OCTOPATH TRAVELER 0 is a damn good JRPG. The world, despite my grievances with the main story, is interesting and fun to explore when the game lets you. Wishvale’s rebirth’s best parts aren’t the uninteresting city building but, again, the stories of the characters within. With great music and visuals accompanying all this, you can’t go wrong with SQUARE ENIX’s latest turn-based title.
SLEEP AWAKE is a game I saw in my email, having never heard of it. I redeemed the key on a whim, and dear lord, am I happy that I did. The four hours I spent in The Crawl as Katja were full of intrigue, some genuine scares, and a hell of a lot of enjoyment.
DOG WITCH is plenty cute as it is fun. Thanks to the short runs, it’s easy to hop into whenever you need to spend a bit of time without having to overthink on builds and setups. Thanks to a good amount of enemy and equipment variety, you can’t go wrong with this adorable deckbuilder.
In a year full of genuinely incredible games, I’m more than pleased to have found another one that you should immediately look to pick up. I beg you, don’t let Sektori pass you by. This is an utterly mesmerising and innovative twin-stick arcade shooter, packed full of content and modes and with a level of challenge that ticks all the right boxes. Now to take on those harder modes – I’ll see you on the leaderboards!
Chaos Zero Nightmare shouldn’t be this addicting, but I spent a lot of time crawling through the Chaos over the last month. There’s a fair bit of content to trawl through and the bleakness of the world contrasted with the colour anime aesthetics is very interesting, which has kept me engaged with the story thus far. It’s not easy to wrest me away from my other actively played gacha games, but CZN has done it and I can recommend it to anyone who enjoys sauntering through gloomy deckbuilding dungeon crawlers.
My biggest hope is that Tribute Games can implement some of the combat tweaks I mentioned earlier to really take this title to the upper echelon of games in the genre because as good as it is, it doesn’t quite stand toe to toe with the greats, but it’s agonisingly close.
SILENT HILL 2 is a fantastic remake. It uses the skeleton of one of the PS2 era’s best titles and improves upon it with fantastic graphics, excellent new voiceover work, and, as an Xbox Play Anywhere title, there isn’t a better storefront to buy it on.
Despite my issues with the game, Ire: A Prologue is one of the better survival horror titles I’ve played. It’s got a good lore backing it, a great performance from the cast, and the objectives chance often enough to keep gameplay fresh. Emily might chip in to occasionally help the player, but you’ll be doing most of the puzzle solving on your own. Against the precipice of a terrifying-looking monster hunting you down in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle, this is easily a game that’ll terrify you to bits. If this is a start to a franchise, this is definitely a good one.
A.I.L.A is a solid experience, with a strong beginning and end, let down by a weak middle. If this version of VR existed in the real world, then the medium would have taken off far more than it ever did. It’s a good setup for a horror game, and fans of the genre would do well to check this one out sometime.
Dave the Diver is an excellent, enormous title that is best left as vague as possible. Go in without looking too deeply into it and be ready for dozens of hours of some of the best that video gaming has to offer.
