Echo Isle is heavily inspired by The Legend of Zelda, and it's not afraid to show it: The retro graphics bear a striking resemblance to Link's Awakening, the main character wears a blue tunic and wields a sword, and he navigates dungeons to collect items and keys to fight bosses and gather magical MacGuffins. But where Echo Isle shines is how it takes the best parts of a Zelda adventure and shrinks them down to their essence - I finished the game in a little more than an hour.

The game starts with the main character falling from the sky onto Echo Isle, an island protected by a magical lighthouse that has mysteriously gone dark. While you d …

Read the full story at The Verge.

There are a lot of games that remind me of summer - hot days in the backseat with a copy of Dragon Warrior III, cooling off in the basement while grinding Gran Turismo races - but there aren't a lot of games that are actually about summer. That's part of what makes Kabuto Park so charming. It's a game that manages to not only capture the fleeting moments of a childhood summer, but also cram a Pokémon-style adventure into a game that lasts only a few hours.

Kabuto Park actually launched last year on PC, but it's available now on both Xbox and the Switch, the latter being probably the ideal platform for it. It takes place over the course of a …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Slots & Daggers, a low-key, fantasy-themed slot machine roguelike, was one of my favorite games last year. That may sound like a complicated description, but the game mixes ideas from deckbuilding roguelikes with slot machines to create an engrossing loop, and there's steady meta-progression that helps you push further with just about every run. Perhaps the best part is that Slots & Daggers is short: Solo developer Friedemann describes the game as a mini roguelike, and I completed it, including all 12 achievements, in just under six hours. This month, Slots & Daggers came out on the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X / S, and …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Finding a cafe that fits you can be a revelatory experience. For me at least, there are few places outside of my house that I can truly feel comfortable in. I'm lucky enough to have two options in walking distance: a coffee shop that's bright, airy, and full of art, and another that doubles as a plant shop so that I'm surrounded by greenery while I write. They're third places that have become central to my life. But in the virtual realm I have an option as well - and while it's not a place for getting work done, it's just as relaxing.

The Coffee Talk series kicked off in 2020, with a direct sequel three years later, and the title really say …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Playing Mixtape is like playing a video game version of a high school movie. Kids banter about the meaning of life and the theme songs that would play when they walk in a room. They're worried about looking cool at a big party. They're obsessed with finding booze. But under all of those tropes is a meaningful story about nostalgia, friendship, and teenage angst - and it's all backed by a great soundtrack packed with classic hits.

Mixtape takes place over the course of a summer day. You play as Stacey Rockford, a music obsessive and recent high school graduate. Rockford is leaving her sleepy California suburb for New York City the next morn …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Water gets all the credit. When gaming companies want to show off new graphics technology, things tend to get wet; splashing waves that are only possible with the latest physics engine, or puddles that can reflect the world around them thanks to ray tracing. But there's something special about snow. It might not be as technically impressive as water, but when it comes to creating a mood in a game, snow can be very powerful. And two recent releases - Moomintroll: Winter's Warmth and Froggy Hates Snow - really capture just what snow is capable of.

Let's start with the Moomins. Winter's Warmth is the second game based on the iconic Finnish fai …

Read the full story at The Verge.

It took me a while to get into Esoteric Ebb, a new CRPG from developer Christoffer Bodegård. The elevator pitch is basically Disco Elysium, but in the fantasy style of Dungeons & Dragons: You play as a cleric wandering around a small town who's trying to figure out, among other things, the mystery of why a tea shop in town exploded, and all the while, you're having conversations with different character traits in your head. Like Disco Elysium, you see the world from an isometric, top-down perspective. Also like Disco Elysium, Esoteric Ebb requires a lot of reading, weighing the opinions of your competing voices, and making some bold dice rol …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The first rule of Titanium Court is that you can't explain Titanium Court. Not because we're living under the omerta of an 8-bit Fight Club, but because it's one truth I can stand by. For the past week, I've been facing the consequences of getting isekai'd into a digital pastiche of the entire history of dramatic allegory and contemporary humor, leading a whimsical quasi-sentient court of wildly unmedicated faeries to their doom. They try, in their roundabout faerie way, to be helpful, because I don't know what I'm doing. "I'm looking forward to you explaining the game to me," said my editor Andrew Webster - words he silently swallowed after …

Read the full story at The Verge.

When Vampire Survivors first exploded onto the scene, it was pretty much all I could think about. The formula of jumping into runs, taking on thousands of enemies, and becoming absurdly overpowered kept me picking up the game again and again - Steam says I've played it for more than 60 hours. Over time, though, despite the game's many updates and expansions, the formula got stale, and I haven't played it in more than a year. But I've become obsessed with the Vampire Survivors universe once again thanks to the new spinoff Vampire Crawlers.

Vampire Crawlers - technically, Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors - successfu …

Read the full story at The Verge.