Woodlance

You. Yes you. Are you dreaming of blasting off and striking at the heart of the evil alien empire, but your aging reflexes cannot keep up with the high-octane action? Are you not 1CCing Ikaruga like you used to? Then we have the alternative for you: R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos! Yeah, sorry about the name. We don’t know how that period got stuck up there either. Anyway, you can now enjoy the shmups of yesteryear in turn-based format. All of the space action, none of the excitement!

But first, a history lesson.

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When developers IO Interactive obtained the rights to make a James Bond game, it’s like a tiny cog in the machine of the universe fell into place. IO Interactive’s flagship product is the Hitman series and the titular hitman, Agent 47, is basically James Bond without the sex drive. He’s a snappy dresser that attends cocktail parties and infiltrates military bases. He meets all sorts of interesting people… and then kills them. However, Hitman fell into a bit of a rut. On the other hand, the James Bond franchise has multiple games under its belt, but those were mostly straight-up shooters. Apparently, the Broccoli family, the historical owners of the James Bond IP, were wary of allowing violent games to be made with the licence. That’s weird, but I get the point. Bond is not just a guy that shoots people. Where’s the spycraft? The gadgets? The suave party chatter? All of this happens to be IO Interactive’s strong suit.

IO Interactive and James Bond are a match made in heaven. So how did they do? I’m a bit anxious… Okay, deep breath, let’s do this.

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It is a well-known fact that critics are like sea monsters. They latch their miserable appendages upon the ships of passing artists, leeching sustenance by taking down other people’s hard work. If the artist’s ship is sound, if their creation has no visible flaws, it is that much harder for the wretched critic to latch onto.

Look, what I’m getting at: it’s harder to write a review for a good game than a bad one. Where are the clever put-downs going to come from? The witty repartee? The first Hades has become the new gold standard for action roguelikes. It’s probably not going to surprise anyone that Hades II is also good. Very good.

What’s a sea monster to do? It’s a conundrum.

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It’s wonderful stuff, snow. Very multi-faceted.  Did you know that the Inuit have a hundred words for snow? Oops, that’s an urban legend. Oh wait, it is true, sort of. Anyway, leaving linguistics aside, snow can be many things. It can come down in great globs of Christmas magic. It can be hard as rock, strong enough to make an igloo. It can be heavy and full of water, perfect for making a snowman, or fine like sand, stinging your eyes as it is carried by the wind. It can even be soft underneath with a thin crunchy layer on top, like a crème brulée for your feet.

Snow deserves a video game worthy of its majesty. It’s so often treated as a mere change of scenery to be sandwiched between the lava world and the tropical world. Canadians eat snow for breakfast, they’ll know what to do.

Enter The Long Dark, a game about surviving winter in the Great North after “The Quiet Apocalypse”, a geomagnetic event that has made modern technology inoperative.

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Tom reviewed Resident Evil Requiem and gave it a measly one star. But can you really trust Tom? That young firebrand accused Resident Evil 7 of “transpacific awkwardness”. I’m still not quite sure what it means, but I assume some people at Capcom were devastated.

Accordingly, I have been mandated by the Qt3 Department of Fairness to give the game a second opinion. First of all, you should know that I am a true fan of the series. I even have the figurines (don’t ask). I had an official fan club number too, but it turns out the whole thing is a way to nag you into giving the games free promotion on social media, so screw that. If you’re wondering about my journalistic integrity, well, the joke’s on you, I’m not a journalist and I have no integrity.

So what does a true fan think of Resident Evil Requiem?

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You know what’s my favorite level? Sea level. Still, I can understand the allure of mountain climbing. It’s the feeling of being literally and figuratively on top of the world. A selfie on top of a mountain is that one photo everyone has on social media.

That being said, there are not that many mountaineering games and even fewer games about rock climbing. Most games about climbing are drab or intentionally goofy and sadistic, in the vein of Getting Over It and Baby Steps. When I heard that The Game Bakers (Furi, Haven) were making Cairn, a climbing game, I knew they would add just the right amount of pizzazz to the concept.

Confession time: when I tried the demo a few months ago, I absolutely hated it. 

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The fact that Pathologic 3 even exists is a small, maggot-infested miracle. For one, there are not many games about curing a plague in a tiny town in the middle of the steppe, a town overflowing with butchers and philosophers where magic realism meets absurdist theatre. The more complicated reason requires a bit of an explanation. Sorry about that. If you can’t stomach a dry intro, you probably won’t like this obtuse game about a plague. Call it a test. Triage.

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You are in a dingy cell with a toilet, an ATM and a slot machine. Win enough money to pay an ever-increasing debt or the floor literally drops under you. Maybe you’ll earn the key to escape, maybe not. It sounds like the pitch for Saw XIV, but this is CloverPit, one of the bigger roguelike hits of 2025.

CloverPit is pure distilled “roguelikiness”. All the excitement of choosing perks, levelling up and creating a build, only to lose everything and start over again… all without having to deal with anything as pesky as a main gameplay loop. This is the game’s biggest strength and its biggest flaw.

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I’d like to preface this by saying that my skating expertise is sorely lacking. I don’t really know my Ollie from my Nose Grab and I’ve barely played a skating game since Tony Hawk on the original Playstation. That being said, Skate Story is just too tantalizingly weird to be left solely to the skate park kids.

In Skate Story, you’re a demon made of glass and pain that has to eat the moon in order to catch a break from the devil. Cool, cool. I can dig it. We can all relate, am I right? That being said, does Skate Story pull off the trick of being more than trippy visuals and a cool soundtrack? Or does it fall flat on its face?

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