Latest articles by Ali Jones
Critical Role 4 DM Brennan Lee Mulligan confirms the D&D campaign's big bad, and I've got a feeling no amount of natural 20s is gonna beat this one
News I know DMs that use subtexts, and they're all cowards
Critical role 4 newcomer says she's in "a race to the bottom" with one of her co-stars: "I made the mistake of thinking I could out-troll him"
News Tyranny and Wicander are causing problems on purpose
Pokemon Legends Z-A tests my 25 years of Pokemon experience in all the wrong ways, and I'm begging Game Freak to ease up on the tutorials
Opinion "I know more than you"
Pokemon Legends: Z-A might have overhauled combat even more than I thought, with an entire set of strategies sacrificed on the real-time altar
News My Absol would like a word
The last time I was this obsessed with a Balatro-like, it sold 750,000 copies in 2 weeks – and this one has a D&D twist so it's easily my favorite roguelike in Steam Next Fest
News Slots & Daggers is a strong entry in a crowded field
Ball x Pit review: "Vampire Survivors and Breakout collide in this brilliant roguelike ball basher that struggles with repetition"
Review
The biggest roguelike in Steam Next Fest is a Braveheart-inspired musou fighter with almost perfect reviews
News You'll never take our free-demo
I never really vibed with XCOM 2, but this Steam Next Fest demo is a turn-based strategy RPG I can finally get behind
News Menace's suppression system fixes everything that annoyed me about XCOM
A zombie apocalypse sim that puts you on the front lines of a The Last of Us-style outbreak is tearing up Steam Next Fest
News Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor
I've been a professional writer for 8 years, but that didn't stop Steam Next Fest's weirdest battle royale - a terrifying typing game - from completely humbling me
News Final Sentence proved I'm not quite as good at my job as I hoped
One of Steam Next Fest's biggest survival games was a supremely zen rock-climbing experience - right up until I fell to my death
News Cairn is tearing up the survival game charts
Steam Next Fest's first big hit is a brutal medieval combat sim where I bludgeoned three other peasants with a candlestick
News Half Sword is a massive early breakout
Undertale comes full circle as the JRPG creator who inspired it says his new game is inspired by Undertale
News The cycle repeats
Borderlands 4 butcher slaughters 3,000 bosses over 150 hours to prove just how bad the shooter's drop rates are: "I am pretty much done"
News Prepare for a hefty loot grind
Pokemon Legends: Z-A is the latest victim of a major Nintendo breach, as more than 70GB of information is reportedly shared online in huge 'Freakleak'
News But this could be a planned extension of the recent 'giagleak'
Borderlands 4's loot grind is good for your brain, Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford says, and that the studio would "be dead" if other competitors understood that better
News Randy says "most of what our prefrontal cortex is for" is picking better loot
Even after 14 years of League of Legends, fighting game 2XKO can do little but make me think of the games I wish Riot was still making instead
Now Playing Now Playing | If only MOBA experience matched FGC experience
Critical Role 4 fans are celebrating an easily-missed piece of D&D expertise that helped manage the 13-player chaos of the campaign's first episode
News Aabria Iyengar's DM experience proved very important
To celebrate Critical Role 4, Matt Mercer hid an important message to new DM Brennan Lee Mulligan inside a gifted pair of hand-forged swords
News "He’s just the sweetest guy of all, man. He’s the best."
Assassin's Creed Mirage: Valley of Memory is a sleek DLC for die-hard fans, but it just might transform the whole game
Preview Preview | Inside a smaller, sleeker Assassin's Creed update
James Bond game 007: First Light "would not have happened" unless it was an origin story: "We weren't interested in pushing pixels on how good we could make Pierce Brosnan look"
News "Everyone knows how Bond takes his drink, how he dresses, what he drives. That stuff gets shallow very quickly"
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 lead writer "did not play any video games" before joining the hit French JRPG, but now she's speedrunning the hits: "I have Platinumed Elden Ring, God of War, God of War Ragnarok"
News Making up for lost time
Alien: Isolation writer admits its Xenomorph got too smart for the devs, which is why the horror game runs longer than most
News Isolation's 20-hour runtime was an accident
I'm begging you not to sleep on the Hades 2 boon that single-handedly carried me all the way to the top of Mount Olympus
Opinion Hestia, my beloved
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7's new Endgame mode "is the final proving ground" that could be so challenging you need other co-op teams to help you out
Big Preview Interview | "We wanted to break the rules of what a campaign in Call of Duty could be": Black Ops 7 is back, bombastic, and finally packs a true endgame
