Wordsmith's Anvil

Image courtesy of Costa Pritsos & Me   The Title 1801 “Everybody get the fuck up right now! Get the fuck out of those racks right now! Get on line!” My voice sounded foreign to me, but somehow that didn’t matter. This role felt great. The raw recruits in the barracks scrambled to get out of their racks and get on the chalk line drawn on their side of the room. Young men wearing nothing but their underwear tripped over one another or the edges of their beds to make it happen, most recovering quickly with just a stubbed toe or a hop and a skip. One sprawled face first on the floor. “Don’t get up,” I told him. “Push.” He knew immediately what I meant. This wasn’t his first day of training, after all. He got himself into a push-up position and started dipping his chest all the way down to the floor, then shoving himself up to full extension. Repeat. And again. After the twentieth one I told him he only had twenty more. Then I moved on. “Count off!” Davidson, my fellow drill instruc...

  Image courtesy of Cyanide As much of a horror buff as I am, it's a bit of a surprise that I typically don't venture down the horror game path. I think it might have to do with the fact that a lot of them end up being campy and lame, and the truly good ones like Alien: Isolation are so few and far between. The trick must lie in the source material, and for me I guess it looks like Lovecraft speaks my language.   Earlier this year I reviewed Call of the Sea , a Lovecraft-inspired puzzle adventure that I actually thought did a good job fleshing out its story. Call of Cthulhu is another trip down Lovecraft Lane, but this one is definitely more solidified into the horror genre than anything else.   We take on the role of a private investigator named Edward Pierce, and through his WWI shell-shocked perspective we get assigned a delicate task off the bat. That mission is to find the truth behind the death of a wealthy Bostonian businessman's daughter. This woman, a d...

  Images courtesy of Obsidian Entertainment I've honed in on quite a few reviews in recent days. The truth is, my review backlog fills up just like everyone's gaming backlog does. Sometimes a game will dominate hours on end of my time and then a block of weeks will go by without a single word written about it, then a string of short games will come along and I have to do a half-dozen in a row. In spite of what everyone's complaints were about the original Outer Worlds being too short, the Spacer's Choice Edition  does not fall anywhere near that category now.     The Outer Worlds clocked in at just over sixty hours from start to finish for me with all the DLC included. As a game, it blends the perfect amount of science fiction, fantasy, adventure, and comedy into a package that tells a compelling tale without ever taking itself too seriously. We start as a solo colonist plucked from the Hope, a colony ship carrying tens of thousands meant to populate the far-flung sy...

  Image courtesy of Black Salt Games When you look up Dredge in an attempt at defining the game, one of the labels it possesses is that of a role-playing adventure game. I'm not entirely sure that I would classify it as adventurous in the traditional sense of that word at all. And role-playing is also a definite misnomer. It's a misnomer that has been repeatedly utilized throughout gaming in recent years, however, where every game and its offshoot are classified as "role-playing" simply because it might have an element or two found in a true RPG.     But I digress.     Dredge is, in my humble opinion, a cozy/casual game where the player will spend more time navigating the puzzles of where, when, and how to catch certain kinds of fish than anything else. As a humble fisherman, it's your job to help supply the townspeople of a couple habitable locations with all the fish they need whilst also solving the disturbing nighttime occurrences plaguing those same people....

  Image courtesy of Evil Empire I think it might be rare that I come across a game that has no connection to my childhood in any fashion. The original Prince of Persia was released in the 80's, with the most famous adaptations coming after Ubisoft purchased the franchise rights in the early 2000's. This also led to a film adaptation with Jake Gyllenhaal, and the rest is - as they say - history. Persian history, at least.   For whatever reason, I was never really into trying the games. That changed with the day one release of The Rogue Prince of Persia  on Playstation Plus.   I've been a fan of roguelite games for a little while now. Hades is a lot of fun, and  Children of Morta is just plain incredible. I was more than eager to try a roguelite that would involve some sidescrolling and platformer action, and The Rogue Prince of Persia did not disappoint.   Evil Empire's take on the Ubisoft-published franchise involves a new prince, as most of...

  Images courtesy of CD Projekt Red There are few examples of games in recent years that have had a more contentious start than Cyberpunk 2077. When it originally released, CP dropped with a slew of issues ranging from empty streets to recurrences of broken loading. Even PSN pulled the title from its online selling due to the issues that ran so rampant across nearly every player's experience. As time went on, patches and fixes helped to bring it to playability for Next Gen consoles and PC while still rendering it next to useless for the Playstation 4 and XBox One generations. I was one of those people who had been so looking forward to the amazingness CD Projekt promised with Cyberpunk , especially after being so wowed by The Witcher 3 , only to have my heart broken when I tried to get into the game on my PS4. It just wasn't happening, and so I put my hopes for a true Blade Runner- esque game to the wayside for a bit. Now in 2025, one of my close friends highly recommended CP w...