Plus: first impressions for Karters 2: Turbo Charged, and a little bit of business about kart racers in 2025 generally, how much they'll cost you, and why that's a problem.
Plus: Thwack, a delightfully weird $2 indie tennis game, Biochemist Margaret Downs on Spiritfarer, and more.
An early, less sweary version of this essay was posted on this site's direct predecessor on July 21st, 2025. The July 2025 Xbox cuts have me severely despairing about the state of ‘triple-A’ game production, which is a concept that shouldn’t exist. IP revivals (are a hallmark
It had to happen - there had to be a Mario Kart game that I would only find middling, after mainlining Wii and 8 Deluxe for a significant chunk of the time in my life that I’ve spent playing games. Mario Kart World represents an evolution, and even a
I reviewed this on the Nintendo Switch 1, which is bizarre for me. Skyrim has been out, as I write, almost thirteen years, but, up until recently, it did absolutely nothing for me. I used to find Skyrim unengaging, and its approach of letting the player be a thief-mage-warrior-assassin-chosen-one overwhelming,
Bully: Scholarship Edition is a remaster, featuring additional content, of Rockstar’s school-set open world action-adventure Bully (2006, Playstation 2). You play Jimmy Hopkins, a pitiable fifteen-year-old slaphead sent to Bullworth Academy, a not-so-elite boarding school that’s probably in New England during an unspecified time period that suits the
It’s been near enough six years since I last played Heat Signature. I start a mission, I run in, thinking I’m hard, and immediately get pasted. I’m halfway through a save and I have no idea what I’m doing. I start a new galaxy and am
The last hour or so of puzzle-platformer Split Fiction — where the two-player split-screen format, and the game’s basic premise feel like they work as one — is its best. That hour’s presentation of the nth rendition of certain platforming sequences is interesting in ways largely absent from the previous
Donut County is a casual, cosy, narrative puzzle game set in an ultra-capitalist, even fascist, raccoon hellscape. You control an ever-expanding hole in the ground, swallowing objects in deeply earthy, American scenes in-between cutscenes set underground with a squabbling cast of critters, and just the one human. The writing is
I’m not very good at the pinball game Xenotilt, but I am finding its onslaught of sight and sound engrossing to the point where I crossed the thirteen hour mark in four days. I play Xenotilt in the living room, I play it at my desk and, when I’
Lake is a visual novel about mid-life crisis with a delivery itinerary minigame bolted on. You play Meredith Weiss, a computer programmer covering her father Thomas’ postal shift in a small Oregon town for two weeks; the duration of the campaign. I completed the game in two sittings; spending the
I don’t go in for Steam Early Access at all, but this arcade ice hockey game that’s simultaneously trying to offer hockey tournament simming and a wacky powerups-roguelike has really got its teeth into me. I had never played NHL ‘94 on the Sega Mega Drive until the