Category: Reviews
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The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow Review – Quintessential British Folk Horror
Folk horror has been a part of British culture for a long time and, even though the term itself is somewhat new, the genre continues to be a popular source of spooky entertainment. A recent example is Alex Garland’s 2022 film Men, which recontextualises folk horror tropes to tell a distinctly modern story about gender.…
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Binary Domain Review – Seven Out of Ten
Developed by Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, the team behind the Yakuza series, Binary Domain found itself in an odd kind of limbo upon release in 2012. A third-person cover shooter in the vein of Gears of War, the game arrived towards the end of the seventh generation of consoles, during a time period in which…
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Card Shark Review – A Cultivated Garden
Voltaire is famously quoted as saying that you shouldn’t ‘think money does everything or you are going to end up doing everything for money’. Indeed, this adage is so popular that you’re most likely to come across it plastered on Minions-based image macros shared by your extended family on Facebook, or by that dude in…
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Day of the Tentacle Remastered Review – Perfectly Paced Puzzles and Puns
There are several factors that contribute to making a point-and-click adventure game truly great, and rarely do they all manage to coalesce like they do in LucasArt’s 1993 classic Day of the Tentacle. Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman managed, in their first directorial roles no less, to create a sequel to Ron Gilbert’s ground-breaking Maniac…
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Chocobo GP Review – Indefensible Fun
I am a bad person for buying and enjoying Chocobo GP. Only in the year of our Lord 2022 could the physical act of walking into a shop and purchasing a game prove itself to be a moral dilemma. The upcoming Harry Potter game also looks to fit neatly in this category, and consumers will have to grapple…
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Bully Review – The Broadest Possible Strokes
To label something as a product of its time can feel like a non-statement, but for both better and worse, that is exactly what Rockstar’s open-world juvenile delinquent simulator Bully (or Canis Canem Edit in PAL territories) is. Released worldwide in 2006, players take control of fifteen-year-old troublemaker, James ‘Jimmy’ Hopkins, as he navigates the cliquey social strata…
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Sin and Punishment Review – At the Top of the Treasure Chest
Due to my recent acquisition of an RGB modded Nintendo 64 and an EverDrive-64 X7, I was able to indulge in something I’ve wanted to do for a long time — play Sin and Punishment on original hardware. Often considered the ‘one that got away’, Treasure’s rollercoaster third-person rail shooter was a popular choice for import gamers…
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‘How Can You Be Friends With a Monster?’ – Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Review
If you’re anything like me, the title Guardians of the Galaxy immediately conjures mixed feelings. The initial charm of James Gunn’s 2014 action-comedy superhero flick has worn somewhat thin over the years, a phenomenon doubtless intensified by having to hear the phrase ‘I am Groot’ parroted ad-nauseam at countless comic-cons and on numerous message boards.…
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‘The Singer’s Voice Was Honey-love’ — Gitaroo Man Review
In some ways, it’s miraculous that Gitaroo Man was released in Western territories at all. An anime rhythm game in which you battle an axe-wielding demon, aliens, and a giant robot hammerhead shark (to excellent dub-reggae, no less) seems an odd choice for localisation — something you can imagine would have been rejected by publishers on grounds of…
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