Tag: charming
This cottagecore platformer is ultra charming, and out this week
There’s something very sweet about playing as a postal carrier. As we’ve seen in games such as Tiny Echo and Lake, it can be a relaxing and enjoyable job delivering mail in a small community, and that’s the pitch-perfect tone that solo developer Kela van der Deijl has managed to capture in their cutesy mail-delivery game Mail Time. After playing the Steam demo, I can tell you that it’s one of the most charming games I’ve played all year, and it looks like I’ll be able to play the rest soon because Mail Time is out this week on Thursday April 27th.
Minecraft Legends is a curious and charming blend of adventure and RTS
There’s always been something quite comforting about loading into a brand new Minecraft world. Dropping into that first forest, punching that first tree… It’s a promise of all the myriad adventures to come. And despite some fundamental changes in genre and perspective, it’s something that the team behind the upcoming Minecraft Legends has tried hard to preserve.
I recently was treated to the most in-depth look so far at Minecraft Legends, in an hour-long livestream which gave us all some much needed answers on what manner of beast Legends actually is. It’s a curious blend of action adventure and RTS, one that shares Minecraft’s focus on exploration, but guides the player down a stricter, simpler path of summoning friendly mobs and constructing defences to repel a Piglin invasion. This will likely be a solid introduction to the RTS genre for a lot of players, but I came away unsure about whether the game will have enough depth to keep its prospective playerbase’s attention.
The Pokemon Concierge is a charming new stop-motion Netflix series
The Pokemon Company and Netflix are coming together to develop a stop-motion series, as well as other unannounced projects.
At today’s Pokemon Presents, a new series based on the world of Pokemon called The Pokemon Concierge was announced. Being produced by Dwarf Studios, best known for its other Netflix series Rilakkuma and Kaoru, the entire show will be animated in stop motion. A very short teaser was shown off during the presents, showing a little Psyduck waddling along a beach. Not much, but the little it did show looks quite lovely so far!
Introduced by Netflix’s vice president of content, APAC Minyoung Kim, the show follows the titular Concierge, a young woman named Haru, and her experiences with the various Pokemon that come to visit her at the Pokemon Resort. Not much else was shared about the show, and we don’t have a release date just yet, so keep your eyes peeled for more on that.
The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil In Me review: fourth time’s charming but still not a charm
Ever had a real-life experience where you’re something like 90% sure you’re actually in a horror film? Answers in the comments, please. Now, imagine that, but also someone asks you to pop your phone in a lockbox, you know, for safekeeping. Also, they say something like “You won’t need it where we’re going” and then do a murder wink at an imaginary camera. Something quite similar to this happens to our ill-fated documentary crew early in The Devil In Me. ‘Aha!’ I thought. Supermassive are being knowingly, playfully tropey again. Great. These games are best when they lean into the cheese like a drunk buffet guest, and I was pumped to watch it stumble around a schlocky murder party and get baked brie all over the elbows of its best tux.
For those yet to stick their snout into Supermassive’s truffle-trove of horror offerings, the basic premise of these narrative adventure games can best be summarised: What if shouting at the screen to try and stop idiot characters performing horror film no-nos actually worked? The formula was both invented and, miraculously, perfected in 2015’s Until Dawn. Since then, the studio have released three ‘episodic’ (although narratively independent) Dark Pictures titles, and The Quarry, all of which can best be summarised: Like Until Dawn, but not as good.
Entergalactic review: a simple but charming animated romance
Return to Monkey Island review: a charming nostalgia-ridden musing on the ravages of time – and a worthy successor
Return to Monkey Island has a lot of tricks up its sleeve. The greatest trick it manages to play, however, is to pick up where Monkey Island 2 left off, 30 years prior, and do so while feeling entirely natural. Not a beat is missed, not a shred of strange discomfort. It just works. Older players will slide into this game’s embrace like an old, battered sofa. And it feels like home.
It has other tricks, however. Return to Monkey Island isn’t the third Monkey Island game in truth, of course – but it’s the third from series creator Ron Gilbert. Return has things to say about the canon of the series, given this presents itself as the third Monkey Island game despite being the sixth to actually hit store shelves.
There’s a neat subtext throughout about what stories really mean to us all. The decades between Monkey Island 2 and this new story has clearly given Gilbert time to reflect on the originals, the games which are likely to headline his epitaph regardless of what he does in the future – and the end result is fascinating and heartening.
Bring a little light this month with charming adventure game The Spirit And The Mouse
Indie team Alblune, which consists of developers Lucie Lessuyer and Alexandre Stroukoff, have a release date for their cute new game The Spirit And The Mouse, a narrative-focussed adventure game with some platforming thrown in. In order to save the cosy town of Sainte-et-Claire, a charming mouse called Lila and a soft spirit called Lumion join forces to restore the town and its people. They’ll be teaming up on Steam later this month on September 26th. Check out the trailer below.
Railbound review: a charming, first class puzzler
The sight of a two-carriage train is normally something that prompts a deep sigh of despair from me in real life. Nine times out of ten, it’s a sign that something’s gone wrong further up the line – that someone, somewhere, has sent out a train with half its usual number of carriages, and is therefore destined to ruin everyone’s day in the process by cramming us all in like a pack of sardines.
In Afterburn’s adorable train puzzler Railbound, however, two carriages are a cause for celebration. In a game that’s about guiding numbered compartments onto the back of an engine (using a limited number of track tiles to get them there in the right order), two-carriage puzzles offer the perfect amount of cerebral head-scratching. They’ve got a bit more bite than simply guiding a single carriage to its destination, but they’re not so complicated that they’ll repeatedly make you reach for the hint button to help you fill in the gaps. Railbound has a tendency to be a bit too abstract in its later stages, but more on that in a sec. All you need to know right now is that there are plenty of smart ideas to wrap your head around here, and that you’ll be grinning from ear to ear by the time you reach the end of the line.
Cursed To Golf review: a charming golf sim that’s stuck in roguelike purgatory
Golf games seem to be having a bit of a renaissance right now. From their beginnings on the fairway fringes of Flash-game forums, we now have been blessed with a handful of fun indie golf sims. We’ve seen the bizarre buffoonery of What The Golf?, the high-speed, eye-popping courses of Golf With Your Friends, and Secret Mode recently completely threw the clubs out the window and replaced them with highspeed motorcars in Turbo Golf Racing.
It’s safe to say that golfing games are always full of shenanigans and Cursed To Golf is no different. Playing as a golfer who has been cast into Golf Purgatory, you need to golf your way back to the land of the living, completing all eighteen holes in one roguelike run. It’s a fun premise and the game bursts with silliness and personality, but unfortunately Cursed To Golf fails to iron out certain roguelike frustrations. After mistiming a shot in the game’s final area and being sent back to the beginning (ending an excruciating four-hour run time), I truly did feel cursed.