Even if the controls sometimes just make you wanna scream, Bonfire Peaks is a nice and small puzzle game worth playing. Its compact diorama levels are brilliantly engineered, using small spaces to test the player's cleverness. Voxel graphics, more that just being nostalgic, help the game in recreating the right atmosphere of old adventure games like the original Tomb Raider.
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While being a good clone of the original MGS, UnMetal does something few other MGS-like games did in the past: it not only emulates the stealth mechanics, but it replicates Kojima's metareferential design, and it does so in a way that feels both fresh and funny. UnMetal plays with 80's stereotypes and the player's mind at the same time.
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The Artful Escape is a hard to define game. Light platform and rhytm'n'game elements are diluted inside a narrative driven gameplay that tasks the player with life and artistic choices. While the gameplay is bent to the main thematic of the game, visual and music take the mind of the player through an epic, psychedelic journey in a rock, sci-fi, over the top space opera.
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Golf Club: Wasteland is a masterpiece in the art of telling a big story in a tiny game. Ruins of our Earth, devastated by climate change, speak to the player through the music and the chats of the great Radio Nostalgia and the ironic neon signs of Alphaville. In the meanwhile, the silent Charlie from Mars plays an intense and challenging arcade golf game, where you can never tell what happens next. It's rare to find so much greatness in a small indie game.
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Big Rumble Boxing: Creed Champions is like a 90's game: good for short sessions of play, with only few modes, a cheating AI and a lot of pressing the same button over and over. Despite all that, it manages to be entertaining for a few hours, but you'll soon get bored of fighting the same boxer but with a different skin. The strange, over the top narrative Arcade is enjoyable, but with just one more mode (Versus), there's no way to get to the twelve round without getting tired of its basic mechanics.
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Road 96 is a nice revelation. The slow start gives the wrong impression of a game similar to many recent narrative adventures: well written, but without that peculiar something that can make it shine. Instead, its formula based on the repetition of the paths and on the procedurality of the encounters proved to be a great strength in the long run, capable of adding depth to the game and distinguishing it from its (valid) predecessors. More than this, it's the perfect game for summertime: a good song on the radio, the long road ahead of us, sunglasses on and a future where plenty of choices await.
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Minute of Islands is an adventure where the story and its themes get the main stage, while the gameplay is mostly there to get the story going, but it stands among other games thanks to the depth of its narrative. The added value are the outstanding illustrations, sort of a mix between Attack on Titan and Adventure Time, that manage to create a fresh, colourful, intriguing, but at the same time disturbing world, just like Mo's adventure.
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Super Soccer Blast: America vs Europe is a small, arcade soccer game that is super entertaining to play, at least for the first hours. As almost every other arcade sport game, when you learn to master all of its mechanics it gets a little less entertaining, but you can always use it as an old-style 1vs1 couch game with friends. Few rules, a fast pace and hilarious names are everything the Euro (or Copa America) summer needs.
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Virtua Fighter is still a great game, no doubt about it. And Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown fully re-proposes the old-but-gold original combat system, enhanced by a Training mode that explains in depth everything there is to know about it. What's inexplicable in this operation is the poor care paid to the multiplayer, penalized by an old and poorly performing netcode, which heavily limits a game designed to be SEGA's first step towards esports.
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I honestly don't know if Wonder Boy IV was a real blast in 1994 since I could not play it then. What I know is that Wonder Boy: Asha in Monster World is not a blast today. It's kinda average in everything it does, but what I really can't bear is how the new art style feels like a significant downgrade over the magical 16-bit pixel art.
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Despite its ups & downs, it's hard not to love Miitopia and its quirkyness. Even the most generic and basic RPG story suddenly becomes a compelling tale if you use friends-shaped Miis as characters and Miitopia adds to this formula a large amount of humor and weirdness that fills the void when the rhythm slows down. If I had a child, this would be the first RPG I'd play with him (or her).
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The Wardrobe: Even Better Edition for Xbox is a good conversion. The transition from mouse to gamepad is almost painless. Years after his first release, the game is still good thanks to its iconoclastic humor and many, many geek references.
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Say No! More is such a strange game it can barely be considered one: you just need to press the spacebar to get to the end (even if there's a moment when you need to *not* press it and I almost got stuck). Despite this, it is indeed a funny game that smashes the "yes man" workaholic culture, and it does it under a beautiful SEGA-blue sky. Perfect if played after eight hours in the office.
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Oddworld: Soulstorm is an imperfect game, like many other, but unlinke most of them it accepts the idea of taking risks to achieve something different. Unfortunately, it only sometimes happens, but it was worth trying. As Abe knows well, there's no way other than fighting (or jumping, or chanting…) to achieve what you want.
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Sometimes, less is more. Chronicle of Innsmouth: Mountains of Madness is a game that knows its limits and strives to do its best with the resources it has. The story is short, but well written and fascinating, the English acting is good and background illustrations are often inspiring. Considering that the team is small and so was the budget, their work deserves to be praised.
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While Paradise Lost has everything to be a great game, it ends up being just good. Its background story is strong and intriguing, but you can't feel it that much in the game. Locations and objects are well crafted, but invisible walls keep you from feeling them as if they were real and alive. Everything is in his place, but by the end nothing leaves you wanting more. This four-hour adventure is worth playing, but it won't change your life.
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After playing Adios I felt like I did when I first saw No country for old men, and I can't imagine a greater compliment. Graphics are definitely not its strongest suit, but they do a decent job at supporting Adios' touching story, that shines thanks to its fantastic voice acting. A couple simple minigames add a little variety to this walking simulator. All in all, Adios lasts a little more than an hour, but it's an hour that is totally worth experiencing.
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Cyanide & Happiness: Freakpocalypse is a game made for C&H's fans, rather than point&click lovers, and it's okay. The game's mechanics act as a stimulus, prompting the player to talk to all the characters and examine every single part of the setting, enjoying the surreal dialogues and absurd descriptions that dot the game. I don't know if everybody can appreciate it, but if you like dark humor and you're not afraid of BDSM teachers, bullies and delusional weirdos, this is a point&click adventure that may fit your lovely taste.
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Surviving, nowadays, is hard. It's DAMN hard. So it's good to find a survival game like The Wild Eight that does not enjoy punishing the player without reason. I still don't know if this softer approach is an attempt to offset some design issues (like the combat, or the clunky inventory) or if it was meant to be like this since the beginning. Anyway, The Wild Wight feels like a survival game approachable even by players that usually don't like survival games so much, and at the end of the day this feels like good news.
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When a new idea arises in a genre where recycling is the new normal, it's always good news: and this is the case with Gods Will Fall, who reminds us that challenging the gods is quite the gamble. Unfortunately, even if the idea is clever enough to be appreciable even when it causes anger, it does not appear to be supported by an equally valid gameplay. The boss fights with the giant gods are quite entertaining to play, but the tons of repetitive battles against uninteresting enemies that you have to face to get there feel way less intriguing.
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