malvasia bianca

Dicey Dungeons first caught my eye because it was a Terry Cavanagh game; ever since he released Super Hexagon, he’s been somebody whose work I am curious about. Though, to be sure, Dicey Dungeons seemed quite different from Super Hexagon! It’s clearly dice-focused; and the game blurb says that it’s a deckbuilding roguelike. All of […]

I’ve been listening to a lot of role-playing game podcasts recently that use rolls of six-sided dice to help advance their narrative. So, when I heard that Citizen Sleeper was using some of those ideas in a video game format, I was curious to see how that would work out. I’m used to video games […]

When NEO: The World Ends with You was released, I was surprised at its existence and not particularly interested in the game. I’d played the original The World Ends with You back when it came out almost a decade and a half ago; my memory was that it was a stylish game, with an odd […]

As I mentioned in my last post, I’d been at a bit of a loss of what to play, and had ended up grabbing Another Sight from the list of Xbox free games; actually, in April, there were two free games that caught my eye, with Hue being the other one. Hue is a puzzle […]

I was, honestly, feeling a little burned out on games after giving up on Elden Ring; and too many of the games that I’d noted as potential games to play next had enough mechanical overlap with Elden Ring that now in particular wasn’t the time for them. While I was wondering what to do about […]

Yoku’s Island Express is a pinball-themed Metroidvania. Which is not a sentence that I ever expected to write, but here it is; and that combination works well? You’re a ball rolling through the game’s environment (well, I guess technically you’re a bug rolling the ball); and periodically you get to parts of the world that […]

(Wow, this ended up a little long; my apologies in advance for that! So odd that a post about Elden Ring turned out to be excessively long, quite idiosyncratic, and reader-hostile…)   Back in 2009, there was a fair amount of discussion in video game blogs about Demon’s Souls. More than enough to get me […]

Back in the pre-pandemic days, I basically had three options as to how to pay attention in meetings. One was to close my laptop, and actively participate. The second was to leave my laptop open, and try to not be distracted by stuff on there too much. And the third was to leave my laptop […]

So: Forza Horizon 5. It’s really good? But it’s also really good in a certain sort of very polished way that’s really good in basically the exact same way that Forza Horizon 4 was; and, honestly, when talking about Forza Horizon 5, I don’t have much to add to what I said about its predecessor. […]

I played the original Psychonauts a few years after it came out, as part of the Vintage Game Club. I honestly didn’t remember much about it, other than a vague memory that I was happy enough to have played it but wasn’t as impressed by it as some people are; I wrote about it at […]

I’ve been working part time (three days a week) for most of a year, so I figure that it’s about time for an update. My top-level take: definitely the right choice. I’m glad I’m not working full time (whether at my current employer or a different employer); but also I’m glad that I’m working a […]

The Forgotten City hadn’t been on my radar until I heard a couple of end-of-year podcasts make a plug for it; seemed up my alley, I figured I should give it a try. And I’m glad I did! Partly because it’s a puzzle game in a format that I’m not used to and that I […]

I’m playing through the Yakuza series at a rate of about once a year; so now I’m up to Yakuza 3. Which is the first entry in the series that I’ve played in over a decade that’s not either a prequel or a from-the-ground remake. It’s a port of a PS3 game, so it looks […]

I’m behind on my blogging, so I would say that I wish that I’d written about A Short Hike sooner, so that I could remember what I had to say about it. But, honestly, I feel like I didn’t have much to say about the game even right after I finished it? Don’t get me […]

I think the thing that struck me the most about Disco Elysium is that it’s, in some sense, an RPG without combat, and it shows that RPGs without combat work fine? You’ve got your stats, your leveling up, your equipment, your quests, your skill challenges; but the skill challenges are much less frequent than the […]

The trailer for Beast Breaker looked charming, though I couldn’t quite figure out how much gameplay there was: was it really doing enough with Peggle-style mechanics to support a game? Were there enough adventure game trappings to make me care? Still, I heard a few people talk about it positively, including some expressing pleased surprise […]

I recently hit a bit of a lull in my backlog: I’d made it through the recent games that had particularly caught my eye, and wasn’t sure what to do next. It had been a while since I’d done a random AAA game, so I decided to play Ghost of Tsushima: I don’t have a […]

If you like playing video games, you, up until fairly recently, had two choices of how to play them at home, a console or a PC. If you play them on console, then, basically, you can just stick in the game and it will work. But the downsides are that it will only work on […]

I’m always keeping my ears open for interesting Apple Arcade games, and I’d recently gotten an Apple TV, which made me more curious about console-style Apple Arcade games in particular. And I saw some positive mentions of The Pathless on Twitter and in podcasts, and at least some of the people involved in it had […]

Chicory is, basically, a game in the style of a 2D Zelda but with almost all of the combat removed and with the game themed around coloring the world. (At the start of the game, all color has been drained from the world; you’ve got a paintbrush that you can use to paint colors back […]