tldr videogame curation
melbourne, australia

Genre: Role-playing (RPG)

A multiplayer fighting-game often confused with a soulslike. While you can feel its influence, this is at heart a masterfully crafted fighting-game with a great aesthetic and tonnes of depth.

Utterly brilliant. Takes everything it learned in its predecessor and does it much better. The concepts driving this game are so ingenious and well executed, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

To be clear, this is a very good game. I couldn’t get into it, however. The design is clever and ‘endings’ very cool. But the setting, characters, movement & navigation frustrated me to a distracting degree.

As with a lot of soulslikes; The Surge has a few respectable and cool ideas for ideation on the genre, but ultimately falls flat - repetitive enemies & environments, and a not-very-engaging story.

If you’ve ever played simple IRL RPGs like Mafia you can imagine that the quality of the ‘matches’ depends entirely on the people you play with. The game itself however is pretty solid & worth a look.

A rogue/soulslike with a great aesthetic and lots of potential, but sadly underwhelming after having been abandoned by its developers before introducing sustainable amount of content.

Behemoth’s crazy, typically absurd & funny take on a simple tactical RPG. Great characters, world and the usual quality animation. Fun with a friend if a little repetitive eventually.

Pyre is not for everyone, but the Supergiant hallmarks of amazing worldbuilding, dialog, art direction and interesting mechanics are all here. This is their most different game, but no less brilliant.

An enormous world, wonderfully fleshed out with great writing, characters and tonnes to do. Incredible production, varied gameplay and fun as hell. Manages to explore the setting and tropes without being tacky.

Dark, varied, complex, addictive and unforgiving. If you like turnbased RPGs, just get it - no question. When I first played I could not stop myself from saying aloud “this game is so fucking good.”