Big Blue Sky Games' first title, Merchants of Rosewall, is a blend between a visual novel and store manager with a unique take on crafting. It’s an impressive first outing for the indie studio. Not…
March 4, 2025 | 02:19 EST
There’s been an uptick to the brightside lately, and that’s excluding the deluge of wholesome games that have become part and parcel of the indie scene as of late. Pessimism is no longer at the…
May 15, 2024 | 07:11 EDT
New IPs like Harmony: The Fall of Reverie don't have the easiest time in the modern gaming landscape. They need to not only live up to the expectations of those who have experienced their developer's…
June 8, 2023 | 01:00 EDT
Legacies are a tricky thing, running parallel with the vacuous nature with which humanity weighs itself. It’s easy for you to consider your life to remain less than a footnote in the wake of a few…
April 19, 2023 | 10:00 EDT
There’s no real easy way to introduce this, so let’s get to the main event: The Wreck! A 3D visual novel and the latest game from French developers The Pixel Hunt, known for releasing games like the…
March 23, 2023 | 11:00 EDT
Digimon games have always come in a wide variety of genres. Some entries are simulation games where you'll need to correctly train your Digimon to have it evolve into greatness, others are full-blown…
August 4, 2022 | 11:30 EDT
“Couples See Man-Sized Bird...Creature...Something” is what the headline of a newspaper in 1966 said in reference to the first sighting of the Mothman in 1966. Needless to say, Mothmen 1966 is based…
July 18, 2022 | 10:30 EDT
Given the exciting, bombastic noise of many sci-fi games today, Citizen Sleeper contrasts this by exploring equally meaningful ideas through smaller stakes. After their well-received first title, In…
May 19, 2022 | 11:30 EDT
Dating sims are a pretty broad genre of games these days. From dating sims about cosmic monstrosities to ones about pigeons, and even dating sims for people who don’t like dating sims. You can’t move…
December 15, 2021 | 10:00 EST
Since the Japanese release of The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures back in 2015 on the 3DS and the arrival of its sequel The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve two years later, series fans have been eagerly…
August 18, 2021 | 11:00 EDT
In my first half hour of playing The Shadow You, I was cringing but I kept humoring it. It reminded me of community-made games on Newgrounds, filled to the brim with teenage emotion and indignation.…
February 22, 2021 | 11:30 EST
I’ve never been a huge fan of Otome games, or dating sims in general. They’re much more my best friend’s thing than mine. However, a few years ago, when browsing on TvTropes, I found a description of…
January 13, 2021 | 10:00 EST
If Found... seemed like a relatively unassuming visual novel. It mixes together certain contemporary sci-fi ideas with existentialist themes and young adult staples like aimlessness and self-identity…
May 28, 2020 | 12:00 EDT
At first glance, Ciel Fledge: A Daughter Raising Simulator seems like an eclectic blend of game genres and themes. It aims to combine life simulators, turn-based RPGs, and visual novels into an epic…
February 20, 2020 | 09:00 EST
Hunie Pop is a Dating Sim and Puzzle game in one and comes after a successfully funded kickstarter. Kyu with the very first girl you meet, Lola.Merging two genres together, Hunie Pop begins with…
October 24, 2019 | 02:00 EDT
When I look back on all the Lyft and Uber rides I’ve taken in my life, not even the best ones come close to reflecting my experience playing Neo Cab. You play as a ride-share service driver in the…
October 9, 2019 | 06:44 EDT
The year was 2013. BBC’s Sherlock was waiting for a highly anticipated third season, CBS’s Elementary had premiered its second season, yet another iteration of Lupin III had just premiered the year…
August 23, 2019 | 12:30 EDT
My parents were prolific readers, and among their collection of books was a large library of Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys. I read these detective stories voraciously, and I've loved a good mystery…
October 4, 2017 | 11:00 EDT
Three years ago, Supergiant Games asserted itself as one of the premier indie developers of this console generation with the release of Transistor. Now, with their newest game Pyre, I believe they…
July 28, 2017 | 09:00 EDT
Visual novels seem to work better when they give players (or readers, as the case may be) more to do beyond clicking to advance through text boxes. Some of the most beloved visual novels, such as the…
June 22, 2017 | 12:00 EDT
When I try to talk to my friends and family members about Zero Escape: The Nonary Games and its creator, I run into the same problem. Unlike the film industry, where directors, producers, actors, and…
April 3, 2017 | 09:00 EDT
The first season of Batman: The Telltale Series is over, with Telltale's unique take on Batman, and more importantly Bruce Wayne, finishing off with a bang. Telltale has put out great games, and…
December 26, 2016 | 01:00 EST
We finally reach the final episode of another one of Telltale's episodic adventures. I've continued to insist that Batman: The Telltale Series has been one of the best that Telltale has given us, but…
December 22, 2016 | 01:00 EST
I've always insisted that Telltale has had a fourth episode curse. Every Telltale series I've played, I've found the fourth episode to be the weakest of the bunch, with The Wolf Among Us being a…
December 11, 2016 | 11:00 EST
Telltale has gotten through two episodes of Batman: The Telltale Series without any major stumbles so far. The plot keeps advancing in unexpected and exciting ways as the new and still unnamed…
November 4, 2016 | 02:00 EDT
When I first looked at the original release of Tokyo Twilight Ghost Hunters, I honestly wasn’t particularly eager on it. On the outside, the way the trailers sold it felt like some stereotypical…
October 25, 2016 | 09:00 EDT
Telltale's first episode of Batman: The Telltale Series was a pleasant surprise that took a hard look at the man behind the mask. Bruce Wayne's time in the limelight led to an interesting take on…
September 29, 2016 | 11:00 EDT
Batman has been written and used many different ways over the years, and he has been in many video games in that time as well. Telltale has always been big with their story games, and now they're…
August 7, 2016 | 09:00 EDT
Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma, the third in the trilogy from writer/director Kotaro Uchikoshi, has the mammoth task of bringing one of the greatest visual novel series in the history of video games…
July 11, 2016 | 11:00 EDT
Glitch City is not a very nice place to live. It's a cyberpunk dystopia, a corporate-owned metropolis overrun by brutality and drowning in the nonstop flow of technological progress. But despite all…
June 21, 2016 | 07:00 EDT
Cyber City 2157, a visual novel from Harotobira and published by Sometimes You, attempts to do a lot of things. It does very few of them well and, along the way, tells a story that is disjointed,…
June 6, 2016 | 09:00 EDT
Imagine, if you would, being deposited on a tropical island with fifteen of your peers and one slightly overbearing chaperone. Sounds hunky dory, right? Days in the sun and surf with pals, nights…
April 18, 2016 | 09:30 EDT
Welcome to our look here at Queen at Arms, a recently released visual novel on Steam. Let's clear a couple quick facts out of the way here just for everyone to know: This is a visual novel It does…
March 19, 2016 | 09:00 EDT
Amnesia: Memories is a visual novel, if it wasn't already clear, but more than that it is a dating sim. Not the one for guys like Katawa Shoujo or the more recent Huniepop, but the more traditional "…
October 1, 2015 | 09:00 EDT
It is a tough sell, sometimes, to publish an independent game. Even with the help of crowdfunding, some games struggle to really stand out in the now bloated independent market. With shoestring…
August 31, 2015 | 12:00 EDT
Alright, this is an interesting case for me. I actually don't play that many visual novel games, with probably having the most hours within Long Live The Queen more than anything else, which has an…
August 6, 2015 | 01:00 EDT
Hatoful Boyfriend has been out a few years now so the concept should not be new to most gamers, but the remake for PS4 and Vita has been recently released alongside the PC versions last year and so…
July 31, 2015 | 09:00 EDT
It is not my intention to begin this review so negatively, but Roommates as a visual novel suffers from the same issues nearly all Western titles of this genre do. This slice-of-life visual novel is…
February 24, 2015 | 09:00 EST
What would you kill for? This is one of the questions that drive the narrative of Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc. A scary conceit that makes for an entertaining story. This narrative, combined with…
February 17, 2014 | 09:00 EST