After being exposed to many people saying how much fun and how relaxing this game was, it isn’t a surprise that I bought it for the Switch. Also, all those people were right. You’re given a mountain, and a route to the bottom filled with twists, turns, jumps and cliff edges, and have to ride to the finish as quickly as you can with as few crashes as possible. There are many shortcuts, some of which are obvious, some are …
I’d never heard of this point-and-click adventure game but it seems it was a Kickstarter project a while back. Looking at the credits, now I’ve finished it, there are a number of high profile backers and a fair few people I know or follow on Twitter, so I’m surprised I’d not seen it mentioned before now. Anyway, the lovely @IndieGamerChick gave me a copy via her IndieSelect initiative earlier in the week so here’s my Contactually Obliged Comments. I mean, …
With the original Golden Sun ending on a cliff-hanger, and The Lost Age carrying on directly from it (or rather, from slightly before the end of the first game), I didn’t really have a choice but to start it immediately afterwards. Well, not quite immediately, as you can transfer your saved game from the first game to the follow-up but this required half an hour of password input and correction. Not that you see the benefit of the password for …
It’s been a while since I went cold turkey on Animal Crossing, so I thought I’d inject a bit of something similar when this came up on sale on the Switch eShop. Apparently it’s the first Doraemon game to be officially localised for the West, but it’s also a Story of Seasons (née Harvest Moon) crossover title. How that robot cat/farming game amalgamation works is like this: The plot is about Noby, Doraemon and chums being magically sent back in …
In a sea of coattail riding Vampire Survivors clones, it takes something for one to stand out. HoloCure did this by being free. As in, completely free. No cost, no IAPs, no paid DLC. Free. That, and it came to my attention via a recommendation from Gaming on Linux, who I follow because apparently I’m a Linux gamer now what with the Steam Deck and all. Anyway, the game. it’s Vampire Survivors only with anime girls and cute baddies. Apparently, …
What’s this, you say? It’s been over a month since I completed anything? You thought I was dead? Well, no! Turns out that Tears of the Kingdom is Quite Large and so it has taken me 95 hours to complete it. Which, across a month, is about three hours a day. That’s fine, right? There’s a lot to talk about regarding the game. For example, a number of people complained that it’s just using the same overworld as Breath of …
In which you run a launderette, put washing on, tumble dry, collect it up, and pick up rubbish. Only! In the back room of the launderette is a mostly forgotten and unloved video game arcade with a handful of machines! So when you make laundry money, you buy more arcade machines, and then they make you money, and then they start to make so much money that, actually, the laundrette starts to just get in the way so you oust …
Just in case I’d not had enough Metroidvania games, I bought another one. Only this one is underwater! Which means you constantly have to look for oxygen, and being attacked drains your oxygen, and jetting around drains your oxygen, and you move slowly and you have a harpoon. And at one point you gain use of a hovercraft cowfish shaped submarine which means you don’t need oxygen when in it, and – more importantly – you can survive deeper water. …
What I was expecting from this game: a sort of Tetris puzzle game where you have to fit items into a room. What I was not expecting: a putting-things-away simulator with an unwritten, non-verbal story about the life of a woman. Told over a number of years across various different houses, you unpack your belongings as you move in. Over time, you acquire (and lose) new hobbies, tastes and relationships, but this is only explained by the objects in the …
It’s different, isn’t it? The last few main Pokémon games have all claimed to be “new” in terms of how they play, with Let’s Go! doing away with proper battles with wild Pokémon, Sun and Moon being properly in 3D and Sword and Shield having the Wild Areas. Arceus is like an extrapolation of those Wild Areas, with several large regions you can freely travel around, seeing Pokémon in the wild doing what they do, and catching them by sneaking …
The sequel to Gate of Doom, apparently. Well, it’s obvious when you play but not so much from the titles of the games. Although they’re called Dark Seal and Dark Seal II in some regions so I suppose that makes sense. It also doesn’t say “I’m the wizard!” any more, which instantly loses it a million points. It is a bit better in terms of clunky-flickeryness, and the magic system is improved: Previously it seemed random which effect you’d get …
I used to play Echo Bazaar, an online web-based story RPG thing from Failbetter games, ages ago. Before it was renamed as Fallen London, which is also the setting of the game. It was good, although you really needed to pay for extra moves and features to get the most out of it. I’m against IAPs as a rule so kind of fell off it. I did love the Lovecraft/Pratchett crossover vibe of the world though, and so Sunless Sea …
A long, long time ago, I played about 15 minutes of the original Mega Drive version of this game in a local game shop. It was all in Japanese but I liked the look of it. Not quite as long ago, but still over a decade ago, Sega released the first English translated version of it as part of a Wonder Boy pack on Xbox Live Arcade. I bought it, but never played it. Then this came along. A remake …
When you pay for the Switch Online service, every so often they give you the full, complete versions of retail games for free – for a few days. Then they stop working. This week, they let you download and play Minecraft Dungeons, and my daughter and I completed it before our free trial was up. That’s not to say it’s short, although it’s nowhere near as long as I expected (partly because two large additional areas are walled off behind …
