I love the presentation, I love the conceit, but ultimately this is just a cleverly disguised badly designed point-and-click adventure.
I’d love to have played a game that tried to explore that rocky landscape, with some nuance, some introspection, and most of all, with some humility. This is not that game.
I love the ideas behind The Pepper Prince. A little queer love story, written in verse, presented in faux-ASCII. Sounds gorgeous. But on the evidence of the first episode, the verse is poor, the story meagre, and the puzzles absent. Which makes it hard to recommend. And yet, had I not winced and winced at the writing, I’d have enjoyed the aimless process of clicking through it all.
What a really pleasant time this is. It’s family-friendly, without being a kids’ game.
This remains the magical, bizarre, joyful and utterly peculiar game that earned its place in gaming history. It also remains very short (about four hours at a slow pace?), but also extremely replayable, with so many targets to meet. And it’s very funny, in a super-dark way.
Clicking buttons is obviously an innate pleasure for all humans, and The Room Three understands this on such a wonderful level, as your interactions reap such visually and aurally gratifying rewards.
It’s fair to say On A Roll does a good job of capturing the cartoon. It’s bland, repetitive, churned-out rubbish seemingly based on the mantra, “Oh who cares, it’s for three year olds.” I’ll tell you who cares: THE PARENTS.
Honestly, I find writing about these games increasingly exhausting, and playing them just as fun as ever.
I’m really impressed by Sagebrush. It could have been tacky, it definitely could have been gross, but it’s neither. It’s sensitive, well constructed, and harrowing just where I think it should be.
It's often a lot of fun to grapple and leap about in, but it's always too quickly spoiled by something else.
Wreckfest is a splendid antidote to the po-faced severity of the current crop of Need For Speeds, Crews, and so on.
Although that said, even if the bugs and AI were fixed, it would still leave behind a version of Just Cause that barely changes anything you actually do since the third edition, yet has made every aspect of doing it so astronomically more annoying. What went wrong? How did such an established and entertaining series end up in such a quagmire? Gosh I’d love to know.
Mooncrash is an enormous paddling pool compared to Prey's Olympic swimming pool. There's none of the depth, but it's a heck of a good time to splash around in.
I've had such a blast playing it all over again, and desperately wish Volition would announce a new entry in the series that – unlike the follow-up Armageddon – is also set outside in a big open world.
I honestly can't remember the last time I've enjoyed a long-form point-and-click adventure this much. It reminds me why I love the genre so much.
It's very charming, very beautiful, and both its comprising halves are enjoyable in their own ways.
The Forest remains a huge achievement, and a survival horror game that somehow manages to keep those two elements surprisingly separate and yet let each impose upon the other in very interesting ways. I do wish it had been tidied and bug-fixed by now, but I can't stop wanting to play despite it.
Right now, this is an awful lot of not very much.
Pivross is a 3D picross game that still needs some work
Obviously reminiscent of Gone Home (and there are a couple of nods hidden in there), it manages to feel different enough in its approach to stand apart. And indeed that it packs all the detail into one room is no small feat.