The end of PAX West marked the beginning of the busy season for gaming with so many AAA titles hitting the market in such a short amount of time. And while we're all quite focused on the exploits of a friendly neighborhood superhero, I stil...

Sometimes a game's title tells you everything you need to know. Shovel Knight, Battletoads, and even Super Mario Odyssey all give you a pretty good idea of what you're in for before you boot up the game. That isn't the case with D...

I'm not exactly sure how much laughing is appropriate during the demo for The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories. The title, due out for PC and all major consoles this year, is the latest project from avant-garde game designe...

Nintendo has had its ups and downs with indie developers, but the Switch seems to be doing things right. The versatile console has become a lot of people's indie machine of choice, and most games released on the system seem to be performing...

The Quiet Man isn’t a game I’m supposed to preview at PAX. When my appointment was made for Square Enix, it was for Left Alive, a lackluster presentation I’ve already covered. I have no interest in playing The Quiet Man af...

It's safe to say every game developer working today has probably played and enjoyed a Legend of Zelda game at some point in their history. Nintendo's adventure series has been consistently popular for more than 30 years, and it's not h...

I imagine most visitors to PAX West this year don’t even know about NIS America’s suite at the Sheraton in Seattle. In a small room on the second floor of the hotel, a half-dozen NISA employees in “Dood” jerseys dire...

PAX's Indie Megabooth is always worth checking out, and it's frequently one of the most crowded sections of the show floor. You never know exactly what to expect when you visit, but there's almost always something exciting and eye-catching ...

What the Golf? is by far the shortest appointment I had at PAX West. In the overcrowded Indie Megabooth, where a day earlier I meet former Destructoid editor Hamza for the first time, its quirky demo encourages people to watch the utte...

Gris is an absolutely stunning game. The first title from Spanish studio Nomada made a splash in mid-August when it announced a publishing deal with Devolver Digital. Anyone can immediately tell it's a real looker. That beauty isn't j...

Up until this past weekend, ToeJam & Earl was a title I knew nothing about. I've heard of the games over the years, usually from people at GameStop romanticizing the days of their youth spent with it, but for decades it was just a ...

Double Fine is always trying something new. The developer regularly invites employees to pitch their game ideas during its annual Amnesia Fortnight events, internal game jams where no idea is too bizarre. Several well-regarded games have re...

It's rare that I get to cover a game twice in a pre-release state, but I'm happy I had the chance with Ashen, an action-RPG I first played at E3 last year and just saw again last weekend at PAX West. While the first impression was promising...

Inti Creates is one of the more reliable supporters of Nintendo hardware. Its games are a shining beacon of quality on the 3DS and its Switch output is quickly matching that same level of excellence. The developer jumped on board quite quic...

When you play an urban planning simulator like SimCity or Cities: Skylines, you probably don't give much thought to the structures themselves, other than trying to place them where they'll do the most good. Indie developer Blackstaff Games ...

I can't really call Biomutant my biggest surprise of PAX because I once publicly said it "looks weird as hell and I'm really into it," and the Internet never forgets. But if it weren't for that article, it sure would be. It's strange, risky...

Preview demos rarely coddle, but they're also almost always accessible. Like, the whole point is to get a good broad understanding for what a game hopes to accomplish. On a subconscious level, there's probably something to be said for makin...

I'm not convinced Dying Light: Bad Blood will catch on in a significant way, but then again, it has a more manageable scale going for it as a 12-player mix of PvP and PvE survival, and people sure do love them some Dying Light. If nothing e...

The visuals for Save me Mr. Tako!, Nicalis’s upcoming platform adventure game from Christophe Galati, don't activate any “rose-tinted glasses” sense of nostalgia for me. I never owned a Game Boy, Game Boy Color, or the Sup...

We've seen some admirable attempts at asymmetric horror games, but none of them have quite clicked for me. There's still an opening for a studio to own this genre whether it's with licensed characters or original creations that draw inspira...

Last year's sudden resurgence of Windjammers blew right over my head. I never owned a Neo Geo as a child, don't keep up with the crew at Giant Bomb, and am certainly not French. So when it reappeared in the spotlight last year, the new...

What little I've seen of Devil May Cry 5 is enough to tell me what we've come to expect: this game rules. It goes to show that if studios take time away and return to a series with a clear and creatively-recharged mind, great things can hap...

Having now gone to my first E3 and first PAX as a member of Destructoid, I'm not sure if I'll ever go to either of these events again if I'm not a member of the press. It spoils a person to get almost instant access to any game they want, b...

When procedural generation became a big thing, there were a lot of high hopes about what it could mean for infinitely explorable spaces. Some games do it better than others, but a lot of the time a strange paradox occurs: with everything di...

If there is one thing PAX West has taught me, it's that what's old is new again. Throughout the show, I see games that hark back to classic console eras and remakes and HD ports of the timeless titles from our youth. Grandia + Grandia ...