Let it die. I’ve never been a particularly nostalgic person, at least not for artistic mediums and media types. While I’ve been prone to longing for, or at the very least appreciating, specific design philosophies that have largely gone the way of the dodo, I don’t have any specific desire to house or make use of old technology. The classic systems and technology I grew up on, such as SNES and VHS players, don’t hold any power over me insofar as I largely see them as simple delivery systems for the actual art — video games and film, respectively. Katanalevy’s Dead Format  explicitly hearkens back to the time of VHS, taking place in the 1990’s. The player character is searching for their missing brother, rummaging through his apartment to find a new format and series of films (referred to as “Video Ghastlies”) which must then be played in order to open doors to the worlds shown in said films for the player to explore. While the titular “dead format” works as the mechanism for the delivering these worlds, I find that the reverence and nostalgia is targeted less toward the technology, and more for the types of art they were able to produce.  Publisher: Oro Interactive Developer: Katanalevy Platform: Played on PC Availability: Released December 10, 2025 on Windows PC. Older formats were, in many ways, much more constricting. Artists are ultimately bound by the current tech when creating a film or video game, such as films being exclusively black and white before the color technology was invented. But those bounds also served as guidelines. Rather than the whole universe of creativity being open to the director or creator, the films would necessarily have to work within that technological context; low resolutions, 4:3 aspect ratio, and even limited color all serve to influence the ways in which people made their works. It would change the way in which shots were framed, lit, or even played.  These creative choices are where Dead Format  lays its flowers. It pays very little reverence to the actual technology itself — something that I find is all too frequently done by modern retro enthusiasts — and instead focuses on the art itself. The video vignettes that you find throughout the short runtime are all reminiscent of the period they are emulating, using similar shot styles and visual effects one might find in a real work from the period. There’s a care taken in the fake movies that I truly respect, with the fake films even going so far as to use period appropriate color palettes, costuming, and contrasting. An underrated element to this is just how much adding something like tracking lines and CRT blurriness serves to solidify the eerie atmosphere of those “video ghastlies.” Dead Format is phenomenally atmospheric. Once a video has been placed in the player and viewed, the apartment door will unlock and allow the player to walk through the world depicted in the video. Similar to the videos, the levels are also appropriately representative of the film styles they emulate. The first level, a silent film setting, is rendered in black and white, the 80’s horror flick has high contrast and has a bit of a noisy or fuzzy image.  This is such a great concept in my mind, and it is executed excellently overall from a visual perspective, but falls flat on the gameplay front on the back half of the game, especially. At some point, an entity that can kill you in only a few hits begins to stalk you through your travels. It's a very similar concept to the excellent Alien: Isolation: there’s an unkillable monster hunting you, so you must hide and outmaneuver them to complete your objectives. While the tension is welcome in some respects, I find you spend too much time simply sitting and hiding. There’s an element of stealth you can rely on, where if you’re quiet enough you may be able to avoid the stalker in a few instances, but the primary method of avoidance are these little alcoves where your character is invincible and undetectable. As a product of the way the game’s save system works, you really don’t want to die, lest you be set back a long way. This leads to most of the final hours being spent sitting and waiting for the monster to pass so you can walk down the hallway, or enter the next room. The video vignettes that you find throughout the short runtime are all reminiscent of the period they are emulating, using similar shot styles and visual effects one might find in a real work from the period. The back half of the game is frankly joyless because of this. Because there are so few ways to mitigate or avoid these scenarios, and because there are specific set areas the stalker appears at, there’s no real tension in the way that there is in a game like Alien: Isolation . There’s no second guessing or panic — once she appears, you know you must return to the alcove and wait. This does detract from your opportunity to appreciate the settings as well. While they are few in number, these levels are clearly crafted with care and love, but it’s hard to appreciate any of that when staring at the bottom of a table. It ’s hard to overstate just how much this singular (but pervasive) aspect brings the rest of the game down. I do understand what they were going for by introducing a stalking element to Dead Format , but the implementation of it steers into ‘boring’ territory. Verdict Dead Format  is host to excellent ideas. The “haunted VHS” concept of opening up new worlds to explore sounds genuinely exciting in theory. To add to this, Katanalevy has a masterful grasp on the aesthetics of the past, using the constraints of VHS and film to create a genuinely unsettling atmosphere, but the poorly implemented stalker mechanic drags the experience down. Image Credits: Oro Interactive Disclosure: We received a free review copy of this product from the publisher.

Got any sheep? The first escape room I ever found myself in remains one of my core memories. My wife and I had just started dating, and I was hoping to introduce her to some good friends of mine. I knew that she was a fan of the setting that the local escape room was based upon, and as I was interested and willing to try out some new experiences, I figured it would be a great way to get all of us interacting. What I found was not just a great way to commingle, but a fully immersive investigative experience. One in which each person was invested in working together to not only solve the obtuse riddles of the room, but also to assist one another and lift each other person up in the process. I suppose that’s the beauty of an escape room. Each person is able to work to their strengths, solving puzzles in an open format by cooperating with one another. The tangible aspect of it is no doubt a huge part of that — each turn of a key or new door opened creates a real sense of success. In this respect, EXIT: The Game – Adventures on Catan  does an excellent job of simulating a more curated escape room experience. Product:   EXIT: The Game – Adventures on Catan Designer: Inka Brand, Markus Brand Publisher:  Thames & KOSMOS Price: $ 19.95 Age: 10+ As stated earlier, escape rooms excel at creating an immersive atmosphere to the action you find yourself in. That is a tall task for a such a small box to emulate, but EXIT: The Game – Adventures on Catan attempts to do so by providing you narrative hooks in writing and giving clues and elements that are representative of the simulated setting, such as resource tokens and tiles that are drawn straight from CATAN . This isn’t as effective as being in a room wholly dedicated to your immersion, but if you let yourself roleplay, you may find it works well enough to remain engaging. In order to avoid spoilers, I am not going to discuss the specifics of the puzzles or contents of the box, but the puzzles here did surprise me in terms of their difficulty. The clues provided are  adequate for solving each task, and the actual act and experience of doing so goes extremely smoothly. There aren't any elements of unwanted or undue friction. Instead, what you get is a series of tests meant to challenge the group and inspire everyone to work together, crafting a delightful and rewarding scenario that always sparks joy when you find success.  There is a bit of a caveat here in the sense that the game is explicitly marketed as a beginner EXIT  title, with the age rating starting at 10 years old. I frankly would not expect a group of ten-year-olds to be able to complete an EXIT: The Game – Adventures on Catan scenario, though that doesn’t mean no 10 year old would be able to participate. That said, the game works its setting into the process wonderfully. Resources are gained whenever you solve a puzzle, generating a number equal to the number token placed on the resource board tiles, evoking the mechanics of the CATAN game itself. Then, resources are traded to gain new clues for further puzzle solving. It creates this great flow of mechanics where something is always being gained and lost as the game progresses. ...the game works its setting into the process wonderfully. Resources are gained whenever you solve a puzzle, generating a number equal to the number token placed on the resource board tiles, evoking the mechanics of the CATAN game itself. One aspect that EXIT: The Game – Adventures on Catan  does have over traditional Escape rooms is the inherent destructibility of the materials. While in a normal escape room you would take care not to damage the objects in a room out of fear and respect for the owners, here it is key to success. Parts are destroyed in the reveal process or as part of a puzzle solution, markings are made on the objects themselves and so on. It allows for solutions or processes that a normal escape room wouldn’t allow for. When all 10 puzzles are finally solved, the game is won. Interestingly, though this was done with an entirely separate group, I couldn’t help but remember the elation and excitement I felt at my first escape room experience. There’s something so affecting about getting a group together to collaborate and conquer something of this nature. EXIT: The Game – Adventures on Catan  elicits that same feeling when done properly, and that’s a thing of beauty. Verdict EXIT: The Game – Adventures on Catan  is an excellent take on the escape room format for home play. Utilizing the setting of CATAN  to great effect, this game is full of difficult but rewarding puzzles that will keep the group engaged the entire time. Image Credits: KOSMOS Disclosure: We received a free review copy of this product from the publisher.

No need to hold the door open. Up or Down?  is a game of highs and lows. It features stunning art and pedigree design from Kramer and Kiesling, yet the gameplay feels surprisingly on-rails. A simple card game that functions as a hand-builder where the basic aim is to make lines of ascending or descending cards to formulate hands that score based upon length of the hand and color of the cards therein. The specific version I received was the one I got at GenCon 2025, but I’ve been struggling to put into words why this game hasn’t particularly landed for me, despite being a recurring game played at friendly occasions. Product:  Up or Down? Designers: Michael Kiesling, Wolfgang Kramer Publisher:   ABACUSSPIELE, Capstone Games, HOT Games Price: $ 10 Age: 8+ Let’s start with some gameplay mechanics. The baseline gameplay flow is quite simple. First, you start by dealing three cards to each player and arranging six revealed cards from the deck into a circle, ordered low to high, around the remaining deck of cards (exact number varies based upon number of players). The remaining deck is then into two central draw piles inside the ring: one face up and one face down. From here, players take turns placing a card from their hand into the appropriate space in the circle, taking an adjacent card to the one just placed. That card is then added to one of your columns of cards, of which you can have three, in either ascending or descending order. When all cards have been drawn from the deck, players calculate score totals based upon the number of cards in their discard pile (1 point each), and the makeup of their columns of cards. For the card columns, score is calculated by multiplying the total number of cards in the line of cards by the count of the single most common color in that line. The player with the highest total wins. I am aware the column is ordered incorrectly per the rules. Fundamentally, there’s not much going on in this game. There’s really only one strategy you can use — start with the highest or lowest numbered card you can get and go from there, targeting similar colors as much as possible. The strategy aspect is extremely limiting, as there is no true way to interact with other players at the table, and your fortunes are primarily decided by lady luck rather than any particular masterstroke of genius on your end. This makes the entire experience a bit detached, with you and your cohorts playing simultaneous solitaire rather than engaging in a collaborative or competitive experience. All collections are open to view by the table, so I suppose there is the idea that you could work to deny other players cards that would assist them. This would really only serve to play spoiler for one or two other players, leaving you with a weak collection overall and setting up another player for the win. Despite these mechanical shortfalls, I find it works well as a friendly, party-style card game. Without any difficult decisions to make and boasting a very clear turn structure, even beginner level board game players can jump in easily, and paying close attention is rarely necessary. On top of this, the version we obtained is beautiful. The card stock is really solid and feels great in your hands, plus the art is stunning, despite the mundane subject matter.  Verdict Ultimately, Up or Down?   lands at strictly party fare for me. It’s easy to get into, and feels good in your hands, but its distinct lack of true strategic elements or player-to-player interactivity prevents it from being a true staple.  Image Credits: Taylor Rioux Disclosure: We received a free review copy of this product from the publisher.

As I gaze upon the artwork of Hollow Knight: Silksong , I can’t help but marvel at the beauty and craftsmanship of it. Unique and interesting creatures, gorgeous backgrounds, and fluid animations all create this atmosphere of a downtrodden, exploited world. But for me, there is more to a game than how it looks. Art is in the experience. How the act of playing the game makes you think and feel, how it relates to the world beyond. Through play and engagement, some meaning can be conferred. Publisher:   Team Cherry Developer:   Team Cherry Platform:  Played on PC Availability: Released September 4, 2025  on PS4/5, Xbox Series X/S, Windows PC, Nintendo Switch and Switch 2. For Hollow Knight: Silksong ’s part, it has without question elicited emotions within me. Fear, excitement, elation, joy — these are some of the emotions one would expect when playing a game like Hollow Knight: Silksong . Yet no such feeling has arisen; instead, I have almost exclusively felt boredom. Every run back to a boss, every platforming challenge, and every repeated trek through a zone became tiresome. If you take a path not meant to be seen at a specific point in time, you simply come to a dead-end with no way to intuit or understand what is missing or must be done — you are only rebuffed and cursed to wander elsewhere. And so the journey continues as you meander through new and equally complex and hazardous zones until a new tool or ability allows you to go back to your prior dead ends for continued exploration.  This is typical for the genre of course, and does present itself as an accumulation of effort or accomplishment to be celebrated. The journey through the world is perilous, perhaps even more so than fighting any single boss Hollow Knight: Silksong throws at you. Yet there is very little fanfare when you do beat a boss, opening the way to the next zone. Seldom did I feel elated or joyful when my foe burst into silk. Instead, I mostly felt relief that the segment was done with, and hoped that the next area would be less aimless. I was never granted such relief. As the game progresses, zones get more intricate and the backtracking becomes even more frequent, and moments in-game start to blur. There never really feels to be a moment to reflect on events as you are playing, save the minor reprieve of a wayward bench.  Beyond the backtracking, the ways in which the systems interact often leads to minor frustrations. Losing to a boss or field enemy means not only the possibility of losing your rosaries, but the loss of any other resources spent, such as shell shards to repair your tools. Shell shards are replenishable, but it is not a quick process to do so. Hollow Knight: Silksong gives you a plethora of tools to make use of that alter the gameplay flow in interesting or inventive ways. Tools that lay traps or give you ranged options, tools that make your attacks stronger or let them inflict status upon an enemy — the tools are abundant and useful. Yet the resource related friction here means you have to be very careful with their use, and disincentivizes experimentation and play in a game that is ripe with opportunity to do so. In a best case scenario, you consistently have enough shell shards to use your tools on the bosses and mini-bosses without having to grind out shards for repair, but to do so means you must never use them outside of those arenas, relying only on a single basic attack and a small selection of silk skills to carry you through dozens of hours of already monotonous gameplay. Over time, those minor frustrations coalesce into major grievances with how my time is being spent, products of a severe lack of balance in the experience of playing the game. Hollow Knight: Silksong is an astonishingly beautiful game in motion and all other aspects. There’s a sort of religiosity required to play this game to completion. Opposed to the elaborate pomp and ceremony associated with many religious practices today, playing Hollow Knight: Silksong  is more akin to self-flagellation. To inflict upon oneself pain and suffering over and over in order to bring oneself closer to God. Here, it is to suffer the repetition and failures and boredom of the act of playing so that one may say that the task has been completed and that some insight has been gained or purpose gleaned from the endeavor. In this respect, I seem to have fallen to the role of the sinner. I feel as if I have been unwillingly flogged, gaining no such wisdom for the trouble, and instead punished for some unknowable crime. Rather than gaining an appreciation of the game through the effort, I have inherited an aversion. The likening to religiosity is no mistake. Many NPCs throughout Hollow Knight: Silksong  are pious to the point of absurdity, making their way through lava caverns and poison swamps to ascend to the holy Citadel, only to be further pressed upon by those in the position to do so. Shopkeepers strewn about to extort their faith, enemies looking for their next victim, and a god whose silk controls their very thoughts — the world they live in is unkind. And yet they continue to pray.  Perhaps this is where my lived experience comes into play more than any other facet of the interpretation of Hollow Knight: Silksong . I already have an intense aversion to religiosity, and playing something that evokes such imagery and feeling through both its story and gameplay necessarily gives rise to memories of Sundays spent sleeping in pews, of being forced to do something or be somewhere I did not want to be.  It is true that I was not “forced” to play Hollow Knight: Silksong . There was no gun to my head, my feet were not held to a fire, and eternal damnation was not on the table if I didn’t finish it. But I did feel obligated, in some respect. The start of the game didn’t feel particularly offensive to me in any way. With exacting and immaculate level design, varied approaches to combat and exploration being viable, and tight controls, Hollow Knight: Silksong  is a true feat of engineering. Everything just works. And in those early hours, when everything felt new, each new dead-end felt a little more intriguing. Easy enough to put a pin on it and come back later, I would think. As the game rolled on, and those pins and alleyways began to pile up, I just got tired of it. There was nothing keeping me here save the desire to say I had done so. That didn’t feel healthy, so I put it down just a few days after release, close enough to the end that I could just finish it at any time. ...playing Hollow Knight: Silksong is more akin to self-flagellation. To inflict upon oneself pain and suffering over and over in order to bring oneself closer to God. Yet the months passed and still Hollow Knight: Silksong would continue to pop into my thoughts. Generally not in a positive sense, but it was there all the same. I felt a tinge of shame that I had not brought myself to complete it. I felt apart from the overarching conversation surrounding the game. I felt like I didn’t have a voice because technically  I had not beaten it, despite being there at the end. In order to relieve myself of that shame, I had to pick up Hollow Knight: Silksong  once more, though I did throw out any ideas of completing act 3. This was in itself an absurd adherence to traditional norms and customs surrounding video game participation (especially in the critical space). The irony of this is not lost on me. I was hoping — praying — that completing the game would grant me more insight, bestow upon me some truth that I had missed. That by going through its entirety, the time I spent doing so would be deemed worthy. It didn’t take long to roll credits on Hollow Knight: Silksong  this time around. Just a short walk and a few attempts is all I needed. No meaning had been gleaned, no value for the time and effort had become apparent — I felt just as bored as I had all those months ago. That is where my pilgrimage ended. It’s hard to say that my faith in the game was broken as I was never one praying at the altar for it, but I am a bit let down by it all. Verdict Hollow Knight: Silksong is undoubtedly a beautiful game. Gorgeous artwork in the character sprites and the backgrounds breathes life into the world, music both haunting and melancholic permeates the air. More than any other positive aspect, Hollow Knight: Silksong  seems to be a feat of technical prowess, a true masterwork of engineering where all the pieces work exactly as intended. Despite this, it remains one of the most tedious and boring games I have played in a very long time. It is a true shame those perfectly functioning systems don’t work together better to create a more rewarding experience. Image Credits: Team Cherry

Timeless cool I saw Terminator 2: Judgment Day  at far too young an age. I’m pretty sure we taped it from what was probably its first Australian TV airing back when I was about six years old and I instantly became obsessed. I begged my mum to get me a real leather jacket that we miraculously found in kids-size at a second-hand shop, which she did, and for probably about a year I would never want to leave the house without wearing both it and the pair of officially licensed Terminator 2  sunglasses I ended up getting also. For the past few months I’ve actually been living back down in that same house I grew up and first saw Terminator 2  in, and earlier this week I actually rediscovered those very sunglasses.  Yeah, they're real. I guess I’ve been in a bit of a rose-tinted nostalgia hole lately; somewhat mythologizing my past while ignoring the actual reality of it, which happens to be exactly where Terminator 2D: NO FATE  positions itself, funnily enough. Publisher: Reef Entertainment Developer: Bitmap Bureau Platform: Played on PC and Steam Deck Availability: Released December 12, 2025 on PS4/5, Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One, Windows PC, Nintendo Switch. The games marketing copy posits that ‘the guiding principle of its development was to make the kind of game that could’ve come out alongside the movie’, which of course entirely ignores the fact that there was a glut of official T2  video games  released back then. Given that the central conceit of the Terminator  franchise is revisiting the past in order to deliver a brighter today, I can’t help but admire the hell out of how holistically the developers and publisher have presented this throughline. Terminator 2D: NO FATE plays like a highlights package of every memorable side-scrolling action game of the early 90s. Each level features a timer that ticks down towards a game over, and every object you smash and every enemy you defeat adds points to your score. A full run from start to finish will only take you around 40 minutes, but it encourages you to push for higher scores, quicker times, and to try higher difficulties. After finishing the game once you unlock the ability to make narrative choices in a couple of instances on subsequent runs which unlocks some branching levels that give different endings.  From the very idea of making the game itself, permeating all the way through its design, and then out the other end to the way it’s being marketed, Terminator 2D: NO FATE delightfully toys with the notion of changing history and our collective senses of rose-tinted nostalgia. What’s most impressive about Terminator 2D: NO FATE  though is how cleverly every one of its iconic scenes have been translated into different game design frameworks from the era and how smoothly they all weave together. The future war segments glimpsed in the film's opening have you playing as adult John Connor in a straight riff on Contra , complete with cartoonish gun power pickups. Sarah Connor’s assaults on Cyberdyne facilities meanwhile are more platforming focused in the style of Acclaim’s many licensed productions of the day. The motorbike and truck chase through the Los Angeles river hilariously becomes a direct riff on the infamous jetbike levels from Battletoads , though far less infuriating and mercifully shorter. Terminator 2D: NO FATE delightfully toys with the notion of changing history and our collective senses of rose-tinted nostalgia. Best of all though is how the ‘I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle’ scene has been adapted. You’re given control of the titular Terminator itself as it arrives through the time portal to 1995. Unarmed and completely nude, you melee brawl your way into and through the biker bar in a style reminiscent of Golden Axe.  As a bunch of dudes with pocket knives and pool cues can’t reasonably harm a hulking death-robot, any hits incurred instead knock 5 seconds off the countdown timer. I laughed with delight as the Dwight Yoakam song from the film scene played upon entering the bar, too, then absolutely cackled with glee when I smashed the jukebox found in the level and the music switched to George Thorogood’s ‘Bad to the Bone’. Not chiptune interpreted covers either, the actual licensed songs. The fact that each sticks out so much from the rest of Terminator 2D: NO FATE ’s   wonderfully authentic early 90s video game score made the gag land all the better. The level culminates with a boss fight against the shotgun-wielding “I can’t let you take the man’s wheels, son” bartender, and beginning-to-end it’s one of my favorite game sequences of the year hands-down. Terminator 2D: NO FATE lends its own twists to the events of the classic film. Every inch of Terminator 2D: NO FATE  is drenched in this degree of love and reverence both for its source material as well as for arcade and console games of the early 90s, and every bit of this is communicated wonderfully through play. The fact that they clearly couldn't get Schwarzenegger’s likeness rights is a small shame, but the game just presents so splendidly & feels so damn good to play from start to finish that it doesn't matter. Every subsequent run I took through it was inspired by my enthusiasm to relish in the pleasure of it all once again as much as it was to unlock anything new or chase higher scores. All that said, though, $30USD feels steep for a game of its scale as beautiful and brilliant as I feel the game is. I’m also swinging back and forth on feeling outraged at the $60USD price tag for the physical edition and laughing at how authentic to the game's entire concept making that choice for a retail release is. Verdict Terminator 2D: NO FATE is a masterclass in film-to-video game adaptation. It also feels like something a frighteningly clever machine would devise in order to push every single one of my ‘childhood delight’ buttons. It’s easily one of my favorite games of the year and I’d argue one of the best licensed games ever on top of that. Maybe just keep your eyes peeled for any discount on it. Image Credits: Jam Walker, Reef Entertainment, and Bitmap Bureau. Disclosure: We received a free review copy of this product from the publisher.

One of the first presents I remember ever receiving was a set of stickers and a book I could store them in. I spent days organizing my stickers on the pages in a way that made sense to my tiny brain: sorted by animal, by color, by shape, whatever fit my mood. It brought about a level of satisfaction that tickled my brain just right. Little Corners  tickles my brain in the exact, same way. Publisher:   SECRET SAUCE, Gamersky Games Developer:   Meteor Pixel Platform:  Played on PC Availability: Released November 13, 2025 on PC. At its core, Little Corners  is a simple concept: a cozy decoration game centered around using stickers to fill in the space of charming little rooms, decorating them however you see fit. It's the digital equivalent of that childhood sticker book, but with far more creative freedom and far less worry of accidentally ripping a sticker. The game features 8 different rooms to decorate, each with its own distinct aesthetic, ranging from a dungeon reclaimed by nature to a witchy cabin in the woods. Little Corners  has thousands of stickers available in total. There are large furniture pieces like doors and fireplaces to the tiniest details like patches of moss, burning flames, and adorable little critters such as cats, dogs, and frogs. There’s even the concept of “hidden” stickers which are unlocked when you place certain stickers on the page.  The gameplay loop is really straightforward: pick up a sticker and place it in the room. Using your mouse scroll wheel, you can adjust the layer the sticker lands on, allowing you to create depth and overlap elements naturally. It's intuitive and relaxing, perfect for unwinding after a long day. Beyond the room decoration itself, there are customization options to adjust the background of the game interface and the workpad, giving you control over your creative environment. All in all, Little Corners  is a small game made with love, celebrating the simple pleasures of creativity and organization. You don’t have to worry about getting a high score, or decorating your room within a set time. It’s simply about building a space that feels right to you. Image Credits: Meteor Pixel, SECRET SAUCE, and Gamersky Games Disclosure: We received a free review copy of this product.

Shrooms! Tower Defence is the debut game of solo developer Terra Mater Games. Their background in biology shines through as real mushrooms are vivified to protect their habitat from loggers. A simple tower defense game providing a unique challenge from an inability to control mushroom (tower) locations, making every mushroom selection critical to properly defend your trees from destruction. Each mushroom has several skills to choose from for further specialization, on top of a selection of buffs and debuffs to pick from at the start of each match. This in-depth control of gameplay and difficulty helps this game stand out from others in the genre. After completing 50 waves, players also have the option to continue in endless mode for further challenge. I would recommend this to anyone interested in tower defense looking to shake it up a little. Publisher:   Terra Mater Games Developer:   Terra Mater Games Platform:  Played on PC Availability: Released November 27, 2025 on Steam Pros Infinite ways to create challenges for yourself. Simple and quick to learn gameplay. Cons No saves for individual games. Repetitive music. Basic art style. Shrooms! Tower Defence is quite simplistic in terms of visuals and mechanics, but there's enough here to make it worth playing. Verdict Image Credits: Terra Mater Games Disclosure: We received a free review copy of this product from the publisher.

As part of our ThanksGAMING event for the end of the year, I want to take time to elevate and appreciate the people in gaming I admire or inspire me – whether they are content creators, journalists, or developers.  Jay Gary is a writer, YouTuber, and former fighting game commentator who I have followed for a while on several social media sites, and I’ve loved the work he has done across a variety of subjects. From his articles on supercombo.gg  to his detailed video essays on the RPGs of yesteryear, Jay’s work is always insightful, taking you places you may not expect at first glance. Thankfully, Jay was gracious enough to chat with me about his content, passions, and other aspects of his life. To kick things off, I wanted to give Jay the opportunity to introduce himself in his own words for anyone who wasn’t aware of what he did already. “Hello! My name is Jay “IdolismJ” Gary! What you know me for depends on where you’re coming from. I’ve been a person of interest in the fighting game community for a long time, I’ve been running a YouTube channel for video game essays for the past couple years, and there’s even a chance you know me because my belly went quintuple-platinum on Twitter back in 2020. I get around.” Twitter is where I first came across Jay on social media, no doubt. Before it became a Nazi hellsite, I spent an inordinate amount of time there reading up on games and sports. Twitter was where I first started interacting with the fighting game community, specifically — a community in which Jay himself was relatively well-known.  If you follow competitive games for any amount of time, you’ll notice that many of its prominent members are a part of teams and organizations. Often these organizations are represented on stream or online using three to four letters, such as “NRG” or “FaZe”. All of Jay’s socials indicated that he was a part of one such organization, YASE, that I had not personally heard of. So, what is 「ＹＡＳＥ」, exactly? “「ＹＡＳＥ」 is a surprisingly long story. Back around 2010 or so, the concept of fighting game teams really took off. This was spearheaded by established eSports orgs like Evil Geniuses adopting their own fighting game roster and community-first teams like the infamous Empire Arcadia. Soon everyone was forming teams and, more importantly, putting their team code in their usernames. A group of my friends and I decided to start YASE as a parody to the burgeoning team landscape, it stood for ‘Yall Aint Shit Ennyways’. But something curious happened; YASE outlasted almost every other team because we were a collective of chill people (who were still halfway decent at these games) and everyone else were these profit models that realized the FGC had no money in it. There are still some teams left out there in the world, Kick Punch Block and Play All Games come to mind, but YASE has stuck together probably the longest of any FGC team.” But something curious happened; YASE outlasted almost every other team because we were a collective of chill people (who were still halfway decent at these games) and everyone else were these profit models that realized the FGC had no money in it. His point about their longevity rings like pointed criticism of the FGC professional space. While fighting game teams have existed for decades, professional teams like Echo Fox and Tempo Storm made big waves by signing major players in the mid 2010s. The influx of new teams and signed players was impossible to ignore; nearly every player in a major tournament would be sporting their organization’s name on clothing, in their registered name, or both.  When the pandemic hit, many of these organizations collapsed as the money dried up and travel became more difficult. Despite the pandemic and surrounding FCG team landscape, YASE remained. What was the secret to that longevity? Were they dedicated to performance in tournaments, or was there something more to it? “...we did take it somewhat seriously,” Jay told me. “We designed a house brand for our group, we sold merch (rather successfully for a scrappy group of friends!), we donated to charities or helped sponsor costs for players,” he continued, “we [even] had people ask if they could apply to join because it wasn’t always obvious this was a bit of a joke. We did expand the team a couple times, but eventually we stopped because YASE stopped being a team and became more of a family. The other members of YASE have been some of the closest people in my life, they’ve come to my wedding and I’ve gone to theirs. We don’t operate like we used to, we’re all a bit older and out of the game to keep up with the merchandising and whatnot, but we are all still around and remembered fondly.” Despite the professional scene contracting, and YASE itself winding down its tournament play, Jay wasn't content to let his time in fighting games end there. Since the pandemic, he has continued to be involved in other ways, such as writing articles for supercombo.gg  all the way back to 2022.  “One day I made a twitter thread delving into some research I was doing at the time, finding some very curious links between obscure publishing parties and the strange fighting games they had a hand on. The thread was warmly received and a mutual of mine tagged Shib, the current owner of SuperCombo, saying this is exactly the type of stuff that should be written for the site. I was already chummy with Shib so we both agreed that I should join the team and retool the thread into a proper article. Since then, SuperCombo has been a place that has allowed me to write on fighting game topics and research dives whenever a topic sparks my fancy.” Image Credit: Jay "IdolismJ" Gary, from the video " The Final Fantasy Legend (AKA SaGa 1) is Cryptic, Innovative, And Purely Okay IMO " This opportunity was about more than just writing articles for SuperCombo. Sometimes, new opportunities arise in places where you don’t expect. “What might not be as obvious is that this opened the door for me to start writing for events,” he told me. “Shib also is one of the higher ups for Vortex Gallery, an organization that runs the side tournaments at some of the bigger events of the year. I wrote the guide for one of their years at EVO and also was hired by Combo Breaker to write their event guide for a couple years. Writing was always something I enjoyed when I was younger, but my life took me down other paths as I grew up, so I’m very grateful that I got to reconnect with that part of my creativity and I feel halfway kosher calling myself a writer these days.” The more you speak to Jay, the more obvious it becomes that he has a deep love and appreciation for fighting games and the communities that surround them. While this love manifests in many ways through his writing, past organizing, and commentating, I was interested in where that love first bloomed. “Well, I’m of a certain age where the answer is almost always ‘Street Fighter 2 happened’. I think the first time I saw the game was playing it on the SNES at my neighbors house and I fell in love immediately. But what took it into overdrive was being the child of a hockey family. I would be taken to hockey arenas all over Metro-Detroit because both of my parents played and almost all of them would have little arcade sections. Further still, almost all of them had fighting game cabinets. Some like the Ann Arbor Ice Cube had these shockingly large arcade sections, some would only have a couple. I recall one arena only had two cabinets, but those two cabinets were Street Fighter 2 World Warrior and Darkstalkers 1. I didn’t need much more than that.” I can’t help but laugh at that Street Fighter 2  point. If you grew up in the 90s you played it, with very little exception. It was such a wildly successful title that it spawned many revisions and sequels for the franchise and has played no small part in Capcom’s continued dominance in the scene. However, after those early days Jay found community in another series by a different company entirely.  “When I got to high school, I found a group of friends that all played Guilty Gear XX . This was the next big step for me because I now had people to play against. GGXX is one of those games that means the world to my life, it was such a pivotal game in my development and I cherish it deeply.” Of course, the allure of Street Fighter remained all the same. “By the time I exited high school, Street Fighter 4 released on consoles and the rest is history. I was one of the “09ers”, a term used to signal the influx of people who properly joined the fighting game scene with the explosive popularity that SF4 brought to the community. This term was originally a bit derogatory, like it was kinda used to beat up on the new kids, but 2009 is a long time ago now and with all the years I’ve put in being a part of the community I’m more of an OG than many.” Speaking of Guilty Gear XX , it’s had a bit of a resurgence the last few years. The Accent Core Plus R  version on Steam has continued to maintain a strong playerbase, with tournaments running on Twitch and through discord channels regularly — even before the rollback netcode update in 2020. What is it about Guilty Gear XX  that gives it so much staying power and what does Jay love about it? “It’s going to be hard to talk about this game without sounding like a bit of an “old man yelling at cloud”, but +R is a game that refuses to die. It comes from a better, more creative, more experimental time in fighting game design and those conditions created a release that stands as one of the best to ever do it. Fighting games are living documents, they grow and evolve as more hands dig deep into them over the years. But eventually, games should be ‘solved’, maybe there is some meta movement that shifts characters around a spot or two, but most games will have a point where they are mined clean of their tech. +R is different, +R is so alive. It’s the final revision of a game that is so formative for the genre, it's packed to the point of overflow with options and playstyles and character kits so unique it would make your head spin. +R feels like no idea was left on the cutting room floor, anything that sounded cool found their way into the game." ...+R is a game that refuses to die. It comes from a better, more creative, more experimental time in fighting game design and those conditions created a release that stands as one of the best to ever do it. Comments like this might seem inflammatory, but I find it hard to argue when you look at a game like Guilty Gear XX and you can see those creative aspects so obviously on display. Its artstyle is bold and flashy, and the music is a rock-heavy assault on the senses. There’s a freedom to the way the game looks and plays that feels unmatched in the modern, more corporate gaming landscape. “And to be an old geezer about it, when you compare it to modern fighting game design you can see how it stands out. I play a fair amount of Street Fighter 6 these days, it’s a fine game I guess. It’s more tightly designed and it creates a more balanced game, there isn’t much in terms of unplayable outliers or unstoppable top tiers. And that sounds good, like that should be something all fighting games strive for. But in execution, I think how tightly and fairly designed Street Fighter 6 is makes it come off as constrained and a tad boring. Maybe that balance is too safe, too tame. Maybe those outliers are the flavor that excites the palette. And if you look back at +R with that in mind, it is a game bursting at the seams with flavor. +R has a reputation of being ruled by powerful characters like Testament, Baiken, and Zappa. And don’t get it twisted, these characters are insane, but they aren’t the overwhelming majority of the playerbase. One of the best players in America, Skeletal Minion, plays A.B.A., ostensibly a mid tier, and wrecks house across some of the biggest tournaments. TTTTTsd gained fame for taking Kliff, another character traditionally seen as a middle-of-the-pack choice and optimizing his gameplay to noticeably raise the character’s stock. Even Robo-Ky, one of the worse characters in the game, looks like a devil in the hands of a specialist like Dr. Stormlocke.  Despite being over a decade old and being part of a game released a decade before that, it has never felt more alive. There is so much movement and discovery still happening, new strategies and tech being crafted by people who pull this game to its furthest edges to find something. +R represents the best of what fighting games can offer. It’s something that will never die, with all the certainty in the world I can tell you that +R will be played with passion and fervor as long as fighting games exist to be played.”  Image credit: Arc System Works Jay mentioned visiting hockey arenas in the Metro-Detroit area in his youth, so I wanted to dig a little deeper into what shaped him into the man he is today.  “Metro-Detroit is a large and somewhat-nebulously defined part of southeast Michigan, [and] I’ve seen official maps have it take up nearly 20% of the whole state. But I lived on the furthest ends of it and I don’t think a soul alive would look at my hometown of Howell and cleanly say it's ‘Metro-Detroit’. It’s like how people may as well call all of Illinois ‘Chicago’. I was born much closer to Detroit in an area called Dearborn, but pretty quickly my family moved to the sticks and I was living out of the rural woodland between Howell and Pinckney until I left for college. Outside of visiting my grandparents who lived in the Downriver area, a collection of small cities just south of actual factual Detroit, I rarely left my neck of the woods. Living in Howell is at least an hour away from Detroit on a good day, and with Michigan road construction there’s no such thing as ‘a good day’.” The 90s are a very interesting time when I think about Detroit as someone who isn’t from there, as much of my knowledge about it boils down to sports successes in a town full of economic anxiety. I wanted to know what it was like growing up during that time, in that place, and get some insight into the formative memories uniquely attached to it that he carries with him now. “I can’t say for sure, but I’m almost certain I watched the 1997 Detroit Red Wings and Colorado Avalanches brawl live on TV. There was very bad blood between the Wings and the Avs, stemming from their violent meeting in the 1996 conference finals and during a game in 1997 a fucking huge brawl broke out. This wasn’t just a fight, this was a riot on the ice. It’s hard to say for sure that I saw this one live, because another historic fight between the teams happened in 1998. It was a bloody, heated rivalry and there’s always a part of me that feels, at like a core, DNA level, that I hate the Colorado Avs. But as far as the city during that time, I was too removed from it. Detroit was always painted as this bomb-out of a city. A crime-ridden hellhole where you need to rolling-stop through every traffic light lest you get carjacked. Looking back on it, I can see how much of people’s view on Detroit was fueled by generations of either their own racism or the racism incurred by how media forces painted the city. I was told not to go there, not like I had much choice with how far away it was. It was only in the last decade that I started living close enough to visit Detroit and saw how wonderful of a city it is, with my career taking me there as my office and many sites I frequent being in Detroit proper.” Looking back on it, I can see how much of people’s view on Detroit was fueled by generations of either their own racism or the racism incurred by how media forces painted the city. A lot has changed since then, but Jay’s appreciation for video games and fighting games specifically has never wavered. Even now, after decades of playing and being intimately involved in the greater scene, he still loves what they bring to people’s lives. “TarZangief [ a fighting game player from Memphis ] posted this very recently and it sums it up nicely: ‘ The great thing about fighting games is seeing your progression in not just a single game but how it carries to other games. The fundamentals that carry you from game to game are a part of YOU not some hexadecimal code stored on a server. ’ Fighting games are living documents, they never end but not because the content pipeline always has more for you. It’s because you can always get better at them and the act of getting better at them is a skill that transfers to not only other fighting games, but other games and just life in general. People who are deep in the weeds with fighting games take their knowledge and apply it to real life. Risk/Reward study, mental stack control, choice optimization, fighting games teach you skills , you can feel your brain continue to grow, for more grooves to form. There never feels like a point where you have to stop playing them, where they have stopped offering you something, because even in a hypothetical world where you are the single best person at a game; then you need to defend the throne. The game itself is almost secondary to the skills, the adaptation, the community, and friendship that fighting games can supply.” Yet, in spite of this love, Jay has taken a step back from covering and commentating fighting games. Is a return to commentary possible, or have those days passed? “I have only moved on from commentary because I no longer travel to larger events. Commentary is where I really started to make a name for myself, I have broadcast radio experience from college and I was one of the first people in the Detroit scene to really bring a level of skill to the mic for fighting games. Because I was such an early starter in the era of taking fighting games to broadcast, I forget how long I’ve been doing it. There’s one of the people at my local who is about a decade younger than me and they told me ‘I watched you on commentary growing up’. Which checks out when I think about the years, but sure makes me feel reeeeeeal old.  But because I have mostly retired, insofar that I will no longer travel to big events for at least a good while, I’ve pretty much stepped away from the mic as well. If the chance shows itself, I’ll gladly commentate an online bracket, but without being in-person at these events I have to hang up the headphones.”  Stepping away from commentary may have been the end of an era for him, but fighting games aren’t the only things Jay likes to play. Instead of live commentary, Jay has shifted to video content on YouTube, where he covers the history of games and offers his thoughts on the games and the circumstances surrounding their creation and reception. But what was the impetus for this change?  “The emergence of Covid in 2020 really turned my life around. One of the reasons my name is held in such high regard within the fighting game community is my work organizing the Michigan Masters event series. You can ask anyone who attended them; these were some of the best events on the calendar. But Michigan Masters 2020 was scheduled for April and that is exactly the month the disease (Covid-19) tore through the world. Before the government shutdowns were implemented, my directors and I were losing our minds trying to find out what we were going to do. I was at one point staring down the prospect of being tens of thousands of dollars in debt because I would be stuck holding contracts for an event that didn’t happen. Thankfully, the work of the Michigan government and the charity of the community at large allowed myself and my co-workers to safely cancel the event and not burden ourselves with life-altering debt. We permanently shuttered the event series after that because not only did we not know when covid would end (I still don’t think it’s safe to run large offline events, personally) but the trauma of it all happening so we never wanted to revisit organizing again. But now there was a major hole in my life. Michigan Masters was more than just running an event to me; I did the branding, I cut the event trailers, I designed the merchandise, this was my creative output. I needed something to do that could continue to fuel my creative passions. And so, I took what I knew and pivoted to making YouTube videos.” YouTube videos come in all types. Let’s plays, tutorials, reviews — there are many ways one can discuss video games using the format. Jay wanted to try something else, however, so he pivoted to video essays. “This is something I decided early on and have stuck to ever since; I didn’t want to do reviews. Reviewing games felt rote to me, it didn’t have the spark I was looking for. I wanted to talk about  games outside of just how good or bad they are. I adopted this as “topic-based videos”, these needed to be videos about games, but held together by a thesis that wasn’t just the video game itself. You could get a review from many places, video or written, I wanted something that was a bit outside that in scope.  This dovetailed into a love for research. I was no stranger to trying to hunt through Japanese wikis for information on obscure fighting games, so the more that these videos [became] to be about the exterior of the game instead of the interior, the more I fell in love with research. After all, I’ve been around the block quite a number of times myself. I have a pretty good memory of most major gaming events within my life. But using that as a springboard and trying to find additional information and tie a video together with something greater than the game itself became the joy of creation. My video on Love Is All Around is a great example of this, on it’s face it looks like a review of the game (it’s one of the few videos I actually title a “review”), but to talk about the game requires you to talk about the state of the Chinese game industry, it requires talking about Chinese gender politics, it requires talking about the history of genre it is trying to fit into. There’s nothing wrong with discussing a game in isolation, but you learn so much more when building the story out and seeing all the influences and decisions that made the game what it is.”  So far, most of the titles he’s covered on your channel have been RPGs. Why choose to focus on titles like Final Fantasy or Radical Dreamers over, say, a fighting game title that he may already be associated with? “The quick answer is that I love RPGs and I think they have the most meat on the bone when it comes to discussion. I shy away from discussing fighting games because I find talking about them really messy and dramatic. Takes in the fighting game sphere quickly become discourse on ramps, the way those games function make them this weird living document where not only is it too easy to speak on something without all the information, but many times the information hasn’t even been discovered  yet. There’s also a tendency to skill check anyone talking about fighting games, like you must have won X amount of tournaments for your take to hold any water. RPGs, on the other hand, lack this combative atmosphere. They are not living documents in the same way, they feel more like historical artifacts. Yes, there’s always more to learn about them, we could always wake up to a new Yuji Horii interview that rocks our English-speaking world, but the games themselves feel complete. They offer interesting and nuanced discussion both in their mechanical play and their narrative focus. It is very easy for two people to like the same RPG for completely separate reasons or for them to split on the same game over a disagreement in how they see a singular aspect. I also just grew up in the golden age of RPGs, these games were such a big part of my life and they are pretty much a lock as my favorite genre after fighting games.” My video on Love Is All Around is a great example of this, on it’s face it looks like a review of the game (it’s one of the few videos I actually title a “review”), but to talk about the game requires you to talk about the state of the Chinese game industry, it requires talking about Chinese gender politics, it requires talking about the history of genre it is trying to fit into. With a deep and continuously evolving appreciation for RPGs, Jay has crafted numerous hous-long looks at some really great titles. Never shying away from his own passions, he paints detailed pictures of titles like The Final Fantasy Legend (known as   Makai Toushi Sa・Ga in japan) , rather than focusing solely on more popular RPG classics. But is that the long-term goal for the channel, or are there other avenues to explore? “When I started the Playing Every Final Fantasy, Kinda series it was just an excuse to get off my ass and play through all the mainline FFs. I had always wanted to, but I was being a bit of a bump on a log about starting with the old and dusty ones. This has since ballooned out of control, not only have I realized the “old and dusty ones” are some of the best, but I have increased the scope of the series multiple times over because the discussion of Final Fantasy hits so many additional points. The Chrono Trigger  and Radical Dreamers  episodes of a series that is ostensibly about Final Fantasy were the points I planned to reveal my trick. What started as just playing the numbered FFs is now an examination of Square and Square-Enix through the lens of their flagship series. Both the main PEFFK series and the Gaiden subseries are going to start featuring more and more non-FF games because to look at Final Fantasy and its growth through time, you have to look at everything that was going on around it. I have mapped out everything I want to do for Playing Every Final Fantasy, Kinda; it will take me approximately 16 years to finish. And that might be charitable, I could be well into my 50s by the time I see the finish line. It has become harder and harder to make these videos because they continue expanding in scope. Not even because I’m trying to inflate them, but just because the discussions needed are so large. It’s entirely possible I burn myself out before I ever finish the series, but I am more ambitious than you may think and having this sort of long-term goal over my head is something that fills me with more motivation than anxiety.” That is an impressively lofty goal, but one that makes sense when you consider the scope of covering even just the Final Fantasy   titles alone. With over 100 titles in the series, covering each and every one with this sort of care would take a lifetime and a half, let alone extending it to games outside of the series. But what about right now? What comes next for the “IdolismJ” channel? Well, Jay has one particular Final Fantasy title in his sights. “It’s the Final Fantasy 7  video. Everything is in service of the Final Fantasy 7 video. I’ve been working on the FF7 video on-and-off this entire year and I still have so much left to go. FF7 is in the argument for one of the most influential games of all time, especially if you look at it as something well past the era of true innovators ( Xevious , Tower of Druaga , etc.). I would not be shocked if this video eclipses 6 hours in length, that’s an egregiously long video, almost a masturbatory showcase of creation, but it’s a game that well and truly deserves every drop of ink spilled about it. My hope is that by the time it is all done you learn just as much about Final Fantasy 7  as you do everything surrounding it that isn’t Final Fantasy 7 . It will also be nice to have this video behind me because I doubt anything else in this series will ever require the effort this one will.” In speaking to Jay, his passion and love for games comes across so strongly. I truly appreciate all of the time he has given me to shine a light on the work he has done and will continue to do and I can't wait to see what comes next. That said, our ThanksGAMING event is all about shining a light on the people and things in our lives that we are grateful for, so I wanted to give Jay a chance to express his own appreciation for the people or things he loves.  “I recently put out a video  promoting a bunch of smaller creators I love, so check that out if you get a chance, but as far as what I’m thankful for; the researchers, translators, and archivists that make what I do possible. So much of gaming history has been logged by the hard work done by them. It’s one thing to tell people about what happened because I was there, it’s another to be able to pull together the artifacts of the time to show  what all went down. When you look at everything we’ve saved, you can see the world where none of this was here for us anymore and it’s a cold and bleak one. Thank you to everyone who helps in games preservation.”

School's out for summon. Demonschool is a breath of fresh air. I know how that sounds, all things considered. Your first look at it will likely conjure some fairly specific comparisons to games like Persona (2, especially)  or shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer . Those comparisons are lofty in the minds of many as both are beloved franchises that have stood the test of time, but Demonschool  comports itself in some key ways that allows it to distinguish itself from those 90’s paragons, while also coming out favorably. Publisher:   Ysbryd Games Developer:  Necrosoft Games Platform:  Played on PC Availability: Released November 19, 2025 on Windows PC (Steam), PS4/5, and Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch. First and foremost, I think Demonschool might be the most relaxing tactical RPG I’ve ever played. Perhaps not the most expected outcome for a horror-inspired tactical RPG, but everything just comes across as so free-flowing. There’s no guessing or hoping involved in plotting out your day. With no timers, you’re never feeling like you’re on the clock, or driven by a need for efficiency — you can simply do as much or as little as you want. Spending the days doing mini-games or character quests never limits what you can achieve. There are two distinct ways in which you spend the bulk of your time on Hemsk Island: exploring the town and combat. Exploration is mechanically simple, as each self-contained zone is chosen from a list-like menu, and is small in scope, taking no more than a few seconds to explore fully on any given day. These forays into the island are supported and enhanced by Demonschool ’s phenomenal soundtrack. It’s no surprise that it is full of electronic influences and heavy synth beats given Necrosoft’s track record, but I actually stopped in my tracks the first time I got the freedom to explore the town and the music kicked in. The zones are densely packed with a multitude of NPCs, each with their own personality. Over time, the locales and inhabitants shift, with different people in the zones at varying times of day, days of the week, or during specific story beats; new mini-games reveal themselves throughout the course of the game, as well, such as fishing and cooking games. This really helps the school and island feel a bit more alive. Rather than a static thing  for you to engage with, it’s a place . A place full of humor, and quirks, and even sorrow.  While the game and setting are mostly played for laughs with very few moments of sobriety in between the zany antics of your eclectic crew, I do find myself thinking about some specific interactions had with NPCs throughout the game — perhaps even more so than the story proper. One of the key elements of the story is that most normal people are losing their memory of the supernatural events they find themselves in. So while things go off the rails each and every night, the NPCs continue on as if nothing was amiss. Early on in the game I came across a man who expressed great joy at being a father of 6 children. Only four were standing next to him. Much of the dialogue straddles the line between explicit and absurd, and yet I felt a tinge of sadness immediately. Were they lost to demons and he simply forgot? Are the others at home? Is this man just stupid? As a father myself it hurt my heart. To lose something so important only to turn around and forget it is such a miserable fate that I almost cannot bear to think about it. As the game progressed, those numbers continued to dwindle. Moments like this are rare, but I think there’s a real humanity to the people that makes the ongoing events of the plot all the more tragic, in a way. So stylish. The combat makes up the other major facet of gameplay, and it has quickly endeared itself to me. Combat is a grid-based tactical slaughterhouse, where your positioning and planning will be the key to your success. Each of the characters, including your enemies, have their own characteristics, such as pushing back enemies when they attack, pulling people forward, or area effects. Broken down into “planning” and “action” phases, you’re goal is to use your abilities to plan your actions and position yourself and your enemies in a way in which you can eliminate a specific number of foes in the allotted number of turns, then seal the battlefield off by running to the end of the enemies’ zone.  Fights is quite simple, but the amount of freedom given to the player is deceptively deep. While each character only has two moves, normal attack and special, customization options allow the player to tailor their party to various needs and playstyles and can dramatically change the way each character interacts with enemies. For example, normally a healer can only heal teammates and can’t travel through enemies or attack, but there are abilities that allow them to pass through enemies, or even debuff foes by interacting with them. The way you line up enemies on the small battle grid does remind me a bit of a game like Radiant Historia , where shifting and stacking your enemies was essential to success. That level of planning is less essential here, as the fights are mostly a cakewalk, especially since you can make real-time corrections with the rewind feature. Much like the rest of the game, there’s no need to obsess with efficiency. As long as you come out of the fight alive, you get to move on. Despite my own predilections, knowing that I was not bound to such exacting performance was a relief in itself and a huge weight off my shoulders. Once the planning is done, you then move on to the action phase, which functions as a moving scene that displays the effects of your turn actions. This phase is incredibly satisfying to watch as characters dance and weave around the battlefield, leaving havoc in their wake. Combination attacks make glyphs appear to destroy your foes, demons explode into fountains of blood or pools of poison, and the sounds of your foes being mashed into dust fill the air. Once you’ve had your turn, the demons then act and try to kill you. It’s flashy, grotesque, and mesmerizing. Much like the rest of the game, there’s no need to obsess with efficiency. As long as you come out of the fight alive, you get to move on. It’s hard to talk about Demonschool without referencing the other other titles that have inspired it. The humor is reminiscent of Buff y the Vampire Slayer  in tone and it shares some setting similarities as well by taking place in a school. The more obvious and stronger comparison is Persona , matching the aesthetics of Persona 2  with an isometric view of the fields as you navigate the world. Even the calendar and town listings share similarities to other titles in the Persona series, such as Persona 3 Portable . The horror elements draw inspiration from or pay homage to films such as The Ring and The Cube , and so on. It's all very 90s by design, but rather than just living in those shadows, Demonschool embraces them and carves its own path.  Its visual style is full of bright, bold colors that make each room or scene pop. The character portraits are distinct and striking, utilizing thick lines and emotive posing to express each character’s distinct personality. It has a nearly surreal vibe to it, as if you were watching a neon dream of some half-remembered day long ago. Much of the visual style is jarring in a good way. Those aforementioned colors often clash, and the 2D models don’t always fit neatly onto the 3D backgrounds. But every bit of detail, down to the gridsquares of the battlefield, gives it a retrowave look and feel, overwhelming the senses with energy. Energy feels like an important word as it relates to Demonschool . With the game being so focused on its irreverent humor and style, it is easy to see how it might wear out its welcome, and veer into more juvenile or boring writing traps. I suspect for many it will feel that way. The main cast is one-note, the combat is not crunchy enough to satisfy more tactically-minded players, and the plot itself is a bit routine. Despite these pitfalls, I’ve come away with a strong appreciation for what Demonschool does. It's exciting, and stylish, and a hell of a lot of fun to play; it has great energy. Verdict Demonschool is stylish and irreverent. Grotesque foes are contrasted by the bright hues and neon stylings akin to a retrowave album cover, and the shifting electronic soundscape enhances the mood in any given scene. There are some minor pitfalls in terms of battle difficulty, but there’s enough depth and visual flair to keep things interesting. Demonschool is positively bursting with heart and energy. Image Credits: Necrosoft Games and Ysbryd Games Disclosure: We received a free review copy of this product from the publisher.

It’s a tale as old as video games themselves — your silent protagonist boots up alone in an unfamiliar room, with only an unseen speaker to guide you. This speaker, Hawking, spends these early moments guiding the player through the basics (such as movement, crouching, and puzzle-solving), but he also lets on a bit more. It is here that we get our first hints of meaning. That, at its core, Total Reload  is a game about solitude, loneliness, and working your way through it.  Publisher:  TORSHOCK Developer:  TORSHOCK Platform:  Played on PC Availability: Released on Nov 7, 2025 for PC (Steam) You learn right from the beginning that Hawking is alone. The universe is empty, save you and Hawking, but Hawking has a plan: restart the universe. The specifics of this plan and details of Hawking’s past aren’t elaborated on much in the early moments, instead being spread out across the entire game through murals as you progress. Often, Hawking will just tell you the relevant details, but in many cases you must formulate the question by looking at the appropriate images in a specific order to form a question for Hawking to answer. It’s not the most elegant solution to communication, as you’ll find yourself looking at the images accidentally quite often or forming a sentence in a way that the game hadn’t devised an answer for, but it mostly gets the job done.  To do that, we must contend with a series of puzzles in order to get everything back online for Hawking to complete his masterplan. These puzzles start off quite simple, featuring only wires you must connect to terminals and switches to change the direction of the power. Most often, the main objective of any given area is simply to guide all available power to a single terminal in an area, which then opens up pathways for you to continue forward. As the game progresses, the puzzles become more intricate, introducing new mechanics and objects that you must use to complete each task.  Most of these puzzles are curated in a way that allows for only one possible solution or pathway for advancement. You can't run fast enough or jump high enough to cheat your way onto a platform or unexpected area, so engaging with the puzzle exactly as intended is your only recourse (most of the time). Due to the limiting nature of your character’s movement, you are also forced to endure Total Reload ’s biggest flaw — moving platforms.  The speed at which platforms move in this game is genuinely a problem. It is excruciatingly slow, and they feature prominently in the gameplay and puzzle-solving. The first platform I ever set my feet upon was an omen. I turned it on, hopped atop the platform and then it started moving…without me. My character model simply shifted off to the side, falling to my death. Such a thing is unfortunate, but not experience-breaking as a one off, so I set the platform to return and waited. And waited some more.  Oh, that is very slow. The speed at which platforms move in this game is genuinely a problem. It is excruciatingly slow, and they feature prominently in the gameplay and puzzle-solving. Waiting for these platforms has constituted more than half of the 10 hour total runtime of the game. Any time you fall from a platform, or power up something before you are supposed to, or accidentally do a task out of order, you’ll have to find a way to send that platform back to you without messing up the flow of the puzzle. I think it’s easy to say that you should simply do the puzzle right the first time, to look around and make sure your next move is the correct one, but many of the interactions are difficult or impossible to know with certainty before pressing a button; how each system works inside each puzzle is bespoke, meaning you must first engage with it and explore before you can get the full picture. And so you must wait. Waiting in the large, mostly barren rooms in which Total Reload  takes place, I was forced to contend with something unexpected — loneliness. Not the loneliness of the characters in-game, but my own instead. I couldn’t help but feel alone, as there were no actions to take, and no people to speak to in-game. Even outside the game, it isn’t as if I could talk to friends about my frustrations. I was forced to contemplate my mistakes, and the challenges Total Reload  posed — intended or not. Perhaps in that way, the waiting is sometimes welcome, as it offers you a moment to breathe and collect yourself before moving on to the next solution. Environments are a bit drab, which seems reasonable for a robot's abode. To that end, the puzzles themselves are not particularly difficult and I think that’s fine. They force you to think about your actions, and plan your next steps. They keep things interesting enough to give you a few “ah-hah!” moments in between the plodding and waiting. And through all of that work and effort, there is no reward — at least not in a traditional sense. Solutions don’t generate coins or equipment, and there are no achievements or anything of that nature to trigger the Pavlovian responses we’ve become so accustomed to. The work is the reward.  I wonder if that's how Hawking felt. Those countless moments spent just plugging away at his work, hoping to see it through — was it worth the effort? I think so, at least in the right mindset. Total Reload  offers an almost comforting take on the puzzle-platformer. There are challenges, sure, but it is almost entirely a low-stakes walk in the park, with puzzles only tickling the brain rather than wringing it dry. Combined with the quiet hum of the platforms and clanking of boxes that fill an otherwise barren soundscape, it becomes almost mesmerizing after a time.  I do wish the platforms moved faster, though. Image Credits: TORSHOCK Disclosure: We received a free review copy of this product from the publisher.

Cozy games have exploded in popularity over the last few years, making it increasingly difficult for any single title to distinguish itself in this crowded genre. Pine Creek Games rises to this challenge with Winter Burrow , a woodland survival game that manages to feel both comfortingly familiar and refreshingly unique. This single-player indie experience casts you as a young mouse returning to your childhood home deep in the forest; a place you and your loved ones affectionately call "The Burrow." Publisher: Noodlecake Studios Developer:   Pine Creek Games Platform:  Played on Nintendo Switch Availability:  Released on November 12, 2025 for PC (Steam & MS Store), Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and Xbox One The story begins with you, the young mouse, reminiscing about The Burrow and the lovely memories you have from your childhood. You remember quality time with your mother and father, captivating stories shared by your Auntie Betulina, and the simple joys of woodland life. Your family leaves the Burrow for a life in the City, where both of your parents succumb to the relentless demands of modern life, working themselves to death. Refusing to follow that same path, you head back to The Burrow, where you hope to find your Auntie Betulina and bring life to the Burrow once more.  As the gameplay begins, the screen finishes loading to display a lovely hand-drawn environment. Visually, the game is stunning. Each section of the map is dripping with love and care, from the paths made of fallen leaves peeking over the snow to the small patches of clover that line your pathways. As time passes, the lighting changes and each detail is so intricately laid out that it’s hard not to appreciate it.  The musical score suits the hand-drawn theme very well, a perfect balance of peace during moments of exploration and fast-paced drumming to signify moments of danger. Though reminiscent of the music found in Ori and The Will of the Wisps , I feel the music is distinct enough that it can stand on its own two feet while also helping to build the world of Winter Burrow . I haven't finished Winter Burrow  yet, but I have every intention of finishing the game. Despite being labeled a “cozy game”, I’ve had a difficult time navigating the large world because there is no built-in map. Though, in a way, it works out in the game’s favor, as I’ve had to really pay attention to the details of each section of the forest just to remember how to find my way home. If you’re anything like me, a player who would prefer a map, this game may be difficult for you too. But I promise, it does feel worth it. Winter Burrow is so inviting, it can be easy to forget just how gorgeous it is. Winter Burrow  feels like it’s designed towards the type of player that likes crafting and gathering. With many different items to decorate the Burrow with (such as beds and tables), your only limit is your own creativity. As far as gathering goes, it can be difficult to tell what items in the forest can be gathered or not, because even the gatherable items are drawn with the same level of care as the rest of the environment.  There are hints of what can be described as ‘farming’ if you squint. You are given the opportunity to grow mushrooms in the Burrow’s basement, though I haven’t quite figured that part out yet.  There are quests and a story line you can follow, woodland creatures you meet and help but to refrain from spoiling the gameplay, I have omitted them from this review. I will admit that I’ve had some trouble with the quests. There aren’t many hints to go off of, and if there are, they’re a bit too subtle for me to catch. Despite that, I’m enjoying just being a young mouse learning how to survive in the woods. I don’t feel pressure to complete quests in a certain time frame; I’m perfectly content passing time by just harvesting mushrooms to make mushroom stew. Image Credits: Noodlecake Studios and Pine Creek Games Disclosure: We received a free review copy of this product.

As part of our ThanksGAMING event for the end of the year, I want to take time to elevate and appreciate the people in gaming I admire or that inspire me – whether they are content creators, journalists, or developers. When I began brainstorming ideas on the best candidates, MarcoMeatball was the first person I thought of and reached out to. Marco is a YouTuber who wears many different hats but is most well-known for his video game music react videos. I first found his channel (which you can find on YouTube under the handle @MarcoMeatball ) about two years ago. I was browsing YouTube and came across his reactions to “Bury the Light” from Devil May Cry 5 and “To Zanarkand” from Final Fantasy X. I was hooked and I’ve been a subscriber ever since. Marco recently gave me the opportunity to chat a little bit with him so we can all learn more about him, his channel, and what his future plans are. Marco's video, "Opera Singer Reacts: Bury the Light from Devil May Cry 5," was where I found him first. I first asked Marco to tell me a little bit about himself. Q: Who is MarcoMeatball? A: I am a person. Just kidding! I’m someone who loves video game music, my dog, and my fiancée. I’m also someone who left behind a career I studied for over ten years because I realized it was slowly killing me and making my life worse. Q: How did you get into opera/music? When did you first realize you had a passion for it? A: I was resistant to opera for a long time. In fact, I didn’t really like it until I forced myself to sit in a room and listen to it repeatedly. One day, it finally clicked. I realized there was so much potential for expression, purpose, and power in operatic singing. Originally, I went to college for musical theater because I wanted to sing on Broadway. But over time, I discovered how much I loved opera and the stories it allowed me to tell. As for music in general, I got into it because I didn’t have much purpose growing up. My mom forced me to attend a musical theater camp, and there I discovered a love for self-expression, public speaking, and connecting with others through acting and music. I’ve been acting since I was 13 and in the 10th grade, but my love for music has been with me since I was a child. Q: Why did you transition to YouTube music content creation? A: It was an accident. My dad had just passed away, and I was looking for an outlet. Initially, I filmed videos like “deciding whether or not I’d like an anime based on its opening themes,” but I got worried about copyright. Then I tried making Final Fantasy XIV content exclusively, but that didn’t last long. Eventually, I realized there was space for me in the music content creation sphere, particularly sharing my experiences as an opera singer. It seemed like a natural fit. I was lucky—my first video took off about two weeks after I posted it, thanks to the algorithm (or something!). After that, I doubled down. I was mourning my father, doing auditions, and recording voiceover work in my booth anyway. Making videos became an additional outlet for my time, and it’s been a defining part of my life since then.   Q: You always seem to have a very positive disposition online—not just in your videos, but on social media as well. Is that a conscious decision or just who you are as a person? A: It’s a conscious decision. I’ve noticed many people don’t value honest, plain, and gentle communication. We live in a society that often tries to tear us down—it’s easy to destroy but difficult to build. The Internet can be aggressively vile at times, but I believe in kindness. I think people who gravitate toward my content often have soft souls in a world that pressures them to be hard and brutal. That said, my tolerance for rudeness has gone down over time. I wouldn’t quit YouTube over personal issues, but the Internet’s lack of civility and tolerance for disrespect could someday push me to hang up my hat.   Q: Your community seems to share that positive disposition. Why do you think that is? A: Like-minded people tend to find each other. I try to foster an environment of mutual joy and gratitude. Joy for video game music, joy for the games I’ve loved since I was seven, joy because life is short, and music is beautiful. If someone doesn’t share that positivity—if they’re rude or disrespectful—I usually hide them from the channel. That’s just how I run things.   Q: In your mind, what is it about music that brings people together? A: Music conveys feelings, emotion, and power. It unites us around common life experiences, no matter how different we are. That connection makes us feel less alone, and it’s something uniquely beautiful about music. Q: You recently started a YouTube channel dedicated specifically to anime music. What was the impetus behind that? A: I love learning, and anime music is a corner of the music world I know very little about. My goal is to approach it with fresh eyes and curiosity. On my main channel, I have a series called Non-Gamers React to Video Game Music, which I love because it lets me share something I’m passionate about. This anime music channel flips that dynamic—I get to learn from others who are passionate about something I’m new to. I’m pacing myself to avoid burnout. I’ve slowed down production and have content planned through January 2025, so I’m confident I can manage both channels.   Q: Do you feel like your main channel audience and anime audience are separate, or is there some crossover? A: There’s quite a bit of crossover—more than I expected. Some diehard video game fans aren’t into anime, and I was one of those people for a long time. But now that I’ve started reading manga, my world has been blown wide open.   Q: What’s next for Marco the man and MarcoMeatball the creator? A: For Marco the man: be healthy. I want to lose 40 pounds and enter my 40s in the best health of my life. My 30s flew by, and the pandemic didn’t help. I’ve also had to pull back from workaholic tendencies because they can be damaging if unchecked. For MarcoMeatball: ride the wave. I’ve been exploring broader, thematic videos that celebrate video game music rather than focusing solely on hyper-specific analysis. Celebrating video game music is my goal, and I hope to do it for as long as I live. Who knows what the future holds, but I’m enjoying the ride.   Q: And finally, are there any people or things you want to shout out or give thanks for? A: I’m endlessly grateful for my mods, my fiancée, my editor Nathan, and my thumbnail designer Raul. Special thanks to folks like Jesse’s Auditorium, Alex Moukala, Davi, and Tony for their support. And finally, my dog Luna. She’s been a bright spot in my life every single day since I brought her home at nine weeks old. I named her Luna because, at the time, all I had around me was darkness, and she became my moonlight. She’s one of the best things to ever happen to me. Marco doesn't always analyze the music himself - sometimes he brings in others.   Although I only had the opportunity to ask Marco 10 questions, I feel honored that I had the chance to learn more about him. I was struck by his kindness and generosity. It seems to me that the man behind the camera is just as warm as the persona we see on screen. As someone who is not very familiar with the Music world, I’ve always found Marco’s videos to be illuminating. You can learn so much by watching his conversations with others in the Music space or his reactions to your favorite video game music. Marco never fails to teach me things I didn’t know and I walk away with a deeper understanding and appreciation for the music. I look forward to seeing what Marco does next. I am thankful that Marco has been able to curate the community that he is proud of, as it is a community I am proud to be a part of. On behalf of all 350,000 subscribers, thank you, Marco.