tldr videogame curation
melbourne, australia

Platform: Nintendo Switch

As heartfelt and charming to play as it is to look at. Warm, cosy and quintessentially British, I Am Dead is a exploration/puzzle game with a unique mechanic and ruminations on community.

A stellar albeit hyper-minimal discovery & adventure game with surprising emotional depth. Beautifully crafted, relaxing and immersive. Fantastic visual design, sound design and music.

Significantly more polished and refined than its predecessor, but no less charming and creepy. Has frustrating moments, but overall a fantastic, memorable experience. Play the original first.

Won’t be for everyone, with an arguably repetitive gameplay loop, but I found it to not outstay its welcome and love it. A surreal squirrel mystery puzzler, surely showing its love of Firewatch.

Really cute & wholesome little adventure game. Artstyle is great, writing is solid, gameplay loop is addictive and fun. Alba is a really great, relaxing excursion which can be finished in one sitting.

Pretty fun turnbased roguelike which starts really strong & has some promising ideas. Mechanics which could potentially have lots of depth sometimes fall a bit flat ultimately, but worth checking out.

An autorunner with a dash & slide attack. Some of the original charm is here, but the (very clever) effort that went into making an autorunner interesting doesn’t quite make up for what’s now missing.

Fresh & clever, Ring of Pain’s simplistic inputs bely its depth and difficulty. Absolutely stunning art, haunting music and great sound are underpinned by a fun and addictive gameplay loop. Love it.

Do you like organising and sorting things? Do you like cute art and low-pressure, low-stakes gameplay? If so, you’ll like this game. It’s simple but cheerful and charming. The co-op is great too.

It’s wickedly fun, no doubt about it. Frenetic, insane combat like the one that came before it. But I can’t help but feel it’s a little too self-aware now, and may have edged into genuine cheese.