Category Archives: Reviews

Been playing this a lot for the past few days. Into the latter half of my first playthrough. Various thoughts: Overall it’s great. The writing and atmosphere are very cool, and consistently build on the themes of exploring the mental effect of being in a gothic horror setting. Very immersive throughout. The game systems are well setup to hit all the standard roguelike patterns for people who like XCOM et al. Making the choice not to have a failure state (no game over) is a very significant one. It enables […]

Dark Souls is widely regarded as an outstanding game for a variety of reasons, such as the “hard but fair” ethos in which its only demand is that you prove your growth as a player at each step.  The world is similarly praised for its clever interconnectedness.  I want to illustrate the level of thought that went into the level design, using a series of highlights progressing through the game.  This is somewhat inspired by this analysis of Super Metroid, a game which itself is clearly an element of the Dark Souls pedigree.  Many of the concepts described in that […]

Introduction In preparation for Hero Academy coming out on PC, I’m collecting and filling out the mechanics guides I used to post on the forum. If you’re 100% brand new to HA, you don’t need to read this first, just use the in-game tutorial and play a few turns to get a sense of what’s going on. But as you start playing, you’ll encounter units/mechanics/races that you haven’t seen before, and sometimes you just want to check what they do without having to use trial and error in the middle […]