Alan Wake 2 is a storytelling masterpiece in gaming, blending horror tropes seamlessly into its narrative. The game offers a thick atmosphere, deep characters, and intertwined storytelling with Control. Although reliant on callbacks to previous games, it delivers exceptional combat, pacing, and an enthralling story, making it a must-play for fans of the series and new players alike.
Pixel Cafe has a smooth lo-fi vibe with some of the best music I’ve heard this year. Released early October, we finally got a chance to sit down with what can be considered revolutionary in its own genre. You’ve got gorgeous pixel-art style beats, a soundtrack that kicks off from the start and doesn’t stop and a hypnotic gameplay loop that’s as mediative or brow-sweating as you want it to be. Quick note: The developers have been active in updating the game. A mid-December 2023 update introduced difficulty modes, giving the game more depth from the challenging kitchen manager that it was to a zen like rhythm game to the challenging kitchen manager that many loved as is. Let’s dig into what separates this game from others. Running the Pixel Cafe The game starts off with a cup and a coffee machine and simple instructions. The game’s complexities slowly unveil…
You should play Mondealy if you have the chance to. That’s our review. If you want to know why we say that, read on, but ultimately, we’re going to tell you to play Mondealy. If you don’t like visual novels, that’s fine. If you don’t like pixel art, that’s fine. If you don’t like indie games, that’s fine. Go play it. That’s as high of an honor as a game can get from us and we’ll gladly hand it to this year’s best visual novel adventure game. Mondealy is a journey of friendship in a weird world that exists slightly below our own. The best way to describe is what happens in Undertale if the barrier went down but no one left and classism is at the top of the discussion list. Modern culture weaves through with love and affection as Michael journeys through a world that evokes both nostalgia…
The wacky moving simulator Moving Out was a hit, so naturally the devs at SMG Studio cooked up a bigger, better, and even more chaotic sequel. Moving Out 2 takes the ridiculous physics-based gameplay we loved from the original and turns everything up to 11, delivering double the content and a whole lot more over-the-top action. To put it simply if you’re looking for something like Moving Out or Overcooked, then you need to get Moving Out 2. The improvements to the game are well worth the cost. It can get repetitive yes and some of the later levels are eh, but Moving Out 2 is 2023’s best cooperative game released so far this year. In a genre that needs more, it delivers. Massive improvement as well to Moving Out 1! What was to me at least an already great game has gotten better. Let’s check out some high-level reasons…
Adore’s combat is groundbreaking, intuitive and different from creature summoning games that have been needed for a long time. The latest update and full release have shown a polished strategic pet summoning game that has ARPG elements, rogue-like elements and something different than turn-based pet combat. If you’re big into pet games, you shouldn’t take my word for it and head on over to the Adore steam page to start checking the game out yourself – we recommend it. You summon a team of four creatures who fight for you. Your main character can’t actually engage in battle directly, only dodge and you don’t have absolute control over your summons. You’ve got to involve a lot of strategy and tactics to get through combat and what appears to be simple gameplay unravels as you move deeper into the game. If you played the game early in early access, you will…
Tim Cain is known as part of the legendary trio behind Fallout 1 & 2. He also worked at Troika and programmed Vampire: The Masquerade and one of my favorite games Arcanum. He recently released a video lambasting Carbine and NCSoft while disclosing some deep interpersonal issues at Carbine. Tim’s video is authentic and his recount is accurate by all means. I covered WildStar heavily from 2011 onward and the stories back then were well known. Carbine was a toxic and unhealthy workplace which had the potential to release the best MMO of the golden age but instead failed with 9 years of development time and a further four post-launch to win back everyone ala Final Fantasy XIV. The video is very misleading in some ways. It argues that there was a lack of unified vision. That’s true, but it was also completely the fact that everyone at Carbine was…
Gaming is the most social activity online. The only other more social activity is FaceTime, due to its liminal space intrusion into your life when someone calls. Social activity requires platforms that allow users to connect. The entire basis of the Internet is to send and receive from other users in other locations. Twitter has recently rate limited users on a temporary basis, which has greatly slowed the flow of information between communities. There’s a crisis unfolding on the Internet’s most social town square. Twitter’s pathway to monetization continues to be rocky. Decision after decision has left users a gasp at what to do when their normal that had been consistent for so long rapidly changes day after day. The long and short of the current crisis is that new users, regular users and paid users all have different amounts of posts they can view per day. The limit seems…
Feng Shui is a very deep practice that has many elements and a lot of philosophy to it. Often thought of in offices and at home, yet rarely thought of in video game homes. Yet, the basic principles of Feng Shui can apply to your Minecraft, Valheim, Rust, Grounded, etc. base just as well at your apartment or house. Let’s dive into that. The Flow of Energy In Feng Shui the idea is that the entrance of the house is where energy begins to flow from. Pathways that everyone walks brings energy with it and manipulating that flow of energy is how you can have good energy or bad energy within a home. While this is a massive oversimplification, that oversimplification can really help to understand the basic principle here. If you think about your base in a game, especially a multiplayer base, you can quickly see the pathways where…
Only Up! is a strange game that’s received a lot of attention lately and dialog around the game has gotten kind of… strange. For some context, Only Up! is a game that’s a Roblox Obby that takes itself as a Getting Over It style game made with Unreal Engine, generic assets and NFTs. That’s a lot, let’s unpack it. Only Up! and NFTs This is a weird one, the game has NFTs throughout it. No links, QR codes or advertisements so don’t believe the misinformation that the game itself is a scam. It does, though, have other NFTs in it which some people have found poor taste? There’s an argument that streamers have been advertising these NFTs unknowingly because they’ve been included in this game. There’s not much else other than a lot of misinformation. The only truth is the game does have NFT images in it, but an NFT…
For those of you who have ever worked a job that had any kind of meeting this may actually resonate differently than those who haven’t. When video games are developed there are, surprisingly, a lot of meetings that occur. When we’re talking meetings we’re talking a lot of meetings. So many meetings that it’s actually kind of fascinating to think about. None of the below is really applicable to single developer games that don’t utilize outside contractors. Single developers naturally work entirely alone on their own game and purchase / generate all the assets and resources themselves. Single developers who contract out work still have meetings, interestingly enough. Meetings and Video Games So there’s a lot of cooks in the kitchen. You have the product team, that’s the developer and the game designer along with their associated analysts and support staff. You have a technical team that’s got a considerable…