Author: Christian Donlan

[ad_1] Compact and terrifying, this score-attack shooter feels like it’s come from the future. In the Secret Fountain levels, I fell in love with the water. I didn’t notice it at first. I was just digging downwards, flattening baddies with my shovel, enjoying the regular knockabout fun of a 2D platformer. But then I…

[ad_1] Compact and terrifying, this score-attack shooter feels like it’s come from the future. Isaac Newton was once moved to put a bodkin, or large, blunt sewing needle, behind his eye. Where exactly? (I feel you would want to be exact about this.) “Betwixt my eye and bone as neare to [the] backside of…

[ad_1] I first read Paul Auster when I was at university. A tutor recommended The Music of Chance, I think, and I ended up reading all of his stuff in one of those bursts of love you sometimes get for writers. Then, I sort of dropped out of the Auster business. At the…

[ad_1] A deft and heartfelt journey through nostalgia. My favourite Monkey Island story isn’t about a puzzle or a character or a joke. It’s not Stan and his hand-talking, or the severed head that can lead you through mazes. It’s not actually a story from the game itself. It’s to do with a friend…

[ad_1] Last night I got through two whole districts with almost no health, and no prospects. An early boss had whittled me down to almost nothing, so I lurched into the eternal night thinking – four health? This won’t last long. For comparison, I start with 300 health, and that’s rarely enough. But something happened.…

[ad_1] I had an interview with the team behind Plasma. Sadly, I listened back to the transcript and it’s fifteen minutes of me laughing with delight, while heavy aircraft are clearly going through maneuvers overhead. No matter. Plasma is dizzyingly complex, but very easy to explain. It’s an engineering sandbox game. You make stuff…

[ad_1] Around these parts there is no higher praise than “double-A”. It may sometimes be a reflection on the budget, but never on the skill and craft and imagination of the developers. A great double-A game is often a quirky affair built around immediate pleasures and often delivered with a twist. Steelrising Developer:…

[ad_1] Halfway through playing Cult of the Lamb I found myself engaged in a neat little dice-battling game. It was a mini-game, I guess, but it was so nicely handled, so rich in strategy and the suggestion of depth, that it felt like it could well have been spun off as a game in…

[ad_1] Gloomwood came alive for me when I got outside. This is immersive-sim-ish territory, everything tilted towards horror and stealth. Navigating the lovingly rendered PS1 era visuals, which do help a great deal to make ordinary objects singular and creepy, I awake at the bottom of a pit with nothing but a mysterious ally,…