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Manual Intervention by Spannerworx lives in the comfy realm of "updated classics". As Nova Drift is to Asteroids, so Manual Intervention is to Missile Command, overhauling the basic "shoot

When my wife looked over my shoulder and saw Dead Pixels by CSR Studios, she remarked, "Wow, you're actually playing a zombie game?" It's true, I'd gotten very tired of the zombie trope package,

For as much as the "JRPG" genre differs from the "western RPG", the two tend to share tropes at the high-concept level, both featuring swords and magic deployed against wildly nonhuman

I don't get along especially well with "sandbox" games. An open world with lots to do, like Horizon Zero Dawn, sure--but inevitably, I get 50-75% of the way through clearing assorted quests and

I've had a theory of sorts bouncing around my head that ended up relevant to my experience of Sky Rogue by Fractal Phase. It goes like this: advancing in a video game requires some mix of luck, technique,

Creators Digital Poppy have over time built up an oeuvre called the Bluehills County Stories, with three noteworthy features: furry characters, Lovecraftian cosmic horror, and unapologetic queerness. Prior

I've appreciated the sheer variety of items in the Racial Justice Bundle. The first games I picked out were quick-play shmups; then I played some meatier action and exploration titles; then recently I

Itch has a reputation for hosting weird games. Half-finished prototypes, entries for high-concept game jams, pornographic visual novels, whatever! I find it delightful, a hotbed of creativity unrestrained

Ever since the Chainmail era of fantasy wargames, fantastical hacky-slashy RPGs have grappled with the conceit of "magic" as "the ability to hurl battlefield-leveling artillery from one's

As an 80's child, I barely missed the heyday of the video arcade. I fondly remember a couple of glorious birthday parties at a local Atari-branded mall spot, burning bags of tokens on Turtles in Time,

Tamashii* is another game from the Big Bundle whose tagline succeeded in grabbing my attention. "Weird Luciferian Puzzle Platformer". Luciferian, eh? Not "Satanic"? When I saw the option

If you were to conduct a Family Feud survey titled "Trendy Elements in Indie Video Games", Lenna's Inception would hit at least five of the top ten. Retro visuals! Procedurally generated levels!

Task Force Kampas' tag line is "A classic arcade space shooter on steroids", which strikes me as a rather trite--and maybe even slightly offensive--attempt to describe what sets it apart from

Games are powerful vehicles for emotion. The most common, perhaps, are frustration and gratification: the cycle of failing repeatedly at a challenge until, eventually, you triumph. But there's also awe,

A few days ago, this gem of a Steam discussion got referenced in a forum thread about Caves of Qud that I follow: If you're literate in the vocabulary of computer game genres, you're likely facepalming

Steam's most recent seasonal event--not quite a sale, at least in the sense of deep, store-wide discounts the platform is known for--encouraged users to play games from their libraries that hadn't seen

It should surprise no one, given the length of delay since last post, that I've gotten distracted again. The culprit this time? Caves of Qud, an early access, tile graphics, weird post-apocalyptic sci-fi

Last episode, I screwed up a bunch of stuff in my Arcanum playthrough. Some of it, like pissing off the whole town by throwing a bomb in the wrong place, was fixable by a saved-game reload. Some of it

Oh boy, y'all. Going to briefly depart from the chronological narrative approach, here, to tell the story of Amaira Grayson's No Good Very Bad Day, or, An Arcanum Comedy of Errors. When You Ask People

When we left off, we'd created our heroine, Amaira Grayson, a sickly Half-Orc given a new lease on life. Seeking fortune, she boards a zeppelin headed for the great industrial city of Tarant. (I've rewritten