Kingdom Elemental

Kingdom Elemental looks like a tactical combat game in a fantasy setting. You fight your way through round after round of bad guys with soldiers you buy with a pile of gold. Win a battle and you can unlock new powers and new soldiers. I say “looks like” because it really isn’t a fantasy tactical combat game; it’s a puzzle game with a hack and slash theme. Read more

Shady O’ Grady’s Rising Star

I mentioned to a friend of mine that I was playing with Shady O’ Grady’s Rising Star, which is a “run your own band” sim. Read more

Arctic Stud Poker Run

Originality, in video games, is a somewhat oversold attribute. Everyone says they want to play original games, but when they vote with their dollars they buy the 16th iteration of Madden Football, and leave games like Beyond Good And Evil on the shelves. Some people also like to argue about whether or not a game is “really” original, since, as the saying goes, there are only 5 plots in Hollywood. Read more

Bookworm Adventures

Many reviewers have focused on Bookworm Adventures’ development budget. I prefer to judge it by another standard: a game that keeps me up until 5 in the morning is a bloody marvelous game. Here’s its description in three words: “Boggle, The RPG”. There’s a plot and dialogue, penned by Stephen Notley of Bob the Angry Flower, but primarily this game is about feeling terribly clever because you were able to find the word “pilgrimages” in a tangle of letters. Read more

Dwarf Fortress

“This is a joke. It has to be a joke.”

That was my reaction when I first downloaded and started playing Dwarf Fortress. At first blush it looks like a throwback to an old University mainframe game. I assumed that, like Robot Finds Kitten, Dwarf Fortress was some sort of sophisticated metacommentary on PC gaming. Read more

Deadly Rooms of Death

Take one part Sokoban, stir in two parts Chip’s Challenge, and add just the tiniest dash of the old Unix game Robots (for flavor), and you have a concoction approximating Caravel Games’ flagship title, Deadly Rooms of Death, or DROD for short. DROD is a puzzle game where you assume the role of Beethro, a Smitemaster, who cleans out dungeons using nothing more than his sword and his wits. Read more

Styrateg

Rake In Grass is an independent game developer from the Czech Republic. They’ve recently turned heads with their hysterically gory side-scrolling shooter Jets n’ Guns. But the real gem in their collection is Styrateg, a turn-based strategy game with a fantasy theme. Read more

Shadowgrounds

Tired of dropping 60 bucks on “new” games that re-hash the same gameplay and fancy graphics over and over again? No? My bad — skip this review then. If you said yes, or maybe even pounded your fist on your desk in affirmation, then Shadowgrounds is right up your ally. Read more

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