16 Dec 2024
Attack on Titan VR: Unbreakable Meta Quest 3 Review 3/10 "Broken blades won’t do in battle!" πͺ @UNIVRSstudios #IndieGame #GameDev
In game, I’m a graceful sword-wielding warrior, acrobatically swooping around a city to plant precision blows on rampaging titans. In reality, I’m obliterating my mantlepiece for the second time as my increasingly exasperated partner tells me to go out and buy some superglue to piece together the shattered remains of her ornaments. Is calling this game “Unbreakable” some kind of sick joke?
21 Nov 2024
Predator: Hunting Grounds PC Review 5/10 "The devil is in the details" π @IllFonic @PHGTheGame
You can see why they thought this would work. Asymmetric horror-themed multiplayer is IllFonic’s bread and butter and the much-missed Friday the 13th: The Game did an incredible job of putting you in the sneakers of hapless Camp Crystal Lake counsellors… or wielding the machete of Jason Voorhees.
If you were perusing other 1980s IPs looking for something to fit into the Friday the 13th mould, Predator makes a lot of sense. The all-timer 1987 Predator sees a group of macho characters who already feel like they’ve been lifted out of a video game battling against a single powerful adversary - the ideal recipe for asymmetric multiplayer.
And so Predator: Hunting Grounds was born.
8 Aug 2024
Princess Maker 2: Regeneration Nintendo Switch Review 0/10 "In summary, do not buy this game." π
Princess Maker 2: Regeneration is a game that should come with a content warning. How else am I supposed to approach a Nintendo Switch game in which you can feed your 13-year-old daughter pills that increase the size of her breasts and then marry her?
The 1993 original is, for a certain audience, a cult classic. In that as in this modernised remake you play a famed warrior who’s gifted a naked 10-year-old girl by the gods, and must raise her to adulthood. Will you up her combat skills and send her adventuring, make her the best cook in the land or, uh, force her to work in a sleazy bar and become a teen hooker? It’s your call!
17 Jul 2024
RoboCop: Rogue City PS5 Review 8/10 "Oh, how I miss squibs!" π€ @TeyonGames #IndieGame #GameDev
RoboCop: Rogue City developer Teyon clearly feels the same way. This is a game almost entirely about blasting sneering criminals with high-powered weaponry and every thumping shot sends beautiful fountains of the red stuff spiralling through the air and onto the scenery. If this somehow isn’t enough, the game offers a “More Gore” weapon upgrade to truly paint the town red. Paul Verhoeven would be proud.
3 Jun 2024
Rainbow Cotton Review 3/10 By Pixel Hunted "Seeing Rainbow Cotton back on sale is genuinely surreal" π§Ήπ§♀️ @ININ_Games
You really can’t polish a turd. We live in a renaissance for video game remasters, remakes, and re-releases, where even the most obscure titles can be given a lick of paint and sent out into the wild world of digital storefronts.
But, even in a world where the likes of Baten Kaitos, Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninjas and Famicom Detective Club have been exhumed from their mouldering gaming graves, seeing Rainbow Cotton back on sale is genuinely surreal.
1 May 2024
Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol. 1 PS5 Review "Now a New Generation Can Enjoy Getting Urinated on By a Guard" π¦❗️
I joke: “Why not squirt ketchup on the floor and lie in it so the guard thinks you’re dead?”. It works. A single shard of moonlight pierced the window to illuminate me. Trumpets played, angelic choirs sang. I had discovered Metal Gear Solid.
13 Mar 2024
Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story Review 10/10 "If you have even the slightest interest in games as an art form, you must play this." π¦π¦π¦ @DigitalEclipse #IndieGame #GameDev
Jeff Minter has been making my soul sing for three decades. I have hazy memories of being confused by the Amiga version of Revenge of the Mutant Camels in the early 90s, but Tempest X3 on PlayStation blew my young mind. Impossibly cool, brain-meltingly intense, and powered by a throbbing rave soundtrack, it felt like being allowed entry to the clubs the bouncers wouldn’t let me into yet.
Back then I didn’t know X3 was an inferior version of Tempest 2000 on the Jaguar, but it burnt a love of all things Minter deep into my gaming tastes. From there I hoovered up Space Giraffe (which looks incredible on Steam Deck OLED), developed a crippling late-night addiction to TxK that burrowed into my dreams, and played Polybius in VR for so long that after one session I fell down the stairs and hurt my shoulder. Worth it.
26 Jan 2024
Arizona Sunshine 2 Meta Quest 2 Review 6/10 π @pixelhunted #IndieGame #GameDev #VRGames
The VR dream isn’t dead, but it’s starting to look a bit wonky. The Metaverse is a joke, PSVR2 is dying on the vine and, almost four years after the release of Half-Life: Alyx, there hasn’t been a title that comes close to its production values and ingenuity.
Enter Arizona Sunshine 2. The first game released in 2016 across multiple VR platforms and, while an utterly boilerplate zombie shooter, at least delivered on its promise of letting you mow down hordes of the undead with a variety of high-powered weaponry.
We’re now eight years on and the sequel has finally arrived. So, what’s changed?
2 Nov 2023
Ghostrunner 2 PC Review 8/10 "Ah, endorphins" π️ @GhostrunnerGame #IndieGame #GameDev
One hit means death. I can’t help but respect the purity of Ghostrunner 2, which follows in the muffled ninjacyborg footsteps of its excellent predecessor.
Just as before you’re Jack, a true glass cannon protagonist whose speed, agility, and ever-growing suite of techno-ninjutsu abilities is matched only by his constant fragility.
In Ghostrunner 2 you will enter a combat arena and die instantly. At the tap of a bottom (and with no loading) you’re back to try again. This time you might die after a few seconds. Rinse and repeat twenty times and suddenly you have a plan:
Wallrun, slowmo dodge, kill, grapple, deflect, kill, boost pad, shuriken toss, mid-air grapple, kill, slide, vault, slice your cyberkatana through a cyberfreak’s body as the two cyberhalves spiral through the air in front of you. Ah, endorphins. There you are…
18 Sept 2023
The Bookwalker: Thief of Tales PC Review 7/10 "Prepare to be tossed into the narrative deep end" π @bookwalkergame #IndieGame #GameDev @PixelHunted
The Bookwalker takes place in a world very much like our own, with the teensy difference that writers can not only conjure up entire worlds within books but travel into them and interact with their characters as if they were real people.
You play writer Etienne Quist, a writer serving a 30-year sentence (geddit?) of writer’s block for a mysterious crime. Etienne hopes to reduce his sentence by taking on “bookwalking” gigs, i.e. diving into various books to retrieve powerful items. For example, you’ll head into a fantasy world to swipe an Immortality Potion or venture into a gloomy robotic take on Norse mythology to get your hands on Mjolnir.
5 Sept 2023
Death Becomes You PC Game Review 2/10 "Perhaps I’m just not the right person to be writing about anime magical lesbian teenagers" π§ @pixelhunted @quill_studios #IndieGame #GameDev
Perhaps I’m just not the right person to be writing about anime magical lesbian teenagers.
As I sat on the London Underground playing Death Becomes Her on my Switch I became intensely aware of the passengers on either side of me. Before this moment I’d never been self-conscious about gaming in public - why the hell should I care what some random strangers think of me? But I realized a glance at my screen would show two canoodling cartoon schoolgirls. Let’s face it, this is a powerfully bad look for a middle-aged man.
31 Aug 2023
Ghostrunner 2 Preview by @PixelHunted "harder, better, faster, stronger than the original" π₯· @GhostrunnerGame #IndieGames #GameDev
I missed Ghostrunner on its original release, but when a polished next-gen edition landed on PlayStation 5 in 2021 I fell deeply dippy in love with its lightning-quick, lethal and acrobatic combat. Since then there’s been nothing else that’s captured the same sense of dynamic combat, where death you or your opponent’s death is a cyber katana swipe away.
Now, courtesy of a demo courtesy of developers One More Level, that same adrenaline rush is back. What’s immediately apparent is that everything great about Ghostrunner is present in the sequel. This is an evolution rather than a ground-up reworking, to the point where my initial suspicions were that little had fundamentally changed.
25 Jul 2023
Ray’z Arcade Chronology Review 8/10 ☄️π @PixelHunted
35 years later (...ugh) and, despite my best intentions, I haven’t substantially improved. I’ve often returned to dip my toe into the genre, figuring that critically acclaimed darlings like
Radiant Silvergun, Ikaruga, or Gradius V would finally give me the motivation to get gud.
I never did, but even though I’m crap at them I maintain an admiration for their purity, the focus they require to master, the complex interlocking systems and, perhaps most of all, for the gaming wizards that can one credit clear these bad boys.
Enter the Ray’z Arcade Chronology, which consists of best-in-class remastering studio M2’s ports of three classic Taito shmups, 1994’sRayForce, 1996’s RayStorm and 1998’s RayCrisis.
14 Jul 2023
Brain Show PC Review 2/10 "Brain Show may eventually get better..." π§ #IndieGames #GameDev
Sony’sBuzz! trivia game series was a massive PlayStation hit in the 2000s. Its straight forwardness was key to its success, with the game faithfully replicating a TV quiz with the aid of the Buzz! Buzzer controller that lets you chime in to answer just as on a real-life game show.
Sadly the format didn’t last, presumably, because the internet is swimming with free trivia quizzes. These daysBuzz! games and peripherals are most commonly found clogging up the shelves of charity shops across the nation: casual players don’t need this plastic tat in their house and retro games fans are a little snooty about this powerfully mainstream mini-franchise.
It’s now been thirteen years since the last Buzz! game and the (aptly named) developer Simplicity Games thinks it’s time for a comeback. Enter Brain Show, which waits until the dead of night, grabs a shovel, heads to the graveyard, and tries to bring Buzz! back from the dead.
16 Jun 2023
Planet of Lana PC Review 7/10 "...absolutely reeks of competency" π⬛ @PlanetofLana #IndieGames #GameDev
This cinematic 2D platformer is the debut release from indie developer Wishfully Studios, and if they’re setting out to make a name for themselves as an artistically minded team with a rock-solid grip on puzzle platformer mechanics then mission accomplished.
Set on an alien yet familiar world you play as young girl Lana, who we meet enjoying a bucolic life in her cosy fishing village. Naturally, as is the fate of practically every video game hero’s cosy home town, disaster soon strikes.
Robots emerge from the blue skies to entrap the locals and promptly speed off into the distance. Lana is the sole survivor and must rescue her ambiguously defined best friend/girlfriend/sister/boyfriend/brother from their steel clutches.
12 Apr 2023
Loretta Review 7/10 "A Nice-Looking Tense Horror Title" πͺ @yabutuzoff @PixelHunted #IndieGame #GameDev
It’s 1947. You’ve just killed your useless writer husband and dumped him the well. Time to get out of town and start a new life… if only you could get into the safe where he’s locked away his final manuscript so you can make a decent payday from his publishers.
This is the setup for the tense and atmospheric Loretta, from developer Yakov Butuzoff. The game wears its influences on its sleeve, attempting to capture the paranoid vibes of Hitchcock movies like Vertigo, Dial M for Murder and a smidge of the desolate Psycho. Less a game and more of a visual novel, Loretta lets you guide the titular housewife through one of the worst weeks of her life while her sanity gradually crumbles under the weight of her past and her murderous inclinations.
6 Mar 2023
Sakeworld PS5 Review 5/10 "Outsider art that’s crowbarred its way onto the PlayStation Store" π @pixelhunted @Sakeforever15 #IndieGame #GameDev
But - and this is a big but - it’s interesting. And interesting goes a long way.
3 Mar 2023
Fashion Police Squad PC Review 8/10 "Chalk Fashion Police Squad Up As a Very Nice Surprise" π @nomorerobotshq #IndieGame #GameDev
We’re now three decades on from Doom and iD Software’s cast iron classic has still got it where it counts.
The past few years have seen a renaissance in throwback first-person-shooters attempting to recapture that retro magic, with highlights including Ion Fury, Dusk, and Prodeus. But, for me at least, few have nailed it quite like Fashion Police Squad.
16 Feb 2023
Hogwart’s Legacy PS5 Review 6/10 "...It's fine" π§♂️
Let’s get one thing right clear right off the bat: I didn’t buy Hogwarts Legacy. I wouldn’t be seen dead giving any money to J.K. Rowling after the shit she’s come out with over the last few years and, as someone who doesn’t care in the slightest about Harry Potter, would have been a very easy game to skip.
But, for professional reasons, I was obligated to play the game prior to release and was sent a code by WB Games in order to do so. So here’s what I thought after coming to this game with zero excitement and a powerfully icky feeling at loading it up for the first time.
….It’s fine
24 Dec 2022
A Plague Tale: Requiem PC Review 9/10 "Requiem goes hard on disgusting environments and intense squalor" π @APlagueTale
It’s estimated that the Black Death killed around 25 million people when it tore through Europe in the 14th century. You’ll see most of those corpses in A Plague Tale: Requiem, which doesn’t miss an opportunity to toss you into a charnel house bristling with rotting bones, have you clamber over giant heaps of fly-ridden bodies, or simply gently float downstream on an otherwise peaceful riverboat cruise as dead peasants serenely bob around you.