Why yes, I did decide to play Portal 2 after Portal. And yes, I have played Portal 2 before. But! I haven’t played this Portal 2 before. I shall explain. What I’d never realised before, is that co-op mode in Portal 2 is not Portal 2 with two players. No, it’s a completely separate game. Different levels, different plot, different player character(s), just all set in the same world as Lonely Boi Portal 2. With two players at the same …
It has been a while. I’ve often thought about playing through Portal again, especially since I have it on Steam and so could play it on my Steam Deck. So, naturally, I bought it for the Switch. To be fair, it was a bundle of Portal and Portal 2, and it was on sale for under £3. And you can’t own the same game on too many platforms. Although it looks a little dated now, perhaps not as much as …
Donkey Kong ’94 on the Game Boy is one of my favourite platformers. After the first four levels, which are the same as the original Donkey Kong arcade game, it becomes this massive puzzle platformer with a very agile Mario up against Donkey Kong. Mario vs. Donkey Kong, the Game Boy Advance sequel, was also great, but it introduced levels with mini Mario toys in it that you have to help to the exit in a very Troddlers/Krusty’s Super Fun …
Imagine a cross between that weird hypercube animation optical illusion thing and The Stanley Parable, and you’re some of the way to understanding Superliminal. Like The Stanley Parable, it’s a narrative discovery game in a series of corridors, offices, warehouses and… other places. Whereas Stanley is trapped in a Groundhog Day style scenario, your nameless hero here is inside a dream which has been engineered to help them deal with something in their life. So, almost the same thing. However, …
Well, what a lovely surprise this turned out to be! It had been on the periphery of my want list for a while, but I was sceptical that it was just going to be a Pikmin clone like the reviews suggested it was, and Pikmin is fantastic so that’s a hard wall to break through and every likelihood it’d be a bit pants. And, while there’s definitely a Pikminny taste to Tinykin, it’s certainly its own thing. You’re a little …
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 …
Anyone who describes themselves as a gamer, or even those who read a lot of books, collect DVDs (remember them?) or are avid fans of various other arts, know about The Backlog. It is, as a gamer at least, a list of games that have been bought (or acquired – most games are “free” these days) under the full intent to play, but for whatever reason are Pushed on the stack and have not yet reached Pop. Why these games …
It’s been a long time coming, what with the original game coming in at the end of the Nintendo 3DS’ viable life, and it now being the twilight hours of the Nintendo Switch, but finally it was released and, having given it to my daughter to play first, the time eventually came for me to finish the story that cliffhangered on the previous game. Now, I may be misremembering the first game, but I’m pretty sure this one is somewhat …
It’s another one of those “why did it take me so long to get round to it” games. Well, to answer that, just take a look around the rest of my site. But here I am, having eventually played and completed it. There was much kerfuffle about the change in graphic style between this and the original (and the remasters of those, and the Telltale Games ones) as if the pixels of the first two games were sacred and should …
Unlike 99.99% of Splatoon players, the game has always been about the single player game to me. My understanding is that most players aren’t even aware there is a single player mode. I don’t dislike the online multiplayer, and sure, I supplemented my solo play through Splatoon 3 with a few online games, but it’s not where all the fun for me is. At the end of Splatoon 2 (as in, the single player game there), it’s teased that some …
Back in the 90s, Channel 4 in the UK would sometimes show strange animated short films from abroad. I think they were part of some animation festival or something. This game immediately put be in mind of one of those. It’s a weird, nonsensical, abstract cartoon but it’s also a point and click adventure game. There’s no (recognisable) speech. Little in the way of explicit instruction, no narration, and certainly no explanation to the events. But it works! Assembling the …
And the first completed game of 2024 is… A Tiny Sticker Tale! Which you already knew because that’s the title of this post. Free on Amazon or Epic or something (it’s hard to track these days), A Tiny Sticker Tale was on my Switch eShop wishlist following John Walker’s enthusing on his blog. But since it was free elsewhere, and Steam Deck-able, I moved there instead. It’s not often I have to rush to complete a game. With this one, …
What is this? A Playdate game? That I purchased? With actual money? Is that even legal? It seems so! Sketch, Share, Solve is a Picross game, and a $3 Picross game at that. It also has mostly the same (correct) controls as the Jupiter-written 3DS and Switch Picross games, which is good as that’s the only way to play them as far as I’m concerned. As it’s on the Playdate, it’s all in black and white and the size of …
Delayma because it’s like “dilemma”, you see. And autokerwrongt keeps changing it to that. Trolley Delayma was an entry in a Ludum Dare game jam, where the theme was “delay”. They’ve used that, combined with the philosophical “trolley problem” to make a game which looks somewhat like, but plays very differently to, Baba Is You. “Trolley” is American for tram, in case you were confused why this isn’t set in Asda, and the associated problem is whether to run down …
It’s another Rusty Lake joint, like Samsara Room from the other day. It’s very similar in style, only the setting this time is, as the title might suggest, a hotel. But not an ordinary hotel, oh no. This is one where a number of distinguished animal guests have been invited to attend several consecutive evenings of exquisite meals. Meals where one of the guests is the main course each night. Your job is to kill each in turn, using standard …
