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...