I once heard Unity described as "a very great tool [for building video games], that is very easily abused."  I can't think of a game that better epitomizes that sentiment than Void.

Yikes.  Hmm, I could probably stop the review right here and just let that stand, but I suppose I should probably go into some more depth and talk about just why this game so colossally disappointed me.  Regular readers of our little blog will have detected an excess amount of snark coming off that sentence and may have a sense of impending dread.  I rarely bust out the poison pen, but Void just left me in a foul, foul, mood.

Let's get something out of the way: I have never finished Super Meat Boy.

That's something I'm sure a lot of gamers are reluctant to admit, but probably have to.  Consistently ranking among the hardest games of all time alongside infamous controller-hurling fodder like Contra or Ghouls n' Ghosts, Super Meat Boy is the 2010 debut game from Team Meat, the aptly-named studio created by designers Edward McMillen and Tommy Refenes. 

As a not-so-closeted über patriot of the Great White North, it was a no-brainer that KONA would come across my radar eventually.  The first independent gaming project from Quebec-based studio Parabole, KONA is still in early Access on Steam and GOG, but is powering towards a full release tentatively around September 2016.  So at this point, it would be unfair for me to review it, but I do want to say that even in Early Access, this game plays and looks better than hundreds if not thousands of survival horror games in full release on Steam, and is absolutely something you should check out.  What I do want to talk, with regards to KONA and the broader picture, is the idea of crowd-sourced horror.

On the occasions where I do manage to take off my fedora long enough to actually admit that mainstream titles still hold interest for me, I usually find myself going back to the same group of select studios, chief among them Firaxis.  Firaxis has long held my loyalty for creating the inimitable greatness of theCivilization series, but if that hadn't been enough, they earned my love forever when they finally brought justice to XCOM.  I've already gone on at length about XCOM in two different posts, and suffice it to say that as a fan of the original Micropose game, having lived through disappointing sequel after disappointing sequel, I was not only relieved, but absolutely thrilled with Firaxis' effort.  So it was with a mix of trepidation and enthusiasm that I watched the approaching release date ofXCOM 2, like a hawk with indigestion.

As I was playing The Fall, from Canadian developer Over the Moon, I was forcibly reminded of Bungie's Halo predecessor series, Marathon.  That's a line of thinking that will probably make sense to, oh, I dunno, maybe dozen people in the entire universe, but I'm happy to explain it to the remaining several billion people who just rolled their eyes at how hipster I'm being right now.

When I last wrote about The Last Door, the episodic point-and-click adventure/horror game from The Game Kitchen, the series was in mid-swing, entering it's second "season" of episodes.  Nearly a year later, I'm sad to say the series has ended, probably for good.

As someone who grew up on point-and-click adventure games, I am still prepared to admit their flaws.  They can be onerous, with puzzles thrown in merely to extend gameplay.  They sometimes have too-simplistic or too-complex interfaces.  Mostly, though, they rely largely on a player being able to follow the same twisted sense of logic that the designers had when they built the puzzles.  In certain situations, like in the Monkey Island series, a lot of this is played very effectively for laughs.  Indeed, comedy and the point-and-click adventure seem to go well together, with classics like Day of the Tentacle and Grim Fandango.  Horror and point-and-click adventure is a less slam-dunk melding of mediums, and though the mix can produce really surprise hits like The Last Door, often the sheer otherworldly quality of the horror game overwhelms any sense of even remote logic, like in Decay: The Mare.

When I wrote about Don't Starve about a year ago, it was a game that had boiled the "survival" part of Survival Horror down to a raw essence epitomized by its blunt title.  At the time, they had released a large number of updates to the base game, adding cave systems and boss monsters.  The game really came into its own with the release of the Reign of Giants DLC, in April 2014.  The expansion added new seasons, new biomes, and, best of all, even more boss monsters.  This had the effect of making Don't Starve into a more thorough, complete experience, though the core mechanics were essentially the same.  The biggest challenge of survival in previous updates - winter - came about a year earlier.  Though summer and spring offered some nifty mechanics, they didn't feel all that different.

With the latest major DLC of Shipwrecked, however, Don't Starve is moving into new territories that are offering something that feels like a truly complete experience.

Imagine, if you will, a land of bright, colourful cheer.  It is a place of magical, frolicking creatures.  A place of candy, and soft, puffy clouds, and gentle music.  It is, both literally and figuratively, a Dream Land.

Yet every light casts a shadow.  Every God has a Devil.  And even the gentlest, most wondrous of places must have its reckoning.

For Dreamland, that reckoning had a name, spoken only in hushed tones:  Kirby.