Colossal Cave isn’t for everyone, but it’s like a slow and meticulously designed theme park ride, all built around an old text adventure game, making for a fascinating experience. Whether you play it or not is probably more up to your personal sensibilities, but Colossal Cave remains an immersive excavation that’s more than worth the trip, even with all the old screws and rusty bolts binding the two periods of game history together.
Lone Ruin will test your patience, but let’s all be grateful the arcade action comes without the arcade cost. The “just one more try” gameplay benefits greatly from the snappy load screens and menus, even on the Nintendo Switch version, making it easier to recommend this brutally difficult and magical indie hit from Super Rare Games.
Slime Rancher 2 is a refined and slimy good time, building on what made the first game work. There's colorful exploration, exciting farming, and some of the cutest video game characters since Pokémon.
In the same way that films like Nope and La La Land are about films, We Are OFK feels like it’s about creating music, or perhaps more broadly but also more accurately: how painful and hard it is to create art with people you love, including yourself. And I played and replayed We Are OFK about a dozen times from its release to this chilly day. It wasn’t intentional for me to have such a long time with the game but it was ultimately for the better, I think. Life kept interrupting not only my review but my memories of We Are OFK.
Tinykin is a meaningful experience that reminds me of why I fell in love with video games. I hope a lot of people play it so we get more colorful and wonderful titles like Tinykin because games like this are what it's all about.
Cult of the Lamb has its share of bugs, but the addictive cult management gameplay blends perfectly with its combat crusades and catchy soundtrack. It's a must-play indie game.
Pac-Man World Re-PAC Edition might be worth checking out if you’re extremely curious about the game, genre, or even the time period it comes from, but there are just better games to spend your time with. If you insist then just try to get it on sale, or better yet, during its inevitable visit to Xbox Game Pass before making its way to the bargain bin.
Mothmen 1966 brought me back to a different time in my life. When I was a young girl, I used to pour an ungodly amount of time into ‘Give Yourself Goosebumps’, R.L. Stine’s horrific (heh) take on the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure genre. Not just with the series but even with the individual books themselves. I was not finished with a book until I had soaked up every possible scare, from front to back.