“Trust no one.”
It’s a phrase that’s often uttered, but no game has really delivered on the promise that lies within it. After all, you may find a traitor in your midst in a game, but it’s usually an isolated incident and always something you can know ahead of time with a little research. Lost Dimension‘s very premise takes on the challenge: anyone around you could turn on you at any moment. In fact, the game’s main adversary, a fellow appropriately named The End, comes across as the most trustworthy of them all: you can trust that he’s up to no good and messing with you at every turn.
Or can you? This is a game that revels in challenging your assumptions, and pays off just often enough to keep your suspicions high. READ MORE
With six games on the PS3, Atelier has become one of the most prolific JRPG series on the platform. Atelier Shallie: Alchemists of the Dusk Sea, the end of the Dusk trilogy and likely the last PS3 Atelier release, continues to refine the franchise’s mechanics, focusing on removing constraints to the systems and controls. READ MORE
Like clockwork, NIS America releases niche titles that, for the most part, will go under the radar, but manage to catch the eye of a few. A year after the success of The Guided Fate Paradox, a sequel makes its way onto North American PS3s. The roguelike formula seems to be working well, and with Haruhi Suzumiya artist Noizi Ito once again at the helm of creating characters once again, The Awakened Fate Ultimatum hopes to keep players hooked. READ MORE
Helldivers does not like you. Every time Arrowhead could have chosen to help you out they chose instead to hamper, and Helldivers is better for it. Buried beneath a Starship Troopers (movie, not book) veneer is a challenging and interesting twin-stick shooter. It is the job of the titular Helldivers to spread managed democracy to the bugs, the cyborgs and the illuminant. Super Earth is at war with all three races, and when they are all vanquished the war simply starts over, but if the bugs are defeated when you play for the first time then you’ll be fighting cyborgs and illuminant. READ MORE
Developers rarely attempt to focus on our teenage years in games, but when it does happen, it goes surprisingly well. I’m thinking of Gone Home or even the Persona series, which isn’t entirely about high school students yet the drama of that time in their lives is ever-present. Dontnod, the team behind 2013’s Remember Me, attempts something similar with Life is Strange, an episodic drama focused on an 18-year-old and her time in private school.
The first episode, Chrysalis, introduces us to a diverse cast of characters and a plot that seems to be heading in some interesting directions, complete with a science fiction twist that ties it all together.
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