SAM READER
Nighthawks Review
Nighthawks is a masterful adventure/RPG, a game that’s mature without being edgy, grotesque without being gauche, and deep without being either exhausting or falling into the usual pitfalls of changing a bunch of surface things without changing anything else. It’s a big, deep, beautiful, bloody pool, and you owe yourself the opportunity to dive right in and experience all its horrors and delights. When this drops on the 22nd, hopefully you’ll be the first through Nighthawks’ velvet rope.
Mechanicus II Review
Beneath the bugs, visual confusion, dull palette, and gameplay so punishing it borders on the sadistic, there’s a good game in here. The bones of the first Mechanicus slumber beneath the surface, and the Necron mechanics have some interesting wrinkles on top of the basic campaign.
But much like the constantly spawning onslaught of reinforcements, all this stuff just frequently gets in the way.
Tiny Bookshop Review
For all “cozy” is in the public eye, for all “cozy” is a genre of game, it does require some element behind the coziness. What Tiny Bookshop gives us instead is a glorified screensaver and some minimal adventure game elements, a strangely transitory experience much like customers wandering in and out of a bookshop, never really building the lasting connections with players that a cozy game should. It’s a game that’s about coziness more than a game that’s actually cozy, and in the end, that’s the thing that undoes it.