Seems these days that games I’m interested in playing end up free somewhere if I just wait a while. It Takes Two is one of those titles, as there it is, on PS+++++ (I forget how many +). It’s a two player co-op title, with players each taking control of a heading-for-divorce couple who, because of magic or something prompted by their young child being upset with Mummy and Daddy arguing, have been turned into toys. You know, standard stuff. …
Had some time off ill (yay crippling Covid!) with my daughter so found this cheap to play through together whilst exhaustion drained my life force. It’s a Lego reimagining of the PlayStation Horizon Zero Dawn game, only isn’t really like all the many other Lego games by TT Games perhaps because it isn’t by TT Games. You still go through levels, smashing some Lego stuff and sometimes building Lego stuff, but really it’s more about the combat sections and story. …
There is nothing to say about Jupiter’s Picross series that I haven’t already said. There’s not much new here that hasn’t been done before, it’s just more brain-wrinkling and relaxing (at the same time, somehow) picross puzzles. One thing I would like, perhaps, is fewer of the 5×5, 10×10 and even 15×15 puzzles, and more of the 40×30 ones. There are only a handful here, and you only get them if you have save data from previous games in the …
After finishing Xenoblade Chronicles X, I was at a loss as to what to play next. I didn’t fancy another 125+ hour epic, so had a flick through what I had installed, and came across Night in the Woods. I’d looked at it before but hadn’t realised I owned it (well, PS+ rented it anyway), and I found it was only a few hours long, so here we are. It starts with you, an anthropomorphic cat coming back to her …
And that’s it. I’ve officially run out of Xenoblade to play. In about a year and a half I’ve completed the entire series of games in some sort of obsessive newfan flurry of activity. Why did I sleep on this series for so long? It’s bloody great. Anyway, I’ve said a lot about the three numbered games in the series, and I have to say I was a little worried coming to X because I’d heard it wasn’t quite the …
As I have a Netflix subscription, I get access to a number of games on iOS as a bonus. Most of them are shovelware nonsense. Some are tie-ins with Netflix shows like Squid Game or Queen’s Gambit. Some, are “indie hits” like Kentucky Route Zero. Some fit into more than one of these categories. Word Trails is probably shovelware. It’s one of $hlmun games which litter the App Store that are effectively identical, and when you see the screenshots you’ll …
No, I don’t know why I played this either. It wasn’t that great, with very flickery graphics, was very short, and did nothing much other games (even at the time of original release) hadn’t already done far better. Probably a miracle it managed as well as it did on the Game Boy hardware, although, I suspect, impossible to see on the original device’s blurry screen – it’s bad enough on the telly – but still average at best.
Keita Takahashi makes some really odd games. Most well known (and probably still his best) is Katamari Damacy, but I’ve also played, enjoyed and got thoroughly confuddled by Noby Noby Boy (the refrain from which is still a thing in my house), Wattam and Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure. to a T, completed with a lower case t at the start, is his newest and yeah, it’s a concept. Your main character, who I think is a girl but maybe you …
Season Two of the Playdate games have started arriving, and the first one I worked through is this lovely little archaeology title, where you dig down and find bones and… well, you do that a lot. It reminds me a lot of SteamWorld Dig, although it isn’t a platformer and has (almost) no combat, but progression is similar. The deeper you dig, the more energy it takes to dig, so you buy upgrades (with money earned from things you’ve dug …
I’ve always loved this game. It’s the Game Boy version of Donkey Kong, also sometimes referred to as “Donkey Kong ’94”. I talked about it more last time I played it, which I thought was maybe three years ago but it turns out it was FOURTEEN years ago. Cripes. This time, I played it on the Switch’s Game Boy game service thingy, but it’s just the same game as it ever was before. It’s still really slick, and plays well …
This Famicom Detective Club game differs from the others in a number of ways. Firstly, for some reason, “Famicom Detective Club” is now the subtitle rather than the title. Secondly, there are a few tweaks to the dialogue system (which I’ll explain in a bit), but the big one is that this isn’t a remake of a 40 year old Famicom title – it’s a completely new game in the series, with the murder mystery story written by the same …
So what if dominoes was an art deco dungeon crawling roguelike deck-building puzzle game? You’ve inherited a fortune from your great uncle, but only if you’re able to reach room 46 of his 45 room house. Getting to the room involves solving logic and cryptic puzzles, realising that random items in each room might actually be important clues, and putting together hidden messages and objects to understand your family’s past and the reason the house is so weird. The weirdness …
Remember a while back I played a game called Shin Chan The Endless Subtitle About Seven Days Of Summer Or Something? It’s one of those lazy Japanese summer games by Kaz Ayabe where you go fishing and catch bugs and do lots of minor things with very little consequence. Natsu-Mon is one of them. This time you’re a boy who’s part of a circus troupe, staying at a guest house in a small town for the summer. You run errands …
This is actually half of a double pack along with The Missing Heir, as they were released together but are actually separate downloads. It’s obviously very similar to the other Detective Club game, and has some of the same characters. This one is set a few years before the other, however, at the start of your private detective career, and centres around investigating a murder in a high school (where you meet the girl who will become your partner in …
I’d seen a number of reviews comparing this series of games to the Phoenix Wright games and let me tell you this – they’re not really much alike at all. Phoenix Wright has humour and puzzles and magic and stupidity and nonsense, whereas Famicom Detective Club is (despite appearances) rooted in reality with no magic or ghosts or stuff like that. And there’s no trial – just investigations. Which play out mostly like a visual novel. The Missing Heir is …
