Author: Pyre Kavanagh

During this year’s Atlus Tokyo Game Show presentation, they announced a demo for their new highly anticipated game, Metaphor: ReFantazio. This Demo will cover the prologue of the game and is available on Steam, PlayStation 5, and Xbox consoles. The Steam demo will be available later today at approximately 12 p.m. Pacific time, but the console demos are available in English now if you visit the Hong Kong, Korean, or Japanese storefronts. Metaphor: ReFantazio takes place in the United Kingdom of Euchronia, a land plunged into turmoil following the assassination of its king. The story takes a dramatic turn when the Royal Magic, a mystical…

Introduction to Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club When Nintendo dropped that 15-second-long teaser for ‘Who is Emio,’ the last thing I was expecting was an entirely new game in the Famicom Detective Club series. This series of mystery adventure games, originating from the late 80s with a third game in the 90s, had two entries remade for the Nintendo Switch in 2021. Inspired directly by one of the progenitors of the detective fiction video game genre, The Portopia Serial Murder Case from 1983, The Famicom Detective Club games star a Private Investigator’s office with a couple of teenage…

Introduction to Tribe Nine TooKyo Games is a group I’ve been following for a while. The creatives involved in the group had developed some of my favorite titles or were heavily influential to me when I was younger. So seeing the directors of Danganronpa, Zero Escape, or Root Double team up for various projects like the World’s End Club, Death Come True, or the anime Akudama Drive has been exciting, and I’ve enjoyed their works. One title that was announced some time ago was the extreme baseball live-service game Tribe Nine. Two years ago, it got a tie-in anime to set the scene, but we haven’t heard anything…

Introduction to Closer The Distance The fun part of any simulation game is managing an egregious amount of bars and panicking whilst trying to make sure that you’re using your time wisely. This means that most often, the simulation games that offer the most interesting stories are dating sims, but even then, it’s still dependent on you not catastrophically fumbling your run. The German-based Osmotic Studios, though, had an idea for a simulation game that I had never before seen. Published by Skybound Games, Closer The Distance is a simulation game with all the bars you’d expect of a good…

In the same breadth as announcing the release date for Fate/Stay Night Remastered in english, TYPE-Moon and Aniplex have announced that a remaster of the game’s sequel, Fate/Hollow Ataraxia has been announced to also hit all of our shores. The title will, like Fate/Stay Night Remastered be available on Nintendo Switch and Steam. Fate/Stay Night is a classic visual novel developed by Type-Moon and released exclusively in Japan in 2004. Since then, the game received various ports and enhanced editions over the years. The sequel, Fate/Hollow Ataraxia was a Japanese exclusive release in 2005. Since its inception, the series has spanned…

Cult Classic Visual Novel Fate/Stay Night has a worldwide release date of August 8th, TYPE-Moon has revealed. It’ll be available on Nintendo Switch, and Steam, with store pages up now. The title will launch with language support for English, Chinese and Japanese. Unlike Tsukihime, Fate/Stay Night Remastered will not be available on PlayStation consoles, or at least has not been announced for them at present. Fate/Stay Night is a classic visual novel developed by Type-Moon and released exclusively in Japan in 2004. Since then, the game received various ports and enhanced editions over the years. The Fate/Stay Night Remastered release will not include…

Introduction to CLICKOLDING Strange Scaffold are the developers of some very peculiar and evocative games. Titles like El Paso Elsewhere, a supernatural third-person shooter about killing your ex who will end the world from a hotel basement, Life Eater, a horror fantasy kidnapping sim, and Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator. I think that the last one explains itself. In their infinite wisdom, while developing their next title, the thriller fps I Am Your Beast, they have decided to develop an entirely new title that is just as evocative. CLICKOLDING. That’s an L followed by an I, just so you’re aware.…

Introduction: With Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail becoming runaway successes, Hoyoverse, formerly Mihoyo, has decided that they’ll add another gacha game to their growing list in the form of Zenless Zone Zero. I’d seen some trailers showing off a fast-paced combat style, and it got me curious. They’d released an action title before, Honkai Impact 3rd, which I played for a bit eons ago. I don’t usually play live service games, so I thought I’d give this one a fair shake. Within the world of Zenless Zone Zero, the apocalypse nearly happened thanks to the mysterious advent of strange…

I’m a fan of a lot of FuRyu-published games. They throw a bunch of money and experienced writers at a small developer in order to hire some big names that also function as advertising. The budgets still aren’t big, but you end up with some really interesting games with fantastic gameplay concepts or enthralling stories and characters, and they always have fantastic music. Some of these titles include the Lancarse-developed Monark and Lost Dimension, the Aquaria-developed Crymachina, the Three Rings-developed Trinity Trigger, and my favorites, the Historia-developed The Caligula Effect Overdose and The Caligula Effect 2. And that brings us to…

Coinciding with the game’s announcement, one of the directors of TooKyo’s new title The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy has posted some important details about the upcoming title on Twitter/X. This is Tookyo Games’ first in-house IP game. We have invested all our money and human resources into this game, and in a sense, it is an epic indie game. I will also have an English dubbing ready for release. Your support is needed! We spread this game to the world!… https://t.co/YJYTxoJYvn — Kazutaka kodaka/小高和剛 (@kazkodaka) June 19, 2024 Firstly, the game is the studio’s first properly in-house developed game,…

Aniplex has posted a new trailer for the just-announced The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, which will be available for the Nintendo Switch and PC. This new trailer features many tidbits not seen in the original Nintendo Direct trailer, including copious amounts of blood, and more prominently displays both directors involved in the project. This project by the creators of Danganronpa and Zero Escape features protagonist Takumi Sumino, an average teenager living in the Tokyo Residential Complex before monsters start attacking. However, a creature named Sirei appears and offers him the power to protect those he cherishes, but it requires…

Exploring the Cult Appeal of Library of Ruina Project Moon has gathered something of a cult following with its release of titles like Lobotomy Corp, Library of Ruina, and most recently, the mobile game Limbus Company. I had been meaning to play Library of Ruina for a while. I already had it on PC. It’s a deckbuilder; I love card games and games about cards. I play several Trading Card Games and deckbuilders. But alas, it was lost to the backlog….. Until Arc System Works published a port of the game for the Nintendo Switch. I’m far better at playing…

Nintendo have taken to social media to make an announcement in regards to the highly anticipated Nintendo Switch follow-up. The successor has had rumors surrounding it for a while, and as the original console is nearly a decade old, they have only intensified with time. The post on X (formerly twitter) reads as follows and can be seen below. “This is Furukawa, President of Nintendo. We will make an announcement about the successor to Nintendo Switch within this fiscal year. It will have been over nine years since we announced the existence of Nintendo Switch back in March 2015. We…

Life Eater Review: A New Horror Simulation Experience I’m a big fan of simulation games, which is precisely the variety that has me stressing out over time management and trying to get all my numbers in a row with limited assets. And then I found out about Life Eater. Developed by Strange Scaffold, the minds behind one of my favorite games from last year, El Paso, Elsewhere, in collaboration with Frosty Pop, this new video game has the outlandish pitch of being a horror fantasy kidnapping simulation game where you sacrifice people to a dark god. It’s so absurd that…

Reviving Touch Detective: A Classic Series Returns It’s always refreshing to see games ported to new consoles, breathing new life into classic titles. Recently, we saw Another Code: Recollection—a combined remake of a DS and Wii game—receive high praise. Similarly, the Touch Detective series from the DS era has been revitalized for the Switch. Published by Nicalis, this collection includes all the games in the series, notably featuring Touch Detective 3, a 3DS game previously unreleased in the West. Step Into Mackenzie’s Shoes: The World of Touch Detective In the Touch Detective series, players step into the shoes of the…

Introducing Buckshot Roulette: A New Take on Russian Roulette Russian Roulette with Shotguns is the easiest way to distill the premise of Buckshot Roulette. That’s the entire game and the only thing I needed to hear to be interested in playing it. This new title, developed by Mike Klubnika (his name is on the title screen), was released on itch.io for a dollar in December. It’s now being released on Steam and published by Critical Reflex. We all know the rules of russian roulette, how do you play it with a 12-gauge? Stepping into the Den: The High-Stakes World of…

Someone puts on a strange mask while hunting down their lost lover; they wake up on a beach. With no memories, no weapons, and no idea where they are, they discover a mansion. Some people have been here for an incalculable amount of time. But there’s only one important detail you can get out of them. The answers you seek lie somewhere in the mansion. There’s a nun outside who offers you guns. Welcome to the Stylish Apocalypse: An Introduction to Otxo’s World Welcome to Otxo, a stylistic top-down roguelike developed by Lateralis Heavy Industries (a team comprised entirely of…

Please note this is the opinion of the author and not the entire Noisy Pixel staff. When Episode Aigis was announced for Persona 3 Reload as DLC for a remake of ‘The Answer,’ a bonus chapter from the PlayStation 2 re-release, Persona 3 FES, a lot of people were asking, does this mean there’s a chance for the female protagonist to be added as well? Producer Kazuhisa Wada, whilst interviewed by the Japanese outlet Famitsu, answered this question with a hard ‘there’s no chance of this happening’ and ‘Additionally, we as the Persona Team need to work on completely new…

As a strategy RPG series nearing 20 entries, Fire Emblem has a lot of maps. And since I’ve played all of these games, god help me, I thought I would be most equipped to talk about the best of the best throughout the franchise. Each Fire Emblem game brings its own mechanics and concepts to the table, but not all of them can make the most of them. So, we want to talk about the ones that take advantage of their available systems and couple them with the story to develop them into the best experiences for the player. Maps…

Under Night In-Birth II [sys:Celes] Review: A Fitting Sequel to the Beloved Fighter An actual Under Night In-Birth sequel has been highly anticipated both for the addition of new characters to the game and the continuation of the original story. Each update has only added a bit of build-up, and Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late cl-r, which added just one character, did feel a bit egregious to some fans. But now, there’s a sequel hot on the heels of Tekken 8, in the form of Under Night In-Birth II [sys:Celes], which will conclude the story and features rollback netcode. Mastering the…