less the impetus of Mike Bithell's 2017 "short", Subsurface Circular : a largely passive adventure game in which a detective robot interviews a series of other androids on the titular underground conveyance about what they know and who they are. I knew going into t...

Jazzed to see you all once again for another series of interdimensional GMod heists. Part Two's going to represent what I would diplomatically call a typical session of Jazztronauts: not everything works out the way you'd hope, but there's always something to learn from the experience. The limitations of the Source engine, usually. If you recall from Part One - which I posted yesterday - we hav...

Bonsoir, amis. Novembers are usually marked alternately with tryptophan-induced slumbers and chaotic consumerism, though for us video game types on Giant Bomb it's more about cramming in as many current-year releases as possible before GOTY podcast season rolls around (what the normies call "the Holidays") and with it the requisite torrent of spoilers and arguments. While I have certainly begun...

Hey gang, I just wanted to try something fun this week, so I've taken ten games released this year that I've been looking forward to playing and tied them to germane Simpsons screenshots and .gifs, courtesy of Frinkiac. I realize there's a Twitter account that does something similar, but it's kind of half-assed about attaching the games to the clips in question. (Personally, my "Simpsons gifs r...

In my quest to play every Indie 3D platformer in due time, I was waiting for a game like Poi to appear. Not in the sense that it meets every hope and dream I might have for this underappreciated genre, but how it perfectly represents how I imagine a colorful and imaginative 3D platformer on a strict budget would look. To say Poi would be rough around the edges would be to ignore how it's rough...

The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as...

I've always considered myself eclectic when it comes to video games, bouncing between multiple genres to take in the wide range of mechanical diversity that this medium commands, but I'm also cognizant that my tastes aren't quite as broad as I'd like to purport. I think this illusion of being a more well-rounded gamer (in several senses) is borne from the time I've spent here, at Giant Bomb. No...

Oh boy, was I not ready for Rakuen . Rakuen, created by To The Moon composer Laura Shigihara , is similarly an adventure game developed via RPG Maker software with a strong narrative focus. It concerns an unnamed boy currently undergoing treatment at a hospital who is regularly visited by his mother, and spends his time talking to a lonely boy called Yami who visits his ward after dark and read...

No time for intros this week! I'm bailing because it's Extra Life and the mod team are on full deployment for six straight days of chat supervision. Kind of a wild time of year that doesn't leave much time for blogging, but it's for the kids so it's all fine and good. That said, I did manage to write a few blogs before the madness began, and I have a few Addenda items worth mentioning too. All...

I spoke about this a few weeks ago with Aarklash Legacy , but there's a tendency with Indie RPGs to narrow down the focus to the barest essentials because there's often simply not enough time and resources to cover every aspect of what is often the most feature-rich genre. With Aarklash, everything outside of the combat took a hit, and Cat Quest instead focuses more on the exploration and side-...

The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as...

Naturally, as we're only a few days from Halloween and I've spent a sizable portion of this month watching horror game LPs, I've been thinking about survival horror and its aberrant status in terms of genre and its codified conventions. What we accept as "survival horror" usually boils down to running around exploring dilapidated structures while solving inventory puzzles and evading or fightin...

You know the drill (or wrench): If a new Indie spacewhipper shows up, I'm going to find a way to play it eventually. Iconoclasts - a rare case of me playing a game the year it came out - is the newest game from Noitu Love developer Joakim Sandberg and his Konjak label, and like his previous games sorts of balances a hyper-animated Metal Slug / Gunstar Heroes Saturday morning cartoonishness with...

Here's a piece I've been meaning to write for a long time. CING Inc. was a game developer that worked primarily on adventure games back during a dark period where the future of the genre was uncertain, years before Indie developers like Wadjet Eye and King Art Games would effectively revitalize point & clicks and others like Campo Santo , Fullbright and Love Conquers All Games would take games...

Another short intro this week, because I went on and on again in the Addenda section. I wanted to talk a little about Indie RPGs and design prioritization, since it relates to this week's Indie Game of the Week. RPGs are some of the most expensive games to produce: not only are there a lot of systems to create and balance, from equipment to character and enemy stats and skills to elaborate comb...

As has become a familiar refrain for this feature: I had no idea what I was expecting after booting up Cyanide Studio 's Aarklash: Legacy for the first time, but it wasn't this. Cyanide has a somewhat sketchy reputation for their CRPGs; playing their game of Game of Thrones didn't appeal, nor have I felt an inclination to pick up Styx . Likewise, when I swept up Aarklash: Legacy for a quid and...

The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as...

This week's SatSum's going to be a little bit bottom-heavy (there is something in the trunk, but my pride prohibits me from calling it junk) so just a moderately-sized intro this time. Speaking of moderately sized... Since it comes up a little later when I talk more about Shadowrun: Hong Kong, I wanted to cover game length and how much is appropriate in what contexts. We've become inured to the...

No-one's more stoked for the coming dominance of Indie 3D platformers as I am. A few years ago, a lot of the hopes that the Indie scene would eventually progress from 2D NES and SNES platformers to revisiting the N64 era and the Rare collectathons of the late 90s were pinned on a little game in-development called A Hat in Time , with a small team of creators outlining a strong vision for a brig...

Something I've been doing for the longest time is taking single VGM tracks from the soundtracks of video games as "sound souvenirs," or "soundvenirs," and adding them to an ever-growing shuffled playlist. I've been doing this for two reasons: first is to venerate those soundtracks that were especially great, and the second because those tracks reminded me of what it was like to play those games...

It has been a while since I played Shadowrun: Dragonfall , Harebrained Schemes 's prior outing in the cyberpunk-slash-fantasy universe of the table-top game Shadowrun , but it's both heartening and a little discouraging to discover very little has changed in Shadowrun: Hong Kong , the third and so far final entry in their Shadowrun Returns series. Obviously, there's a brand new setting - Kowloo...

The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as...

It's the end of another quarter! You know what that means: only three months left in this bastard of a year! It also means I get to take a gander at what's coming up in the final weeks of 2018, and see if there's any last-minute additions to the GOTY discussion of which I should be cognizant. I've done a terrible job of actually playing games released in 2018, but I've plenty to go on for futur...

It's not uncommon for games, especially Indie games, to embrace the new and old alike. That dichotomy of creating something fresh and relevant from a blueprint that is many decades extant. I suppose it's not unlike a classic car chassis placed over a modern engine and state-of-the-art computer systems; a certain "cheating" of nostalgia for the sake of creating something contemporaneous out of s...

I've been pondering the preponderance of save states in our retro gaming venues of late, in part because of the ongoing SNES feature I've been writing, but also as a built-in feature of various retro-themed rereleases and devices, such as the Mega Man Legacy Collection s (as conservatively demonstrated by Alex Navarro in GBEast's ongoing Blue Bombin' series) and miniature consoles like the orig...

In an unusual twist for Indie Game of the Week, I've chosen to play a game that was actually released this year. Yoku's Island Express , you might recall because it came out four months ago, is a spacewhipper with a pinball affectation. The game's map is split between more conventional tunnels and passageways that criss-cross a large interconnected world, but also has these self-contained arena...

The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as...

I want to make one thing clear first of all: I really enjoy Giant Bomb West's Ranking of Fighters feature, even as someone who doesn't care for fighting games or watching them for extended periods. The additional layer to the format - ranking these games in a specific order based on "scientific" considerations - rises them above the standard LP format, and I appreciate how much Jeff, Jason and...

If there's yet another pretender to the Banjo & Kazooie crown out there you'd better believe I'm checking it out. It feels like a gaggle of Indie studios are trying their luck at a classic collectathon platformer, and I can only see that number increasing with the tacit encouragement that came from Nintendo's Super Mario Odyssey and its return to the format of chasing shiny gewgaws across all c...

I'm Raiden high on cyberpunk ninja espionage hijinks this week, as we put on our titanium high heels and pull out our vibrator sword for another surprisingly kinky episode of Mento Gear Rising. If you're just joining us, this is part two of my playthrough of PlatinumGames's 2013 hit Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance , delivered to you in the format of my many prior blind-run Metal Gear Solid journ...

The site's big change this past week has been updating their review format to a more casual roundtable discussion between the various staff members who have played the game in question, which for this inaugural test run was Insomniac's Marvel's Spider-Man . It could be that we might see another for next week's Shadow of the Tomb Raider , and possibly (though my hopes aren't high) one for Valkyr...

I've been curious about these Holy Potatoes! games for a while now, since new ones seem to keep popping up on Steam whenever my head is turned. The developers, Daylight Studios , are working on the fourth one now, so I figure these games must be doing something right. It turns out Holy Potatoes! A Weapon Shop?! is one of those real-time "plate-spinner" sims: the type of game that is half clicke...

The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as...

I've been browsing through some of my old "Lists of Shame" - an annual reminder to stop buying new games and play the untouched ones I already have - for a sense of what I've abandoned from the previous console generation and how slow it's been to come around on some others that, despite my best intentions, remained or still remain sitting unloved on a shelf for years. Now that we've entered Se...

If there's one thing that an Indie developer can do to earn my respect, it's when they have the chutzpah make a play for the Zelda throne. The original 1986 The Legend of Zelda came out swinging with its unique blend of Tower of Druaga and Hydlide , minimizing the RPG elements (not that Druaga or Hydlide had much of either) for a purely puzzle, action and exploration-oriented game. In the decad...

One of the rules of nature, or at least my nature, is to mock the overwrought Metal Gear franchise at every opportunity. That's how it was for the following Metal Gear Solid playthroughs, most of which occurred simultaneously with the site's " Metal Gear Scanlon " premium features: Mento Gear Solid MGS1: Part One Mento Gear Solid 2: React-Sons of Incredulity MGS2: Part One : Tanker MGS2: Part T...

I was alerted to news the other day that The Last Remnant , an Unreal Engine-based RPG created by Square Enix for Xbox 360 and PC and geared towards western audiences, is to be removed from the Steam store close to its tenth anniversary. Now, this could mean that a remaster is on the way, but it seems odd to not announce that in the same note as the removal of the original. Another possibility...

It's been a while, so it's time for another feelings game. Last Day of June is that sort of adventure game that's geared towards spinning a narrative first and foremost with puzzles and other more traditional forms of video game conflict taking secondary roles. You're familiar with this type: Gone Home , Firewatch , Dear Esther - the sort of game that's been pejoratively called a "walking simul...

The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as...

Recently, after accruing several of them over the past few months, I've been considering the pros and cons of "evergames": a goofy appellation for games which are built in such a way to be effectively endless. Or, as is more often the case, games you play until you decide you're done with them, rather than them showing you the door or dropping the curtain with some sort of conclusive end-game s...

I sort of knew what I was in for by booting up the legendarily brutal Brad-breaker Volgarr the Viking , but curiosity kills cats and Norseman alike. Besides, you can't really get a measure of a game until you have it in your hands and can see for yourself the way it controls and flows and can piece together in your mind what it is about the game that you personally hate. OK, maybe that's just t...

Two recent events - the upcoming Mega Archive episode and the news that more major emulation sites are getting shut down - has me thinking about the availability of older games. One of the "statistics" I include with every Mega Drive game featured in the Mega Archive series is a rundown of where someone might be able to pick up the game in question in this day and age. For most, if they're not...

A few weeks back when I covered Halcyon 6: Lightspeed Edition on Indie Game of the Week, I briefly expounded on my quixotic endeavor (thesaurus working overtime today) to find a modern interpretation of Simtex 's nonpareil 4X civilization-sim Master of Magic . Master of Magic was an extraordinarily ambitious confluence of ideas to effectively create a bridge between a Sid Meier -esque macro-siz...

The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as...

I've been batting around a game design observation that I don't have a name for yet ("something something confluence", but to paraphrase BioShock Infinite the mind struggles to create puns where none can exist) but pertains largely to crafting, survival and "life-sim" games. Chiefly, that these games present a concrete, primary objective and then gives the floor to any number of optional modes...

Welcome to the latest episode of "let's clear out some DRM-free games that have been sitting on my desktop for long enough", a feature-within-a-feature here on Indie Game of the Week. Puzzle Puppers is one of those Indie puzzle games that quite obviously began as a mobile game; it's not so much the basic controls and interface that gives this away but the sort of simple appeal of the aesthetic,...

In Part IV, I said there were two significant events that would change the fortunes of the Sega Mega Drive and Genesis in the November of 1990. The first and the most significant detriment to Sega's 16-bit console - though one could argue that it inspired a stronger sense of competition - was the debut of Nintendo's Super Famicom in Japan. The SNES/SFC would go on to have a very contentious rel...

No intro this week, because I accidentally wrote too many words for this week's Addenda section. My bad. I should really look into ways to keep this blog shorter, as it ends up eating most of my Saturday the way it is now. Still, I refuse to make my Yakuza 5 breakdowns any less expansive than the game itself, and I don't think separate TV/Movie review blogs will necessarily play (so to speak) o...

Less a full game, more a teaser for what's to come, The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit introduces the next setting and potentially a few of the characters from the upcoming Life is Strange 2 , due to be released in a couple of months from the time this blog goes up. It's a completely free adventure game too, which as far as short-form interactive advertisements go is definitely my preferr...

The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as...

From the daily series of reminders of just how old we all are comes the news that Giant Bomb turned ten years old this week, if you consider a very specific definition of what Giant Bomb is. There's a lot of nostalgia wrapped up in those ten years, and Rorie and the editorial team have done a fine job curating the highlights in the site's anniversary round-up here. I've been trying to think of...

Something I always appreciate about the Giant Bomb guys is their willingness to break out of their bubbles once in a while. Patrick made a point of it back when he was still with the site, occasionally trying genres that he previously had no interest in to see if either they had matured to the point where he found them palatable or he had, switching priorities for what he wanted from a game as...

On the last Bombcast but one, Alex said something curious regarding the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive and its best known game, Sonic the Hedgehog . Specifically, he called Sonic one of the system's earliest games. The reason I call it curious is because I feel like it's an erroneous fact that a lot of people (myself included for a time) nonetheless share because of the general perception of the machi...

After a deeply unpleasant week for a number of reasons (some dental-related, some heat-related), I'm looking forward to some peace and quiet to push ahead with Yakuza 5 - which might take me the rest of the year at the pace I'm moving, let alone the rest of July - and catch up with a lot of other backlog items across various media during the drought each summer brings. I think that's going to b...

Ah, we've once again come upon a certain recurring theme of Indie Game of the Week, wherein Mento is so entranced by an RPG's mechanics and/or gimmicks that he neglects to notice that the game is a clearly defined roguelike, and an insistent one at that. It's like buying a brand new chocolate bar because you were wowed by the packaging without reading the fine print that says "contains mint", a...

The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as...

It's become something of a running joke of late that everything should be on the Switch. That's in part spurred on by Nintendo themselves, who have recognized the great expanse of nothingness between the release of Super Mario Odyssey and every other major first-party property of theirs, and have wisely decided to fill that gap by remastering and porting various Wii U games to the system in the...

I swear I didn't pick an anime visual novel to coincide with Jeff and Dan's Anime 101 panel at Anime Expo this week, especially given how little I'd want to type a sentence that said "anime" three times, but it is true that I've been meaning to check out more visual novels of late. I've been interested in how much gameplay and interactivity plays a role in some of the big-name VNs, and how that...

Howdy Mega Drivers to another episode of the Mega Archive. We're continuing to update the wiki and spackling over gaps in our coverage of Sega's most successful console in the period between its Japanese launch and the release of Sonic the Hedgehog , the killer app that brought the system to new heights. Speaking of its Japanese launch, we're creeping closer to the console's 30th anniversary in...

Man, the halfway point to another crummy year. What's worse is that, unlike last year, this one doesn't seem to have nearly the same wealth of great games coming out as a distraction from the burning trash fire that is our present reality. Maybe I'm being too harsh (about the games, not reality) and that the third quarter of the year could have some sneaky surprises for us all as we emerge from...

Though I'm often one to avoid certain recurring characteristics in Indie games, most notably roguelike behavior by way of procgen level design and permadeath states, there's a few that will likely draw me in despite any other misgivings I might about a game from its reputation or early impressions borne from browsing the Steam marketplace or watching a Quick Look. One of those positive characte...

The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as...

Now that E3's come and gone for another year, I'm ready to enjoy the rest of my June by checking in with the Summer Games Done Quick charity event that begins tomorrow. I've been a little lax in my usual diligence to ensure the Giant Bomb Wiki is in fine shape for the event: the bare minimum is to make sure everything on the schedule has its own game page, so that the event's Twitch channel ope...

Something I've begun to appreciate with this Indie Game of the Week column is the restorative powers of a breezy, minimally-challenging game that can suck you into its aesthetic for a few hours and spit you back out feeling rejuvenated and relaxed. Not that my life has been particularly stressful of late, but this Thursday saw the one-two punch of the final formatting of this colossus of an E3...

Welcome back, Gen-heads, to another edition of the Mega Archive: a chronological journey through the library of the Sega Genesis a.k.a. the Sega Mega Drive. I've tried to pack these entries with as much info as is healthy, but I'd highly recommend Player One Podcast's video series Generation 16 which covers these games in more detail, with video footage even. This fortnight's entry includes fif...

I talked at length last Summaries about how exhausting E3 week can be, whether you're covering the event professionally like the Great Big Balls of Fire Boys, or staying up late to watch the night shows or (if you're particularly masochistic) writing a daily blog series concurrently. Since it's been occupying all my waking moments the past week, I might as well actually talk about the event som...

E3 might've been a major timesink this week, but nothing stops Indie Game of the Week consarnit. Today's game is Scrap Garden from Flazm (best known for their Train Valley series), released in 2016, which follows a little robot that could on his journey to restore his mechanical civilization after something went awry as he was undergoing maintenance. As one of the last robots to be powered by a...

The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as...

This is it. After six days, seven conferences, and 200 trailers uploaded to Giant Bomb ( thanks Marino ), the end of E3 is in sight. It's certainly been a harrowing week, though if past events are anything to go by tonight's live shows will probably be the most harrowing yet, to our sanity if nothing else. That's why we're (figuratively, but if you want to do this at home no-one's stopping you)...

E3 is raging on around our ears, but we're safely ensconced in this, our No-E3s Cushion Fort. It might be drafty, it might have no structural integrity, and Mom says we can't have any more snacks until after dinner, but at least it's a chill place where we can hang out and play Game Boy until it's time to put the sofa back together (or, in the case of GB's sofa, fix its janky-ass legs before it...

"Enjoy E3 or die in obscurity!" We've all been told that from time to time. But what if I offered an alternative? An alternative to E3? Doesn't that sound nice? Certainly nicer than crowding together inside a stuffy fake church hall, I'd bet. That's what we're doing here, in this Alternative to E3 series that - for 2018 at least - is looking at various "randomizer" hacks to see how fun it might...

Hey paizanos, and welcome back to your oasis away from the triple threat of E3 briefings due to start earlier today. I'm still tinkering around with randomizers over here, having caught the non-indigenous procedural generation bug after playing through A Link to the Past with all its scrambled treasures. Be sure to check that out if you're still not copacetic on what a randomizer is or entails....

We're another day closer to the end of E3. Doesn't that sound swell? I mean, sure, it's really only just started, but there's no reason we can't be optimistic about it. Talking of optimism, what's more friendly and inviting than a gothic castle full of demons? Not a whole lot, is what. The Week of the Randomizers continues today with Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, perhaps the second best of the I...

Welcome, E3 asylum seekers, to a new edition of Mento's Alternative to E3 series. This is Your Sanctuary away from the hustle and bustle going on in the LA Convention Center, or at least the hustle and bustle that's due to start three days from now, hence the slightly weird numbering for these days. Thanks EA. To pass the blissful time away from all that noise, I'm going to be checking out a ga...

As I write this, I've submitted my votes for Giant Bomb's E3 Banner contest, and am preparing my body (to use the official vernacular) for EA's press briefing in a scant few hours. E3's always a weird time for me, because I'm always ambivalent about the event itself - as a, let's diplomatically say "frugal", consumer of video games, it'll probably be at least a year before I'll try anything I s...

I don't generally go for cute games. I mean, I don't take steps to avoid them either if they look like they have potential either. All the same, Hidden Folks might be one of the cutest games I've played so far for this feature. Taking the Where's Waldo/Wally (delete as appropriate for your region) books as a template, Hidden Folks creates these enormous, highly-detailed and densely-populated di...

Like many of us, I've been a big fan of what Giant Bomb East have been doing lately. I've always felt an exceptional video feature for this site usually contains some extra edge or idea beyond than everyone sitting around commentating while one person plays a new game, which is of course the essence of a video game website but is already adequately covered by Giant Bomb's "meat and potatoes" fr...

After all those enervating CRPGs this month, I needed something loud, stupid, and fun to cleanse the ol' palette. In other words, Super Time Force Ultra is exactly the tonic I needed: a run-and-gun action game that broadcasts its dumbness loud and clear with its silly, broad humor while secretly packing a lot of cleverly subtle (or subtly clever?) mechanics under its hood. The framing story, su...

Sorry to end this year's May Maturity on a bummer, but I had to bounce from Anvil of Dawn also. The developers of this game really could've benefited from a better sense of conciseness. After the promising initial dungeon of Gryphon's Keep, which had a few clever if somewhat incongruous traps for a keep that was theoretically built to house guards, and a sizeable first floor that broke off into...

The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as...

Prior to a few months ago, I'd never heard of Anvil of Dawn , the fifth (and almost certainly final) game of this year's May Maturity feature. If you told me its name I'd have figured it was one of those noxious balms you mix together to appease a hangover in the morning. Anvil of Dawn is instead a 1995 RPG developed by DreamForge Intertainment - a developer we encountered last year with Menzob...

The release of Dark Souls Remastered this week has me thinking about that series again, as well as its many imitators. It's one of those franchises where its appeal is difficult to communicate to the uninitiated; after all, the game industry has been slowly moving beyond the idea of harsh fail states or the repetition of content you've already seen before you can make further progress. Even gra...

Well, I gave it a shot. If you didn't see it earlier today, I posted an Indie Game of the Week that covered Kathy Rain ; a sterling example of what the adventure game genre can be in this modern era where they no longer feel compelled to throw enormous budgets and intolerable mini-games at the player to justify a high price point. For as many details as I like about The Feeble Files - the voice...

After playing both The Feeble Files (a big-budget adventure game from 1997) and Kathy Rain (an Indie adventure game released in 2016) this week, I came upon an epiphany. An epiphany that might explain why adventure gaming "died" in the late-90s and early 00s and only came back to the extent that it has when the Indie development scene rose to prominence. The epiphany is thus: at a certain point...

Welcome back to Hyrule, all, for this special one-off bonus episode of A Randomized Link to the Past . The site that creates randomizer seeds has a plethora of different conditions and configurations: the one with Garflink was Normal difficulty with no assurance that we'd get the sword and shield from Uncle Deadmeat, which is what I'd recommend to newcomers (the Easy difficulty makes the game's...

With the successful completion of Ultima Underworld II yesterday, May Maturity thunders on with its fourth game of the season: Adventure Soft 's The Feeble Files . Adventure Soft was one of the last, great UK-based adventure game developers, having made their mark on the genre - and the gaming industry - with their sardonic Simon the Sorcerer series. Building on the humor and storybuilding of t...

And so it comes down to this: the final episode of this The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past randomizer run, featuring the only version of Link that leaves dead mice at Zelda's doorstep. Like a piece of uncooked spaghetti (or an erection, I guess) Garflink's journey has been long and hard, and if you have no idea what I'm talking about then I would suggest that you start here to experience t...

The Intro blog didn't really do Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds justice. Not because it didn't adequately cover the way the game looks or plays, but how there's a certain point around four or five hours in (which was after the Intro ended) that the true hook of the game comes into play and it finally starts surpassing its predecessor rather than walking down similar roads to diminishi...

Hey peeps, and welcome to another weekend update. It seems like I passed the 1,000 blogs milestone earlier this week - I'm not quite sure how I should be feeling about that. Proud? I guess? But it's also the culmination of eight years' worth of constant blogging, throughout which I seem to have improved my craft very little. Since I made watching more TV and movies this year a priority, maybe I...

Eschalon: Book I , which I wrote about around a month ago , was the oldest game I had covered in this weekly feature. Offspring Fling , conversely, is the "Indie Game of the Week" entry that's been in my collection the longest: I bought this in a Humble Indie Bundle way back in the halcyon era of 2012, a few years past the point when the Indie market had truly landed but early enough that you c...

The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as...

It's time to bid our Garfield-head/Link-body abomination good fortune as he stands outside Ganon's Tower poised to put the kosher kibosh on the mad pig wizard's schemes. However, if you happened to join us this close to the end of the adventure, you'll probably want to retrace your steps to this first episode and the explanations therein for what a The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past random...

May Maturity is back with our third game this month (sorry for the delay; Eurovision sorta happened, and I'd rather not talk about it). Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds is continuing a trend set by The Legend of Kyrandia Book 3 earlier this week in delving into the sequels of games we covered last year. Part of the once-immensely popular Ultima series, which up and vanished some twenty...

Sort of a miscellaneous intro section this week, since I've covered most of the topics I usually talk about - RPGs, backlogs, Indies - far too recently. First, I want to talk about what some of my blogger peers are up to on this site. ArbitraryWater's getting into Tales , and I couldn't be happier for him and the long yellow brick anime road that stretches out before him. Talking of Namco joint...

Oh boy, that sure was an adventure game created in the mid-90s. The big innovation for The Legend of Kyrandia Book 3: Malcolm's Revenge - as I learned from @arbitrarywater directly in the comments for the intro and indirectly from the game itself - is that it has multiple solutions for its puzzles. These alternative solutions often, but not always, involved different levels of dickery: part of...

Having played Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment last year, and having no idea when Shovel Knight: King of Cards will arrive this year, I figured there was a sufficiently large enough gap in the schedule to squeeze in Shovel Knight: Plague of Shadows , the first of Shovel Knight 's three "Treasure Trove" spin-offs. Shovel Knight's developers, Yacht Club Games , has been supporting their debut ga...

I managed to make my way through two of Westwood Studios 's comedic fantasy games last year, but didn't quite have enough time to complete the set. Taking elements of Sierra 's King Quest and LucasArts 's Secret of Monkey Island franchises but mechanically distinct from either, The Legend of Kyrandia games were difficult graphic adventure games to break into due to some odd decisions they - and...

As predicted at the conclusion of this game's Intro blog , I'm nowhere close to completing World of Xeen. I'm not even close to completing Clouds of Xeen , the first "half" of the game. That isn't to say that I won't (temporarily) leave the game in an encouraging state: my party is level 15 now, getting closer to the max for training (on Cloudside at least), and have most of the dungeons cleare...

Howdy, all, to this week's second episode of my The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past randomizer run. If you're new, I'd break the ice, but we already kinda did that last episode by shattering the Ice Palace and its guardian. Instead, I might recommend you visit here for all the deets and greets. Shoo, go on now. The rest of you, who have been loyally following Garflink's expedition through i...

"Oh boy, Mondays." That's probably what's running through Garflink's head right now as he stands at the precipice of Turtle Rock: the penultimate The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past dungeon and the only one that shares its name with a track from the TMNT movie soundtrack. That's right, it's time for the seventh episode of this Garfield-themed randomizer playthrough. Be sure to walk, don't r...

May always finds me in a nostalgic mood, largely because I keep choosing to make it the home of a month-long series on 90s PC gaming. I've been considering older console games too, not only due to my May proclivities but also because of the sterling work Microsoft has been doing of late to make its various hits of the past backwards compatible with the Xbox One. I'm not sure there's ever been a...

This weekly series is no stranger to graphic adventure games, and the Indie market never tires of making them. Yet, oddly, I've never got around to one of the most prominent franchises of this particular genre: Deponia , from Daedalic Entertainment . Part of the reason why is that I've always heard mixed things about these games, about how often the humor misfires or other fundamental issues th...

Hail and well met, followers and/or fair-weather friends of the finely-aged, to another May dedicated to retro gaming. It's the triumphant return of May Maturity for its second year! I've been knocking together these May-focused features for a while, but since starting a weekly series for Indie games, I've sort of parlayed my old Steam spring-cleaning feature into one that chases up on various...

The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as...

It's another Monday, so it's time to see how Garflink is getting along on this increasingly forlorn The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past randomizer playthrough. If you want to know what a randomizer is and what it entails, I'd highly recommend starting with the first episode and working your way back to here, through all the highs and the lows. Mostly the latter right now. Let's not split ha...

Welcome to my new series, "Test Blog", where I conduct the testiest of tests over a lengthy testing period.

Despite some recent... complications, I've been having a great time with the A Link to the Past randomizer playthrough I've been chronicling. It creates new wrinkles to overcome which demand a certain level of intense familiarity with the original game to surpass, and I've been considering other games that might benefit from a similar treatment. Poking around in the dark for hours has definitel...

Sometimes I feel I set myself up for disaster with the choices I make for this feature. I've made it abundantly apparent in the past that, while I continue to give physics-based platformers such as Human: Fall Flat or Octodad: Dadliest Catch chances, I usually walk away feeling aggravated by how arbitrary they can feel and how paper-thin their gameplay is beyond "we've made it that much more aw...

It's an alternate Tuesday! That means you all get a double-dose of Garflink and his quest to eat all the lasagna in Hyrule, or something equally on-brand. We're playing a special randomized seed of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past , and you can read more about what that means by visiting the first episode of this series over yonder . Arbuckle-up, kiddos, because I'm going to take on Agah...

We're back once again with Garflink, America's favorite heroic tabby, and me, the guy who makes you go alt-tabby (wow harsh). We're still navigating a Hyrule gone mad with this The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past Randomizer playthrough, so be sure to visit here to get all caught up and then follow the links in the table at the bottom. I'll level with you: between my own half-remembered ment...

I've been thinking about ProcGen (or Procedural Generation ) again recently as it continues to be a major force in modern video gaming, and of Indie games in particular. Simply put, it's when a designer decides to relegate a certain amount of level design or treasure/NPC/enemy allocation to a randomized system, creating a doubly beneficial outcome of a game that never offers players the same ex...

I've had a dilly of a pickle of late trying to hone in on what an "Indie" game is, beyond its nominal definition of a game created by independent means in lieu of a major publisher. I think one of the biggest difficulties in figuring how to codify Indies is that they've always been around in one form or another, as far back as computer gaming has existed. In ye olden times where I apparently ha...

The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as...

Welcome, once again, to another episode of this The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past Randomizer LP. We're three episodes in now, so if you're just joining us I'd highly recommended starting here , or using the table at the end of the blog to catch up with this playthrough as well as learn more about what a randomized Zelda game entails. When we last left him, Garflink had found what seemed l...

Something you get exposed to on the regular when playing open-world games are fishing mini-games. They're not always present, but they're usually a common avenue for a means of bolstering the range of options you have to spend your time, and have different levels of engagement with the rest of the game: for instance, the rewards you obtain from fishing (mostly fish) can often be required for a...

Oh boy, in retrospect I'm not quite sure I was in a good place for this one. However, The Cat Lady has something of a glowing reputation for being, let's say, a challenging game and not in the traditional sense. As I continue to expand my horizons as far as the Indie scene goes, and in particular adventure games of every conceivable stripe and color that emerges from same, Harvester Games 's ps...

Welcome to the second part of this The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past Randomizer LP! I simulpublished (real word) the first two episodes, so if you found this one before Episode 1 be sure to start over here for an explanation of what's going on. At the end of the first episode, Garflink finally made it out of Hyrule Castle's sewers after trying and failing to bash his way through with a us...

Hello, happy Hyrulians, to a new Tuesday feature: a The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past Randomizer LP! Ever since watching the dramatic LTTP randomizer race at this year's Awesome Games Done Quick event, I've been fascinated by the idea of jumping into one without that scary level of complete memorization that speedrunners possess for their chosen games. How would someone fare if they had,...

The AV Club recently put out an article delineating the history of the burgeoning Indie game market, choosing Jonathan Blow's Braid as its "definitive" example and the turning point for the popularity of smaller, downloadable games which has continued to grow unabated to this day. I have a few misgivings with that hypothesis, which lead me to consider two things: a list of what I would consider...

Between this and Sutte Hakkun this week, I've been burning brain cells like nobody's business. Infinifactory is, like its sister games SpaceChem and Opus Magnum , a puzzle game from Zach Barth (of Zachtronics ) that leans heavily on building assembly lines and constructing logic circuits with which to take multiple components and fuse them together to create a desired composite structure. It's...

The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as...

As has become a Summaries tradition, we celebrate the end of each year's quarter by looking at what the subsequent one has to offer. 2018's been a fairly low-key year so far, especially compared to 2017, but I already have a handful of smaller games on my wishlist that I'm meaning to delve into when the opportunity arises, including Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom , Iconoclasts , Celeste , Into...

I knew it wouldn't be too long before I found myself back in the bloom-drenched world of Frozenbyte 's Trine , having completed the first two episodes of its little trilogy relatively recently ( Trine: Enchanted Edition was part of 2016's May Mastery feature , while Trine 2 was the 33rd Indie Game of the Week ) and eager to see how it concluded. Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power 's big advancemen...

Like any good experiment, Rainy Days and Mundis went as far as it could go before it suddenly mutated and killed a bunch of people [citation needed], so it's probably time to draw it to an end. My original intent was to go ten episodes, if only because I picked up ten Aritfex Mundi games in the same bundle, but I've been repeating myself a lot more than I anticipated. It's not just that these h...

After watching the new Tomb Raider movie (I get into more detail on that below), I've been considering movie adaptations of video games and how they always seem to miss the mark. I think there's a couple of obvious arguments to make: the first, and perhaps more cynical, is that video game stories are rarely decent enough to work in a medium like movies or TV or novels which have far higher stan...

Survival horror is one of those genres I dip into occasionally, partly because it offers a distinctive atmosphere that's a welcome change of pace from all the platformers and RPGs, and partly because I'm curious to see if anyone's innovated on the core mechanics that seem to be the bedrock of almost all survival horror games, which is to be ferried through a circuitous path to look for key item...

The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as...

As with Hollywood, video games have been a little remake-happy of late. I've been looking ahead at the releases for a Q2 round-up (that should drop on the Saturday Summaries for the 31st) and there's a lot of familiar games coming to Switch and enhanced remasters for PS4 and Steam. There's even a few upcoming Japanese games that are actually remakes of games we never got the first time around:...

I am not what you would call a casual fan of stealth games. I am, however, a fan of Mike Bithell : the UK developer of this game, Volume , as well as Thomas Was Alone and, more recently, Subsurface Circular . In addition to producing mordantly amusing games with minimalist looks and an emphasis on layered game design, he's an entertaining figure to follow on social media; like Rami Ismail , he'...

Pick up your clickers and squint your eyes with your head askew, because we're heading back to the arbitrary world of Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure games, or HOPA: an acronym I recently learned was not in wide use by anyone! I've been around this concealed paraphernalia mill a few times now, as evinced by the numerical in the blog title, and yet this week opened my eyes to a few new unfortunat...

I realize we've been saying this for a while now, but the wiki update is almost here. The engineers have been working tirelessly on various site features of late, from a new search engine to the well-received "Giant Bomb TV" 24/7 rerun channel, but their major focus over the past year or so has been what I've always considered the spine of Giant Bomb: its enormous, user-curated wiki of video ga...

There's definitely something scrappy about Indie physics simulators. Realistic physics is a difficult thing to get right for a major AAA developer who requires some state of the art tech behind its various big cinematic set-pieces, let alone for an Indie poking around to slake their own curiosity. I submit that it's why these Indie physics simulators/puzzle games generally have a healthy dose o...

The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as...

Back when Screened was still around I created a little annual blog feature with the dubious name of "Oscar Noms to Video Game ROMs": a doomed attempt to hypothetically adapt the various movies nominated for the "Best Picture" Oscar that year into their own video games. It proved easier with some than others: a superhero or sci-fi movie begrudgingly given Best Picture consideration by the spoils...

While I created this weekly feature to galvanize me into playing more Indie games, I made no such lofty promises about branching out into the many varieties the Indie market has to offer. I'm a creature of habit, especially as I get older, and I'm frequently drawn to the many genres of my youth: genres that the nostalgic Indie market is all too eager to resurrect. That's why in this blog you te...

It's the fourth episode of our in-depth study of the H.O.P.A. (Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure) genre and boy are my arms tired. From pointing at things that are hidden. I... may have bought more HOPAs. They were in a dollar bundle, and I'm only human. However, they weren't Artifex Mundi brand HOPAs, which means they won't be making an appearance here (I'd have to change the feature's name first...

One of my favorite aspects of a truly global video game distribution system, which the Indie game market has fostered over the past decade or so, is seeing various fandoms through multiple cultural filters. For instance, today's game - Behold Studios 's Chroma Squad - is based the Japanese TV obsession of tokusatsu Super Sentai -type shows as perceived by a Brazilian development team. Creating...

The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as...

On the whole, I probably write more about JRPGs than CRPGs. That's not to play favoritism, but until fairly recently JRPGs were more frequently released and more convenient for someone who largely sticks to console gaming rather than chance anything halfway modern on this basic bitch laptop. CRPGs are having a big resurgence of late, however, beyond the occasional Todd Howard wanderlust sim and...

It's the distant future. The cities of man lie in ruins, nature having taken most of its territory back from the concrete monoliths that once defied it. What remains are not people but machines: robots created by humanity in their image but are abandoned and bereft of purpose with their absence, left to eke out existences of their own choosing and ponder their own inchoate stirrings of consciou...

Our look at the cottage industry that are HOPA games - Hidden Object Puzzle Adventures, though I'm still not certain if that's common nomenclature or just some Steam reviewer's preferred acronym (and I know a lot about preferred genre names that no-one else uses) - continues this week with the introduction of yet another developer who works alongside our old titular friends Artifex Mundi: Brave...

It occurs to me that despite making this site my home over the past... oh god, nearly a decade huh?... I don't really talk about Giant Bomb and its output all too often. There's some big changes coming down the pipe fairly soon (nothing too grand as far as the content is concerned though - I don't have any scoops on new staff members or anything) but we've already seen a lot of unexpected chang...

Ahh, it's great to be back in the comforting embrace of the traditional point-and-click genre, after some earlier tangential dalliances this year with the likes of The Wolf Among Us and those HOPAs I've been experimenting with. I have plans for plenty more of these this year, between Indie Game of the Week and the upcoming return of May Maturity, and Bear With Me is a fine game to start us off....

The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as...

The North American/European JRPG fan had quite the banner year in 2017 with the releases of Persona 5 , Tales of Berseria , Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana , NieR Automata , Dragon Quest VIII (for 3DS), Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age , Xenoblade Chronicles 2 , The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3rd , Nioh , and others. If I were to narrow down the most exciting of those, objectively spea...

In truth, I acquired Affordable Space Adventures in a special "Friends of Nintendo" Humble Bundle from a couple years back that I bought largely for a Wii U copy of Shantae and the Pirate's Curse , and promptly forgot about it. It wasn't until I played Uurnog Uurnlimited last December and was doing some research on Nifflas - the Swedish Indie developer who usually fills his 2D games with puzzle...

Now that we have a second game for a comparison, we're getting closer to what I wanted this series to be: a celebration, if that's the word, of the many differences and similarities of the fledgling Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure genre. We're not picking on Artifex Mundi in particular; it's just that they have the best reputation of the many developers who attend to this surprisingly popular fo...

Ever have one of those weeks where nothing coming out interests you in the slightest, but is lighting the rest of the internet on fire? It puts you in that position of wanting to air your displeasure at this arrangement, but then stopping yourself from posting that tweet or Facebook post or Instagram when you recall at the last second that people who complain about the fun people are having wit...

It's been a while since I last visited my hircine Houdini buddy; 2012, in fact . I'm heartened to see that not much has changed in his 2D world of blocks, mechanisms, platforming, and frequent mousecapades. The Escape Goat series invariably drops you into a single-screen room with an exit and any number of keys required to unlock said exit, with a handful of persistent mechanics to rely on and...

The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as...

Towards the end of last year, when I was plowing through a group of 2017 Indie games for Go! Go! GOTY! , I hit upon an unusual number of roguelikes . It's a format that, along with spacewhippers and other old-school genres like point-and-click adventure games and first-person dungeon-crawlers, is something the Indie market has been resurrecting with a vengeance of late. I have a few ideas for w...

I've had a minor epiphany about Z-Games of late. Z-Games, which is another one of my wonderful nomenclature creations destined to be picked up by no-one, refers to deliberately bad joke games that - at the same time - at least retain some kernel of wit, craft or ingenuity at its core to separate it from the actual garbage out there that infests Steam's new releases ticker on an hourly basis. A...

The point-and-click adventure genre has long been one of my favorites, ever since I was first acquainted with the early Sierra and LucasFilm games back in the Atari ST era when I was still yea-high to a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle. As with two of my other favorite genres ( spacewhippers and JRPGs), it also lapsed for what felt like a long time, shortly after FMV and an over-relia...

This week introduced most of the blogging schedule for 2018, but something I've yet to broach is how I'll be tackling the Giant Bomb wiki this year. In 2017, I reached the end of an important long-term project regarding the SNES and then... kind of stopped. "Podcast games" - those with long periods of non-story grinding/exploring that are ideal for some background talking to split my attention...

It was only a few months ago when I caught up with SteamWorld Heist , but here we are back once again in Image & Form 's endearing steampunk/western robot universe for another excavation in SteamWorld Dig 2 . Dig 2 is the classic example of a sequel done right: it keeps the spirit of the original intact, but adds a lot of iterative gameplay changes, makes the game larger in scope without necess...

The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as...

Will the SNES Classic Mk. II have any games as good as the Mk. I's EarthBound or Super Mario World? Probably not, but there's plenty more gold out there to be mined. I had a great deal of fun writing and organizing last year's PlayStation 2-themed The Top Shelf , because it afforded me an opportunity to do three things I loved: write about games, fuss over arbitrary rankings, and give me an exc...

Welcome to 2018, everyone! Maybe this year won't suck quite as bad! I feel like we could probably use that statement for every year from now on as the new replacement for "Happy New Year". At least we can make the best of January with this weekend's Awesome Games Done Quick event , which always starts the year on a positive and charitable note, and spend the quiet Winter months checking out som...

Welcome to a new year of Indie Game of the Week! We'll be talking about another fifty Indie games in 2018, barring any apocalyptic mishaps, starting with Telltale Games 's 2013-14 fairytale-themed detective noir serial graphic adventure The Wolf Among Us . I'd originally planned to put this one off for a while despite the glowing reviews it received at the time, in part because I'm generally no...

Welcome everyone to the last All-New Saturday Summaries for 2017. It's probably time to retire the "All-New", huh? Maybe I'll just go with "Mostly Still Newish" next year. Or just write titles like a normal person, perhaps. Regardless! It has become my custom at the end of every quarter to chat candidly about the games coming up in the subsequent quarter, which is to say January 1st to March 31...

We're seeing out 2017 with, you guessed it, another Indie spacewhipper . However, Pharaoh ReBirth+ is the rare case of a Japanese doujin game: what that country usually calls their smaller, self-published Indie games as a blanket term, but literally translates to "fan game". With all the Indie games I've played this year, I'm realizing there's something modest if perhaps a little reductive abou...

We made it to the end of another year, everyone. Good for us. As always, that means it's time to hand it off to Stick Figure JC Denton to hand out some coveted Mento Awards for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Video Game Excellence - or the MGAs, for you busy millennials on the go. Disclaimer: I barely played any new games this year, so this awards show should only be consumed as a form...

I have a lot planned for this following week, as I imagine we all do, so this Saturday Summaries is going to have to be a relatively concise one. I suppose that is to say, expect something more Anna Karenina -sized instead of my usual War and Peace weekly text dump. Since we're approaching the end of the year and I want to spend the very last Saturday Summaries of 2017 to talk about the games I...

You didn't think I'd forget, did you? Even knee-deep in all the GOTY material I've unwisely given myself to craft, there's enough time left to review another fine Indie product. Campo Santo 's Firewatch became something of a minor meme around these parts, but I suspect it was largely played up as a joke: it's very apparent what Firewatch is and what it's trying to do from the moment you start p...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Well folks, we're coming down to the wire now. Soon I'll be working on a finalized GOTY list and an illustrated awards blog for the games of the year I want to commend for specific accomplishments, from best music to best new character to a few new topics like the best game covered by my Indie Game of the Week feature. However, given how much work goes into those doodles (and yes, there is some...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Game : Nifflas Games 's Uurnog Uurnlimited . Release Month : November (though it first became available as an exclusive "Humble Original" for their February Monthly bundle). Quick Look : N/A. Started : 11/12. Completed : 12/12. A last-minute addition to Go! Go! GOTY!, Uurnog Uurnlimited was a game I'd never heard of until earlier this week, when I saw it was the latest game from Nifflas : the S...

Game : Juggernaut Games 's StarCrawlers . Release Month : May. (It's been in Early Access since 2015 though.) Quick Look : N/A. Started : 8/12. Completed : TBA. Well, this was a pleasant surprise. I've been on a StarCrawlers tear over the past three days, trying to collect my thoughts on what to prioritize first in this rundown. Let's stick with the basics for now: StarCrawlers is an old-fashio...

I've been revisiting a number of slightly more antiquated genres this year, between the 00s-oriented The Top Shelf , that block of 90s games back in May , and the occasional Indie throwback (one of which I'm playing presently for the next Go! Go! GOTY! entry), but those occupying the most attention right now are the many incarnations of CRPGs throughout the years. Ultima Underworld was a real e...

Game : Aeiowu 's TumbleSeed . Release Month : May. Quick Look : Here. (Brad/Jeff.) Started : 6/12. Completed : N/A. Man, I might have to call a moratorium on roguelikes and roguelites for a while. I think the reason I ended up with so many this year was due to that Day of the Devs bundle from Double Fine a few weeks back (it's also where I got Flinthook and Loot Rascals ), or maybe it was just...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Game : Cavalier Game Studio/ Tequila Works 's The Sexy Brutale . Release Month : April. Quick Look : Here. (Alex/Dan/Vinny.) Started : 04/12. Completed : 05/12. An extravagant masquerade ball at the Marquis's legendary manse, the Sexy Brutale! Nine guests, each to be horrifically and elaborately butchered that night by the Marquis's loyal servants! One priest, who has to save them all with his...

Game : Alientrap 's Cryptark Release Month : June. Quick Look : Here. (Ben/Jeff.) Started : 03/12. Completed : N/A. Another day, another Indie roguelike to play for a few hours until I've had my fill. Cryptark follows in the footsteps of the likes of Galak-Z and Nuclear Throne , creating a sci-fi twitch dual-stick shooter with roguelike elements attached to its main progression. In this case, y...

Game : Team Salvato 's Doki Doki Literature Club . Release Month : September. Quick Look : N/A. Started : 02/12. Completed (?): 02/12. It's odd, this game was released in September but I hadn't heard about it until a couple of weeks ago when the mod team's very own Anime Editor ZombiePie told me to give it a look. Seeing it was free and all, I added it to the docket for Go! Go! GOTY! and prompt...

December's already shaping up to be ending the year the same way it started: awfully. In spite of what might be occurring and who might be robbing whom of a future, let's instead focus ourselves on things we can do and things we can change. Like all our GOTY lists in the eleventh hour? That's what I've been doing with this year's season of Go! Go! GOTY!, checking out a handful of remaining 2017...

Game : Hollow Ponds 's Loot Rascals . Release Month : March. Quick Look : N/A. Started : 01/12. Completed : N/A. Our inaugural game for Go! Go! GOTY! this year is Loot Rascals, a quirky sci-fi roguelike from British developers Hollow Ponds. The game has what I would call a very contemporary animated TV show look, like The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack almost, with a vivid use of color to...

Hey there gents of the year and gals of the year to Game of the Year revision time. For those of you unacquainted with this series, every December I take stock of all the smaller unplayed games I have sitting in my Steam and PSN libraries that were launched earlier that same year. I then blitz through them all, or at least as many as possible, in preparation for the GOTY material I create towar...

NEStalgia might be one of the biggest driving forces in the Indie market, at least as far as Steam is concerned, because not only does it invoke a common touchstone for those of a certain age - and, honestly, probably more if we include cases of hand-me-downs and situations where the system is seen as a good entry point by retro-savvy parents - but also because the relative simplicity of the fo...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Welcome to the last Summaries of November, everyone! Coming down to the wire now, with only one week and one month remaining in the year to cram in a playthrough for every as-yet-untouched 2017 video game in our possession for the sake of our GOTY lists. The greatest way to enjoy video games, am I right? Speaking of which, I believe it's time for... GOTY Prognostifications from the Bomb-Beast W...

We're a long ways away from May 2018 and the next edition of the " May Maturity " 90s game feature I introduced this year, but I couldn't wait to finally rev up some Full Throttle : one of the few games from the peak LucasFilm / Schafer graphic adventure game era of the early-to-mid 90s that I'd never found the time to play back when it was new. It's no secret that Tim Schafer is a fan of leath...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Welcome, all, to another November Summaries. I've noticed a certain mournful atmosphere surrounding the Nintendo Wii U of late, largely from Giant Bomb's coverage of the end of the Miiverse which in many ways was the heart and soul of the Wii U and the community around it. Since the Switch has spent 2017 kicking everybody's ass, it's safe to say that it's fully arrived and supplanted the Wii U...

We're back in the land of roguelikes for Rupeck Games's Caveblazers , a platformercurial (oh, I'm going to make that one happen, believe it) that's a bit more your classic roguelike - colored potions with unknown effects, shrines that provide random benefits, being lucky enough to find a better weapon early on, etc. - than either Flinthook (reviewed a few weeks ago ) or something more instantly...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Jeremy Parish, previously of USGamer.net and now mostly freelancing and working on a few video series as part of his Patreon-funded service, recently provided Polygon a list of his favorite Mario games in order of preference. As someone who's been writing about retro games for nigh on two decades now, he's a person with a significant amount of reverence in that arena, so his list carried an app...

After a slight disaster trying to get Everything to run on this PC (it does, but only sorta), I decided to take a walk down Easy Street via Phoning It In Avenue this time and opted for what I initially perceived to be a throwaway picross game I could write a few hundred words about, largely because I was getting a little frustrated at an already irksome week and picross has always been a tonic...

Welcome to another Saturday Summaries! I'm spending most of today in our chat room, watching Alex "Rock God" Navarro drum for sixteen hours for our Extra Life charity streams. This will be a shorter Summaries as a result, but there was one sorta nerdy talking point I had in mind for this intro before we dig into what I've been playing this week. When Star Wars started over, tossing out most of...

We need a better term for these roguelike platformers, since there's enough of them around now - e.g. Rogue Legacy , Spelunky , Risk of Rain , Super House of Dead Ninjas , and now Flinthook - to justify having their own genre tag. I was batting around "Platfortune" or "Platformercurial" before I realized the inventor of " spacewhipper " probably has no business coining new genre nomenclature. B...

It's another All-New Saturday Summaries coming atcha! I'm going to have to figure out if I can sustain this "all-new" joke for another year. I suspect it shouldn't have persisted beyond January, but what's done is done. You know what else is overdone? Scary games! It's Halloween! Soonish, at least! One might argue that scary games are the most successful of all game types in conferring a very p...

Playing Indie games sometimes feels like taking a step back in time, though rarely in the negative sense. More that, the designers of Indie games are frequently those with a long history of gaming and of a specific favored strain in particular. The solo creator of an Indie spacewhipper , for instance, was almost assuredly raised on a diet of Super Metroid , Castlevania: Symphony of the Night ,...

Welcome to another edition of Sunday Summaries! I mean, Saturday Summaries ! Sorry, this format's still a little too new, I guess. The big topics of the times right now are lootboxes and microtransactions and the games that include them as part of their business model, either instead of the original $60 R.R.P. buy-in or in addition to same, so I thought I'd weigh in on the matter. Not in any pa...

We're a week and change away from the new season of Stranger Things , but it turns out the Duffer Brothers aren't the only ones interested in artifacts of the 70s and 80s and their capacity to still scare us. Stories Untold , from Scottish developers No Code, is a series of little text adventure games that take place in various settings, from a creepy house to a classified laboratory to a remot...

Welcome everyone to another spooky October update. Actually, I'm not really talking anything spooky this week; that can wait for the end of the month. Instead, I wanted to start on two mini-topics before launching into the rest of the Summary and a couple of in-depth pieces on the games I've been playing this week. First, though: how crazy is it that we're getting Super Mario Odyssey , Wolfenst...

Once again stretching the definition of "Indie" here with another game crafted via Ubisoft 's " UbiArt Framework " development tools, which was the source of a handful of smaller games from various Ubisoft studios taking a brief sojourn from building towers for assassins to leap off. I reviewed Valiant Hearts: The Great War a few Indie Game of the Week blogs ago , which was an Ubisoft Montpelli...

We're a week into October now, and it appears I might finally be in with a chance to put together a top ten GOTY list this year thanks to some recent purchases I probably couldn't afford to make, and a few recent bundles and Steam Giveaway successes. My idea right now is to complete at least ten games from this year for a perfunctory list, and then after I'm done polishing off the last few entr...

Amanita Design has been crafting these beautiful, dialogue-free adventure games for a while now, and each one has emphasized exploration, visuals, music and little self-contained brainteasers over more traditional point-and-click inventory puzzles. They rose to fame with 2009's Machinarium , concerning a tiny droid who foils the terrorist plot of a trio of bad robots while discovering and rescu...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Welcome to the end of September everyone! It's been a wild, nostalgic ride for me at least, as Shelftember draws to a close later today with the final blog for the second round (not to be confused with the second blog for the final round, which will come way later). More than that, though, September has perhaps managed to pip the uncharacteristically insane early months of 2017 for quality vide...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Yacht Club Games has been busy making mini-sequels (or, in this case, a mini-prequel) to their 2014 hit Shovel Knight , and I figured it was about time to dig back into their world of chivalrous shovelry to see what these new campaigns were like. We're playing Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment this week, but there's also a Plague Knight campaign and an upcoming King Knight campaign , so I'm pla...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Hey Bombarinos, how is September treating you all? I think I've discovered why I'm getting so far behind on my video gaming and TV watching, and it's twofold: there's just way more of it than usual, and I've been watching far too many PUBG streams. As I've said before, PUGB kind of has the pace of a soccer match, where they spend a whole lot of time doing basically nothing before it builds up t...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Detective Grimoire is, like many Indie adventure games I've played over the years, a recommendation that came from former mod, current book-writing guy, and perennial forum wiseacre @sparky_buzzsaw . The guy has good taste in adventure games, at least of the traditional point-and-click variety, and while I have some misgivings about Detective Grimoire it turned out to be time well spent. But he...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Welcome, all and sundry, to another episode of the Saturday Summaries. It definitely feels like September now, because there's far too much on my plate and far more on the way. Summer didn't quite make the dent I was hoping, and my personal wishlist for 2017 has exceeded 30 games as of writing. It's pretty sweet. But we're not going to go over backlog stuff again; it feels like that's the topic...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

As I work through my back catalog of Indie games I've accrued over the years, it strikes me just how unfortunate it is that so many slip through the cracks. Despite several years spent writing hundreds of Indie-focused features I'm still a dilettante in this field, having only seen the tip of the iceberg. Big reviewer/critic names like the major gaming sites and streamers and YouTubers can help...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Welcome to another edition of the Saturday Summaries: September Synopsis Special Sibilance Spectacular. That's not a name I'm planning to stick with. Let's preface this with saying that I hope any Florida duders or those with family in the area aren't strongly affected by what looks like a legit insane-in-the-weathervane category 5 hurricane. Stay safe, take Maiden's advice to run to the hills...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

There's a particular type of Indie game that... well, I hesitate to call them "prestige games", like they were eligible for some version of the Video Game Oscars, but in essence those spurred by a noble purpose to educate as well as entertain. Not in the Math Blaster sense, but in the "this is a particular type of folklore or historical event that goes underrepresented, and we wanted to base ou...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Welcome to the first Saturday Summaries of September! To say we've had some shitty summer weather of late would be an understatement, so I'm always thankful for the coming of autumn. Not only do we all stop melting, but it also means an uptick in the release of quality video games and TV shows. Even though Game of Thrones has ended its somewhat uneven seventh season, I'm stoked to watch more Bo...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Swedish Indie dev team Image & Form recently announced the release date of the upcoming SteamWorld Dig 2 - September 21st, though I believe that's just for the Switch version - which feels like kismet, because I only just started the excellent SteamWorld Heist earlier this week. I tend to leave most of my Indie Games of the Week playthroughs for Thursday, hence why this weekly feature occasiona...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Welcome to the last Saturday Summaries of August. Pretty much the same as saying the last Summaries of summer, or the last summery Summary? At any rate, I'd say I wasn't quite the backlog-crushing force of nature I'd hoped I would be this season, but I probably talk about my backlog way more than is healthy. Can't help but think if I repurposed all the time kvetching and monitoring that backlog...

It's tough to know what to make of Virginia , at least sufficiently to offer a critical view in a format like this. That goes for both its narrative and its status as a game alike. Now, I'm not going to throw an adventure game under a bus for opting for a more narrative heavy focus, because I see the genre as ever expanding to include differing levels of interactivity. In fact, I might go so fa...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Welcome back everyone to another Saturday Summaries, rounding up a week's worth of blogging. I say that, but it's just the same two blog series as always. I'd write more, but I'm now playing four games simultaneously, which is rarely a state I like to be in as it means my focus is just everywhere and nowhere. It kinda feels like the movie Inception , where I have all these playthroughs nested i...

Ahh, it's starting to feel like a greatest hits month already. Last week we checked in on what old JRPG friends Zeboyd had been up to, and this time we're back in the fantasy realm of Frozenbyte 's Trine : a co-operative puzzle-platformer full of light blooms and dark tombs. 2011's Trine 2 feels like very familiar ground to me, because it was only last year when I played the Enchanted Edition v...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

Welcome, everyone, to the newest edition of Saturday Summaries. It's still Summer, but this August has been unexpectedly busy all the same - this following week sees the release of Nidhogg 2 , Agents of Mayhem , the Switch versions of the first two Jackbox Party Pack s, the PS4 versions of Undertale , N++ and Zero Time Dilemma (really looking forward to finally playing the latter of those) and...

It was nice to wander back into Zeboyd 's orbit again. The 16-bit JRPG throwback developer has been quiet since their last Penny Arcade licensed game released in 2013, and has evidently spent a lot of time and energy in that interim producing 2017's Cosmic Star Heroine : a sci-fi RPG inspired in parts by Chrono Trigger and Phantasy Star , as well as a host of other influences. We're still deep...

Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrow...

I'm looking forward to Vinny's new " The Exquisite Corps " idea, though I wonder how long it will take them to crash and burn on XCOM with Ironman activated. I'm hoping they move onto something that offers a lot of personal expression and difficult choices to make, like a Terraria or a Stardew Valley . In Stardew especially you often need to spend several days of farming and exploring to raise...