Author: Christian Donlan
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Lucas Pope’s new Playdate puzzler is a lovely, silly game about community
Not to brag, but I’m pretty sure I know what Mars After Midnight smells like. I reckon Mars After Midnight smells of church halls and community centres, which means it smells like warm dust, floor polish and feet. These are the kinds of places that cater to many different parts of the community, altering and…
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“The fear phase”: Tomas Sala on landing another Falconeer game
Earlier this year I spoke to Tomas Sala, the developer of The Falconeer and his new game, Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles. I was particularly eager to chat while development on Bulwark was wrapping up, since, as a pretty-much solo developer, Sala’s process has always seemed so explorative. In the case of Bulwark, this explorative process has…
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Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile: the series survives the transition between platforms
Oh, and we’re off into the hot zone, and with a hot phone. There’s snow on the ground in Verdansk, but after five minutes of playing the mobile version of Call of Duty Warzone this morning, my aging iPhone 11 was getting pleasantly warm. Warzone’s a beast on phones, actually: even before the game began,…
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Small Radios Big Televisions: heading for delisting, but still a weird classic
Small Radios Big Televisions may be my favourite kind of game. I’m not just saying that because it’s set on something that looks like an oil rig – I love oil rigs – and involves the collection of old audio cassettes. I’m saying that because it’s a game that you play by playing – in…
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Game of the week: Getting to know the author in Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story
This week’s Game of the Week is Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story. It was not a difficult decision, and that’s no slight to Penny’s Big Breakaway, which is a really gorgeous and creative 3D platformer that offers nostalgia as well as something new. In many ways, what’s great about Penny is what’s great about Llamasoft…
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Penny’s Big Breakaway review – a bright platformer with a serious lineage
An ingenious combo-driven challenge that’s speedy and fun. Whenever I first get to play a new Mario Kart game there’s always a moment – often when I reach a Bowser stage – where I look at the road ahead of me, the broad, curving path that leads through gorgeous Mario clutter, and I wish I…
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Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story review – classic games, now with fascinating context
In the latest from the team behind The Making of Karateka, a true genius gets an interactive museum for the ages The black screen has a single white dot at its centre. The expectation is that we’re in for something like Pong: something simple, direct, immediate and, as far as games are concerned, ancient. Llamasoft:…
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Game of the Week: Snufkin’s adventures in Moonminvalley show how finely judged a licensed game can be
Odd as it sounds, part of me misses those old licensed games. Everyone who came up in games journalism in the early 2000s will have been given some of these things to review, and it was always a fascinating challenge. I remember a former editor of Eurogamer telling me that the first game they ever…
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Summerhouse review – a house-building toy that contains genuine magic
Drag and drop with a blessedly empty head in this total charmer. There is an island in the Aegean, an island of stray cats and tumbling bougainvilleas, that has an instagram account devoted exclusively to its many doors. This account is a catalogue of variations on a theme, the theme being how you get in…
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Cataclismo is a game of castle walls and terrible mistakes
Cataclismo is the new game from Digital Sun, the team behind Moonlighter, so I was waiting for the twist from the moment I started. Moonlighter’s a straight-up dungeon crawler, until you crawl out of the dungeon with all your loot and have to face a far more terrifying foe than any monster you encountered in…