Hate Plus is an incredibly well-designed, engrossing, pretty visual novel: this is not all surprising given the high bar set by Christine Love’s previous work. For Hate Plus, however, the standard video game review fluff around mechanics is completely and utterly superfluous: as with the previous games, one could strip away all of the wonderful … [Read more…]
Humour is a sadly dying thing in games: whereas in the mid-nineties, we had the likes of Parodius, Harmful Park and Conker’s Bad Fur Day to satirise and parody tropes of the time, there’s been a move towards the incredibly po-faced in the early 2000s as games have struggled and struggled to finally have their … [Read more…]
No game as adequately expresses the sentiment that existence is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” than Comix Zone: half-an-hour and a bit of luck is enough to see one through the game from start to finish. That short half-hour, however, will be among some of the most tense and wonderful that one could hope … [Read more…]
Bastion‘s greatest strengths lie in its wonderfully consistent art direction and dogged insistence upon telling its story on its own terms. It is a testament to experimentation in how game narratives are conveyed in its focus on continuous storytelling, rather than relying upon breaking up the flow of the game with cutscenes or similar player … [Read more…]
After seven iterations, it would take something special to keep the produce of a franchise fresh: in the case of films, the cinematographic tropes used by the director of the series would become known to the watcher, perhaps to the point of them tiring of them; in the case of books, the sort of narrative … [Read more…]