Secret Mode’s buzzing with 13 TIGA nominations! ‘Oil Strike ’75’ and ‘Loddlenaut’ lead the charge, capturing hearts and hopefully coming home from TIGA with some big wins under their belts.
Starfield, which has been the hallmark moniker for “Toddslop,” has set the bar for future Bethesda games fairly low. Starfield’s launch has been met with a considerable amount of negative reception and I fully expect that Elder Scrolls 6 will meet the same fate. To succinctly put my point: Skyrim will remain the gold standard and Elder Scrolls 6 will fall as flat as Starfield has. That is unless Bethesda does some major restructuring with their creative design. Skyrim is where this series will rest on its laurels forever, unless innovation comes fast. Starfield gave us an inferior experience to Skyrim, even with the wealth of new technology and learnings from Skyrim and Elder Scrolls Online, along with Fallout 4 and Fallout 76. Starfield Sets the Bar Low Starfield should have been the latest open world RPG that players flock to. A space setting, with the Bethesda world building and…
The gaming landscape, now more than ever with the modern proliferation of indie games, has shown that great games can come in all sizes. There are low quality AAA games that cost millions of dollars to make, and there are fantastic games from one-man studios that were crowdfunded, and some not even that. Further, while all of us wish we had the kind of money in real life as we tend to end up with in our favorite video games, that’s not always the case. And even for those who do, there is no income limit where you are required to stop being careful with how you spend your money. So, why pay a lot for a bad experience when you can pay a little for a great one? For someone with a computer, there is a vast, wide sea of Steam games that are both high quality and wallet-friendly.…
Soundtracks significantly contribute to the immersive experiences indie games provide. This post highlights 10 indie games with exceptional scores, from Celeste’s emotional melodies to Hollow Knight’s haunting themes. Accompanying vinyl collections are available at iam8bit and Fangamer. These games exemplify indie titles’ ability to deliver soundscapes rivaling AAA productions.
Cult of the Lamb is a game I was iffy on for a long time and was happy to find the motivation to spend a week playing it to completion. It mixes city management alongside a roguelike top-down hack and slasher which is very appealing, but it only really offers great gameplay if you more or less want to run the same few dungeons (four in total) over and over again. There’s a lot of games that evoke the same feelings in the same way Cult of the Lamb does, like Trigger Witch, where they have all the parts that make an amazing game but none of the substance or content to deliver. There are a few weapon types, a few spells you can use. The game’s pacing is predictable and every note you expect it to hit strikes. I both love and don’t love Cult of the Lamb. We…
Arcadegeddon is a colorful mashup of arcade nostalgia and roguelike action that mostly succeeds thanks to its vibrant style, frantic gameplay, and reverence for gaming’s past. Arcadegeddon is effectively if you took Risk of Rain 2 and removed the sadder overtones and replaced them with a Saturday morning cartoon gamer vibe aesthetic. The music is absolutely worth the price of admission alone. We recommend this game, if you’re wondering why read on below. You play alongside Gilly, a likeable underdog trying to save his retro arcade from being bulldozed by the evil Fun Fun Co corporation. To drum up interest and funds, Gilly cleverly hacks together the greatest hits of arcade gaming into one super game called Arcadegeddon. However, Fun Fun Co retaliates by injecting a virus that corrupts the creation. Now it’s up to you and friends to dive in and exterminate the bugs overrunning Gilly’s digital dream. The…
You should play Mondealy if you have the chance to. That’s our review. If you want to know why we say that, read on, but ultimately, we’re going to tell you to play Mondealy. If you don’t like visual novels, that’s fine. If you don’t like pixel art, that’s fine. If you don’t like indie games, that’s fine. Go play it. That’s as high of an honor as a game can get from us and we’ll gladly hand it to this year’s best visual novel adventure game. Mondealy is a journey of friendship in a weird world that exists slightly below our own. The best way to describe is what happens in Undertale if the barrier went down but no one left and classism is at the top of the discussion list. Modern culture weaves through with love and affection as Michael journeys through a world that evokes both nostalgia…
Adore’s combat is groundbreaking, intuitive and different from creature summoning games that have been needed for a long time. The latest update and full release have shown a polished strategic pet summoning game that has ARPG elements, rogue-like elements and something different than turn-based pet combat. If you’re big into pet games, you shouldn’t take my word for it and head on over to the Adore steam page to start checking the game out yourself – we recommend it. You summon a team of four creatures who fight for you. Your main character can’t actually engage in battle directly, only dodge and you don’t have absolute control over your summons. You’ve got to involve a lot of strategy and tactics to get through combat and what appears to be simple gameplay unravels as you move deeper into the game. If you played the game early in early access, you will…
The Life of a Magical Circle is the first game from Solideo, a one-person indie game development studio looking to focus on more philosophical games. Their first title definitely doesn’t disappoint, taking the general aesthetics of Geometry Wars, with the frustrations of Getting Over It, dashing in a bit of roguelike and philosophy with dynamic music, narration and lots of intent. There is a lot to what is overall a rather simplistic game. There’s just a circle, it’s a bit hard to control and there are things that you don’t want to hit. There are some collectibles. There’s not a lot going on until things start to advance and the narrator starts to provide color to the world you’re playing within. Soon you’re trying to figure out what each collectable does and what you’re wanting to collect and not along with the true meaning behind the journey. Intentional Design Simple…
Gaming is the most social activity online. The only other more social activity is FaceTime, due to its liminal space intrusion into your life when someone calls. Social activity requires platforms that allow users to connect. The entire basis of the Internet is to send and receive from other users in other locations. Twitter has recently rate limited users on a temporary basis, which has greatly slowed the flow of information between communities. There’s a crisis unfolding on the Internet’s most social town square. Twitter’s pathway to monetization continues to be rocky. Decision after decision has left users a gasp at what to do when their normal that had been consistent for so long rapidly changes day after day. The long and short of the current crisis is that new users, regular users and paid users all have different amounts of posts they can view per day. The limit seems…