Features:
Sable. Go Your Own Way: Inside the soulful sandbox of Sable - an open world with true player freedom as its goal.
Pixel Perfect (Developers going to extreme lengths with modern systems to revive the flavour of gaming's past)
State Of The Art (Virtual Realms)
The Making Of...Manifold Garden
Studio Profile (Nihon Falcom)
Time Extend (How Grin's Bionic Commando Rearmed helped redefine arcade gaming for the download era)
Hype
The Artful Escape
Far Cry 6
Weird West
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt
Salt and Sacrifice
Heavenly Bodies
Phantom Abyss
Reviews
Neo: The World Ends With You (and Post Script)
But Neo's biggest strength is not just virtual tourism but the depth of its characters and story. Both are brilliantly conveyed through dynamic manga-style panels, bolstered by stellar localisation that captures each personality, such as Nagi's archaic otaku manner of speech. It's not just the Twisters' banter that is easy to warm to, either: the leaders of rival teams also leave a strong impression, even when you inevitably find yourselves fighting to the death. Even individual Reapers become relatable: not all are as antagonistic as their leader, who has an exasperating fondness for that most irritating of portmanteaus, "sheeple". While the original Japanese title Subarashiki Kono Sekai, translates as 'It's A Wonderful World', the English name ultimately aligns better with the overriding message that a place is nothing without the people in it, so it's only fitting that character designers Tetsuya Nomura, Gen Kobayashi, and Miki Yamashita shold get the honour of being credited on the title screen. Neo may not have the game-changing novelty of the original, but what a thrill to discover that, 14 years on, TWETY continues to march to its own beat. (8)
Road 96 (and Post Script)
As in those [roguelike] games, though, the most satisfying thing you gain is knowledge. Even as your character resets, you hold on to your understanding of the recurring cast. This means that you're equipped to pick up on the inference of a particular line, an added layer of meaning that wouldn't have been there had the scene been served up sooner, or connect the dots between two scenes that happen to sit next to one another. The execution can be uneven, but in all of Road 96's wild ambition, there is a touch of genius. This doesn't feel like the endpoint of all these ideas, but the marking of a route forward. It's one we'd love to see explored further. (7)
The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles (and Post Script)
Generally, though, progress is smoother than the bumpier Ace Attorney trilogy, and the option to save and reload at any time makes it easier to feel an answer out. There's even a 'story mode' that plays the game for you, turning this into a (very long) Netflix boxset. It feels less an attack on player agency as recognition that the story does comfortably hold up by itself. By the time the final finger is pointed and two games' worth of loose threads are yanked into a satisfying bow, it's hard not to be swept up in the gallop of music, jokes and court-smashing theatrics. Is it a victory for Sholmes or our plucky lawyer? You be the judge. Either way, this is a game with great characters, and of great character. (8)
The Ascent
That becomes a bigger problem in the late game, where it resorts to the cheapest method of raising the difficulty by simply throwing high-level enemies at you in increasing numbers. In one battle, you're tasked with holding a position for a given amount of time, before being told that isn't enough; you must now finish all of the remaining enemies. At which point it has become clear that no matter how effective the synergy of our augs, mods and weapons may be, our survival hinges upon us grinding side-quests to raise our level. What a shame The Ascent should make the final steps of its climb so arduous - even if there is evidence here that its maker could yet go all the way to the top. (6)
Death's Door
Occasionally it goes a little too far. With no map, and a few samey-looking areas, the route forward sometimes only becomes clear after a fair amount of wandering. One fussy timing-based challenge involving precise hookshot use while moving across slippery ice platforms briefly has us considering a lower score. And if bosses are intended as a test where you apply everything you've learned, in one case Acid Nerve really does mean everything. Otherwise, this is a distinctive twist on an established formula, and a remarkable accomplishment for such a small team. Its subject matter might seem like serious business, but this game about death feels thrillingly alive. (8)
Wildermyth
These graves complete the final piece of the puzzle: the legacy system. Characters who've been memorialised (or made it to the end of the journey alive) enter your 'legacy', a personal pantheon of heroes who can be reintroduced in different roles in later campaigns. They crop up and vanish like mythical demigods, gradually growing in strength as they weave themselves deeper into Wildermyth's tapestry. It's a lovely acknowledgement of the way folk stories actually function. They don't conclude so much as reform, regrow, adapt like an organism from page to page, mind to mind, enduring like the memory of the people we've loved and lost. As long as we keep dreaming them up, their story will never end. There's always another campfire. (9)
Last Stop
This is one way that Last Stop might not be quite what you're expecting. Another lies in the kind of stories being told. The pitch seems to sell it as a science-fiction anthology, and that's not untrue, but its main concerns are those of another genre entirely. Plots about family illness and difficult neighbours, work struggles and romantic trysts, told across multiple generations of characters, all condensed in one specific area? This is EastEnders as much as The Twilight Zone.
Approached with that soap-opera mindset, Last Stop comes into focus. Like all good TV, its pleasures are cumulative, as you get comfortable with the characters and become invested in their lives. And as with those programmes, we find this most effective when taken in nightly doses, something the structure seems designed to encourage. Episodes open with a 'previously on' recap and, while their length and content varies, most feel like something that could sit between ad breaks - you should be able to squeeze in an instalment of all three stories into the running time of a standard Netflix drama.
This is what Last Stop is competing with: not the rest of your to-play queue, but whichever boxset you're currently chewing through. Which goes some way to explaining the lack of interest in interactivity, at least. It may not be able to compete with the best of prestige TV but, if you're willing to meet it on its own terms, Last Stop is a pleasant groove to slip into for a week or so. Just make sure the kettle's at the ready. (7)
Cris Tales
That's symptomatic of a game that feels like it doesn't quite know how to make the most of its many good ideas. In many ways, Cris Tales' biggest problem is that its inspirations have become its competition, while a noticeable amount of typos and out-of-place text ("I'm not running a charity here," a robot innkeeper says after you stay the night, a script probably meant for when you turn them down) add to the feeling of incompleteness. It's not so much that less could have been more here, but rather that it fails to replicate what made those classic JRPGs so beloved. (5)
Where The Heart Leads
Gratifying though it is to see your decisions produce such tangible results, Where The Heart Leads is consistently let down by its storytelling. The ability to tackle the many sub-stories during each section in any order leads to moments that don't fully add up, while the passage of time is frequently disregarded, and some fanciful subplots are difficult to swallow. Like Anderson, it makes some odd choices throughout: the impact of an absentee father on his two sons, hammered home in the dialogue, might have carried more weight had we not spent a good chunk of the game in his company. And it's not just its thirdperson camera that keeps you at a distance. We spend our time interacting with iridescent figures without faces, the looping ambient soundtrack completely flattening the drama: when everything feels as if it has equal weight, nothing has any impact. The idea of reimagining a life to make brand-new memories is an alluring one; alas, Armature's game doesn't generate enough unforgettable moments of its own. (4)
Boomerang X
Developer Dang smartly refuses to complicate things, instead relying on its diverse menagerie and devious level designs to keep you on your toes. Just as you think you're safe in the air, you encounter a towering quadruped that produces circular storms around its head, with multiple crystals on its body to smash before it falls. A large butterfly might be shielded by an escort of smaller ones, while a projectile-vomiting toad only exposes its weak belly once it's sprayed a cascade of poison in a circular pattern, giving you scant time to hit it before it slams back down. Vast columns of water force you to an arena's edges, while later you'll find yourself chasing a huge saw blade up and down a cylindrical ice tower. But it's the movement that makes it: the handling is wonderfully refined, and yet you never feel in total control of that slingshot. The magic is in the weapon, not your hands, as you're yanked around this way and that, feeling giddily disoriented as you reach once more for that left trigger to find brief respite from the chaos and get your bearings before you take flight once more. Whoa, indeed. (8)
No Longer Home
Among all the fretting about gas bills and eulogies to chicken nuggets abandoned in the freezer, things do start to get a little more heightened. Every part of the flat is decaying and being reclaimed by nature to an extent that occasionally resembles Annihilation's Area X. Behind some of its doors, meanwhile, are unusual housemates whose many-eyed forms we suspect don't feature in the real-life story. This blend of magical and social realism owes a lot to Kentucky Route Zero, as does the way the point-and click adventuring is presented. So much so, in fact, that the game itself makes a cameo here, complete with a reprise of one of its more famous choices. No Longer Home is considerably slighter than that game, at least in its eventual form, and the story - perhaps inevitably, given its nature - ebbs out more than truly ends. While the details and relationships are sharply observed, everything around them is a little fuzzy. But then so is the moment it's trying to reflect. (7)
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