Board games
fromKotaku
12 hours agoPuzzle Spy International Deserves To Be Played By Way More People
Puzzle Spy International offers a collection of 11 engaging puzzles with a light story, ideal for solo or cooperative play.
Whenever you're working with an existing IP, there's always the question of how you're going to translate and adapt, right? Because it's not a one-to-one sort of interpretation.
Dimension 20 has primarily used Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition across its campaigns, with occasional side quests using other systems. The main cast has only deviated from D&D for the sixth campaign, A Starstruck Odyssey, which utilized an unofficial Star Wars system.
The study, published in the Current Psychology journal, was conducted by researchers from SWPS University and the Stefan Batory Academy of Applied Sciences, who set out to measure the 'sense of emptiness that arises after completing a deeply immersive game.' Post-Game Depression, or P-DGS, was measured across two separate studies, with a total of 373 participants.
Timber Rush is about numbers going up in the crudest way imaginable, a clicker game that barely even features clicking, in which you move your woodcutter side to side as increasing numbers of increasingly silly logs fly around the screen.
The last five years have seen a tremendous resurgence of role-playing games, from the turn-based masterpieces of Baldur's Gate 3 and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, to the action-packed Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. And staggeringly, it looks like that trend is set to continue well into 2026. While there's undoubtedly a handful of games we don't know about, even what we do have looks like it's going to make this another banner year for RPGs.
In March I started experiencing excruciating pain in my right arm and shoulder burning, zapping, energy-sapping pain that left me unable to think straight, emanating from a nexus of torment behind my shoulder blade and sometimes stretching all the way up to the base of my skull and all the way down into my fingers. Typing was agony, but everything was painful; even at rest it was horrible.
Games did not suddenly become "worse." Games adapted. Attention got tired, schedules got tighter, and competition for free time turned brutal. A ten-minute gap now has to fight against messages, videos, and endless feeds. In that environment, long-form sessions still exist, but short sessions often win because they respect reality instead of demanding a perfect evening. That shift is visible everywhere, from mobile puzzlers to competitive titles and even casino-style experiences where a quick crore win feeling is part of the appeal.
Through the ingenious medium of an interactive scrapbook, we play as Connie, glueing in photos, notes and memories of her friend after years of separation. The game begins with several attempts to write Connie a letter, before we cut-out, stick and sort the story of their lives together.
There were lots of good stuff in this week's Convergence Showcase too, including another peek at Mouse: P.I. for Hire as we get to see one of the game's bosses for the first time. This first-person shooter with rubber-hose animation is set to arrive on March 19. There were other welcome announcements for me in this showcase. First, there was a release date for the Zelda-inspired adventure Gecko Gods.
The new chapter will include not only a game but a novel and music, the company said in a press release. The developer revealed the new IP via a live-action teaser, with an actor reading lines from William Blake's poem, The Sick Rose. A painting then fell from the wall, and the actor then turned over an hourglass with red sand, with a tagline stating "The door won't stay closed."
Trails Beyond the Horizon's new character, Ulrika, is like staring into the abyss of a broken TikTok algorithm, and while my knee-jerk reaction might have been shock and even a little disdain, over the next 100 hours, I grew to find the character's bit surprisingly genuine and, admittedly, hilarious. What first felt like a gimmick grew to become one of my absolute favorite parts of the game, enhancing the already distinct personality of the Trails games.
There's a lot about Perfect Tides: Station to Station 's Mara that I find relatable. Like me, she's recently moved to a place simply called "the City" from the middle of nowhere, and like me, she's an avid writer. But these biographical details aren't the important thing; it's the way she's painted by the game's incredibly sharp writing where I start to feel uncomfortably seen.
"I'm a voice actor and software engineer and I've combine these skills to make something wonderful for a game that I really care about that's super important to me and I know is important to a lot of people," said Hobby in her initial announcement video. "I think this was a perfect opportunity to combine those skill sets and make something that I'm proud of for a game that I really care about and give back to the community a little bit."
It's no secret that Cassette Boy is inspired by the classics. It's a top-down adventure game in the vein of a retro Legend of Zelda, while your home base is a small town like in an older Pokémon game, complete with a mom who is constantly wishing you well. The game's blocky 3D graphics evoke Minecraft, and you save at campfires that reset the world, like a FromSoft game.
The best new co-op games are those that do something a bit different, offering more than a single-player experience with another player thoughtlessly tacked on. These multiplayer games account for groups of friends all wanting their own role, with a shared goal in sight and plenty of chaos on the path to getting there.
might be the most ambitious game I've played on the Playdate. It's all about perspective: You turn the handheld's crank to rotate your viewpoint of the bite-size 3D landscapes, which lets you peek around corners to find solutions to various puzzles. On a device with a 1-bit, black-and-white display, the miniature worlds feel miraculous, like little dioramas you can spin around in your hands. But the most impressive part is the puzzles that will have you twisting your brain as much as the crank.
TR-49 is analogy rendered in four dimensions. On a surface level, it's a game about sorting through an archive of written works and commentary that has you identifying dozens of excerpts and documents, all with the aim of destroying a particular work. Beneath the surface, however, this is a piece of art that speaks viciously and satirically to so much of our reality.
punishing dodge and parry windows are one of the RPG's defining characteristics . Enemies basically do a little dance before they bring their weapon down on your party, and you're expected to memorize and dodge every pattern lest you end up dead before your Gommage. Naturally, fans took this as a challenge, and one person has finally beaten Sandfall Interactive's GOTY sweeper without taking any damage.
Square Enix has announced that a demo for Dragon Quest VII Reimagined will become available tomorrow, January 7. On top of that, your save data can be transferred to the full game when it launches next month, meaning your lengthy adventure can start early for the RPG remake. It's unknown how much content is in the Dragon Quest VII Reimagined demo to check out. However, Square Enix is promising on X that players will receive Maribel's Day Off Dress as a reward in the full game.