Lucas White
Game industry critic and reviewer
Writing For
ShackNews
TheGamer
Playstation Lifestyle
Nintendo WireLatest Reviews
Here at Shacknews, I’ve talked about Atelier a few times. GUST and Koei Tecmo’s item synthesis and cozy vibes RPG series has had a lot of ups and downs over the past few decades. If you’ve read my previous reviews, you might have a skewed perspective, as the most recent...
Sometimes you see a game when you’re just scrolling through the eShop and you see the potential for a life-changing experience. Sometimes it doesn’t pan out the way you’d hoped, but you still have a few laughs along the way. That’s what happened when I tried Full Metal Schoolgirl, the...
Unless you’re sitting in the ludicrously small mid-section of a Venn Diagram comparing “Katamari Damacy fans” and “Apple Arcade subscribers,” you’ve probably been waiting upwards of 14 years for a new Katamari game that isn’t a remaster or wacky spin-off. And Touch my Katamari was a PS Vita game, so...
I find myself growing more and more tired of roguelikes lately, and I don’t really believe in “guilty pleasure” as a concept. But if you held a gun to my head and asked me to identify my gaming guilty pleasure, I’d probably answer with Vampire Survivors. It’s the perfect combination...
Playtonic Games’ Yooka-Laylee was one of many Kickstarter successes of its time, in an era in which spiritual successors for classic games were an easy hit. The 2017 original was a clear callback to Banjo-Kazooie, a Nintendo 64 platformer known for its googly eyes, wealth of collectibles, and complex platforming...
King of Meat is an action-packed, multiplayer dungeon crawler developed by Glowmade and published by Amazon Games. It’s kind of a mix of goofy vibes, from Adult Swim-like edgy cartoon humor to Ninja Warrior and Most Extreme Elimination Challenge. Imagine a fantasy-flavored challenge of carnage, spikes, and skeletons, televised to...
Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth, a janky, low budget PlayStation Vita RPG from 2015, is one of my favorite games of all time. I’m not even that much of a Digimon person, but that’s a game I’ve dumped a few hundred hours into over multiple playthroughs, something I’m rarely capable of...
Mine is a Mario Party household. Over the years my wife and child have enjoyed many nights of minigame-fueled board game chaos. Things always got heated, especially as we taught our young one to handle things not going his way. The grown-ups needed a refresher on those lessons as well,...
Atelier, Gust’s long-running item synthesis RPG series, reached new heights with the debut of Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout in 2019. Gust used that momentum to sincerely attempt to reinvent what Atelier is in systems and scale, leading to the massive and successful Atelier Yumia: The Alchemist...
Re-releasing a classic game isn’t as easy as you might think. People talk about preservation, but that’s largely solved. You can just download a ROM. Hell, Final Fantasy Tactics, subject of longtime fan demand, was a ROM you could pay for if you had a PlayStation device, for years. But...
As I pushed my way through Baby Steps over 11 or so of god’s own hours, I asked myself a few questions. What does it mean to feel accomplished in a game? What value is there in pushing beyond one’s own perceived limits for the sake of finishing something? Can...
The PlayStation Portable was an iconic homestead for niche RPGs, cementing the likes of Nippon Ichi Software as small but permanent fixtures of video games. Cladun started there, a series that combined retro gaming aesthetics with the enduring fixtures of contemporary, premium handheld gaming. Cladun struggled a bit to survive...
