Game Reviews
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Gunma’s Ambition Review: 群馬群馬群馬群馬
Gunma’s Ambition is one of the most surprising games to ever be translated from Japanese. It’s a parody of the Nobunaga’s Ambition series, but instead of tasking you with conquering Sengoku-era Japan, it asks you to turn all of modern Japan into Gunma. Gunma is a largely rural prefecture somewhat near Tokyo that, if it’s…
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Lost Wiki: Kozlovka Review – 10 Piece Jigsaw Puzzle
Lost Wiki: Kozlovka is the latest entry in the emerging genre of mysteries based on retro tech and reading lots of documents. This one has you reading the internal wiki of a fictional Eastern European state rather than the usual internet or lost device exploration. Some pages are gated by passwords that you’ll get later…
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Schrödinger’s Call Review – Coming Through Clearly
Schrödinger’s Call is a visual novel in which humanity is 21 nanoseconds from being wiped out by the Moon falling from the sky. It hasn’t happened yet, but is unpreventable, so everyone is momentarily in a state of being alive, yet completely doomed. For… reasons, this means that every human is now in a sort…
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Castle in the Sands Review: Short and Sweet
Castle in the Sands is a very short visual novel about a man who ends up in a magic desert castle while traveling with his sick brother. It describes itself as being inspired by North African culture and by the style of Arabian Nights. I can’t speak to how accurate the cultural details are, but…
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Titanium Court Review: Well, I Didn’t Vote For You
Titanium Court is certainly not like other games. Its gameplay loop is a truly bizarre mix of Match-3 and RTS/autobattling that is presented through an interface with the insane color palette of an 80’s adventure game. Its story casts you as a mortal who has become trapped in a fairy court and made their Queen,…
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Magical Princess Review – The Royal Treatment
Magical Princess is the latest game to get big in the Princess Maker / stat-raiser genre. Like all of these games, it has you playing through a few years of life and making choices about which classes to take and what to do in your free time. Different choices lead to different events triggering during…
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Atelier Escha & Logy Review – Expertly Crafted
Atelier Escha & Logy: Alchemists of the Dusk Sky is one of the most common answers if you ask fans what their favorite Atelier game is. It’s not hard to see why. It sits between the more complicated older games and more approachable newer games and delivers an experience that has the best of both…
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Echo Isle Review: A Very Mini Zelda
Echo Isle is an exceptionally short re-imagining of the GameBoy Color Zelda games. It features sprites and characters that are often as close to the originals as possible while being legally distinct. Almost everything about the gameplay is directly analogous to something from the GBC games. It’s far from the most original game ever made,…
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Pragmata Review – A Game of Two Halves
Lunar gravity isn’t enough to hold this game together
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Atelier Sophie DX Review: Bottom of the BARREL!
More like Atelier Soporific