Playstation

Interestingly, the fact you’re playing an arcade game does get used a little bit. Every now and then you’ll get a glitch in the game in the form of random modifiers that get “patched” about a minute later. You’ll cause more damage or gain…

Brilliantly, the table comes with a campaign of sorts, setting you challenges over multiple attempts at the machine. These amount to scoring targets within time limits, or surviving a certain amount of time on a single ball, but each one is…

The setup is at least interesting, with you playing an unnamed investigator entering a digital recreation of the family home. An AI has analysed the house itself and recreated what it’s discovered for you to go in and explore without…

You play as Jim Baylor, a former police officer who was set up by a corrupt force and sent to prison. Upon your release, you find that the city’s crime has escalated considerably, and you join a friend’s private security company intending…

Regardless, here you will find a horror game a year for the past decade, along with the occasional honourable mention. You’ll find fewer major releases here, as I’m much keener to shine my torch on something you may have missed, forgotten,…

The issue here is that due to it being the same game, everything that was irritating about the original is still there too. Those things that made for entertaining Youtuber bait a decade ago aren’t really as much fun to play anymore. If…

Here it is, the dream started by Red Faction: Guerilla, anger at Lego, kicking down a sand castle, all realised in glorious voxels. If you can see it, you can blow it up. Teardown delivers handily on the core idea that collapsing buildings…

Mechanically, this is even simpler than Mario Kart, which likely is due to its mobile game roots. There’s no accelerating here, with your steed hurtling off right from the start and automatically jumping over small obstacles. Amusingly, the…

Most of your time in the game is spent walking around an environment to find a character or object so the story progresses, playing the occasional mini-game as you go. It’s nice enough, and means it’s very accessible to younger kids who…

First is the unique (for the subgenre anyway) Slime mechanic. This works a lot like a meter in many fighting games, most notably recent Mortal Kombat releases, with you building it up by hitting and being hit. Depending on how much Slime…

Larger confrontations are more interesting, with you having options like clapping and bowing in the correct combination to banish your foe, or perhaps using an ally to distract them. I appreciated these more as they put a thrilling…

Mechanically, this is very simple to play, with there actually being quite limited interaction. I could see some people arguing that this is a walking simulator, a term that I’m not a fan of, but there’s a certain element of puzzle solving…

You can end up with a fleet of ships to hop in and out of when you head to home base, or you can sell them to get a new model. They feel quite different too, with powerful, armoured Vindicators being quite sluggish when compared to the…

The first thing you notice upon starting the game, and the thing that immediately attracted me to it, is just how awesome it looks. That 50s movie style is incredibly well done and permeates every element of the game. The cutscenes are…

Hell Pie, or the second coming of Conker’s Bad Fur Day, is another in a long line of indie-made 3D platformers that aim to recapture the hey-day of collecting shiny things, to, once again, mixed success.  It’s hard for me to quantify the…

The levelling up feels a lot fairer now too. Previously, late game enemies would give you very little experience, really stunting your levelling as a run went on. Now you seem to be rewarded much more reasonably, with stronger enemies…

This is in part, a tale of the struggles of families who emigrate and find their new homes perhaps not as welcoming as they would hope, which I feel is an important narrative these days. But Venba doesn’t dwell on this, instead being more…

In each puzzle, you use photographs to manipulate the environment in order to reach a teleporter. By holding up a polaroid photo in front of you and clicking, that photo becomes part of the world. It’s hard to describe just how amazing this…

Rather than being a direct remake of the two games, Layers of Fear tries to tie the events of these games together. This rerelease of sorts wraps the games into an overarching narrative of a writer who has been sent to an isolated…

There are roughly fifty cats on each floor, many of which are easy to spot, but with a good number that will require a more thorough scouring of the environment. Each one is a fairly simple design, but this feels deliberate so that they…