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There Is No Sleep's Game of the Year - the bronze medallists

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Silent Hill 2 is Silent Hill 2

You know, as much as I hate to hand it to Bloober Team, Konami, or the entire video game remake industrial complex, I cannot deny, Silent Hill 2 Remake is really fucking good. Like, I saw all the positive reviews and coverage, which was so overwhelming that I was incentivised to play a game I had less than zero interest in, and even then I went into it anticipating a flop. There’s no way the…

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Metaphor: ReFantazio is Persona in new clothes, and I love it [INITIAL VIBE]

The Persona series is incredibly unique, in not just its thrilling turn-based combat or its groundbreaking time management life-sim mechanics, but in the beautiful weaving of the two concepts to create a beautiful cohesion that makes its ridiculous runtime feel like a breeze. There truly isn’t another game series like it, not has there really been many attempts to replicate that winning formula.…

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The best, worst, and everything in between from the September '24 State of Play

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Core Keeper is a survival game I actually like

Release Date: 27th August 2024 Developer: Pugstorm Core Keeper held my attention for longer than I expected. Not that I was expecting to dislike it, per se, but rather that it seemed like a very familiar game to me. Mining, crafting, some light combat… you get the picture. And yeah, Core Keeper is basically that, with some slight differences that made all the difference. I love my beautiful…

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10 Cool Indie Games from 2024 you need to try

We’re at the halfway point of the year, and what better way to celebrate the occasion than you talking about some cool games that released within this arbitrary six month timespan! It’s been a solid year for games so far, but personally I’ve been a bit disappointed by the bigger releases this year. We’ve had some bangers for certain – Dragon’s Dogma 2, Shadow of the Erdtree and Kunitsu-Gami:…

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Clickolding: fear, isolation, and god

(thumbnail artwork done by Trevor Henderson for the Clickolding soundtrack album cover. Check it out here!!) Clickolding is a game that is basically impossible to recommend with a straight face. I mean, look at that title. What do you expect this to be other than exactly what it says on the tin? You click a clicker endlessly for the sexual gratification of a creepy guy in a bizarre mask and a…

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The Best and Worst of the Summer 2024 Anime Lineup [Part 2]

Hey! This is a continuation of a previous post, which you can view here! You don’t necessarily have to read it to understand this post or whatever, but if you’re looking for my thoughts on a specific series and it isn’t on this list, it’ll probably be there. In the meantime, here’s a quick summary of the plan here. I have decided to watch the first episode of as many anime airing in the Summer…

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The Best and Worst of the Summer 2024 Anime Lineup [Part One]

Recently, I’ve been getting back into anime, an interesting development given that I’ve averaged less than one anime season per three-month release window. I used to catch loads once upon a time, but I think having a job and a general change in my personal tastes made me more interested in video games for a couple years. That being said, shows like Delicious in Dungeon and Kaiju No. 8 piqued my…

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Shadow of the Erdtree, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bullshit

It’s the end of June 2024, and the only thing anyone is talking about right now in the gaming sphere is Elden Ring‘s first (and last) DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree. I am no exception to this! Since the day it came out, my life has basically been utterly dedicated to this enormous expansion, and by this point I’ve experienced pretty much all that it has to offer. I’ve enjoyed my time with the…

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The Until Dawn remaster reveals a decade of technical stagnation

I really, really like Until Dawn. It’s a surprisingly nuanced take on the classic slasher genre usually reserved for the silver screen. It markets itself as a playable version of those movies, where you act as a director of sorts, your choices and abilities affecting the outcome of the game’s story. If you haven’t played this game yet, have fun figuring out what on Earth this guy’s damage…

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Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, and artistic sincerity

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is a game that makes its intentions clear right from the beginning. This is a game about a woman with psychosis, and it aims to provide an authentic representation of the experience through simulated auditory and visual hallucinations. It does this through the accumulation of research and expertise provided by academic researchers and those with firsthand experience…

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What I Played in April 2024

April! Four months into the new year and I’m pretty pleased that I’ve managed to keep this up as a regular series on this blog. It was a better month than March for certain, as far as video games went. Playing this month’s games felt a lot less like a chore, I think because I wasn’t putting an arbitrary pressure on myself to schedule reviews for games I didn’t feel like finishing, which is what I…

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So I've Been Playing: Far Lone Sails & Changing Tides

I’m an unbelievable sucker for cinematic puzzle platformers. Limbo, Inside, Little Nightmares…those games truly hit like crack to me. Even the kinda boring ones like The Cub or Bramble: The Mountain King, games I straight up don’t enjoy, still work a little bit for me. There’s something about playing through a carefully designed series of set-pieces where the intent is to elicit a specific…

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INITIAL VIBE: Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes

2024 has been a year of really long games which I start but rarely finish. That’s sort of my fault – I have a bad habit of not completing tasks in general – but I think part of the reason is a general sense of burnout I get. I struggle to stay engaged with a gaming experience long enough to see it through to credits, with some exceptions (my beloved Dragon’s Dogma 2 springs to mind right away).…

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REVIEW: Open Roads

Memories are strange. They can be all sorts of things: joyful, forlorn, regretful, cringeworthy and everything else in between. Always, though, they are distorted, at least a little. For most people, it is impossible to remember a moment in our lives with absolute clarity; the recollection will always be affected by our biases, fragmented too as our brain sift out the white noise and letting the…

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REVIEW: Dragon's Dogma 2

In a lot of games, especially role-playing games, the aim is to make the experience feel like an adventure. Games are often structured to suit this, sending the player across its fictional world, visiting towns, cities, ruins and so on, to evoke this sense of scale that wouldn’t be possible were the story limited to a single setting. Dragon’s Dogma 2 is, first and foremost, a game about…