March2024
Review Snufkin: Melody Of Moominvalley (Switch) - A Joyful, Dreamlike Adventure With An Edge
Snufkin compares to you
Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley opens with a goodbye. The music swells and this goodbye pulls hard on the heartstrings. It’s a goodbye to a Moomin, so perhaps you’d think it’s not an important goodbye – just a Moomin, after all. But it sets up the main arc of a well-paced and imaginative musical adventure. For the...
May2023
Review Cassette Beasts (Switch) - An Inventive Monster Battler That's Far More Zelda Than Pokémon
We'd die for Traffikrab
There’s something that feels right about a monster-battling creature-collecting game coming to a Nintendo console. Originally released for PC on 26 April 2023, Cassette Beasts has made its way to the Nintendo Switch where it belongs. At first glance, Cassette Beasts clearly draws quite a lot of inspiration from Pokémon,...
August2021
Mini Review Townscaper (Switch) - A Peaceful, Pretty, City-Building Plaything
If you build it, they will come
They say only the boring are ever bored. Back in the day you’d have been lucky to have a wooden stick to play with – unless it was sunny, in which case you could have the shadow as well. Kids these days with their mobile phones… where’s the imagination? It’s here! In Townscaper, a game which publisher Raw...
December2020
Review Star Renegades (Switch) - Borrows Ideas From The Best To Create A Truly Inventive RPG
"Something good? Something bad? A bit of both?"
Modern game design can be a fickle beast, in that it often falls on either end of the spectrum of innovation. On one hand, you have games that are content to ‘play it safe’ and only stick to well-worn genre conventions that are satisfying, if not unsurprising. On the other end, you have games that...
October2020
Review GONNER2 (Switch) - Another Way To Die In An Increasingly Crowded Genre
I live, I die, I die some more
It’s been three years since GoNNER dropped on Switch, a game we thought pretty highly of. Bringing us a challenging 2D platformer with rogue-like mechanics, it told the story of Ikk, our altruistic blob-like hero that set out to help a land-bound whale called Sally. Placing us in a series of procedurally generated...
February2020
Review Mosaic (Switch) - Biting Social Commentary Masquerading As A Video Game
Just another piece of the puzzle
Mosaic, from Krillbite Studio, isn’t an exciting game. It’s not going to keep you on the edge of your seat, and it won’t get your blood pumping. In fact, Mosaic isn’t even a game at all in a lot of ways; it's more of a grayscale pastiche of physical life in the digital age – but not one that ever follows...
April2019
Review Out There: Ω The Alliance - Somebody Turned Mass Effect 2's Best Bit Into A Full Game
Into the expanse
There are plenty of reasons Mass Effect 2 is considered the pinnacle of Bioware’s grand space-faring saga, but who knew a mining mini-game would remain one of its most enduring qualities? For all the suicide missions and inter-species 'sexy time', it was the sedate pastime of visiting new planets and surveying each one for...
December2018
Review Kingdom Two Crowns - Calming Strategy Made More Accessible Thanks To Couch Co-op
Get crown on it
Following last year’s Kingdom: New Lands on Switch, side-scrolling resource management game Kingdom Two Crowns (no colon this time) is a conscious effort to streamline the roguelike and make it, well, a little less like Rogue. In this third entry in the series from developer Noio – now partnering with Coatsink – losing your...
August2018
Review Bad North (Switch eShop)
Heathen chemistry
If the recent releases of Jotun: Valhalla Edition and The Banner Saga Trilogy have taught us anything, it’s this: the Vikings make for the most bloodthirsty of heroes. But what if the tables were turned, and it was you defending against the reaving Norsemen? The sound of a ghostly war horn roaring in the distance. Longships...
February2018
The strangest dream
One of the defining attributes of any 'Metroidvania' platformer is freedom, but Dandara is built around a rather striking limitation. Our titular heroine can neither run nor jump. Dandara is a mystically empowered figure who's been awoken from her slumber to rescue an oppressed dream-like world from wicked supernatural beings...
September2017
Review Kingdom: New Lands (Switch eShop)
The price is knight
Something of a cult hit when it appeared on Steam, and more recently on XLBA, NOIO and Liquorice games' (published by Raw Fury) Kingdom: New Lands makes its way to Nintendo Switch. A 2D sidescrolling micromanagement simulator in a pixellated medieval landscape, it tests attention, patience and strategy in equal measure. A...
