Video Game, Board Game, Comic Book & Movie Reviews – and more!
Fortysomething gamer with a lifelong interest in many geeky pursuits - including, but not limited to, video games, board games, comic books and movies.
Tapping into the same addictive character spotting, scene scanning fun that you get from the Where’s Wally (or Waldo, if you’re across the Atlantic) books, Hidden Through Time is a delightfully relaxed experience that can be enjoyed by players of any age. Levels take place in charmingly designed historical (and pre-historical) scenes with minimal animation, featuring little visual jokes peppering […]
My Time at Portia was a critical and commercial hit when it launched on PC in 2018 and then later on consoles in 2019. It was a beautifully compelling, Studio Ghibli-inspired life sim, featuring farming, crafting, exploration, combat and much more besides. It was a charming, engaging game that allowed players to indulge in whatever activities took their fancy from […]
Though it unfortunately failed to reach its funding target on Kickstarter recently, WoodZone by DeSand Game Studios continues to show a lot of promise. It’s a unique game that combines crafting, world building and management sim in one very accessible and nicely designed experience, with appealingly colourful, deliberately stylised low-poly visuals. The gameplay trailer is below and the game’s Steam […]
I’m a big fan of the story-based games that the now defunct Telltale Games specialised in. They seemed to perfect the formula with The Walking Dead in 2012, after a few years where they couldn’t quite get the balance right between storytelling, puzzles and interactivity. As I found in the first Batman game – which was released in 2016, and […]
When the character of Borat debuted in 2000 on Da Ali G Show, the short scenes featuring the ersatz Kazakhstani reporter were an absolute blast, with pranks that often revealed the bigotry and snobbishness of his unassuming targets – a new way of pranking unsuspecting victims who were quickly catching on to Ali G’s hijinx. The joke still worked in […]
Now available on Steam, PS4 and Nintendo Switch, Undead Darlings: No Cure for Love is an appealing hybrid of visual novel elements with an RPG featuring dungeon crawling, looting and turn based combat. The story sees main character Reggie awakening from an alcohol-induced coma to find the world overrun with zombies. With the assistance of several half-human undead girls, Reggie […]
On paper, The Predator had all of the right elements to assure us of a slam dunk that the franchise hasn’t seen since the very first film in 1987. Shane Black – who memorably, if briefly, appearedin the original movie as the purveyor of dirty jokes, Hawkins – on board as director. Black co-writing with Fred Dekker, the director and […]
You’d barely know it, but the next generation of consoles is now less than a month away. Yet the hype and the excitement seems to be incredibly muted. Both PS5 and Xbox Series S/X are coming after another pretty long generation – it’ll be almost seven years since the PS4 and Xbox One launched. Both current consoles felt a little […]
The latest episodic narrative game from Life is Strange creators DONTNOD Entertainment, Tell Me Why is the story of siblings Alyson and Tyler, who reconcile a decade after a devastating family tragedy forced them apart. Confronting their memories and re-forging their bond, you’ll discover what led to their separation and deal with the demons from their troubled childhood. The first […]
There’s no getting around it – Safety First is a bizarre, gross and hilarious physics-based puzzler. Despite its crude appearance – both in terms of simplicity and subject matter – it really works; it’s surprisingly good. A game in which you control a stick man whose penis is not only very obviously on display (and subject also to the physics […]
When I first started Mid-Life Gamer Geek back in the now utopian beforetimes of *checks notes* 2019, my intention was to continue writing about gaming; video games, board games and perhaps tabletop RPGs here and there too. I didn’t have the confidence to branch out into other areas at first and believed that I lacked the knowledge and insight to […]
Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a lifelong fan of the Alien franchise, even to the point where I genuinely have a soft spot for Alien 3. If only the movies had ended there, as was clearly intended… I’ve been reading the Alien comics for thirty years now too – and though there have been notable ups and downs, […]
Humble Bundle has been working its magic outside of ‘just’ video games for a while now – and fans of comic books have been well served in recent months with plenty of bundles offering lots of reading material, giving readers absolutely astonishing value for money. The latest comic book bundle is another excellent one; I’ve recently been taking a look […]
At one stage in Bordello of Blood, which feels like an episode of the fondly remembered 90s TV show stretched out to an interminable length (though the main feature minus framing device and credits isn’t much longer than an hour), Dennis Miller’s apparently ‘witty’ private detective character says “I feel like I’m in a bad Tales from the Crypt episode”. […]
Following the remarkable commercial and critical success of the superb 2012 video game adaptation of The Walking Dead (based in the comic book universe rather than that of the TV show, though not following the main storyline or characters of either series), Telltale Games seemed to have settled on a winning formula, with games that featured stunningly dramatic narratives alongside […]
In my quest to cover all of the Specials that Rebellion publish in 2020, it’s inevitable that I would come across a few containing material unfamiliar to me. Tammy & Jinty were girls comics published in the 70s and 80s in the UK (Tammy ran from ’71-’84 and Jinty from ’74-’81); when Jinty folded, it was merged with Tammy (a […]
