Holly Redfield

One of my big failures as a preeminent review artist is my bitchy, grouchy, temperamental moods. When the PC-based platformer Valkyrie Saga came to me in January almost everything poised about it being a relaxing, meditative platformer soured me. This is the weakness of a life lived in excess: something funny about it is that two months spent playing AAA games out of bitter curiosity at the state of what $70 video games looked like drove me right back into its wings — er, arms.

I love short video games, because I’m a father on the go. I’ve read a lot of stuff like that about video games. Tawdry little articles about balancing fatherhood or motherhood and the life of a Gamer. I’m not a father though, and I biologically can’t be. Let me finish the lede here: Vital Shell is quick and snappy enough you can play it while your baby finishes crying.

CULT vs GAL is my brain switch, a turn-on of endorphins and feel-good chemicals slathered in soft and squishy pixels that bring to life an era of anime oekaki art I rarely see in the circles I travel online anymore, a big and fun murder-maze that opens like Wolfenstein and turns into one of those doped up Hollywood slasher movies. Cut cut cut! It feels good to get to cut through my problems one at a time.