I'm not too familiar with the point-and-click genre, so I wasn't sure what to expect when I recieved a review code for My Brother Rabbit. From what I do know, having played through the excellent Tormentum: Dark Sorrow and about an hour or so of Double Fine's Broken Age, I doubt My Brother Rabbit is breaking new ground, but it has some cool features. Find out why I think the positives and negatives of My Brother Rabbit result in an average game by watching the included video review or read the text review, if you'd prefer. 

Car Quest is one of those weird experiences that isn’t particularly fun or engaging, but can tap into your OCD tendencies and keep you playing even when you’d rather not. Its design is rather mundane - you drive around a world collecting an artifact at a time, which opens up a new area of the map where you’ll collect a new artifact, which will in turn open a new area of that map where you’ll collect… well, you get the point. This cycle is only broken on occasion where you’ll gain access to a portal that requires a certain number of batteries to get into. In the portal you’ll do more of what you do in the main world, just on a smaller scale, until you earn an artifact to use back in the main world, where the cycle continues.

I’ve had some trouble sticking with Flipping Death. In between playing other games for review I slowly chipped away at it, making small progress over a pretty extended period of time. On the surface, I really love what it’s going for. This platforming-adventure has a great sense of humor, memorable characters, and a really neat and unique art style that absolutely leaves an impression. While all of the accoutrement is fantastic, solving puzzles and accomplishing tasks feels pretty consistently obtuse and rarely satisfying when you finally figure it all out.

When I reviewed Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, I elected to tell a personal story of my journey through the game in lieu of a traditional review, since it best represented the strengths of that title. As I was playing through its sequel, Middle Earth: Shadow of War, I wanted to do the same thing. Unfortunately, there are enough complexities with this release that story time will have to wait for another feature. Shadow of War is simultaneously the most fun I’ve had all year and one of my disappointments for 2017.

Valiant Hearts is about one of the more horrendous moments in 20th century history, a moment seldom portrayed in movies, TV, games, or other media -- probably because it is not pleasant to relive.  While World War II can be fun, despite its carnage, in pretending to do battle against a true, villainous evil – the first World War lacks such black and white delineations, and for lack of a better word, was simply insane. 

PolyPusher Studios, the Irish developer behind Montague’s Mount, describes its latest project as a “psychological rollercoaster ride through isolation, desolation, and one man’s tortured mind.” Its perception of the game it created doesn’t quite align with the game it actually released, where the rollercoaster is more like rush hour traffic, and the only tortured mind is my own. Montague's Mount is a first-person adventure/puzzle game about a man who awakens on the beach of a deserted fishing island, unable to remember who he is or why he’s there. Promising although the concept sounds, concept only goes so far without the execution to back it up.

There’s a special place in hell for JRPG fans.  Their sin?  Playing the same game with the same story over and over without complaining once.  I suppose there are worse crimes than this, but there is a sort of masochistic glee in which JRPG fans partake in their vice.  Perhaps we love grinding and crafting so much that we don’t really care about the story too much – despite our claims that we play these games for the tales they tell.  Perhaps it’s the newness of the dungeons or the shiny equipment that makes the tedium of saving the world over and over remain novel.  But, despite these tropes, this genre seems to continue on, and sometimes even with some of the most loathed archetypes and clichés, JRPGs can rise to heights other genres can’t. 

Say what you want about Kickstarter, but it has breathed games into existence that otherwise wouldn’t have had a chance, and allowed artists to construct personal expressions without having to resort to eating dog food to survive.  The end results may not always be extraordinary, but sometimes they are still triumphant, as with Lilly Looking Through, a Kickstarter success that asked for $18,000 and ended up with $33,000+ for a point-and-click adventure starring a little girl with time-traveling goggles.  The game is beautiful, but brief, with amazing art direction and sublime animation.

Is it possible to simultaneously love and hate a game? The Starship Damrey certainly makes a compelling case for such a sentiment. On one hand, it borrows many of the less desirable traits of classic PC adventure games, but on the other, it neatly melds an excellent sense of atmosphere and humor to keep you consistently interested. Despite the combination of a complete lack of cerebral puzzles and clunky controls, there’s something intrinsically alluring about this unabashedly short game.

It’s been a little over a year since Kickstarter kicked down the door of the video game industry and introduced itself.  Double Fine’s then untitled adventure game utilized the crowd funding site to finance a game in a genre that most have presumed dead, or at least mostly dead (which means a little alive), for quite some time now.  No reasonable publisher would hand money over to a studio not known to be especially financially successful, for an unproven IP in a genre that some younger gamers may not even know exists – and it’s hard to blame them.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who spent countless hours in the elementary school library reading each and every Choose Your Own Adventure book available, exploring each and every deviating path the story offered. Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward is not unlike these books of our youth; however, it offers an added puzzle-solving experience that differentiates it from its paperback brethren. If you’ve any love for these types of experiences, there’s no question that Virtue’s Last Reward will have you on its hook for well over 30 hours.

With the release of a “mystery” screenshot the other day, Sega essentially let the cat out of the bag and practically told the world that they would be publishing Ron Gilbert’s pet project being developed at Double Fine.  Today Sega and Double Fine came straight out and confirmed that Ron Gilbert’s secret project, titled The Cave, will be published by Sega in early 2013.

I’d bet dollars to donuts that only a miniscule number of our readers had heard of Kickstarter a couple of months ago.  And those that had heard of the crowdsourcing fundraising site could not have possibly known that it would become an important part of an evolving video game industry; that it would throw a wrench into the workings of how things have “always been done” and give the community – the fans – a voice that is not only heard, but heeded as well.

In case you haven’t heard, Double Fine has a kickstarter campaign that’s paid off very well for them so far.  Currently, the ticker indicates they’ve been pledged over two and a half million dollars, and they’ve got some new incentives that might help push that number even higher.

At this point you’d have to be living under a rock to not have heard how Double Fine amazed the gaming world by raising nearly $2 million (and counting) for their next game, Double Fine Adventure through crowd sourcing site Kickstarter.  Gamers who gave generously were given scant few details concerning the project aside from the fact that it would be a classic point-and-click graphic adventure game and that it would be released around October of this year.  But now that the project is certainly a go, Tim Schafer has released a special message with a couple of updates on the project.

Sometimes miraculous things happen in the video game community.  Double Fine Productions, creators of cult favorite games like Psychonauts, Costume Quest and most recently Double Fine Happy Action Theater wants to return to their roots and produce a simple “point-and-click” adventure game that they are aptly calling Double Fine Adventure.  Usually a developer would have to rely on a publisher, investors or bank loans to bankroll such a production, but Double Fine has instead decided to reach out to the community to fund the game.

Myst, one of the most popular PC adventure games from the 1990s, is coming to the Nintendo 3DS. Myst was one of the titles that showed what CD-ROM technology was capable of bringing to video games when it was released in 1993. Hoplite Research, who previously ported the game to the Nintendo DS and PSP, will be handling the port.