Game Reviews
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Mass Effect 2 Review & Retrospective
Mass Effect 2 is one of the most influential games ever made, both in terms of its impact on the industry and on me personally. You can see at least a bit of it in almost every RPG since, whether it’s the companion loyalty quests, consequences remembered from previous games, or an analogue to the…
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Atelier Meruru Review – Craft Me a Village
Atelier Meruru is the final game of the Arland trilogy. The plot follows Meruru, princess of the kingdom of Arls, who has decided to become an alchemist rather than do anything princess-y. Her father agrees to this as long as she uses alchemy to advance the kingdom, which is how Gust justified this being a…
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Subversive Memories Review: Subject Redacted
Subversive Memories is a PS1-style survival horror game set during the last days of Brazil’s military dictatorship. It opens with the standard “this is a work of fiction warning”, yet immediately tells you “this is not a work of fiction” upon starting a new game. It’s pretty clear that, supernatural elements aside, the latter warning…
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Mysteries of Old Tokyo Review: The More You Know
Mysteries of Old Tokyo is a good game made of a bunch of parts that don’t necessarily combine well. It is ostensibly a mystery puzzle game in which you use a 90’s computer interface to navigate around Tokyo, find documents, and then use information from those documents to complete reports about the locations you visited.…
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Atelier Rorona Review – Flawed Craft
Atelier Rorona is the first game in the Arland sub-trilogy of the massive Atelier series. Like all of the trilogies, it’s entirely self-contained, so you don’t need to have played any of the older games to start here. Rorona was one of the first games in this series to get much recognition in the West,…
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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,…
