Zoe E. Whitten

Gaming in 2024 became a bit more vexing for me this year. As I’m mentioned several times before, my PS4 died, and my PC is now so old that it can’t keep up with newer games. So stuff like Elden Ring, Enotria, Lies of P, Star Wars Jedi Survivor, and Marvel’s Midnight Suns all gave me a big nope when I tried booting them up.

Now don’t worry, I’m planning to get a new gaming PC in 2025. Whether I get a PS5 is still up in the air, and depends a lot on me getting some new books out. But that’s a me problem, not a y’all problem.

Despite the hardware setbacks, I was still able to find these gems, which I am quite happy to share with y’all. Continue reading

I am absolutely delighted to be contrasting this review to my last one for a number of reasons, because in most of the ways River City Girls failed, Neon Abyss manages to make playing it not only tolerable, but enjoyable. Granted, they are not similar games, with one being a fighting game and the other being a side scrolling rogue-lite. But what I mean is that Neon Abyss sets out to build a game that I’d want to keep revisiting over and over, and they passed that test with ease.

Neon Abyss opens with Hades asking the player to defeat the new titans, who have stolen some of Hades’ powers and taken over the human world through corporations. So the player picks a mercenary to enter the titular neon abyss to slog though a set of dungeon and boss fights, leading to a showdown with one of the titans.

Each defeated titan unlocks another target to hunt down, and defeating the regular bosses also unlocks alternate forms of the fight. For example, defeating Tok, the god of social media, unlocks Tik, and beating Sung, the god of Screens grants access to later fights with Sam. Continue reading

Time is a funny thing. The way you experience it can feel vastly different depending on whether you are enjoying what you do, or whether you were being tortured. For example, I played just a hair under fifty hours of Shakedown Hawaii and loved almost every minute of it. Then I played twenty-two hours of River City Girls, and it felt like it would never end.

Unlike Shakedown Hawaii, an homage to GTA games, River City Girls is an actual entry in a very long-running franchise, Japan’s Kunio series. The intellectual properties were bought by ARC systems, who then went on to make this and many more games. I can’t talk about the quality of the others, but I can say this was quite a painful experience, both physically and mentally. Beating the game somehow made all of my efforts even worse, like deciding to pick my nose after scratching my sweaty butthole.

Oh, and I need to warn you, there will be massive story spoilers this time, because I cannot explain my pain without exposing that god awful ending. So if you want to avoid spoilers, skip this review, okay? Continue reading

Bro. Bruh! This game…if I were inclined to review games based only on the first day of play-time, Brotato would have not only been a 5 star winner, it would have been on my games of the year list. A lot of this comes down to its similarities to Vampire Survivors, but also to sharing some features of The Binding of Isaac.

Let’s get the story out of the way first. You play a potato who is killing waves of purple aliens. Yep, that’s it. If I make that sound bad, it’s really not. Sometimes it’s good to play a game where the whole premise can be summed up in a sentence, and all the real intricacies comes from learning to master its core mechanics.

In this case, the core mechanic is simplicity defined. You don’t have to push any buttons to attack, because that’s done automatically. All you have to do is learn to move, either to dodge attacks or move in just close enough to deal some damage of your own. Continue reading

You know, I’m starting to wonder a lot about myself. Last year, I loved playing a serial killer in Party Hard, and now here I am mostly loving Shakedown: Hawaii, a game about an evil CEO learning to embrace his inner mobster. If not for the end game, this might have even been a 5 star review because I loved being evil, which makes me wonder: dudes, what the hell is wrong with me?

But let’s start with the plot. The CEO of Feeble Industries is watching TV when he sees a report that his empire is failing. His CFO Ron explains that streaming is killing his video stores, online shopping is killing his retail empire, and most of his other enterprises are falling behind as new technologies supplant the things he’d invested in. So this CEO decides to get “aggressive” to return to prominence.

I think the best part of this story is how many times the CEO discovers how modern business models are forcing him to pay more for bullshit like convenience fees or HD streaming, and he’s mad, but not because they’re fleecing him. No, he’s mad because, as he says, “Why aren’t we doing this kind of con already?” Continue reading

I think that as a lot of us gamers get older, we tend to forget that games are meant for the young. We romanticize the challenges of our first games while downplaying all the games we played that were more accessible. Yes, Ninja Gaiden, Contra, and Ghouls N’ Ghosts gave me many sleepless nights trying to finally beat them. But there were many other sleepless nights because I’d gained so many free lives in Pac-Man that I couldn’t lose, or spent late nights with Super Mario Brothers, Bionic Commando, and Castlevania, games that I had beaten many times, but I just wanted to do it one more time.

In that particular mindset is where I want to talk about The Spirit and the Mouse. Its story is simple and straightforward, the controls easy to understand, and the challenges within are easily surmountable with only a few harder challenges here and there. It’s a game meant to welcome the new kids, yes, but it’s also ready to offer some nostalgia to the older gamer not married to their hardcore pride. Perhaps best of all, it’s short, done and dusted in a few sessions. It stays around just long enough to be fun, and never overstays its welcome.

The story is introduced in a few minutes. A mouse living in a small village in France decides it wants to help people be happier. It sees a woman lose her favorite scarf and gives chase to retrieve it. Instead, it climbs the highest metal pole in the village right as a freak lightning storm delivers a guardian spirit. The mouse receives the spirit’s power and is tasked with making people happy, so it would seem that fate has smiled on the little furry dude. Continue reading

I know, I know. “Again? Aren’t you tired of this game already?” Well, as long as Poncle keeps putting out both free and paid DLC, probably not. Additionally, while I was on the PC grinding through the last free update, Space 54, and the latest paid DLC, the Contra homage titled Operation Guns, I was also digging in to complete all of the base game content on the phone version of the game.

So, here we go again. First, tucked in Space 54 is a new weapon that looks dinky for the first few levels, Phas3r, but both at level eight and evolved to Photon Storm, this thing can clear the screen of all enemies. It can do this even on a single weapon challenge run with the adorable new character Space Dude. But if you add his gun to any other character, it’s an instant win. One the right build, it can even kill the grim reaper at the end of a run. Yes, it really is that powerful.

Then there’s Bat Robbert, whose weapon is bats. They fly in at angles, and at low levels they can be quite frustrating by not going where I need them. If Bat is hit by an enemy, another stream of bats will go to that enemy’s location. (Which again, at early levels isn’t great because by then, said enemy is elsewhere.) Bat’s big deal is that at regular intervals, getting him to critical health will give him an increase in max health. You have to get back to full health and level up before doing it again, but when pairing this with Hollow Heart and Metaglio Left, Bat can eventually get so much health that he can tank hits from the grim reaper and kill that dude. Plus, once his weapon, Pako Batiliar, evolves to its final form, Bat can walk through mobs of high-level enemies like I do through a warm spring rain. It’s good stuff. Continue reading

Back in the far distant past, which is to say last year, I got sucked into the browser version of Suika Game. Despite being very simple to play, I could play it all day even as the wonky physics drove me bonkers.

Well now there’s a game called POOOOL, and it’s like Suika Game, but with balls on a pool table instead of fruit in a jar. Hitting two white ball together makes a red ball, hitting two red balls together makes an orange ball, and so on until you connect two giant purple balls to clear them from the table. Simple, right?

No, not quite. Every ball entering the table is on the same spot, so unlike Suika Game, you can’t aim for a better shot elsewhere. Using a mouse to first click on the table and hold it while pulling the mouse in any direction determines the angle and power of the shot. So there’s a bit more to consider than just dropping fruit in a jar. Continue reading