Review: Skydrift

A couple days ago I wrote about downloadable games, ideally, being perfect little bites of gaming designed for the short experience. They’re either well-crafted, focused experiences, or they’re grasping for big budget success and gasping for air. Skydrift falls in

Jumpy beam adventure: Pid

Well doesn’t this just look like a game right up my ever-expanding alley? Pid is a 2-D “platform adventure game” that looks to take the idea of the gravity beam from Portal 2 and translate it to 2-D, all the

The open roads of Skyrim

As a gamer I am what we call a chronic restarter. I’ve gotten better about it since I’ve started writing about games (as I have to beat things in a timely fashion), but as a kid I would restart Super

Differentiating downloadable games

High speed internet has birthed the cheap downloadable game. If you’ve played video games in the past five years, you’ve no doubt played one: priced under $20, only a few hours in length, as opposed to priced at $60 with

When reviews go Rashomon

How does this happen? How do two review outlets write reviews that are diametrically opposed?

I’m not talking just difference of opinion: “This game is fun” versus “I didn’t enjoy this game.” That makes sense. No, I’m talking reviews that read like the differing perspectives of Akira Kurosawa’s classic film Rashomon: not just mere differences of opinion, but entirely different experiences of reality.

Omnitopic December 2011: Faith

Faith and religion are difficult topics for gamers. It’s something some people don’t really want to talk about because it rarely involves shooting people (though it can involve assassination with hidden blades. Thanks Ubisoft), and because people have so many

The abstract artist: retro styling and narrative

I’ve covered a lot of games recently that have used retro RPG graphics to tell entirely different kinds of stories. And, thanks to Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s coverage of Wither, they found this really interesting quote from the game’s developer about

Abstract art: Wither and magical realism

Wither’s a curious little game. It’s an RPG Maker title and it runs about thirty minutes (less for me. At some point I turned into an adventure game savant), and yet there’s so much to say about it. In a

Out and about: A Walk in the Park

I’m always glad to see new indies come onto the scene, especially ones with such cool style (though admittedly one similar to something we’ve seen before). Here comes A Walk in the Dark, a new game by Flying Turtle Studios,

Hunting for witches: Dragon Age and Skyrim

I’ve made no secret my love of systems in role playing games, a love birthed from Final Fantasies in my youth and Dungeons and Dragons in my college years. I still play Dungeons and Dragons, and when we play we