Another year, another Indie Game Book Club retrospective! If you’re unfamiliar with what I’m talking about, the short of it is that we’re a group who gets together to play a new game roughly once a month and then talk about it together. I thought it’d be good to look back on the year, talk about what we did differently and once again share my reviews for all the games we played.
I wonder how many times I’ll open a blog post acknowledging the large gap since I last posted. At least this time it serves as a framing device for an article! So yeah, hey it’s been a whille since I wrote anything that wasn’t my vows. I got busy with getting married, but more than that, it’s because I fell out of the routine of writing and lost all momentum I had with it.
I’ve been in the mood for DS and 3DS games lately. I’ve got a lot of nostalgia for the handheld gaming era - I miss weird ports that try to condense down big console games, games that have really cool tech that makes you think how they managed that on weaker hardware, and I especially miss the smaller scale games with weird concepts which developers didn’t have to spend millions of dollars and years of development to make. So in my yearning of a bygone era, I decided to do a deep dive on the Guild games on 3DS, which I felt really embodied the weird small scale stuff we never see in the “mainstream” anymore. Setting the scene
Okay so elephant in the room - yeah it’s another double month Monthly Review. But I actually meant to do it this time around! At the end of May, I didn’t really have anything I wanted to talk about except one album. On the gaming side of things, I had spent my time replaying long-ish games (Fallout: New Vegas and Digimon World DS) and movie wise, nothing felt right for a more longer form review that I didn’t cover on my Letterboxd account. So I decided to do another double month feature! I hope you enjoy the Maune Monthly Review!
That’s right, I’m not above clickbait titles. There’s not even a reason for me to do it - I don’t run ads, I don’t track impressions, I don’t even have a late 90s/early 2000s visitor count. I’m doing clickbait for the love of the game, for the respect of the hustle.