“Don’t you be dissin’ my hoodie, son.”

Are you looking for inspiration in the lead up to the recently announced Stealthjam? Perhaps you’d like to take a peek at Dark, the newly announced game from Kalypso Media and RealmForge Studios. This stealth action game takes place in a cyberpunk future dominated by the GeoForge Corporation. The game features subdued cell-shaded graphics and what the developer has termed “RPG elements”.

Dark tasks you with investigating the aforementioned company, a job that requires you to take out adversaries quickly and quietly. Fortunately, you have a distinct advantage in this regard. You see, you’re actually a vampire (yep, that old chestnut) and as such you possess a number of supernatural talents including the handy ability to dissolve into a puff of smoke.

A fusion of horror, sci-fi and fantasy, Dark is slated to arrive on 360 and PC in early 2013. It will be the first release from RealmForge since last year’s Dungeons: The Dark Lord.

When I first received Fez, I have to say I wasn’t excited, mainly because 2D puzzle platformers have never quite hit the mark for me. Braid, Cave Story and Limbo didn’t excite me the way I wanted them to. Something seemed off and while others were praising their originality I simply found them annoying. So it was with some trepidation that I began my journey into the world of Fez. Was I going to once again fail to see what the fuss was about or was this the game to convince me that there is a lot of fun to be had with this format? Read the rest of this entry »

You stand in the middle of an endless ocean of sand. Your identity is unknown and your purpose is unclear. This is where your journey begins.

Some of the screenshots give the impression that Journey offers nothing more than a huge, static and dead expanse of yellow sand. These images can’t embody one of the essential truths about the gane, namely, that it feels alive. Gently shifting sands, robes dancing in the breeze and the subtle shift in colour as you leave one area of the desert and arrive in another combine to form a peaceful, almost melancholy sense of place. Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to my proximity to THQ’s Melbourne outpost, I recently had the chance to try my hand at one of the Capcom titles the company plans to distribute in 2012. After watching a brief but informative demonstration of Dragon’s Dogma, I seized a controller and plunged headlong into the game. Read the rest of this entry »