Comprehensive player reviews, video game backlog slaying, and thoughts on video game culture.
I am a shameless Kickstarter junkie and I wanted to share a little info on Calico, which was successfully funded at 230% of their original goal about a week ago and is now in a brief late pledge period. This title is incredibly cute and worth a look!
Continue reading “Calico Kickstarter; “unapologetically feminine”, with so many animals (Fully funded!)”
Gris is a game I never knew I needed and yet wish had been developed years ago. Whomever had the idea for this game has a heart made of gold. Gris’s story is one that speaks most clearly to those who have experienced intense hardship or loss. It is meant to resonate somewhere deep within your soul, a quietly rising, inspirational call to the part of you that would never give up in the face of tragedy.
Continue reading “Gris Review (Switch) – an emotional masterpiece”
The World Next Door makes a great first impression with its unique character designs and interesting art style, which is a pleasant blend of mystical, rustic fantasy elements and modern urban sensibilities. The environments are vibrant and detailed, with lovingly designed NPCs inhabiting the world. However, there are not enough of them.
While absolutely beautiful, the world feels oddly empty as you move from area to area, even places such as the market that are typically a hub of activity in any other game. Just a handful of additional NPCs would have made the world of Emrys feel more alive. The World Next Door is a pretty package disguising a lack of functional content…
As a woman playing competitive online multiplayer games like Overwatch and CS:GO, it can be disappointingly common to encounter targeted, sexist harassment. For whatever reason, when certain types of players realize they are playing with or against a woman, they just kind of freak out –– aaaabsolutely cannot handle it at all. Yet somehow, harassers never expect spicy trash talk in response.
Continue reading “The Gamer Girl’s Comeback Playbook”
Little Dragons Café is much more polished than I was expecting, to be honest. It boasts a pleasant pallet of pastels and warm shades, with Wind Waker-ish cell shading that look as if drawn with colored pencil by a skilled artist. The inside of the café itself is a quaint, homey scene that could have been torn directly from a page in a children’s storybook tale, one of those picture books that both parents and kids adore.
Continue reading “Little Dragons Café Review (Switch) – a feel-good fairy tale for dragon lovers”
Over a year ago I wrote a post about female support players on the Overwatch subreddit that hit the front page and generated a lot of buzz in the community at the time. It earned 9 Reddit Gold awards and over 14,000 up-votes, with nearly 4,000 comments. I was even reached out to by the head of player behavior at Blizzard whom had read it.
At the risk of sounding like a humble-bragger, I was absolutely blown away by the response to what started as a rambling rant to another post about Mercy players. I’ve revisited the original content and cleaned it up for posterity.
InnerSpace is different. It tries something novel with physics in a video game that is almost certainly worth your time to experience, if only to try something new that you won’t see in other games. Experimental titles like this are a breath of fresh air among the typical industry offerings. As is often the case with bold games taking risks, the feedback is divisive. InnerSpace is a very “love it or hate it” sort of game. If any of what you are about to read is interesting to you, it is likely that you would enjoy InnerSpace.
Continue reading “InnerSpace Review (Switch) – buckle up for something new”
Backlog Crusader 