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Why the Song of Healing is the saddest song in all of Zelda

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask is a game that has stuck with me for a long time. I've never entirely known why. When I imagine playing Majora's Mask, I don't sense the buttons of the controller beneath my fingers or picture the light moving across the screen. I'm enveloped in an atmosphere - a feeling of some kind. As is the case with the game's predecessor, Ocarina of Time, I think this is partially due to the game's wonderful sound design. Majora's Mask picks up the story of Link after th

Game Grooves: Dissociating to the Silent Hill Vinyl

Music is an incredibly important part of the way we see games. It can add levity to a tense situation or creativity to a normal one. It has the power to engross you or the ability to gross you out. A gaming soundtrack is more dynamic and grounding than a soundtrack in any other medium, and that sense of now is what makes them just so charming, especially when it’s something as harsh and challenging as the Silent Hill vinyl.

Little Nightmares: A Postmortem Analysis

Grief, loss, pain. These are all such funny things. Outside of the small vacuum they persist, they make no sense. Random actions, violence, even more pain. What point do they have? If we look outside the inexorable pull of that vacuum, we can piece it together. We can see a little nugget of humanity festering at the heart of bad actions. Little Nightmares knows this more than most games I've ever played and I'm not even sure it’s intentional.

Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope review - All you need is a spark

When a game takes you by surprise, it becomes hard to really understand how good it is. This is why I can't help but look fondly at Mario and Rabbids Kingdom Battle. Now committing to the formula, Mario and Rabbids Sparks of Hope manages to do what few games can - follow up a surprise hit with a sequel that is just as competent. Relying on many of the factors that made the first game stand out, it builds on it in meaningful ways delivering an experience that is reminiscent of the first game yet

We Played ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ On PlayStation 4 Again, And It’s Still A Mess

Cyberpunk 2077, where can we possibly start with you? Your neon-lit city and half-baked promises have left the world enthralled over the last half a year - but not exactly for the right reasons. Now that CD Projekt Red's game has finally relaunched on PlayStation, having been delisted just days after its December 2020 release, it's time to find out if it's worth returning to - or playing for the first time on Sony's hardware.

Best music production apps for Macs in 2022

Being great at guitar or an improvisation king on the piano is only one facet of making good music. In the modern age, being technically great isn’t required if you’re creative enough. How you put together your music is just as important as being able to make it in the first place. The DAW, or digital audio workstation, is what you need to look at if you’re interested in production. This will allow you to record yourself, and it will actively change the way you make music.

Biomutant Review | Raining Cats and Bugs

Biomutant is a game that’s hard to review. I’m going to do my best to fully take in and express the experience I got out of it but this is one of those games I could see being incredibly polarising. There are too many issues and poor design decisions for me to call it a great game but there’s just too much heart to not recommend. This is not a game I can guarantee you’ll like but it is certainly something you should play.

Little Nightmares 2 Review | An Enchanting Fever Dream

I sit here – moments after finishing Little Nightmares 2 – and there’s a pit in my stomach. That feeling you get when a game finishes but you aren’t quite finished with it. Its treacherous world, enchanting visuals and truly captivating story held me in its grasp, unable to move. This Nightmare was scary, occasionally quite complex and will stay with me for a long time. I don’t plan on waking up anytime soon.

Vokabulantis and the Language Barrier: How It Broke Through

It's hard to understate just how important language is. It's used to express love, confusion, anger, and sometimes even used to prove a point. Imagine how hard this sentence would be to read fi ti saw sdrawkcab? Vokabulantis, the new co-op game from Morten Søndergaard, Kong Orange, and Wired Fly, attempts to add a stop-motion style to a moving story about language and, if its Kickstarter is anything to go by, they’ve started on the right animated foot.

Terminator: Resistance Annihilation Line Review

There’s an enigmatic charm to Terminator: Resistance that has left me very unsure as to what I even think about it. On one hand, it’s a bland shooter with copy-paste RPG mechanics and one too many repeated environments. On the other, it’s a fun little shooter with a world that feels oppressive enough to actually work in-universe. I was hoping that maybe Terminator: Resistance Annihilation Line would make up my mind for me - it didn’t.

Alba: A Wildlife Adventure review

I’m not entirely sure if it’s intentional but “Alba: A Wildlife Adventure” and “Alba: A Wild Life Adventure” feel equally applicable to this title. It’s cute, comforting, yet also quite sad in a way. Feeling thematically similar to the likes of Beyond Blue and Abzu, it deals with topics like the destruction of wildlife and touches briefly on the systems that cause it. Despite this, it always has a sense of humanity at its core.

Best roguelikes to keep you saying "just one more round"

Taking its name from 1980 classic Rogue, the term roguelike is a little contentious. Categorized through things such as procedurally-generated levels, elements of permadeath and more, it can be hard to distinguish a roguelike from a game with roguelike elements. A roguelike will traditionally feature grid-based dungeons, permadeath and each run will be totally unique where rogue-lites will generally punish death but have a degree of incremental progress.
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