Recent reviews by - ̗̀ OWLS! ̖́-

An absolute joy.

Absolutely one of the best twin stick shooters around. Tremendous work and oh so wonderfully Dreamcast-y.

Such a nice little thing.

WeAreDoomed is great. It's a really thoughtful and well considered twin stick shooter that understands a lot of what makes many other games great and uses it well to its advantage. There's parts of a lot of games in here from Geometry Wars to the psychedelic classic Spheres Of Chaos all wrapped up in a big laser, big explosion arena shooter that lets you load up and drop into the zone in seconds. Mind, it helps that the music is incredible too.

A great set of short ghost stories as videogame.

Unnerving and with more than a slightly wicked sense of humour, The Charnel House Trilogy is a sort of classic Amicus style portmanteau with a deep understanding that horror works best when it's about the gaps, what's unsaid and what can never really be understood. That mix of the unexplainable within the eveyday mundane.

It's magical, preposterous and at times hilariously willing to have fun along with the player instead of using the player as a prop for cheap jump scares or gross out horror, trusting enough that the player knows the beats as well as the author does and willing to have fun with that without making it impenetrable or offputting.

I think this is the closest a horror game has got to my tastes, it made me wriggle in my seat in parts, left me curious as to where it was going to turn next, smirking at the turns it did take and on more than one occasion, left me laughing like a drain at some of its more absurd moments.

A horror game for your more classical horror appreciating folks but also smart enough and tales well told enough for everyone else.

Absolutely love this to bits. It's a fantastic update to an already brilliant idea. Slick and loads of fun and the cartoon-y elements of it make it an immense joy to play.

Two thumbs up.

I'm not sure how or why this exists but it exists. Luxor has always been towards the runty end of casual, what with taking the least interesting bits from Breakout and Puzzloop and not even really trying to do anything vaguely interesting with anything it does take from. It always, always felt like a bit of a "yeah, I want a marble blaster but totally not Zuma honest guv" thing.

And yet here we are with a vector reimagining of the game, somewhere in the region of Dark Castle Software or Sokurah's house styles and very, very pretty it is too. Yeah, I'm easy and I'm easily sold on things which glow. I can't say I actually imagined for a second it'd be any good but it is good and I'm not sure I know how to parse that. Sure, it's easy. it's tremendously easy and the difficulty curve is pretty much close to non existent but it's satisfying so that's OK, I think.

It is, still, Luxor at its heart. You have a bat that you move across the bottom of the screen to fire the appropriate coloured marble at the marble snake thing that makes its way down the screen. But I dunno, whilst the formula remains the same, the stark neon glow, the great sound effects, the classic arcade bonus rooms, it's like someone really took the time to try and make it work as best they good and then make it pretty too.

I like it. I like it a lot and it surprised me. It's perhaps trying too hard to straddle the casual divide but who cares when you've got neon exploding marbles all over the shop? Did I mention the bonus stages are great btw? The bonus stages are great.

There isn't really a lot to Brainpipe but that's OK. It's a game where you zoom through a tunnel at speed, grab glyphs and avoid anything that's likely to kill you (that's pretty much everything that isn't a glyph, really).

And doesn't it sound so terminally dull when you put it like that? (YES, IT DOES)

Is it terminally dull? Nope. it is so very far from terminally dull! Rejoice.

There's a couple of things that really make Brainpipe special. One is the graphics which, y'know, aren't quite up to the full Minter they're certainly not far off. It's like flying through someone's fevered attempt at a 70's Doctor Who title sequence or what might happen if someone sat down and said "Mr Trumbull, could you make us a videogame please" or something.

The other is the sound. Oh man, the sound. This is the stuff of headphones on, turn it up, sit back and enjoy. Or just turn it up really loud if you can't manage that. Parts of the soundtrack wibble in and out of focus, sounds zip around you ear to ear, it's one long Any Colour You Like ride but a little bit more strange.

It's essentially the full audio/visual woooah there. Which is just fine. I love it to bits. I love it for its simplicity, I love it for its graphics and I love it for its sound but I love it most of all because it's so very pure and unfiltered. It's slightly weirdy, slightly askew and all the woah there. I couldn't ask for much more.

It's a game about hitting things with particles. That's your one sentence elevator pitch right there. YOU HIT THINGS WITH PARTICLES.

And it works. To a point.

It's a really weird game because when it works, when your play and the game come together and you're spinning around this arena with your swarm of particles (hence "Swarm Arena") smacking the hell out of whatever comes your way, it feels tremendous. The way the music kinda syncs up with your actions and it feels like you're performing some sort of ballet of particle death and that, honestly, is really, really something.

But then you start to lose and a lose state in the game isn't quick and clean, it's the slow removal of your abililty to play the game as your swarm gets wittled down and wittled down. It's not quite a walk of shame a la Ridiculous Fishing, it's more that it seems like no-one could work out how to do this cleanly and fairly and just sort of went "that'll do". It wouldn't be such a big sin if it didn't drag the game out and into a state where it's just not, briefly, enjoyable to play. It's like your overriding memory of the last round isn't the bit where you're swooping round smacking everything with your particle army, it's the bit where you're trapsing around trying to keep these two particles going to get a few extra points. It doesn't even feel like clinging on desperately, just sort of "oh. well."

Nevermind though because Swarm Arena is worth it for the moments where you are THE PARTICLE KING and no-one wants to stop THE PARTICLE KING because THE PARTICLE KING has ALL the particles and he'll particle up your face. Or something like that.

Look, it's good except for the endgame bit, OK?

I honestly expected Roundabout to not really gel with me. Oh, it probably won't make me laugh. Oh, it'll probably be another case of Goat Simulator where it burns out within minutes once the slender novelty has worn off. Except Roundabout isn't that, it's actually genuinely a really well designed spin-your-car-around videogame first and foremost and then there's this massive level of slick silly and polish on top of that to round it all off.

It's mainly a series of mini-trials punctuated by FMV cut scenes. Drive over a star, collect a passenger, complete the trial as fast and as cleanly as possible, ranked against your friends list for the obligatory "I WILL BEAT YOUR SCORE" stuff. It's a joy to move around in, it's a game you can and likely will get better at but even if you don't, the game doesn't care. You have to call up the report card yourself so you can just carry on messing around and no-one will bother you. It's a simple but wonderful solution to making what could be a really ridiculous twitchy time trial game into something much more accessible.

It drops the ball on the funny at times but it's all such a glorious bag of silly mess anyway, the odd joke misfire doesn't matter. Everyone seems to be genuinely enjoying themselves, it's that knowingly rubbish sort of FMV but it does have a message tucked inside it that's simultaneously obvious but also the sort of thing that videogames don't really tackle, especially in a silly mainstream-daft sort of way like this. That's appreciated, especially when you consider how games that tread this sort of silly route normally manage to either ignore these things or just plain get on the wrong side of it. It's a game with a good heart, really.

So yeah, Roundabout. Actually proper enjoyable just careful with those pills.