Month: January 2025

With a name like Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms, this dungeon crawler might prompt you to file it as yet another action role-playing jaunt, embellished with a series of colon-spliced fantasy buzz words. But you’d only be half right. What might not translate in its ambiguous title is a wholly unique hook: twin dimensions in which its hack-and-slash fare unfolds through a revolving door of swappable puppet heroes. Though Heretic Kingdoms’ numerous quirks, undercooked features, and surprise cliffhanger reveal the project to be an episodic work-in-progress, rather than a standalone, self-contained game, it boasts enough intrigue to convince you to overlook its obvious faults.

Heretic Kingdoms summons for you the Devourer, a soul-consuming demon confined to the nether realm whose ability to possess the bodies of the long-dead and the freshly deceased grants it a foothold in the physical realm. As your first agent in the mortal world, you choose to resurrect a soul from the traditional trinity: the legendary archer, the famed warrior, or the deposed princess-mage. Your curmudgeonly demon is portrayed as the self-assured protagonist, barking over-delivered Old English lines at its sub…

“Perform a heart transplant.” These are the words that greet you at the beginning of Surgeon Simulator 2013. Beyond that, there are no instructions to speak of: it’s just you, a table full of surgical instruments, and a patient whose life you hold in your woefully unprepared hands. While that may sound like a recipe for disaster, it’s also what makes Surgeon Simulator so wonderful. This is an absurdist parody of one of the world’s most skillful occupations, a game that has you fumbling your way through one operation after the other as you drop your watch inside a patient’s abdominal cavity, lose entire organs out of the back of a moving ambulance, and giggle with delight over your own surgical incompetence.