The experience of playing Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones is frustrating in the best way, just like any exploration of a Lovecraftian world should be. The turn-based RPG from Cultic Games is set the fallen city of Arkham and is heavily inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories about fish people and tentacled atrocities.
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Wazen’s Assault Spy is a game where the player controls a man with a briefcase who is tormented by his junior co-worker, and spends his time being rated on a A to D system for his work. On paper it sounds like the monotonous every day of a office workers life, with a side helping of high school. In reality, it’s anything but.
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Cultist Simulator has its main character creating a cult in the 1920s by placing cards in action spaces, often on some sort of timer. Players must negotiate the limited options given by these cards while deciding what to base their cult around, who to recruit and what rituals to perform. Not only that, the main character is constantly trying to fend off madness, starvation and the Ministry of Suppression. Running a cult definitely isn’t as easy as it seems.
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Past Cure’s story revolves around Ian, a former secret agent who was kidnapped by an unknown organisation for three years. Not only does he have no memory of this time, but he now suffers from both PTSD and painful psychic abilities. His brother has helped him get back on his feet as much as possible, and now with his help, Ian is going after the only link to his missing time, a mysterious drug ring. On paper it sounds like the plot of one of the most interesting games this year, so where did Past Cure go so far wrong?
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Created by Spanish indie developers, Digital Sun, Moonlighter is a roguelite with one very important twist: your character is a shopkeeper, not a hero. Will’s goal might be to adventure through the final, mysterious dungeon near the village, but in the meantime he has to keep his family’s shop open. Potions, swords and armour cost money after all! That’s about all the story Moonlighter has but that’s really all it needs. The game is part roguelite dungeon crawl and part shop management simulator, and strangely enough those the combination of the two genres creates a near-perfect balance.
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Omensight is a game that has the player talking to animals, offering amber to the Tree of Life and meditating. It would be pretty chill, except for the giant serpent slithering forth from the Void trying to end the world. In reality, Omensight’s world is filled to the brim with betrayal and political intrigue where your character, the Harbinger, fights her way through active battlefields and prison riots alike. Basically, it’s a game that contains pretty much everything I love about the medium.
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Indie studio Wazen’s Assault Spy was released into early access on Steam earlier in May, and it’s already showing the signs of being a pretty good beat em up. In the currently available story, you play as corporate spy Asaru, who fights with a briefcase and is constantly hindered by his semi-useless partner, Kanoko. You spend much of your time in the game dodging the laser sights of robots, dashing through semi-destroyed offices and punching your enemies in the face. It’s a lot of silly fun.
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Light Fall certainly has a lot going for it. It features quite beautiful graphics as its fantastical setting of Numbra is realised in black and blue silhouettes. The orchestral score by French Canadian composer Jean-Philippe Tessier is absolutely exquisite, definitely one of the best game soundtracks I’ve heard this year. The gameplay is fun too. One of the best parts is mucking around with the main character’s ability to summon a cube of darkness which can be used in a variety of different helpful ways. All these things add up to a good game, but not the great platformer I’d been hoping for.
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Cyberdimension Neptunia: Four Goddesses Online is a spin-off of the Cyberdimension Neptunia series which focuses on the four main goddesses (or CPUs) of the world of Gaminindustri playing the beta of a new MMO. If you haven’t met these characters before, never fear, throughout the game main character Neptune will fourth wall break to introduce you to each character. In addition to Neptune, there’s Vert, the competitive MMO player, Blanc, the caring-but-occasionally-angry healer and Noire, the slightly insecure cosplayer. Neptune also introduces the players to the supporting cast, but unfortunately, a large portion of what she tells you is often about the character's looks, not particularly helpful, given the player can already see them.
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There’s something a little bit magical about Where The Water Tastes Like Wine, and I’m not entirely sure what it is. The game focuses on developing stories based on the main character’s experiences as they drift across a fantastical version of America. Throughout the game your character encounters a range of different people from different places. This gives the game an almost unmatched depth. There are very few times I’ve fallen in love with the world of a game quite so much, it felt almost painful to leave behind such a fascinating place when the game ended.
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A Case of Distrust is an atmospheric game set in the world of 1920’s San Francisco where you play as a disillusioned private investigator. So far, so much like every film noir movie or game you’ve ever heard of, but there’s one exception. Your character is female. A former policewoman turned PI after the apparent suicide of her uncle, Phyllis Cadence Mallone is one of the more interesting detectives of her genre. The game follows her as she attempts to solve a case brought to her by a former informant of her uncle while navigating the shady world of gangsters and prohibition.
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I'm not the type of gamer who plays new release games, I'm not even the type of gamer who waits for the end of the year sales to pick the best releases at half price. I'm the type of gamer who realizes they haven't played that one game they meant to three years later and then decides to catch up. I'm like that for a number of reasons, I refuse to play games in story-based series without having played the ones leading up to it, and I spend quite a few of my gaming hours trying to finish the ridiculously long RPGs I often play. It all means that I end up playing games years after everyone else has after the hype has significantly died down. This series aims to compare my playing experience to the hype around each game at the height of its popularity and see whether it still holds up.
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