There’s a distinctly nostalgic feel to this month’s review selection. Let’s start with Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion, a disarming throwback from its pixelart aesthetic to a title that wouldn’t have looked out of place during the early Britsoft era. Yet with its contemporary sense of humour and offbeat twists to action-adventure formulas, it serves up a fruitful blend of old and new.
But not every game nails that balance. Oddworld: Soulstorm revisits 1998’s Abe’s Exoddus, yet its ‘2.9D’ perspective muddies the recipe, while cludgy controls and questionable physics mean it lacks the original’s precision in its exacting puzzle-platforming. Mages’ Famicom Detective Club remakes on Switch have the opposite problem: the visual overhaul is certainly welcome, but they’re otherwise too faithful to the originals’ archaic designs.