Wordsmith's Anvil

Image courtesy of Don't Nod Entertainment Now at least once a year, any gamer worth their salt will play an absolute banger. Something memorable that will transport you to another world with its lore, gameplay, and storyline that will resonate with you for years to come. For me that already happened this year with Banishers , but I wanted to explore some more of what brought Don't Nod to their current stage by examining where they came from. As Banishers is something of a spiritual sequel (prequel, maybe? Thanks for normalizing this, George Lucas), I figured that Vampyr would be worth my time.     London, 1918.     Dr. Jonathan Reid is coming home from the Western Front to an ailing mother and his heartbroken widow of a sister. He wakes up in a pile of corpses, just as confused now as he probably was in the throes of the Great War's combat. To make matters worse, a sickness grips his belly as he makes his way to the street and the loving embrace of his sister. He emb...

 Images courtesy of Neocore Games Neocore Games has been a favorite game studio of mine since I played their King Arthur: Knights Tale and fell in love with the gameplay, gritty art, and the story of Mordred's foray in Avalon. As such, I've purchased a couple of their games and explored the transitions they've undergone as a company over the years. Perhaps one of their biggest ventures into grandiose territory has been when they cooperated with Games Workshop to create an ARPG in Warhammer 40K's expansive universe.     This is where Inquisitor comes into play. I'm going to be simply calling it Inquisitor the entire time so that there's no confusion about which version I'm speaking of. The game came out several years ago, and thus it has already gone through several updates and patches and virtually all the DLC has been lumped into the same package. Both Martyr, the original game, and Prophecy, its expansion, are now available as a complete title that tells ...

Image courtesy of Neon Giant Blade Runner, Cyberpunk 2077 , and to some extent... The Outer Worlds 1 and 2 . These would all be works that could be found in the vein of cyberpunk, or at least possess some elements of the genre. The typical pieces are all there. Major distances between rich and poor, corporations in charge of various entities normally controlled by governments, and rain. You have to have rain.     The Ascent tackles every one of these components in spades.     In this newcomer to the cyberpunk scene, we play as an "indent" in the underbelly of Veles, a planet headed by several corporations vying for power over one another. An indent is short for an indentured servant. Similar to the origins of the term from colonial America's earliest days, indentured servants take on terrible contracts in order to get a one-way trip to a burgeoning community promising more. This is the story of Veles, and in order to claw our way out of the underground we have to w...

  Images courtesy of Obsidian Entertainment As many of you have probably noticed with my other reviews, I don't tend to stick with the latest and greatest games that have released. I don't get paid to critique, so my thoughts and scribbles are purely my own and I usually start jotting them down after finishing a game I got on a PSN sale or for "free" via PS Plus Extra. As I don't have an XBox or GamePass... I had to pay full price for The Outer Worlds 2 and happily did so because I love Obsidian and the first one is one of my favorite games in the last decade.     The Outer Worlds 2 puts us in the shoes of an Earth Directorate agent right off the bat. We have a mission to carry out in the colonized system of Arcadia, and that entails working with fellow Directorate hero Augustine De Vries. Within the first couple minutes of the briefing, one can tell that something is off with De Vries. She appears somewhat reluctant, yet resolute, in what is about to happen. Duri...

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...