Planner season is not synonymous with the New Year. That’s much too late for planner people to be figuring out what systems to use in the forthcoming year. Planner season begins in late summer and culminates with the biggest event of the year for the journaling community—the day Hobonichi planners go on sale at 10 p.m. EST on August 31. I look forward to it each year, as Hobonichi generates hype around the niche holiday by unveiling its new covers and books in the lead-up

It's only been a few months since I wrote about the excellent 9 Kings , a roguelike 'Kingdom Sim' that had you juggling base-building with tower defence. Now I am here to write about another member of the same deeply-specific genre that is also excellent: The King Is Watching .

The deal here is very similar! You pick a King and make "runs" through the game, unlocking more stuff every time so that your subsequent runs are easier/more interesting. You have to juggle

Like many of you, I was once a guy who either thought he could build his own PC, or knew a guy who knew some stuff and who offered to scrounge some parts together for a bargain price. I lived a formative part of my life like this, and let me tell you, it fuckin sucked .

Whether it was my own bumbling hands or the ultimately unqualified bluster of A Guy, for years my PC gaming life was plagued by hardware conflicts, part failures , a need to constantly be upgrading one

Like video game adaptations, live-action anime adaptations get a bad rap for being so rancid that fans preemptively sling shit at their creators for having the audacity to attempt them. Having been a card-carrying member of that camp for years, when I tuned into Bet , Netflix’s live-action take on Kakegurui , I expected an irredeemable trainwreck. What I got instead was a surprisingly entertaining, campy fever dream. I take pride in contributing to getting it greenlit for a second season.

Developed by Simon Berry

I have a problem: when I started working at Kotaku in February 2016, many of my coworkers were big fans of The Witcher 3 . Even though a giant fantasy epic was very much not my kind of game, after listening to Luke and Kirk rave about it, I finally in January 2017. Things didn’t go so well at first, but eventually the game hard. Even if I , The Witcher 3 is now one of my favorite games. The problem here is that

It's September, 1999. I am sitting in the driver's seat of my 1983 Toyota Corona station wagon, window down, music blasting as loud as the car's tired old speakers can manage while I cruise home after a day of classes. I'd say I was singing along, but that's not quite right; I was trying to shriek , because in my tape deck was a busted old copy of .

1999 was, if you

Silksong has sent ripples through the indie game world simply by existing. Just last week, all manner of mice and men were on the verge of deploying their best laid plans, but now with the long-dormant juggernaut suddenly days away from release, everyone else has run for the hills – even bigger names like Baby Steps , the new game from Getting Over It creator Bennett Foddy, and Demonschool , a promising-looking Persona -esque tactics RPG by a team of indie vets. These games are nothing like Silksong ;

Long Story Short is the latest animated series from Bojack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg, with art by Lisa Hanawalt of Bojack and Tuca & Bertie . Despite this pedigree, it feels like it's slipped under the radar a bit, with many folks we know remarking that they didn't even know it was out. Riley and Isaiah have both watched it, and we're here to talk what we loved about it, and what hit a bit too close to home.

(Spoilers for Long Story Short

Aside from a brief stint in covid lockdown where I dumped several hundred dollars into MTG: Arena , got to mythic with a deck and went cold turkey, I have been clean from Magic: The Gathering since in high school. But before then I was a regular tournament goer, spent a lot of time playing the game and still have my rare binder. I still keep up with what’s happening to Magic from a safe distance, far away from my wallet. That’s why I’m pleased that