John Mulcahey

It is an incredible year. A new Rune Factory and a new Story of Seasons? Wonderful. The gist is that while there are some caveats, Story of Seasons Grand Bazaar is another lovely farming slash life simulator from the original creators of…

Wadjet Eye, a developer that any fan of pointing and clicking should keep close to their hearts and wallets, has returned with another gracefully told story about flawed humans. Old Skies is, it seems, a less flexible game than previous…

Accurate title! In the world of Nobody Wants to Die, absolutely nobody wants to die. This hardboiled sci-fi noir invites you into a world where death functionally doesn’t matter — providing you can afford it. As a game, the story is the…

Crayon Shin-Chan: Shiro and the Coal Town is the second fusion of Crayon Shin-Chan, beloved anime, and the cult favourite Boku no Nasuyatsumi series. If I’ve lost you already, don’t worry, same. I’ve got zero familiarity with half of this…

Cozy games! Wholesome games! Farming simulators! Post Stardew Valley, the genre is on a seemingly infinite upward trajectory as developers across the world seek to release their own slices of agricultural nicety. I, for one, am living my…

How many times have you played a game that seethed? One that had such a clear voice of absolute fury? I can’t really remember the last time I played a game that was so viscerally charged with one emotion in all its violent depths. Death of…

Alright, full disclaimer — proud owner of several of Tove Jansson’s beautiful Moomin books, Moomin tattoo. I love these weird little melancholic creatures! Who doesn’t? So I approached Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley with a lot of…

Here it is, the dream started by Red Faction: Guerilla, anger at Lego, kicking down a sand castle, all realised in glorious voxels. If you can see it, you can blow it up. Teardown delivers handily on the core idea that collapsing buildings…

Hell Pie, or the second coming of Conker’s Bad Fur Day, is another in a long line of indie-made 3D platformers that aim to recapture the hey-day of collecting shiny things, to, once again, mixed success.  It’s hard for me to quantify the…

Trenches is trying something relatively unique, on a conceptual level. A psychological horror game set in the trenches of the First World War. I can’t understate how appealing that concept is, how it could be such a fantastic vehicle for…

2022 eh. Bit of a mixed year, but I dare say a modest improvement over the last few. Music and movies absolutely crushed it this year, so many quality releases for all tastes. Even the pandemic decided to take a smaller role in the year’s…

Kao The Kangaroo, an oft forgotten star of those loveable mid-tier early 2000s 3D Platformers, is firmly back! As a person who grew up with a strong and enduring love of this trashiest of subgenres, it’s delightful to see a development team…

Oppo’s Enco Free 2 wireless earbuds are incredibly surprising. I’m used to a pair of wireless earbuds feeling in some way like a sacrifice — be that dropping good sound quality for noise cancelling, or simply the concept of working well at…

Stepping away from Norco the game, here’s the slug line: “A sci-fi southern gothic adventure…” I stopped reading here. They had me within 5 words. It delivers on this basic sentiment with enthusiasm and then some; creating a swirl of decay,…

By Christ, this is a good one. I was more or less raised by Gothic literature, as a precocious/pretentious kid, from Poe to Shelley, to later works by Stephen King and Shirley Jackson. The haunted house story is practically engraved in my…

Sometimes you get to play a game so ostensibly intriguing, so fully singular in it’s identity and style you just have to sit back a bit and go “games really are amazing.” Cosmic Top Secret, a highly personal, autobiographical game where you…

Silt is a strange thing — written up as a surrealist adventure horror, where you’re tasked as a mysterious diver sent to uncover equally mysterious things in the depths of the ocean. It’s more or less a really bizarre version of Ecco The…

A bit of an odd one, Lacuna. On the one hand it's a classic slice of Noir played straight, with scifi flourishes. It plays simply, until you hit an investigative sequence. At this point it may well not be as twisting and winding as it seems…

Does Alan Wake Remastered count? Maybe not. If it does, it's that. >So... 2021 huh. Let's leave it at that for a yearly recap. We all know it sucked. Will next year be better... I'm not willing to tempt fate. At least, as ever, media…

Transient is one of those games that, on paper, that I should love. It’s an old-style adventure game; along the lines of Myst. You explore, poke around areas, and solve puzzles. It’s a synthesis of Lovecraft and Cyberpunk, both narratively…