amphibious_ReViews

It can be a difficult thing to convert a fully physical game into a digital format. Questions like how to keep players' cards hidden from each other on a shared screen or how to handle house rules can stop a great tabletop experience from being a great videogame. While concessions were certainly made with Uno, I think the developers did the best they could with the options available to them. The problem is, the best part about Uno is the banter across the table as you play, and that will never come easy to a virtual adaptation. Just about everyone I know has played Uno (the physical version) multiple times before, so I'll spare you a rehash of the rules. Instead, I will say that whatever rules you've played Uno by in the past, you can probably recreate that same ruleset in this digital version. That was one of the most delightful surprises for me when trying this game out for the first time. While the official rules of the card game are faithfully implemented in this digita

Google's collection of doodles is often the source of delightful little games that I never expected to play. The minigame-stuffed quasi-RPG that coincided with the Olympics was a massive standout in that regard, and set a bar I'm excited to see the doodle team surpass someday. However, not every doodle game is quite so fleshed-out, with most lasting no more than a few minutes. This short runtime isn't a bad thing though and actually fits the format really well. Celebrating Bubble Tea is a great example of this, fulfilling its role as a doodle game in just five short challenges. In Celebrating Bubble Tea, you act as the owner of a little bubble tea cart and have to fulfill five increasingly precise orders of bubble tea for a cast of colorful characters, most of which you may find familiar if you've interacted with other doodles before. For each order, you're told how much boba, tea, and syrup (or maybe creamer? I don't drink much bubble tea myself) to add to each

I wouldn't necessarily consider myself an expert on video game history, but before Shovel Knight made indies mainstream, I credit games like Limbo for putting them on the radar in the first place. In an industry increasingly dominated by big-studio, big-budget, big-name titles, it was notable for a game like this to break out from the noise and find widespread acclaim. I didn't end up playing more than the first few chapters when I originally bought it on PC, but I've never had enough time to dedicate to PC gaming in the first place. Once I bought the game on my phone though, that was a different story. Thanks to the portability and generous checkpoints, I could pick up and play for minutes at a time, slowly working my way through Playdead's dark world. Limbo is a game about a boy trying to find his sister. The plot leaves a lot of room for interpretation beyond that, but to avoid giving anything else away, I'll just say that I was surprised, then confused, and fina