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Big Walk Review

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You owe it to yourself and your friends to experience Big Walk. It is appointment gaming at its finest. Big Walk is one of those games that’s both easily explained and difficult to convey. If you wanted to be purely descriptive, it is a multiplayer adventure game where you and two to twelve friends explore an abstracted island full of puzzles and secrets. Think of it as a cooperative-focused Myst or The Witness. However, describing Big Walk like this, or using the much-maligned term “friendslop,” is a disservice to Big Walk. Yes, the core functions and mechanics are walking around and solving puzzles, but the threads that connect you and your friends together are what make it special. You are not just solving a puzzle; you are collaborating with others to find the best method. You aren’t just walking around an environment; you are discussing pathways, stop points, and scouting ahead to find the right way to go. It’s those little moments between the walking and the solving that make Big...
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Everything is Fine, Everything is Just Fine - The Cleanup 05/07/26

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I don't even know where to start. The state of the video game industry is in its death throes right now due to everything happening all at once. I remember about a year and a half ago I was talking to some friends of mine about how I believed we were heading for a video game crash, and I was utterly mocked for even bringing up the idea. I would like to say that I tracked down those friends and gave them the biggest “I told you so” speech of my life, but I'm not exactly thrilled about being right about this particular thing. If Microsoft Was a Centipede It Would Have 3 Feet Left The word going around over the last few weeks post‑SGF was that Microsoft was going to be committing a round of layoffs and studio closures that would make EA pause. Five major studios are rumoured to be completely closed on top of God knows how many layoffs from the many other studios under the Microsoft umbrella. Industry veterans are claiming this is going to be the single largest loss of video game j...
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Not-E3 Round-Up of Opinions 2026 + Expansion Pack

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  About an hour after I posted my prior blog post talking about the announcements of Not-E3, Nintendo had to go and announce a Nintendo Direct for the next day. Naturally, of course, that Nintendo Direct was absolutely filled with exciting announcements that I want to talk about, so here is the Not-E3 Round-Up of Opinions 2026 + Expansion Pack. Big Walk Finally, after waiting for years, we finally get a release date. I have not really had a chance to play some of the so-called “friendslop” due to both my online shyness as well as a majority of my online friends being in inconvenient time zones. But I am forcing myself to play this with friends, whether it is in the afternoon on a weekend or at 11 pm at night. Team Cherry and House House carrying the Australian game industry on their backs. Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave 2026’s most anticipated game is finally coming out, and I am absolutely stoked to see it here. I’ve only really played the last two main Fire Emblem games, but I am a...
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The Not-E3 Round Up of Opinions 2026

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Well, the official fully announced Not-E3 has come and gone, and with that comes a new slew of video game announcements, trailers, demos, and second-degree embarrassment in the case of the actual Summer Game Fest. So today, I thought I’d go through the three major showcases (PlayStation, Summer Game Fest, Xbox) and talk about what I liked, what I didn’t like, and so on and so forth. Let’s get into this. Sony PlayStation State of Play Marvel’s Wolverine Bloody violent way to start the show! I enjoy myself some X-Men occasionally, with most of my knowledge coming from David Hayter’s X-Men (2000) film and subsequent series. I also enjoyed Insomniac’s prior Marvel games with Spider-Man. However, from what is shown here, it is not all that impressive from a gameplay perspective. Yes, this might be the goriest first-party game ever made, but if you remove the blood, screaming, and violence, you’re left with a linear-looking melee combat game à la Arkham Asylum. Granted, this was a combat-foc...
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The Impression Session 9/05/26 – Pragmata, Esoteric Ebb, Bad Star Wars Brainrot Clone

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  This is going to be a new recurring feature (or as recurring as anything here) of just general impressions of stuff I’m playing, new or old, full playthroughs or light touches. All the games I’ve played over the last few weeks will get a little bit of that writing goodness here. Pragmata The type of game Pragmata is doesn’t come around as often as I would like. A game of singular focus with no extra stuff around it. No tacked-on multiplayer, no post-game grind, no asynchronous online features. It is a full, complete video game. The fact that it is a new IP too is even more confounding. Pragmata feels like it fell out of a 2010 Xbox 360. From its storyline, to its characters, and especially the aesthetics, the game just screams to me “late 2000s”. What a state the industry must be in for “complete, functional video game” to come off as fresh and exciting. One of the things I love about Pragmata is that it is lean. There is nothing throwaway about Pragmata unless you engage with it...
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