Author: Christian Donlan
-
Tomb Raider 1-3 Remastered review – you were never going to smooth these games out
These classic games remain as ingenious, memorable and frustrating as ever. Games can be beautiful because they are timeless, but they can also be beautiful because they are timely. When it comes to timelessness, you’re going to struggle to beat Tetris. Its stark and nested blocks face every age with the same eternal silence, while…
-
Ultros review – a blossoming prog Metroidvania for the green-fingered
Psychedelic stylings accompany a game of transformation and discovery. Sorry to get all TikTok MBA on you, but if you’re employing the rule of three in your marketing, you really want to make that third element count. It needs to sing. It needs to be explosive, or at least thoroughly radioactive. More than anything, it…
-
Game of the Week: Hauntii is a ghostly game that never runs out of ideas
I love demos, so it’s no surprise really that our game of the week is a Steam Next Fest demo. There are plenty I could have chosen, but the one that has stolen my heart is Hauntii. Hauntii’s first draw is its art style. It’s black and white for the most part – or rather…
-
Infinite Craft is a powerful glimpse into other minds
Years back I knew someone who was really into lucid dreaming. They had never actually had a lucid dream, but that inevitably only made them more into it. They read books on lucid dreaming and probably attended symposia on lucid dreaming. Their house was filled with Post-it notes on which they had written, over and…
-
Game of the Week: Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and true immersion in a game world
Our Game of the Week is Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. It’s a game I enjoyed much more than I was expecting to. But I’m also deeply aware that I’m not really the intended audience. James Cameron made this deeply felt fantasy world that people really adore – I’m not one of those people. I had…
-
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora review – a surprisingly harmonious tribute to James Cameron’s cinematic universe
It’s a Ubisoft open-worlder to its core, but this spin on the world of Avatar has some really special moments. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora first clicked for me when things got grim. Away from the cascading ferns and artfully twisted tree trunks, far from fronds and petals and whole plants that briskly pulled themselves underground…
-
Game of the Week: Tekken and the pleasures of learning
Hello! Our game of the week is Tekken 8 – one of the easier choices, really, due to its glowing review from Lewis Parker, who gave it five stars. I was fascinated reading what Lewis had to say, and I was particularly struck by the emphasis on learning he put at the heart of the…
-
Another Code: Recollection and the pleasures of games not done quick
I remember being fascinated by Another Code: Two Memories when I first saw it in the pages of Edge magazine back in the early 2000s. An oddball DS game was always something to pay attention to, but this was one in which the main character had their own DS inside the game too. Or rather,…
-
Indiana Jones and The Great Circle’s trailer got me thinking: has there ever been a great Indy game?
Like a lot of people, I suspect, I watched the trailer for Indiana Jones and The Great Circle, Bethesda’s new game and pondered: what’s the best Indy game we’ve gotten so far? I remember that NaturalMotion game from a while back which never came out – I’ve spoken over the years to people who played…
-
Game of the Week: Another Code and the pleasure of in-game gadgets
Our Game of the Week is Another Code: Recollection. It’s a lovely, generous reworking of two weird classics, and it’s a perfect example of the oddities you get towards the end of the lifespan of a Nintendo console. But today I’d like to use it as a bit of a jumping-off point. Playing it this…