About Bill Stiteler

I play games to relax. I play games to feel smart, to feel a false sense of power, or to have a story told to me that makes me feel I’ve learned something. Lunar Lander Beyond is based around the premise that frustration and failure are valid recreational activities.
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Saviorless starts as a platformer. Your character jumps, pushes, and pulls as he attempts to follow the Radiant Heron to the Smiling Islands and become a Savior. Sounds nice! Then that stops. Abruptly.
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Look, I watch anime. I know Jujutsu Kaisen is popular. I have no doubt that there are a lot of people who are very excited to play a fighting game set in this world. But if you’re not, there’s very little to recommend in this game.
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I admire when developers take a lack of resources, or a deliberately clunky interface, and creatively turn that into an asset with visual panache and an unusual vision. And One Night: Burlesque has that in spades.
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In the turn-based RPG Wartales, no one likes you. You are killers for hire, after all, with no loyalty to anyone but your team. But they need you. What the game needs, on the other hand, is a stability patch.
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Deadliest Catch is a reality show about crab fishermen, and how brutal and dangerous the job is. I’m sure it’s thrilling, and I can understand why it makes for good TV. But does it make for a good game? Maybe, but not this one.
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I don’t think I’m alone in wondering this question: “Can I ever experience, even in a virtual form, what it must be like to take on the task of breaking down a sailing vessel to its recyclable components? Do I dare to dream?”
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As a new player, I found Nobunaga’s Ambition: Awakening confusing rather than challenging, obtuse rather than detailed, and lacking a level of basic explanation necessary for someone who isn’t familiar with the series. Also, the controls are poorly-matched for the Switch.
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I’m going to tell you as little as possible about the adventure puzzle game Smile for Me, as it’s best to go in knowing as little as possible and just let the world unfold before you. And what an usual world it is.
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Process of Elimination is a murder mystery that takes place on the island headquarters of a cadre of super-detectives who are being picked off by a sadistic criminal mastermind. I loved it.
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Kung Fury: Street Rage – Ultimate Edition comes to the Switch as a set of (very) simple brawlers that harken back to the days of plopping tokens into cabinets at Bally’s Aladdin’s Castle. But how many tokens is it worth?
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Heirs of the Kings is a retro JRPG that’s so by-the-numbers it might as well be in binary. You fight monsters, improve your weapons and armor, gain skills, and cast spells. And just when you start to wonder when the airship is going to show up, the airship shows up.
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Nadir is a card-based battle game featuring deck building, multiple ways to attack, and a rather ingenious combat mechanism I don’t think I’ve seen before…
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Moncage is both lyrical and confounding, abstract and exacting. It’s a puzzle game that should be treated like a collection of short stories rather than a novel. It’s quite literally to be puzzled over.
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Sometimes, you just want a donut, ya know? You don’t want a buffet, you don’t want a seven course meal, you just want a well-made, fresh-out-of-the-oven, glazed donut. The Dark Prophecy is just that, and I devoured it.
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What fun! Arcade Paradise is a wonderfully weird little pile of several minigames stacked on top of each other. But first, it’s a business simulator where you run a laundromat.
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What if the post-apocalypse was fun? Not the apocalypse itself, mind you, but a period after, when the survivors emerged and things were mostly OK? That’s the case with the city-building sim Before We Leave…until game-breaking bugs spoil the good times.
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What we want and what we want people to know about us are two very different things. And in the world of GameDec, you play a character whose job it is to uncover dirty laundry and clean it up, or maybe throw it in an incinerator, never to be seen again.
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