This is the first paid-for game that I've played on the Oculus Quest 2. I've mostly stuck to demos - because I get bored easily. Or free games - because I'm a cheapskate. But Meta gave me £30 in credit for helping people fix their broken Quests. So I bought this much hyped puzzle game. And… It's excellent! Much better than I expected. As puzzler, it works really well. Lots of different types of puzzles, some of which make effective use of the VR environment. Items which need careful ma…
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I'm about a billion years late to this review. But that's OK, sometimes it is nice to wait until all the bugs have been squashed and all the walkthroughs written up. TWA is a lovely little puzzler. Move blocks around until they fit in the right holes. It is the sort of game which could have been written for the ZX81 back in the day. I played it with the Director's Commentary switched on. How weird that we now have games designers doing that! It was a lovely experience. Mike Bithell gives…
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I'm playing through the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. You can follow along with all my game reviews. It's a lovely morning in the home, and you are a horrible cat. Your aim is to cause mayhem and destruction by knocking over as many things as possible. This is a joyful little game - although I suspect it is a lot more fun in VR than on a laptop. The cartoony graphics ran perfectly on Linux. The controls aren't particularly suited to a laptop. Or, at least, I had…
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I'm playing through the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. You can follow along with all my game reviews. This is... awful? It is visually interesting without actually being fun. It is intriguing for five minutes before becoming hollow. It is surreal and delightfully weird. But it isn't a game. You have to hunt for tiny little targets and click repeatedly to see if anything happens. Sometimes it does. Frankly, the experience would have been more honest if there was just a big …
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I'm (slowly) playing through the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. You can follow along with all my game reviews. Remember all those one-night-stands you had when you were younger? No - me neither. I was a paragon of virtue... But, if you did engage in such shameless behaviour, did you ever wonder how the morning-after-the-night-before could have gone if you'd played things just a little differently? ONS is a simple piece of interactive fiction; gather up clues and converse…
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I am rubbish at video games. I don't have the twitch-reaction speed for shooters, I can never remember what all the buttons do, and I frequently get lost in open-world games. Basically, I'm the opposite of my wife, who will rattle through Dragon-Ages, Mass Effects, Spiders-Men and the like. Factorio is sort-of-like Sim City. Or Populous. You have an open, discoverable world, full of natural resources. Your job is to plunder those resources and build a space ship to get you off-world. Factorio …
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I'm playing through the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. You can follow along with all my game reviews. I've never played a dating simulator before. I'd heard of them, and their weird parodies like Hatoful Boyfriend, but this is my first time playing one. And, I'm delighted to say, Arcade Spirits is delightful. The game looks gorgeous, the voice acting is top notch, and the sound design is just perfect. It's also really, really funny. I don't think I've laughed like this at a…
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I'm playing through the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. You can follow along with all my game reviews. I like puzzle games, and Minit has a unique twist. You only have 60 seconds to complete each action. But, before we get onto the review, here's how to get it running on Linux. Linux Download the minit_linux.zip file to your Downloads directory. Download libssl_1.0.0_32-bit.tar.gz and put it in the same directory as the game archive. Install play.it Once you've installed…
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I'm playing through the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. You can follow along with all my game reviews. The thing about EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER is that it is EXTREME. And it is so EXTREME that it feels a little like a tweenager shouting about how bad-ass they are. The story aesthetic is gorgeous. Brilliant mix of cartoon and ASCII art. I'm not good with controls. I found moving the mouse in one direction while navigating my MEATPUNK MECH in another to be a bit confusing.…
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I'm playing through the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. You can follow along with all my game reviews. How many people have you killed in a video game? Thousands? At least. But how many funerals have you performed in game? Hardly any. It's hard to describe A Mortician's Tale as a game. It is a lovely experience where you play a new employee of a funeral home. The game is, literally, preparing the corpses and dealing with the families of the deceased. Parts of the gameplay…
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I'm playing through the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. You can follow along with all my game reviews. Night in the Woods is a cute looking indie game, with one fatal flaw. Nothing happens in it. I gave the game an hour or so, and all I did was walk left and right and click next in the dialogue. There are a few dialogue options, but that doesn't alter the course of the game. I think I must be missing something. The game gets rave reviews... but for what? There are no c…
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Food is delicious and exercise is boring. This is a problem. I'm not going to cut back on delicious treats, and I don't want to get out of breath climbing stairs - so I need to get a bit fitter. I'm a grumpy old sod, so these are all the things I dislike about this frickin' weird game. Grade Inflation The very first level nets you 900 XP. What? The numbers are meaningless from the beginning. What happens when you reach different levels? WHAT ARE ALL THESE NUMBERS FOR? What do I do with all…
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