11 Bit Studios Game Reviews
Mini Review The Alters (PS5) - Thought-Provoking Sci-Fi Caper Is 11 Bit Studios' Best Game Yet
Hope you're good company
The Alters plays like a mix of XCOM 2's base building, The Sims' personal needs management, and a third-person survival adventure. This sci-fi game begins with a ship crashlanding on a distant planet, leaving one survivor: Jan Dolski. During the day, you explore and gather resources outside the base to improve it. At night,...
Review Indika (PS5) - A Bleak, Beautiful, Bewildering Rumination on Faith and Free Will
My anaconda don't want none unless you got nuns, hun
Indika is a game of wild contradiction. It's compelling, thoughtful, and ambitious, but also tedious, rote, and derivative. It's the sort of video game that ruminates on the nature of devout faith, free will, guilt, shame, temptation, and morality, and then asks you to solve boring box puzzles...
Review The Invincible (PS5) - Hard Sci-Fi Adventure Tells a Good Story
Operation hopeless
The Invincible is one of those games where the less you know the better — to a degree. A story in the stars that adapts the Stanisław Lem novel of the same name, it plays quite a lot like a sci-fi Firewatch. While your actions don't extend much beyond walking and operating gadgets and machinery, an intriguing plot and many...
Mini Review South of the Circle (PS5) - Antarctic Disaster Meets Cold War
Not every cloud
South of the Circle is the story of Peter, a scientist at the University of Cambridge. Set in the early 1960s, the game heavily references the social and cultural movements of the time. There is a deep-rooted fear of Russian spies and multiple references to the Cold War, and also an underlying gender equality focus to the story...
Mini Review This War of Mine: Final Cut (PS5) - Sombre Survival Hits Hard
War, what is it good for?
Originally released on PC in 2019 for the original game’s fifth anniversary, the acclaimed survival game This War Of Mine: Final Cut has been repackaged in a for new-gen consoles. Hitting PS5s with remastered versions of the original and DLC locations, This War of Mine gives a harrowing and to the point view of war from...
Review Children of Morta - Family Matters in This Refreshing Rogue-Lite Adventure
Talkin 'bout my random generation
How do you make your pixelated rogue-lite game stand out? Children of Morta has an interesting answer. While you're cleaving your way through hundreds of corrupted baddies in the title's randomly generated dungeons, it frequently hits you with moments of story. The combination of random levels with a set narrative...
Review Frostpunk - Alternate History City Builder Survives Against The Odds
Colder than the other side of the pillow
Here's a little bit of history for you: back in the year 1883 the volcano Krakatoa erupted, and spewed millions of tonnes of ash and molten rock into the atmosphere. There was so much of the stuff up there that sunlight actually struggled to reach the planet's surface and global temperatures cooled...
Review Beat Cop - An 80s Police Adventure That Gets Away with Murder
Brooklyn rage
The best thing about Papers, Please is the way in which its work-like gameplay combines with narrative elements to create a stressful, oppressive atmosphere. You're checking documents for discrepancies against the clock, while travellers plead and bargain with you to let them pass, putting your job on the line when your family is...
Fame and fortune
It's pretty difficult to be original these days, and in some ways, Moonlighter could be seen as rather derivative. Rogue-lite dungeon crawling, management sims, pixel art action RPGs -- we see these all the time nowadays, but this game's trick is smashing them all together. The result is a title you'll feel like you've played...
Review This War of Mine: The Little Ones (PS4)
The first casualty of war is innocence
Braving the sniper fire of Call of Duty-loving console players, anti-war-'em-up This War of Mine: The Little Ones brings the civilian side of conflict to the PlayStation 4. 11 Bit Studios has created a heart-wrenching experience of a game, one that puts you in charge of a group of adults and children stuck in a...
Review Anomaly 2 (PlayStation 4)
Turning the tables
Tower defence is more of a niche genre for a particular subset of gamers. The slow pace and constant, strategic management of resources that characterises the games may sound like either a fun time or a monotonous drag to you, but something like Anomaly 2 is, er, an anomaly. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to play as...
