Author: Christian Donlan
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Why is Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door so brilliant? Because it embraces Mario for the blank slate he is
This piece is a retrospective rather than a review and contains spoilers for Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. Simply the thing I am? Oli Welsh, gone and much-missed (he didn’t die), once made an excellent point to me about the Mario RPGs. There’s this brilliant running joke in some of them that I had…
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Bonfires are still my favourite FromSoftware idea
Year three, at least, and I continue to play Dark Souls very, very slowly. Actually, that’s not true. Sometimes I play in frantic bursts. At others I let it lie for months and months with no progress at all. I’m still relatively early on, deep in a dungeon that looks like the inside of someone’s…
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Game of the Week: Play WarioWare, it’s what Danny DeVito would want
There’s a lot of good stuff out this week. For starters, Indika looks weird and fascinating, while Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, the latest from the geniuses at Simogo, promises to tie my brain into bows for the next few months: more on that game soon. Either of these would be an ideal game of…
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One last stroll through Redfall, at the pace it was always meant to be played
Calm seas and sunny skies. I had not been back to Redfall in a while before this week, when events meant I suddenly knew I had to check in again. Spring has finally arrived in Sussex, so when I turned the game on one morning and sat down to play, a warming sun was already…
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Game of the Week: 2120 and books that contain mazes
I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Mr Gum books, but I read them with my daughter when she was seven or eight, and I don’t think I’ll ever get over them. They’re ingenious and hilarious and weird, and they all have this lovely sense of having been written at great speed, just conjured…
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Animal Well review – this one gets deep
Explore a bright vision of subterranean nature in this astonishingly rich Metroidvania. In the dripping midnight glade there is a telephone resting on the earth. It’s an antique. I can tell that from the limited 2D pixel art. Although it’s just a few lines and dots and smudges of light, I can imagine the weight…
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Hades 2 early access review – polish and terrifying power from some of the best out there
Supergiant’s first ever sequel may feel very comfortable and familiar, but Hades’ best weapon remains the power of surprise. Sequels are always difficult, I imagine. How to capture the core brilliance of a thing and build on it? What to add, what to remove? I’ve always loved Sid Meier’s rule of thirds for Civilisation games:…
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Let’s go climbing in some games
It was Digital Foundry’s John Linneman who first made me see the truth. The truth, in this case, being that Crackdown, the deliriously great open-world blaster, is not a platform game so much as it’s a climbing game. Crackdown casts you as a supercop in a city in which you can race up skyscrapers as…
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Game of the Week: Not a Hero is another reminder of Roll7’s brilliance
One of the hallmarks of a great studio – I’m deciding this as I type it, but it definitely sounds legit – is that they can take on surprising themes and topics and genres and still feel like themselves. This week’s game of the week had to be a Roll7 joint, and while I could…
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Is Scrabble Together “anti-human”, or is it a creative win for accessibility?
A few weeks back, Mattel launched a new version of the board game Scrabble, called Scrabble Together. While it’s far from the first new version of Scrabble ever made, it’s a super interesting idea. Scrabble Together arrives on the back of the traditional Scrabble board, and the concept is that it’s a cooperative affair. Players…