It’s a late night shift and things are quiet. That nosy journalist who always says she’s working on a book took her espresso and sat down in the corner. A dapper looking elf wanders in with his literal succubus of a girlfriend. It’s gonna be a slow night in Coffee Talk, but that’s fine.
If there's one thing I do for this site, it's play a stack of games. 2016 was an amazing year and offered some of the best video games in recent memory. I sat down to list my personal favourites for our year in review.
Video games send us to exotic locales, charging us to do countless tasks. Amidst what can feel like a jumbled mess of quests, goals and waypoints, finding something consistent can be a treat. Let's look at the ways in which finding something we can do repeatedly in a game can provide a welcome relief from day to day confusion. It can involve patrolling the Martian wasteland or even serving booze to ghosts.
Bartending for a delinquent cast of sci-fi characters, it turns out, is the ideal way to world-build a dystopian visual novel/game. VA-11 Hall-A, released yesterday on Steam, offers players the chance to serve up noxious drinks to the sketchy citizens of Glitch City, circa 207X AD, the kind of place that would star as the background for a sci-fi blockbuster. The game is a must-buy for fans of interactive fiction, stylised retro games, cyberpunk and girls with cat ears -- just about everybody, right?
