You have to imagine that the team at Game Freak is bursting with ideas. The studio puts out new mainline Pokémon adventures with a machinelike precision. But every so often it launches a curious experiment, whether it’s an action title about a militarized elephant or turning horse races into a card game, showing that it’s […]
Untitled Goose Game is a tough act to follow. It was a silly experience that captured what I imagine it would feel like to be a sentient goose: a lot of waddling, a lot of honking, and a lot of shenanigans. That’s why Big Walk, the next game from Goose Game developer House House, feels […]
The Mermaid Mask, the next point-and-click game from Tangle Tower developer SFB Games, has everything you could ask for in a great murder mystery. It starts with a compelling setup: The captain of a submarine is found dead in a locked room, his body next to a mysterious cauldron with blood trickling across the floor. […]
What Surrounds Us takes its title literally. You play as a circle surrounding a hole in its middle – it looks like a donut with frosting. You work together with other sentient moving circles, sometimes helping them joyfully meet with others. And you traverse a large map that’s composed entirely of, you guessed it, a […]
It’s impossible to talk about a new Xbox game without also talking about the state of Xbox. Microsoft’s gaming division is in freefall: Recent headlines are dominated by extensive layoffs, decimated studios, and confusing strategies, most of which stem from years of bad decisions and expensive acquisitions. But it wasn’t always that way. Through its […]
Nintendo does a lot of weird things, but Splatoon might just be one of the strangest – or at least the boldest. The series started as an attempt to muscle into the ultra-competitive online shooter space, but in a way that feels a world away from the violence and bombast of Call of Duty or […]
It’s been a good few weeks for games on rails. Nintendo’s Star Fox remake wisely kept the tightly scripted, action-packed levels from Star Fox 64 largely the same, and they’re still fun to fly through nearly 20 years later. Denshattack!, a new game from Undercoders, similarly features levels packed with carefully orchestrated sequences to great […]
Roleplaying games are often defined by excess. Storylines that span dozens of hours, side quests so big they could be their own game, massive worlds that require complex maps to explore, and casts so big you start forgetting character names. That’s part of what makes these games feel like epic adventures, but it can also […]
This week should have been a celebration for Doom developer id Software. The studio just launched Revelations, a meaty expansion for Doom: The Dark Ages that adds a powerful new weapon and more demonic levels to blast through. Even though I hadn’t picked up The Dark Ages for more than a year, it only took […]
Rhythm Heaven isn’t Nintendo’s best-known series, nor its most prolific. Prior to the launch of Rhythm Heaven Groove on the Switch this week – it’s out on July 2nd – there were only four previous entries, one of which was exclusive to Japan. The most recent came out more than a decade ago. Even still, […]