Nostalgia is a powerful thing, and games that evoke the spirit of much-revered classics are often met with unfettered optimism – and so it happened that I took one quick look at Black Geyser: Couriers of Darkness, a game heavily inspired by CRPG darling (and personal favorite) Baldur’s Gate, and decided I would have to try it.
I think it’s safe to say that even the best video games have things people don’t like about them. Dreamscaper is no exception: tackling the concept of (literally) fighting your inner demons, the game presents this wholly interesting setup in the framework of the classic roguelike dungeon crawler, which, I feel, ends up becoming more of a yoke than anything.
From time to time, I run into a game that makes me question if I’m getting too old for this. Have I become out of touch? Am I missing something crucial that others can most definitely see? Can I no longer appreciate the honest efforts of game developers? And so on – you get the idea...
“Soulslike” and “Metroidvania” are probably among some of the most commonly used terms in the game industry these days, and that’s no coincidence, as both the Dark Souls and Castlevania/Metroid franchises have established templates and patterns that numerous other titles have come to incorporate into their DNAs with varying levels of success.
The Hand of Merlin’s narrative takes place in medieval times, in the corrupted lands of Albion, and your mission is to guide a party of three adventurers all the way to Jerusalem in order to prevent the coming apocalypse. Alas, I stubbornly insisted on sticking to the rather challenging Normal difficulty mode, which resulted in more deaths and failures than I care to admit.
The Magnificent Trufflepigs, a narrative adventure game from developer Thunkd, starts off with an innocent enough premise – a friend asks you to help find a buried earring of great sentimental value, so you travel down to the English countryside with metal detector in hand, and get to… well, metal-detecting.
When the idea of a 2-hour-long metal album being presented as a semi-interactive video game was first brought up to me, I found it somewhat intriguing. I mean, on a conceptual level, it sounded great.
Strangeland is the latest point & click adventure game from Wormwood Studios, the creators of 2012’s Primordia – starring a disturbed man forced to perpetually witness the death of a woman she loves, the game sends players to the twisted, otherworldly carnival of the titular Strangeland, where they must find some much-needed answers to all the big WH questions you can imagine.
A dystopian setting is hardly anything new in gaming circles – from cyberpunk-inspired visions of the future to hopelessly apocalyptic timelines, we’ve seen plenty of examples of how disastrously the history of mankind can potentially unfold.
At its core, DWL is a 2D action-platformer that falls squarely into the “metroidvania” category of video games. There’s a large, twisty labyrinth to explore with visually diverse aesthetics and some genuinely gorgeous pixel art, a bunch of different creepy-crawly monsters to hunt down...
