Author: Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

[ad_1] Often all you really need in a video game is the world itself and some basic encouragement to explore it. So it proves for Chasing the Unseen, which casts you as a little boy gadding about tapering, airborne islands of rock, soil and vegetation, wrapped around each other in a silty underwater haze.…

[ad_1] Blending fishing with Gothic horror and Lovecraft is a fine hook, but Dredge is too defined by simple loot-and-upgrade rhythms to reel you in. Among the critters you’ll draw from the deepest depths of direful fishing sim Dredge is the snailfish, an unhappy sea sausage which, as the game’s encyclopaedia explains, starts to…

[ad_1] All the confusing yet irresistible energy of early-noughties double-A gaming, marred by awful writing and a core gimmick that doesn’t ignite. Wanted: Dead’s marketing materials describe it as a “love letter to the sixth generation of consoles”, aka PS2, Xbox and Gamecube. It’s the work of veterans from that period – developer Soleil…

[ad_1] While a fine piece of craft and a sumptuous reworking of the setting, EA Motive’s Dead Space remake sheds a little of the 2008 game’s enchantment. The not-so-good ship ISG Ishimura is around 62 years old by the time Isaac Clarke arrives there in Dead Space. During its long career as a “planet…

[ad_1] I started 2022 by suggesting that we question the prominence of earning as a “play” activity and of economic transactions generally in videogame worlds. One way of going about that is to think about the many different currencies we’ve all abandoned in various save files over the years. Rupees in Zelda. Glimmer,…

[ad_1] A miserable cocktail of ideas from other action-platformers and the worst parts of Rick and Morty. High on Life doesn’t care whether you think it’s terrible, so why should I waste your time spelling it out? This is a vapid action game and an empty, ramshackle satire locked in a defensive crouch of…

[ad_1] An aimless-feeling revamp of 2016’s best multiplayer game, slightly coarsened by free-to-play grinding. Overwatch is a superhero story, and if there’s one thing superheroes adore doing in their marketing materials, it’s staring dramatically outward at something you can’t see. Overwatch 2’s launch menu art is a classic example of this – and also,…

[ad_1] You didn’t hear it from me first, but Overwatch 2 is not Overwatch 2. It is Overwatch 2.0, a free-to-play rejig of the celebrated 2016 hero shooter with rebalanced characters, a sprinkling of new faces, modes and maps, and a predictably tedious seasonal Battle Pass system whereby unlocks are either paid for or…

[ad_1] An exhilarating, fluid, incredibly broken mage-‘em-up set in tortured procedural worlds. Dream Cycle is the first game I’ve played that puts a fresh spin on Blink, Dishonored’s widely imitated short-range teleport spell. Admittedly, it’s less about the ability in itself, than how it works with and against the game’s sporadically coherent terrain. In…

[ad_1] While component tales and battles can be hit-and-miss, this elderly Squaresoft anthology is a wonderful testament to its genre’s flexibility and range. The RPG is the genre in which side activities are always threatening to take centre stage. Many classic specimens are built around a more conscious antagonism between main and secondary content…