As the grip of the global pandemic has tightened around the world, one of the very few upsides has been increased time for video games. I managed to make it through more titles than usual this year, although a great many remain in the towering “to be played” pile. As with previous years, today I’m […]
I played Alien: Isolation at the Oculus booth at E3 last week. Alien is a high-end experiment in the genre I’ve been calling “exploratory first-person horror” for the last few years. Mechanically, it’s a lot like Slender or the hiding bits of Amnesia: you are running around a dark space ship with an obfuscated radar, […]
It took me a long time, but I finally figured out why I can’t play Dark Souls. I tried to play it–put a good 15 hours into it, which is longer than it takes me to complete most of the games I play. I even played a bit of Demon Souls before that, so I […]
Every once in a while I get an angry message asking me why I omit PC games from this site, or why I fail to include visual novels and light gun shooters. The reason is mostly logistic: I have a limited capacity to buy and play games and so I need to contain my research […]
A couple of years ago my brother, a comic fanatic (and indie comic artist/author/publisher), gave me a copy of The Walking Dead for my birthday. A few years later he gave me a DVD of the first season of the show based on that comic. And that is why, when I read that Telltale had […]
A couple of weeks ago I read about an indie horror game called Slender over at the Frictional Games blog. I booted it up and put on my headphones and was throughly impressed. It’s not much of a game–more of an experiment in setting and mechanics–but it works really well. I had my friend Jonny […]
This weekend I decided that I’d put it off for long enough: it was time to play イケニエノヨル (Ikenie no Yoru, Night of Sacrifice). You might have heard of this game; it made a bit of a stir when it came out in late 2010 because it uses the Wii Balance Board (!?) and had […]
I happened to be in Japan a few weeks ago when Catherine hit the shelves. I didn’t really know what to expect from it, other than it is some sort of sexy, stylized horror puzzle game, or something. Against my better judgement I bought the game for full price. The stylistic rendering and promise of […]
On Monday morning I got up early and washed my face, took a shower, and got ready for work. The night before I didn’t get much sleep. I dropped my daughter off at her preschool at 8:30 and then quickly made my way to work, where I had an appointment with a game designer I […]
It’s 1:52 AM, I leave for work in less than seven hours, and I just wanted to say: Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is the best goddamn Silent Hill game since Silent Hill 2. Wow.