Category Archives: Reviews

I played a few games in this series as a kid, but KQ3 did something noteworthy in terms of its structure. The player-character is a young lad who needs to escape the abusive service of a horrible old wizard. The wizard leaves for periods, and while he’s away, players get to snoop around the house or scour the local countryside for help before he returns. It’s horribly claustrophobic, but KQ3 started my love for games where you explore a place over and over and keep finding secrets – much like the towns of Harvest Moon and the house in Shenmue.

Loop Hero ticks a lot of my indie game boxes.

It’s aesthetically and thematically interesting, despite still largely being standard fantasy knight-fights-monsters affair. It will remind you that pixel-art is a technique – not a style – and that “another pixel-art indie game” only became a disparaging term because so many people were using the technique with far less style than Loop Hero does.

This game is a chunky, crunchy little bag of systems which do borrow from deckbuilding games… but not enough for “deckbuilder” to adequately describe this arcane, obscure little set-and-forget adventure.

I’ve only played through Diablo III a few times, but I can confirm that it does what I want an action RPG to do. Each class feels like a different game mode, and equipment items vary enough in function that there isn’t always an obvious choice. One of the things I find most interesting is how – even after Blizzard have stripped out every superfluous mechanic from its less arcadey ancestors – the third game still retains so much of the same vision you can see in the first game’s initial pitch.