Japanese Rural Life Adventure is what it says on the tin — it’s a 16-bit-style farming sim that takes place in the countryside, and it’s filled with hallmarks…
Read more Japanese Rural Life Adventure is exactly what it sounds like and moreWe’re living in the middle of a bounty of Middle-earth media. Last year’s wretched Gollum game, 2026’s apparent Gollum duology, The Rings of Power’s elven kings, War of…
Read more We got a peek at the cozy Hobbit life sim game and it understands the damn briefBefore sitting down to play three hours of the Silent Hill 2 remake at a recent Konami-led press event in London, we were shown a new trailer. Like…
Read more The Silent Hill 2 remake is at its best when it tries to be Silent Hill 2Gourdlets is like the retirement stage of building sims. The game tells you via a text tutorial at the beginning that any town you make in Gourdlets doesn’t…
Read more Gourdlets is the laid-back building sim for people sick of grindingSometimes, turning a linear game into an open world just makes sense. Whether it’s Elden Ring or Breath of the Wild, plenty of franchises have found that their…
Read more Isles of Sea and Sky taught me it’s okay to move onBen, Steve Ahlman, and Matt James discuss the biggest news from this week’s Nintendo Direct (including a Legend of Zelda with playable Zelda and proof of life for…
Read more Nintendo News and ‘Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree’ ImpressionsAt first “Dot and Bubble,” the latest episode of Doctor Who, seems to be borrowing from Black Mirror’s bag of tricks. It’s set on Finetime, a planet where…
Read more Doctor Who goes full Black Mirror only to set up its most shocking twistInfection Free Zone, now in Steam Early Access, has a basic premise: Zombies have taken over the world, driving humanity into underground bunkers to wait the plague out.…
Read more Infection Free Zone’s early access bugs weigh down its intriguing premiseThere is a moment that looms large over everything else in the pilot of Apple TV’s post-Civil War drama, Manhunt, a conversation that will haunt Edwin Stanton (Tobias…
Read more Manhunt’s greatest strength is letting Abraham Lincoln just be a broIt’s become increasingly clear that the Halo TV show has a villain problem. This may seem impossible for a series that’s supposed to be about a hostile race…
Read more The Halo TV show making the humans the villains completely misses the pointNinja Kamui doesn’t waste any time getting from zero to 100. Within five minutes of its first episode, a bespectacled salaryman is ambushed by a flurry of projectile…
Read more Adult Swim’s Ninja Kamui is a brutal, fast-paced revenge thrillerThis week’s episode of True Detective: Night Country opens with a clever bit of sound editing, as the signature white noise of HBO’s logo blends seamlessly in with…
Read more True Detective: Night Country’s dead are screaming louder than the livingIt seems relatively routine — some “hillbillies” scuffling in the waiting room of a hospital, calling Danvers (Jodie Foster) away from an interrogation. Navarro (Kali Reis), left behind…
Read more True Detective: Night Country is messing with us in episode 3The central mystery in True Detective: Night Country seems easy when the credits roll on episode 1. It’s not that viewers already have the answer, but it at…
Read more True Detective: Night Country is slowly starting to thaw its icy mysteryThis breakdown of the documentary A Disturbance in the Force was originally published when the movie debuted at the 2023 SXSW Conference. It has been updated for the…
Read more A Disturbance in the Force finally reveals how The Star Wars Holiday Special went so wrongTrue Detective is the rare show that was much more exciting and complicated after seven episodes than it is after three seasons. What started out as a brooding…
Read more Night Country gets True Detective’s vibe better than True Detective ever hasI love city-building sims during every step of play — from laying down the foundations to planning a city grid, upgrading the complexity of buildings, and handling the…
Read more In roguelite city builder Against the Storm, failure is part of the process“In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.” That’s the tagline of Warhammer 40,000, one of the most over-the-top and brutal sci-fi settings around.…
Read more Rogue Trader’s role-playing embraces the brutality and freedom of Warhammer 40KThe hero of BBC’s long-running sci-fi series Doctor Who is, famously, not a real medical doctor, but they have been a bit ill. What should have been a…
Read more Doctor Who time traveled back to 2008 to save the show in 2023The rise of franchise-first pop culture has made what was previously a genre stumbling block into everyone’s problem: Exposition. Specifically, the stuff we call “lore.” When every big…
Read more Monarch: Legacy of Monsters takes the Watchmen approach to a Godzilla show
