Noah Caldwell-Gervais


9 games reviewed
70.6 average score
70 median score
33.3% of games recommended
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7.5 / 10.0 - Heat Signature
Sep 22, 2017

Heat Signature is one of the tightest indie action games I've played, packing a maximum amount of excitement into a minimum amount of time and space. My first few hours with the game were genuinely wonderful, filled with rapid-fire moments of delight and triumph. But when I hit my personal skill ceiling, I could do no more than repeatedly bang my head against it. I respect Heat Signature. I admire its success in accomplishing with such skill what it set out to do, and if it had been more forgiving, it wouldn't be as tense. Heat Signature's laser focus on in-depth mechanical play with high consequence is at once what made it satisfying for me to play and what made it easy to put down and walk away from when I hit the limits of my tactical creativity.

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9 / 10.0 - West of Loathing
Aug 10, 2017

Asymmetric Then there's the lore. West of Loathing takes place after a major magical disaster: the Day the Cows Came Home. Portals to hell turned the cows demonic, and great darkness spread across the West. West of Loathing elicits this powerful emotional connection with stick figures. It bonds you to its world with nothing more than doodling and dialogue. There's a pretty good turn-based adventure game there, under the hood, but West of Loathing's many strengths are all personal: connections made between developer and player when you both laugh at the same time. Absurdism aside, there's something fundamentally human and direct baked into the game's whole design from aesthetic to script. On top of it, you can dunk your hand into a spittoon of caustic toxins to pull out an enchanted sword. That's the kind of player choice I didn't even know I wanted in a Western RPG.

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8 / 10.0 - Kingsway
Jul 24, 2017

Like all successful pieces of nostalgia, Kingsway knows the adventure on the screen is less important than the adventure in your mind. Kingsway took me far down those winding paths, deeper and deeper with each hesitant chitter of nonexistent hardware.

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May 29, 2017

The Long Journey Home promises much more than its punishing gameplay can deliver on

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Wildlands wants to be both an ultraviolent cartoon and a grounded, ripped-from-the-headlines thriller. It can't do both, and it's much better at being silly and absurd. The mechanical experience of it is as freewheeling a sandbox as I've ever seen, but the frame, the tone and the script weigh it down like an anchor.

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5.5 / 10.0 - Slayer Shock
Oct 18, 2016

Slayer Shock has more ideas than it has means of executing on them

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8.5 / 10.0 - Obduction
Aug 25, 2016

The world of Obduction is a pastiche of time and mood. So’s the gameplay. Yet in creating something moored only to the design strengths of the studio, Cyan has succeeded in making an another adventure that feels truly timeless.

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6.5 / 10.0 - Breached
Jun 22, 2016

Breached's storytelling is strong, but its mechanics wear thin

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7 / 10.0 - Dangerous Golf
Jun 7, 2016

Dangerous Golf successfully blends puzzle with sports

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