Author: [email protected] (Robin Valentine)

From its opening moments, No Rest for the Wicked is dripping with atmosphere. Literally, a lot of the time—during my 90 minutes with the game, its grim setting is perpetually damp, a clouded island where bandits and worse lurk among sodden ruins.  Its inhabitants—including my created character, a mystic warrior known as a “Cerim”—have a…

While anticipation builds for the next Tomb Raider game, and fans enjoy the recently released remasters of the original trilogy, an unexpected new addition to the series has been announced: a tabletop RPG.  Tomb Raider: Shadows of Truth will let players gather round the table to take on the role of “Truth Seekers”, creating their…

Every February, Kickstarter holds a month-long celebration of tabletop RPGs called ZineQuest, featuring all sorts of crowdfunded zines. What’s a zine, you ask? It’s a short, self-published book, in this context usually an adventure, a supplement, or a small, self-contained game.  They tend to be a bit scrappy and weird, allowing creators to run with…

What’s the word for when something’s like a dolphin? Dolphinesque? Cetecean? Oh, “delphine” apparently. There you go, we’ve both learned something today. The protagonist of Pepper Grinder, she’s delphine, she is.  That might surprise you, given she (Pepper) is not a sea mammal, but in fact a squat, teal-haired woman holding a drill almost as…

The problem with the phrase “it’s like [thing] on acid!” becoming such a lame cliché is that sometimes things really are like other things on acid. The newly announced Children of the Sun, from publisher Devolver, is a dark and hallucinatory tale of a disturbed sniper taking revenge on a backwoods cult, and… well, basically…

You know where you never usually see helicopters? Underground. No idea why that is, but Bore Blasters is here to buck the trend. Playing as a space dwarf (rock and stone!), your job in this arcadey roguelike shooter is to pioneer a bold new mining technique: shooting gold and gems out of the ground in…

Tabletop RPG design studio Son of Oak has had enormous success with City of Mist, a game that combines superhero action with a setting steeped in noir atmosphere and mythological magic. In fact, it’s so full of cool ideas that I put it in our list of the best alternatives to D&D.  It turns out,…