malvasia bianca

Slay the Spire is a deckbuilding roguelike. And it’s a pretty good deckbuilder game! But, unfortunately, it’s still a roguelike, and one of the things I’ve learned over the last couple of years: I don’t like roguelikes, or at least I haven’t yet found one that I like. Slay the Spire is the roguelike I’ve […]

I kind of waffled about whether I should write about Erica, but it’s on the list, so it gets a post. And I do think it’s a good game. You’re watching filmed interactions most of the time, but the bits where you have to interact with the environment (even if they don’t involve a choice, […]

I’d never played a Pokemon RPG before. I’d seen a few episodes of the anime a couple of decades back, and I played Pokemon Go when it came out, but the main RPGs never made it to the top of the list of potential games for me to play. This summer, though, I had a […]

Outer Wilds sounded like a really neat game. Heck, it still sounds like a neat game to me! A tiny solar system, and a ship to explore it; a mystery or two to seed your curiosity, growing as you explore the planets in the system; and then, after 22 minutes, the sun goes nova and […]

I was very glad that Shenmue and Shenmue II got a re-release in preparation for the forthcoming third game: I thought back on those two games incredibly fondly, but I didn’t actually remember so many details about them, and in particular I could use a plot refresher. Maybe I was a little curious how well […]

It took me quite a while to get around to playing Persona 5: I don’t normally play games close to their release date, but given how much I liked Persona 4 and Tokyo Mirage Sessions, I would have expected Persona 5 to be an exception. But some of the stuff I’d heard about the game […]

I wasn’t expecting to bounce off of Baba Is You nearly as quickly as I did: I think of myself as somebody who likes puzzle games and who is good at them, but neither of those proved to be particularly the case with Baba Is You? Maybe I like puzzle games with consistent rules? Maybe […]

(If you’re super spoiler-sensitive, probably don’t read this, just play the game? Though if you’re only mildly spoiler sensitive, it should be fine, I’m just going to talk a bit about the approach to problem solving in a couple of places.)   Liesl and I played Return of the Obra Dinn together. It’s a good […]

A couple of months ago, Sony released an app for the iPad that lets you play games on your PS4. And I’ve been playing Persona 5 recently; it’s a long game that I enjoy but need to keep chipping away at, so playing that while Liesl was watching something else on the TV seemed like […]

Hexcells is a puzzle game take on Minesweeper. Unfortunately, it’s been decades since I’ve played Minesweeper, so I can’t really comment authoritatively on that game, but it has you gradually unveiling more information about the game. This distinguishes Minesweeper from Nikoli/Conceptis-style paper puzzles where all the information is there at the start, you just have […]

I have never seen a video game with an art style like Gris: I’m used to games striving for realistic approaches, and while I still think cel-shading is underused in games, there are a bunch of examples of that. But Gris is doing something else entirely, with some sort of of pen plus watercolor style. […]

Playing Hollow Knight reminded me of how it feels to play a horror game. I like to be in control, and I’m loss averse as a player; so part of me doesn’t enjoy walking through a new area, getting more and more nervous about what might happen, having made more progress since I last saved […]

From the double emphasis in its title, you would guess that Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is a game about masculinity. And that suspicion would deepen as you watch the initial cut scene, in which the mother of the game is immediately fridged; we then see the titular brothers morning at her grave, after […]

Card Quest is, in many ways, right up my alley. It’s a roguelike with a card-based mechanic; I like card games, I wish I liked roguelikes more than I do, but I like the way Card Quest approaches the genre. The card mechanics put me in a state of mind where I’m expecting to lose […]

So: Alphabear 2. It had been a while since the original Alphabear, I enjoyed it, so I might as well revisit it? And the gameplay mechanics are the same, and are pleasant. The only difference I noticed there was my reaction to them: I was hoping I could play Alphabear 2 while wandering around and […]

I used to play driving games a fair amount: they were never my genre of choice or anything, but I found them soothing. I’d gotten out of the habit over the last few years, but I’d been hearing good things about various Forza games for a few years; so when I finished playing through Shenmue, […]

Some iPad games I played recently: Paperbark A lovely art style, and lovely sound design. And I like the idea of having a world that appears as you walk around in it. The gameplay beyond that concept didn’t grab me, though. (Or, for that matter, the learning aspects: it’s an openly didactic game.) And, similarly, […]

I really was not expecting my initial reaction to Limbo to be how soothing it is. But there’s something about the game (its color palette, or rather palette of greys, in particular) that made it immediately feel calming to me, like walking through a quiet evening. Limbo is not actually like walking through a quiet […]

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice got notice for its portrayal of psychosis: Senua, the protagonist, hears voices, and sees things that other people don’t. The developers apparently took this seriously, consulting with mental health professionals and integrating the symptoms and themes into the game. This sort of treatment is, honestly, something that I’m temperamentally not particularly well […]

I started playing Kittens Game because of a VGHVI symposium on incremental games. I’d played Paperclips a few times, but Kittens Game turned out to have quite a different rhythm. To begin with, it’s slower paced, in fact quite a bit slower paced. Fairly soon I got to a situation where I could productively click […]