Game Reviews
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Platonica Space Review: Spaced Out
Platonica Space calls itself an exploration adventure, but it’s really an almost completely linear visual novel. It consists of a bunch of loops of waking up in a maze of repeating rooms and looking at memories from unknown people. Memories appear as wisps of smoke in some rooms and require you to place a related…
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Scarlet Deer Inn Review
Scarlet Deer Inn is an unusual blend of adventure game and platformer. You play as Elise, the owner of the titular inn, and gameplay alternates between talking to people in town and puzzle platforming sequences. I think the game’s store descriptions are intentionally vague about the story. It just alludes to finding something vaguely spooky…
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Princess Maker: Children of Revelation Review
Princess Maker: Children of Revelation is the first new game in the series for almost 20 years and comes from a Korean studio that licensed the IP. It attracted controversy on release from Early Access because it ended up being cheaper for day 1 buyers than Early Access players, but even aside from that, the…
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Endless Legend 2 Review
Endless Legend 2 is the sequel to Amplitude’s 2014 Endless Legend and the sixth game in the Endless Series after that and two games each in the Space and Dungeon series. Space is Amplitude’s take on a galaxy-scale 4X like Galactic Civilizations and Legend is a high fantasy 4X like Age of Wonders, but using…
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Yumegirl Early Access Review
Note: I received this for free through Steam Curator. Since it was pre-release, I don’t know what the price will be and can’t make any value judgment on that. There is very little content in the initial Early Access, but that could be fine depending on what it goes for. Yumegirl is describes itself as…
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Trails in the Sky First Chapter Review
The original Trails in the Sky kicked off a story arc that’s still going strong over a dozen games and two decades later. There’s really nothing else like Falcom’s commitment to this world in gaming, so it’s only fitting that they’ve shown the game itself the same love and brought it into the modern era.…
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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.…
