I’ve been playing a lot of relaxing and comfy games for the past couple of months, for reasons you can probably guess. I’m still on the Animal Crossing train, and then I was playing a bunch of…

This game is wonderful. I went in with basically 0 expectations and here were my reactions, in order:

Half Life surprised me with how immersive it is for a game that came out in 1998. Sure, there are barely enough polygons to go around, but the simple gameplay, uncluttered UI, and real-time events go…

So this one wasn’t in the backlog originally, but some of my friends started a “Video Game Book Club” and this was the first game! Donut County is basically inverse Katamari: you’re a racoon that…

Groovy! I have mixed feelings about this one. On one hand, the graphics and animations are GORGEOUS. I love this game’s aesthetic, it’s well done and well suited to the genre. I really missed the…

The second book club game! Firewatch is a work of art that I don’t want to talk about without spoilers, so don’t click read more if you haven’t played the game. IF you haven’t played Firewatch, I…

Pikuniku was fine, but I felt like the cuteness of the graphics and music and animations and character design didn’t make up for the relative lack of substance. The platforming is kind of janky in a…

The entire time I was playing Bioshock I could not stop comparing it to Bethesda’s Fallout games. The faux-1950s aesthetic shared by both games is too similar to ignore. Both have you exploring…

Bioshock made me want to check out Fallout 2 next, and I had a really fun time. Fallout 2 is in my backlog as opposed to Fallout because I played the first game yeeears ago and was really turned off…

Not sure when I acquired this game but it’s free on Steam and I never actually played it. Really charming little heist game. The narrator adds a lot of drama. I especially loved the bit where you…

I don’t think ever played a game like Outer Wilds before. It’s truly special. The central conceit is that you’re a member of alien NASA on a mission to do space-archeaology in your solar system. The…

All of the hullabaloo around Cyberpunk 2077 put me in the mood for some lowercase-C cyberpunk content so I booted up the original Deus Ex. If you aren’t familiar with Deus Ex, it’s a game from 2000…

This game was pretty good. I really struggled with the first half or so of it, I think because I had trouble relating to Mae and didn’t enjoy acting out her naive and erratic behavior through the…

I’m a big fan of deckbuilding games so I had a really good time with Slay the Spire. I didn’t think I was that in to roguelikes, but between this and Hades maybe I’m coming around. As with Hades, you…

Well that was weird. Kids is an “interactive animation” that I feel belongs on an iPad at the MoMA. Presentation-wise, the black and white visual style that seamlessly blends the interactive and…

So, it became apparent really quickly that the four-hour window I came up with for these backlog games was absolutely not going to cut it for Monster Hunter: World. The number of systems that the…

The recent Star Wars movies left me kinda “meh” on Star Wars as a setting, but Knights of the Old Republic has been doing a good job of re-interesting me in the universe and lore. KotOR is the…

A little over a year into this project and I’ve gotten through less than half of my original list. That said, it’s been a complete success. It’s really expanded my horizons in terms of what games…

If you’re into games that focus heavily on storytelling, go give Mutazione a play if you haven’t already. In it, you play as Kai, a young girl visiting her dying grandfather on a post-apocalyptic…

This is might be the newest game I’ve added the the backlog, but after hearing The Forgotten City be described as “Outer Wilds but in ancient Rome” I just had to check this out. Outer Wilds, but with…

Pyre was made by Supergiant (the studio behind Hades), so I was really looking forward to it, but it hasn’t gripped me as much as I hoped it would. As with Hades, the presentation is top-notch, and…

This game wasn’t in my backlog, strictly speaking, but I put off getting a copy for a long time so it sort of counts. Either way this game is a blast so I’m going to talk about it.

I meant to write this one MONTHS ago and since then I’ve forgotten most of the things I wanted to say. That said, I think Control was my unexpected fave of 2021. It’s so rare these days that I pick…

I want to love Graveyard Keeper. I do love chore simulator type games - I’ve put so many hours into Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing and there’s no telling how many big holes I’ve dug in Minecraft…

Carto is outstandingly cute, and unlike a lot of Cute™ indie games it’s able to back the cuteness up with incredibly creative gameplay. The plot centers around a little kid who accidentally destroys…

Speed Dating for Ghosts might sound like some silly Hatoful Boyfriend type thing, or that dating sim where you date tanks or whatever, but it’s actually really earnest. The game explores some…

I got Hitman (2016) for Christmas years ago and then never played it. I think I assumed my-then computer wouldn’t run it, which is probably true, but I never tried because, I don’t know, I thought it…

I found A Mortician’s Tale to be more of an interactive educational tool than a game. The game part is the peanut-butter surrounding the gamer-pill of “learning about the death industry”. What…

Inscryption was on a lot of GOTY lists last year so I was looking forward to it when I finally got around to picking it up. Playing this duing the Halloween season was a good choice. I really enjoyed…

OneShot is one of the oldest games in my backlog, and while playing it I realized it had a lot in common with one of the newest games I’ve played: 2022 indie darling Stray.

The central gimmick of Minit is that you respawn every 60 seconds, which I thought was going to be really annoying, but once I got into it it really wasn’t! It’s a very cute little game. Very clearly…

Floppy Knights reminds me of a high quality 3rd party DS-era game for some reason. Probably because it’s a strategy game in the vein of Advance Wars or Fire Emblem. The twist is that it’s also a…

Meant to post this a full month ago but I forgot, whoops! Pentiment is so incredibly my shit, to the point that I’m not sure if other people would like it as much if they haven’t taken a couple…

First-thing’s first, Paradise Killer’s vibes are IMPECCABLE. The setting is this fantastic blend of vaporwave and eldritch horror, taking place in a pocket dimension where immortals called “The…

So here’s the thing, I picked up Norco almost immediately after I finished Paradise Killer but I struggled to get through the first chapter at the time because a lot of the early subject matter is…

I’ve been meaning to play Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective pretty much ever since it originally came out for the DS over a decade ago and By George I’ve finally managed it. I knew this game had become…

The pitch for Roots of Pacha is it’s Stardew Valley with cavemen. Say hello to my cavemansona, Mrot, who’s jacked from a lifetime of carrying stacks of rocks to and fro. He’s never cut his hair.