Playing as Zelda in one of Nintendo’s final Switch release wasn’t on my 2024 bingo card, but here we are. The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom takes inspiration from the series’ most recent entries, with relaxed mechanical boundaries and clockwork physics interactions that turns players into game designers. But as with any adventure, there are peaks and valleys on the road. Echoes of Wisdom finally puts Zelda front-and-centre as the main character. Rifts have opened up all over Hyrule and are swallowing up entire towns and trapping people inside, replacing them with shadowy doppelgangers. Naturally, it’s up to the…
Author: Keith Milburn
Concord was fine. Concord has been shut down. At launch, an entire cottage industry of engagement-driven criticism willed itself into existence around the game; a greasy substrate in the knee-high pool of ‘online discourse’ where the most annoying people you know regurgitated the most asinine opinions you’d ever heard. A cursory search on YouTube returned talking heads gleeful at the game’s woes, bemoaning its queue times or speculating on its player numbers, breathlessly connecting bits of red string between the words ‘woke’ and ‘pronouns.’ It became impossible to talk about Concord as a game without talking about it as a…
Time trials have seen something of a resurgence in modern game design—Hyper Demon, Neon White, and Mullet Madjack just to name a few. I’m sure there’s some bleak academic link one could draw between the attention economy and the need to get as much gameplay injected into a person’s eyeballs as fast as possible, but I don’t really care about that. Sometimes, people realise that it’s just cool to do something stylish against the threat of a ticking clock. Anger Foot, the latest first-person shooter from Broforce developer Free Lives, realises this too. https://youtu.be/7kJo0miz08g You play Anger Foot, a balaclava-wearing…
Remakes can be a fraught proposition, but Nintendo deftly elevates one of their all-time classics with Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door.
Run. Jump. Slide. Dash. Familiar verbs in any game, but Phantom Abyss valorises them in a way very few do.
Everyone has a Guy. I don’t mean that in a platonic or romantic sense; franchises today are fixated on creating as many Guys as possible, so people can point at one of them on screen and loudly exclaim to their peers “That’s my Guy!” While comics first brought the idea of The Guy to the masses, Mortal Kombat refined it, calcified it in the collective unconscious: are you yellow ninja Guy, or blue ninja Guy? No, definitely red ninja Guy. https://youtu.be/UZ6eFEjFfJ0 Mortal Kombat 1, the latest entry in the blood-spattered fighter franchise, firmly prescribes to the philosophy of The Guy.…
Can developer WB Montreal step out from Batman’s shadow, or are these caped crusaders trapped in the dark?