Game Reviews
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Our Winter Sports Review – Our Winter of Mild Content
Our Winter Sports is a Winter Olympics simulator, although it avoids needing to pay for any licenses by masking it as a competition between some random kids and having a few fake events. You play a decathlon-style series of 10 events and score points based on how you do in each one. Events range from…
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Desktop Soccer Review – Middle of the Table
Desktop Soccer is an arcade-y soccer game that theoretically features a bunch of modes, but that is really entirely about the tournament mode. Of the others, practice and friendly matches are really the same thing except that one is against the AI and one is against humans. Two other modes are gachas to get new…
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Theatrhythm Final Bar Line Review: Passing the Bar
Theatrhythm Final Bar Line is the third non-arcade release in Square’s rhythm game series centered on Final Fantasy music. It isn’t a particularly radical departure from the last release, 2014’s Curtain Call, although it does feature dramatically more songs and characters as well as extensive plans for expansion DLC. Other than some changes to the…
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The Ship Review – Murder on the High Seas
The Ship is a multiplayer game from 2006 that, in its primary mode, drops players on a large ship and tasks each of them with hunting down a specific different player. Everyone in the game (except, optionally, a handful of “passenger” players) has a target and is someone else’s target, but all you know at…
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A Space for the Unbound Review – Perfection in the Imperfections
A Space for the Unbound is the latest game from Indonesian developers Mojiken, who previously made great games like She and the Light Bearer and When the Past was Around. ASFTU is another adventure-style game, but it breaks from most of their previous work in that it is unashamedly about a specific time and place…
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Judgment Review – I Fought The Law(yer)
Judgment is the beginning of the Yakuza series’ move away from that name and its focus on, well, the yakuza. You play as a private detective/lawyer who is not and has never been an actual yakuza member, but who still has close ties with one particular family. The story and gameplay similarly sit somewhere between…
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Tanuki Sunset Review – Longboarding into the Sunset
Tanuki Sunset is a game about longboarding down an extremely long road while being a tanuki. The road was built with wanton disregard for the safety of both longboarding tanukis and drivers, so there are no barriers preventing you from plummeting thousands of feet to the ground below. The road is also strewn with hazards…
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Bear and Breakfast Review: Half Baked Breakfast
Bear and Breakfast is a game about running a bunch of cabins in the wood while being a bear. There’s really very little significance to you being a bear, though, and, unfortunately, it is far from the only idea that wasn’t fully developed. B&B starts off with a promising loop of repairing buildings, decorating them,…
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Petal Crash Review – Super Flower Fighter
Petal Crash is a puzzle fighting game in the vein of Super Puzzle Fighter, Tetris Attack, or Pokémon Puzzle League, although it relies on a sokobon-esque mechanic rather than falling gems. Any block on the board can be pushed in any of the four cardinal directions ice puzzle-style, and if it hits a block of…
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Peglin Review – Fear the Pachinko Goblin
Peglin is a roguelite by way of Peggle and, thanks to Roundguard, is somehow not the first game I’ve played with this exact mashup of mechanisms. Just like in Peggle, the core idea is that you need to launch a ball each turn so it falls down a pachinko board and ideally hits as many…