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Feature: How the west was fun
Reviewing Red Dead Redemption 2 a year after its console release is like happening upon a frontier homestead after it's been attacked by bandits. It’s a game that has been subjected to every take under the sun, and stripped to the bone by internet vultures; every last secret dug up, every mechanic scalped and scrutinised, until no magic remains. I, adopting the role of world-weary…
Feature: Not much to sea
I cruised through dozens of fights before disaster struck. A scuffle with a cultist saw my ship scuttled, thanks to me forgetting to man the water pumps. A foolish oversight, but I’d at least had the foresight to buy a lifeboat, which saved me and my crew from a quick and merciful death. The days dragged in that tiny boat, as we drifted in diminishing…
Feature: Head banger
I’m almost tempted to celebrate the appallingly named MO: Astray for not being a Metroidvania. I loves me some Metroiding, but it’s proved a real pleasure to play an action-platformer that focuses on continuous progression without a trace of backtracking. It’s especially a pleasure when it happens in a game as precisely designed as this.
Feature: Turn again
Manifold Garden has been described as a 3D puzzle game, but everyone who says that is wrong, because it is actually a horror game. Oh, it might be in disguise as a puzzle game. It has special doors and pressure pads, and you manoeuvre the right coloured blocks onto the right coloured things by walking up walls and changing the gravity and what have you.…
Feature: Always wear your meatbelt
Just outside of my hometown there’s an air rifle shooting club owned and operated by large men whose disposition barred them from joining their local territorial army. You know the men, they smell like sawdust and are all named Colm and wear tattered promotional t-shirts from a local shotgun pellet and rat poison manufacturer called “MAD DOG FIREARMS AND FARMING SUPPLIES” and whose logo is…
Feature: Beast mode
Planet Zoo is a game where you can build your own zoo. It’s buggy, intermittently opaque, frequently saccharine, and - barring an eleventh hour miracle - it’s my undisputed game of the year. Because here’s the thing: it’s a game where you can build your own zoo. And by thunder, it delivers on that promise. Usually, by the time I review a game - especially…
Feature: War is hell, if you haven't heard
Of course Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare has nothing interesting to say about war. Of course its guns feel good, and its explosions are many and impressive. Of course the multiplayer is essentially the same game we've been playing for over a decade, only prettier and in more flavours. Of course a part of me likes it, and of course part of me is jaded…
Feature: Other people, etc.
If you've played Oxenfree you probably already know a little of what to expect from Afterparty: a smart, walking--and--talking adventure game where optional speech bubbles appear above the characters' heads; naturalistic dialogue between characters whose relationships grow in complexity as the game goes on; some weird supernatural stuff. Afterparty does all these things, but Night School Studio's second outing also feels stronger and punchier --…
Feature: Not the Samus the rest
The last few years have seen quite the coming together of gaming platforms. Walls that seemed eternal have come tumbling down, as publishers like Capcom and Konami have brought console exclusives to PC, cross-platform play has become more common, and even Nintendo has released its own IP on non-Nintendo machines. You can even get Mario Kart on your telephone. But sadly, as much as this…
Feature: A gentle, but knotty murder mystery
I love a good locked room mystery. The best ones aren't so much about the 'whodunnit', but the 'howdunnit'. The former's still important for a satisfying ending, of course, but unravelling what appears to be the impossible (how did they get in? How did they leave?) is a much more brain-pleasing knot to unpick than figuring out which of the many shifty faces in front…
Feature: The clunkman cometh
Chernobylite, right, is what's known as a technogenic compound. We found bits of the "lava-like glassy material" in the ruins of the Chernobyl powerplant after it exploded, slopped into a continually melting, still hot structure called the Elephant's Foot. Wikipedia informs me it is a "crystalline zirconium silicate with a high (up to 10%) content of uranium as a solid solution". What horrors man hath…
Feature: In space, no one can hear you meme
There are a few times, during Obsidian's rootin' tootin' shootin' lootin' first person space cowboy RPG The Outer Worlds, where the game lampshades the tropes it uses. One of them really stood out to me. An information broker asked me to clear the airwaves he used for his radio signals, meaning I had to convince two rival faction leaders to stop broadcasting. This meant having…
Feature: King of Dragon Surpassed
The war chief is dead. Aminai, our wisest herder, took her place but was struck with a deadly illness. Crop after crop failed as the world became darker and colder. Our herds are pitiful, barely half of our people have a horse. Our neighbours, once toasting our clan, raid us without mercy, burning defences and stealing precious cattle. Storm worshippers from the south sense weakness…
Feature: “WTF is going on out there?”
Radio Commander is a lit thunderflash tossed through a barracks doorway at two in the morning. It's arriving at the firing range and finding all the rifles in bits at the bottom of treacle barrels. It's John Wayne dressed as a coelacanth conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. It's Dad's Army dubbed into Swahili. It's Polio The Musical... wasabi toothpaste... a Slush Puppie enema... Ho Chi Minh kicking…
Feature: Top of the blocks
Kine! What a wonderfully opaque, wide-ranging word. It apparently means “cattle” or “excellent” in Hawaiian Pidgin English, but I'm guessing the nod here is to “kinematics” as in “abstract, mechanical motion”. That explains about half of Gwen Frey's swish, challenging puzzler -- her solo debut, after leaving Flame in the Flood developer The Molasses Flood and founding new studio Chump Squad. At its most elementary,…
Feature: One man's trash
Depending on who you ask, the apocalypse is not happening, extremely close, or already here. There's already been at least one casualty in the form of usual premature evaluator Steve Hogarty, who has either been raptured or is away for two weeks. No other explanations are possible. I have filled the time this week with post-global flood city builder/Waterworld simulator Flotsam, a special favourite of…
Feature: My uncle told me "disco biscuits" is slang for bad drugs
So, then. Disco Elysium, like Planescape: Torment, or even Fallout or Arcanum, is an isometric RPG with a lot of text. You, an alcoholic, probably drug-addicted cop in early middle age, wake up to face a new partner, a lynching that needs solving, and an apocalyptic hangover that has wiped your memory. So, you start the work of learning... well, everything. I managed to stumble…
Feature: Danse Macabre
Felix The Reaper is a master of distraction. Instead of making him rush to move shadows about so he can set up elaborately fatal traps, all I want to do is watch this chubby lil' reaper bust endless moves to the beat of his Walkman. and I mean moves: it would be ridiculous to call these "idle animations", because this groovin' dealer of death simply…
Feature: Moon's still haunted.
To be a Destiny player is to consume. To voraciously devour great wads of Content, like one of its giant inter-dimensional space worm gods gorging on a planetoid, and then, never sated, moving on to the next. The newest feast is Shadowkeep. It’s as beautifully crafted as ever. We get to eat the Moon! It looks stunning and it’s fun and weird and I love…
Feature: A clone in the dark
Conglomerate. Even the word sounds sinister, like it might throw a burlap sack over your head and bungle you into the back of a blacked out minivan, then pop you in the temple with a silenced pistol and throw your corpse out in the street in front of your mother’s house. Whether it’s the militaristic association of the glottal “cong”, or the overcast bleakness of…
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