Blogs
on April 11, 2026
It's hard to think of Pokemon in the style of Breath of the Wild in practicality. Sure, anyone can edit a screenshot to have Gyarados in a BOTW lake or Rapidash racing across the field, but isn't that just what the Wild Area is? The illusion of an open world, the type that would look good in screenshots, but without meaning or purpose. Without any heart or direction, BOTW would not be the same game. It gives you freedom to go wherever you want, but it also provides contours across the map to steer you towards towns, it makes sure each location is thematically linked, and you often need to hit multiple landmarks to secure the tools and ingredients to reach the next one. Even though I'm not the biggest fan of it, I have to admire the level of design on show here. It's not a level I think Pokemon can match, and that's before you introduce the much more complicated issue of where you put the Pokemon and how you offer freedom while ensuring players don't meet their doom at the feathers of an overpowered Hawlucha 40 minutes into the g
But games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild have gotten a lot of hate for its weapon durability setup. In Breath of the Wild, you go through weapons and shields extremely quickly, and they’re just broken and unusable once you’ve used them up. This game falls into that exact, problematic description that I’ve given above. Considering how great the rest of the game is, it’s unfortunate that so many people could not get past the durability sys
That doesn't mean Legends: Arceus will be like that, of course. Just this year, New Pokemon Snap has proved that Pokemon can still experiment with fantastic ways of constructing narratives through clever worldbuilding, but given the relative lack of innovation the Pokemon formula has had over the past 15 years or so, a full open world could have gone very wrong. The Wild Area was one of Gen 8’s biggest attempts at innovation, and it came with mixed results. A Monster Hunter-style game feels like open-world training wheels - but it also seems as if Pokemon can't be trusted to ride on its own just
In Hollow Knight , the bestiary is referred to as your Hunter’s Journal. Rather than having it at the start of the game, you will need to acquire it; fortunately, this can happen pretty early on in the g
Battle Chef Brigade has a very interesting take on how to make food, namely that to do so successfully, you need to be playing a match-3 game. After the players gather their materials, they can add them to their dish, filling up squares in a 4x4 grid with colourful circles, and mixing those ingredients together by rotating the placed circles to get lines of th
If only the most visually stunning games with elaborate storytelling and rich lore can hold a candle to the void left in the absence of new Witcher content, then Horizon Zero Dawn will fill that void ten times over. Dominating the screen as the fiery heroine, Aloy will certainly scratch the itch for players who especially enjoy Ciri's story and playing a strong female r
What good would a list about cooking games be without the classic and ever-present Cooking Mama ? Ever since its debut in 2006, the Cooking Mama franchise has been a staple of cooking games, allowing players to learn the basic methods of preparing a wide variety of dishes, and trying to make them just as good as M
Some games have definitely used weapon durability systems better than others. Dying Light , for example, allows for repairing and upgrading weapons. In Monster Hunter , https://monsterhunterwildsforge.Com/ your weapons become less sharp as you use them, limiting what you can cut through, but the game allows for the use of whetstones in order to sharpen them again (though different weapons have different limits). The weapons in Fire Emblem break after you’ve gone through the number of uses per weapon, but most of the weapons are so easy to replace that it doesn’t become a consistent detraction from the game, it simply adds to the strategy per
Let’s take a look at the entry for Drowners. The complete entry for Drowners explains that they aren’t actually dead humans, but an entirely new species. Overall, they live in dirty conditions and eat trash. They don’t often leave the water, but if it’s a rainy night, you might find one on l
Geralt will have access to his silver sword for monsters, as well as his sign abilities like Quen and Igni to protect and attack respectively. Monster Hunter: World is the perfect collaboration for professional monster hunter Geralt of Rivia, whose status as a Witcher allows him heightened senses and a long life of accumulating knowledge on tracking and taking advantage of the weaknesses of monsters. This collaboration was announced alongside the DLC Iceborne which is coming to Monster Hunter: World in Q3 of 2
A side-scrolling RPG with a lot of charm, Dungeon Munchies plays on the key phrase: you are what you eat. In this game, that is a shocking literal phrase. To make any kind of progress through the world, players will need to get ingredients from the monsters they k