Roland runs the micro-epic-concept-photoblog Arcade Tokyo while writing and photographing for web and print. He shot the cover photography and wrote essays for Supercade Volume 2 (2023) and regularly contributes to Nintendo Life, Time Extension, and Push Square.
Opinion Cult Classic 'Tokimeki Memorial' Hits Switch - But 30 Years On, It’s Still Out Of Reach
Forever with you; never with us
True love lasts forever – and so do some games. Tokimeki Memorial: Forever with You, the legendary dating sim from 1995, is hooking up with Switch next month to celebrate 30 years on the scene. Immaculately presented but bewilderingly complex, TokiMemo is a foundational piece of video game history that defined a...
Review Rift Of The NecroDancer (Switch) - Imagine If Guitar Hero & Ikaruga Made A Baby
Slimes to the left of me, zombies to the right
Canadian developer Brace Yourself Games first hit the spotlight with Crypt of the NecroDancer, a rhythm-based roguelike, all the way back in 2015. Dungeon crawling to a relentless beat became the new dance craze sweeping the nation, and it was warmly welcomed into the Switch indie canon with the 2019...
Mini Review Pine: A Story Of Loss (Switch) - An Evocative But Oddly Anti-Immersive Tale
Pining for the fjords
'Game' is a funny word. On its face, it describes lighthearted, fun, frivolous things. Even a very serious game of snooker, in which people wear waistcoats, is 'just a game' on some level. But of course video games can be very different, and Pine is one such game. The subtitle gives it away – A Story of Loss – and it does...
You Twinsen, you lose some
You may not have heard of Little Big Adventure, but if you have, it’s likely you remember it fondly. It popped up on PC in the last months of 1994, then found its way to PlayStation and other platforms. It didn’t shift millions, but it gained cult status for its unique atmosphere, inventive controls, and memorable...
Review Broken Sword - Shadow Of The Templars: Reforged (Switch) - A Classic Adventure Returns Intact
If it ain’t Broken…
Broken Sword – Shadow of the Templars is a big deal in the world of graphic adventures. Ever since its release on PC in 1996, it has jostled for the top spot on best-ever lists around the internet. It’s landed on consoles and early mobile platforms, including a Director’s Cut that reached Wii and DS. Now, nearly three...
Review Loddlenaut (Switch) - A Stress-Free, Subaquatic Escape For PowerWash Lovers
Come get some jetsam
Anyone who’s played PowerWash Simulator for too long while in a feverish state from having eaten too many fish fingers knows the feeling. You cease being a sanitary entrepreneur and find yourself submerged in the water, wearing a spacesuit, shooting the dirt off with a laser in a Zen-like trance while you nurture sea...
Mini Review Can Of Wormholes (Switch) - A Very Worm Welcome For This Ingenious Puzzler
Roll tape
Greetings, worms! Finally, for all you readers who are worms, scouring Nintendo Life for worm-related content, here’s a game that puts annelids front and centre. Wiggling onto Switch from solo dev Munted Finger, Can of Wormholes dares to open that proverbial can and launch squiggly bird food – if we may call you that – straight at a...
Review Bō: Path Of The Teal Lotus (Switch) - Charm Meets Challenge In This Gorgeous Metroidvania
More tea, vicar?
Metroidvania fans seem to be living through a golden age. Hollow Knight and the Ori series, indie hits of the last decade, have established themselves as all-time classics, spurring on a horde of imitators, tributes, and new ideas. Even just 2024’s entries range from the imaginative, lo-fi hit Animal Well to the lavishly presented
Review Braid: Anniversary Edition (Switch) - Exquisite Commentary Elevates This Indie All-Timer
If I could turn back time
What is time? Does the future come into existence, become the present, then vanish into the past? Or are all times equally real, only our perspective on them changing as we travel towards our destinies? And while we’re on the subject, why is it taking so much time to get a “Switch 2”? Not to worry: Braid, Anniversary...
Review Planet Of Lana (Switch) - A Gentle Puzzle-Platformer With Sparkling Presentation
Out of this world
The cinematic platformer: although some great examples have emerged over the decades, the genre perhaps under-celebrated, with its fans especially under-served for a long stretch in the 2000s. It has nonetheless provided some truly legendary games: Prince of Persia, Another World, Flashback, and Inside. Planet of Lana gathers...
Review Snufkin: Melody Of Moominvalley (Switch) - A Joyful, Dreamlike Adventure With An Edge
Snufkin compares to you
Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley opens with a goodbye. The music swells and this goodbye pulls hard on the heartstrings. It’s a goodbye to a Moomin, so perhaps you’d think it’s not an important goodbye – just a Moomin, after all. But it sets up the main arc of a well-paced and imaginative musical adventure. For the...
Mini Review Lil' Guardsman (Switch) - A Disarming Fusion Of Classic LucasArts And 'Papers, Please'
Sale of the sentry
When a game cites as inspiration Papers, Please and classic Lucasarts point-and-clicks, it’s hard not to be curious, if a little cautious in your optimism. That’s exactly where Toronto-founded developer Hilltop Studios is coming from with Lil’ Guardsman – and it's come up with something pretty great. The game starts with...
Review Outer Wilds (Switch) - A Sublime Spacewalk That Stutters Can't Spoil
Loop-the-loop
What’s the meaning of life? Are we alone in the universe? How do you know if the fridge light goes off after you close the door? It’s questions like this that have driven humankind to explore the planet, the cosmos, and ourselves. And the kitchen. This irresistible drive of curiosity and the addictive high of discovery are what...
Review Agatha Christie - Murder On The Orient Express (Switch) - A Clever New Spin On An Old Mystery
Train of thought
When a mystery story has been told millions of times before, how can it still be a mystery? This is the challenge faced by anyone adapting Agatha Christie’s phenomenally widely-read 1934 novel, Murder on the Orient Express. And just in case anyone missed out on the book, decades of film adaptations have also solved the case again...
Review Trombone Champ (Switch) - A Hilarious Party Game That Blows A Big Raspberry At Perfection
Night bird
The 17th-century German rationalist philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz wrote that “Perfection is the harmony of things.” If that’s the case then our discordant parping in Trombone Champ is far from perfect – despite the multipliers received on maxing out our 'Champ' gauge. But you don’t need to achieve perfection to enjoy...
Mini Review The Many Pieces Of Mr. Coo (Switch) - Short, Obtuse, But Spectacularly Presented
Surreal Madrid
Games have, over their history, often sought to become interactive movies or cartoons. There is the general decades-long race towards realism in Triple-A games running on higher and higher-specced hardware, the labour-intensive, hand-drawn aesthetic of many indie games like Cuphead or Hoa and, of course, that art form traditionally...
Mini Review Full Void (Switch) - A Tight Tribute That Falls Just Short Of Cinematic Greatness
Another Another World
Full Void, a narrative platforming puzzle game from London indie studio OutOfTheBit Ltd, wears its love of cinematic platformer classics on its sleeve. Bringing along core gameplay ideas from early entries in the genre, it mixes in some modern influences and introduces a few new ideas of its own. You play as a hoody-up teen on...
It’s-a me, Poir-i-ot
The Agatha Christie Poirot games have a long and mixed history. They go right back to PC games in the early 2000s and continue through to the likes of The ABC Murders, which also made it to Switch back in 2020. Over the years, different developers and publishers have picked up the Christie brand and delivered a range of...
Mini Review Crime O'Clock (Switch) - 'Where's Wally' With A Temporal Twist, Clever But Repetitive
Playing for time
Crime O’Clock is a stylish-looking, screen-searching detective game that was featured in Nintendo’s Indie World Showcase back in April. The latest game from Milan-based development team Bad Seed, it promises to blend time travel with crime solving across large, densely populated hand-drawn maps. A hidden object game with a...
Review Dordogne (Switch) - A Watercolour Wonder, Imperfect Yet Touching
L'eau life
Zut alors! Splish-splashing its way onto Switch in stunning watercolour is Dordogne, a nostalgic kayak trip down the metaphorical river of life – and also down the literal river of Dordogne in the south of France. Umanimation, the production company behind the game, specialises in “transmedia universes”, its previous works including...
Review Desta: The Memories Between (Switch) - Dreamy Dodgeball That's Surprisingly Emotional
Balls well that ends well
There’s an approach to relationship counselling where there’s a ball, and whoever is holding the ball gets to speak. Having said your piece, you toss the ball to another person and they get their chance to express themselves without interruption. But here’s an idea: what if you just threw the ball as hard as you could...
Review The Last Worker (Switch) - Well-Packaged Satire That Doesn't Always Deliver
Stand and deliver
First announced for Switch in March 2021, news of parcel-shipping immersive sim The Last Worker has been fascinating. Over the last two years, there’s been plenty of time for interesting little info trinkets to be packed and despatched from the Wired Productions warehouse. There was the time the game competed at the Venice Film...
Review Dredge (Switch) - A Haunting Lovecraftian Fishing Sim That Reels You In
There’s no plaice like home
New Zealand indie studio Black Salt’s Dredge surfaced in a highly mysterious trailer in 2022. All we saw was a small boat chugging around torrid seas, terrorised by Lovecraftian looming skies and giant, tentacled monsters. A later trailer showed a fisherman catching ever larger fish, selling them for ever larger...
Review Backbeat (Switch) - A Unique, Virtuoso Puzzler Steeped In Funk And '90s Cool
Sax, lies, and videotape
When you think “music game”, you probably think “rhythm action”. Well, Stockholm-based indie team Ichigoichie is here to confound your expectations with Backbeat, a funkily fiendish puzzle game about the intricacies of playing in a band. Ichigoichie’s first game was 2019’s Hexagroove, where they were already...
