Wordsmith's Anvil

  Image courtesy of Digital Sun Retro never really goes out of style, does it?     This is evident in the clothes people wear, the music they listen to, the movies they throw on, and the notion has even pervaded the games we play. Moonlighter is a great example of a retro-style game developed in the last several years that fills that retro niche so many people look for. Others that have come out to great success in recent years would be Children of Morta or Sea of Stars . All three of these games tackle different elements of the same void, but with their similarities it could easily be said that the latter two were the games that turned my head towards trying  Moonlighter.     Moonlighter is a little adventure roguelike where the protagonist, Will, heads to the dungeons near his hometown ever night. It's in these caverns that Will moonlights as an adventurer, gathering loot and exploring the secrets of these dangerous chambers so that he can come back to t...

Image courtesy of me A chill lingered in Tartarus's spring air. With a drowsy mind and clumsy feet, Xander stepped off his hay-stuffed mattress and scratched idly at a louse in his unkempt hair. The Thalassan lieutenant eased his weight back and forth on unsteady legs. His right leg still ached where a Gaian shortsword has punctured his calf muscle and just his own body weight was discomforting, to say the least. He glanced at his armor heaped on a chair. It seemed wrong to avoid wearing it, especially given his surroundings, but another twenty pounds of armor would only aggravate the wound only just fully sealed. It took over a month for it to heal properly because Xander continued to tear the struggling muscle open repeatedly. A good remedy for that? A few days doing nothing besides lying in bed. However, that did little to boost the ego or alieve the clumsiness Xander felt with his every move. His hands lumbered about too. With broken bones in his left wrist that rendered his ar...

  Image courtesy of Mixed Realms & Soft Swag Holdings Deckbuilders are those kinds of games that have a certain niche fan base that can be hard for some companies to break into. In an attempt to do so with Gordian Quest , Mixed Realms and Soft Swag decided to go for a jumble of different elements that might appeal to a larger fan base.      Think of it like the Wu-Tang strategy.      Before the Wu was formed, each one of the rappers had their own fans, but there weren't enough of them to really generate any kind of income for them as individuals. By joining forces to create a rap supergroup, fans of Inspectah Deck could be introduced to the likes of Method Man. Gordian Quest doesn't necessarily have its own RZA, but it does have an amalgam of elements from RPGs, dice-rolling dungeons and dragons themes, roguelike runs, and deckbuilding strategies that all combine to create its gaming experience.     The problem is that it can be a little ...

  Image courtesy of A44 Games Review bombing has become something of an unfortunate part of the gaming community in recent years. I feel like it never used to be a problem until the divide in this country started deciding to politicize any and everything that gets put out. If a character is gay or trans in a game, review bomb it. Protagonist a female? Okay, I guess... but! Is she not as cute as you like? Review bomb it. Those 1/10 bombs do more damage than you'd think, as the people who decide to just look at the overall user scores are less apt to purchase a game simply due to the crushing score a group of bitter people decided to give it.     Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn is one such game. On Metacritic, you can see the user score as a 4.7/10, but on IGN's Playlist app you can find it at a much closer to accuracy 6.7/10. That's a two-point differential that nearly had me skip this game over had I not looked into the possibility of review-bombing. Sure enough, just like w...