At first glance, Exanima looks like virtually any other Diablo clone on the market. The dimly-lit dungeons and isometric perspective do little to combat that perception. You’ll spend a lot of your time poking through hallways and hidden rooms, slaying foul creatures, and looting the limp corpses of your adversaries -- all trademarks of the dungeon crawling experience. 

But Exanima, unlike Diablo and its many contemporaries, features a fully-utilized physics engine. The result is a game where ragdoll bodies go flying, improvised tactics are the norm, and combat is never fully predictable.

“If you’re trying to make a really accessible game,” Joni Kittaka laughs, “then action platformer with walljumping is really not what you should do.”

Despite its genre, Even the Ocean, a new game from Anodyne developers Kittaka and Sean HTCH, sets its sights on being enjoyable to a wide range of players. The game follows Aliph, a technician in Whiteforge City, as she travels across a strange, varied landscape investigating a series of power plant failures. In order to navigate this world, the player must balance a two-color energy bar. One end of the spectrum provides higher jumps and slower speed, while the other grants faster speed and lower jumps. Finding the balance between these two poles undergirds both the game’s narrative and its design choices.

How do you tell a story about someone who can’t speak for themselves, who doesn’t have the words to describe what they’re going through? How do you attribute meaning to a life the person himself was likely too young to even remember? Ultimately, perhaps, you don’t. Instead, you talk about what you can and let silence do the rest.

In my 20s, I spent several years living on an antique boat in an industrial canal. The boat sank. We got a new boat, which got destroyed when it ran aground during a hurricane. All this to say, when I saw that Klei had titled its newest Don’t Starve DLC Shipwrecked, I thought, “Shipwrecks? Here’s a game I’ll be good at.”

I am not good at it. Shipwrecked has all the features you love to hate from Don’t Starve: scavenging for resources, brutal seasons, a cascading series of crafting necessities, and that murderous darkness. Instead of waking up to the musical taunts of Maxwell, you find yourself on a desert island surrounded by the wreckage of your ship. Your goal is still the same—to survive as long as you can—but instead of one sprawling landmass to master, you must build a boat (or, in the early game, a raft) to hop from island to island, trying not to spring a leak in the choppy seas as you search for a place to call home.

For such a visually sparse game, so many elements of Noct’s design are luxurious in the extreme—the light bounce to the menu text, the intimate sound of hurried typing that accompanies the dialog, the eerie soundtrack, the way your view through a satellite monitor snaps shut when a monster devours you. The sound effect in this last moment is especially good, full of rich bass that sits in your stomach, startling without being unpleasant. This is a particularly wise choice, as the moment of death is a repeated inevitability: if there’s one thing that can definitely be said about Noct, it’s that you’re going to die. A lot.

Trespasser is the final single-player DLC to be released for BioWare's Dragon Age: Inquisition. It takes a two-year jump into the future following the events of Inquisition, so if you haven't completed the core game and watched the post-credit epilogue, there are spoilers ahead.

After an enjoyable foray into a new region in Jaws of Hakkon, then a so-so delve through the Deep Roads with The Descent, Trespasser puts the previous two DLCs to shame with its depth. Once again we can interact with our companions and find out how their stories have furthered, and our choices from the main storyline in Inquisition may (or may not) come back to haunt us. Orlais and Ferelden are bickering (as usual), French accents are abound, there's finally a mabari introduced, and—depending on who you romanced—a wedding could be in your cards.

Unfortunately (for me), my Lavellan had romanced Solas, so the only thing stacked in my deck was an emotional rollercoaster.

Two buttons, two functions. The rest is just rockets.

If you're wondering, yes that was a reference for The 7th Guest. This review, however, has nothing to do with that old (but good) puzzle game, and everything to do with rockets. Tinertia, the latest creation between Candescent Games and Section Studios uses two buttons. One for an air dash, the other for a level reset. The right-hand joystick is used for shooting rockets. You don't jump. That's it.

Well guys, looks like it's Tuesday again.

Today marks the launch of Dragon Age: Inquisition's final single-player post-game content DLC, Trespasser. Our review for Trespasser is yet to come, but first we want to take a look at the game's previous release.

Last month, BioWare released the second single-player DLC for Inquisition. Taking the Inquisitor on a journey into the Deep Roads (because no Dragon Age game can be complete without that area), The Descent is an adventure that reveals dark secrets that even the dwarves of Orzammar are shocked to discover.

It’s been almost two years since I wrote my review of Square Enix’s MMO, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. I was a big fan of what they’d created, especially compared to the mess that was v1.0. I even wrote a column about the game for over a year. Since that initial release, numerous patches came out, bringing with them new instances, Hard mode dungeons and Hard/Extreme trials, side-story quest chains like the Hildibrand saga, and of course the continuation of FFXIV’s excellent main story questline. Fast forward to a month ago when FFXIV releases their first expansion, Heavensward. This expansion brought with it an expanded level cap of 60, three new jobs, new zones, new instances/trials, and the continuation of that epic main story. For the last month I’ve been put in hours upon hours into the world of Eorzea and now I’m finally ready to give my opinion.