January 19, 2026 by Greg Noe
Boiling a work of art down to its marrow does it little favors. But these often flippant remarks can be useful for communicating what a game is at its core, whether to sell it to someone or scare them away. I recently heard Blue Prince described as “a 3D mystery dungeon game” from someone who hadn’t played it. These are all words that may apply to it, but they used them derogatorily as an excuse to not engage with it further. Even here we used to assign an irreverent “genre” to a game, where else could you see the original Assassin’s Creed described as a “Repetitive Stealth Adventure” back in 2007?
When I first heard about Consume Me, it was “the dieting and eating disorder game.” While not inaccurate, it’s actually an autobiographical, time management heavy, teenage life sim. What begins as a game where you manage what’s on your plate and decide which classes to study for, Consume Me concludes in what I can only describe as: life. People grow up, dreams and goals are forgotten, but our experiences have already shaped us.
I love this game, zits and all, let’s flashback to high school.
Read moreJanuary 14, 2026 by Greg Noe
I’ve decided to try and write more reviews of games in 2026, now that we’re back more or less in full swing, I want to return to acknowledging games I want to call out. We’re going to kick the year off with Kenny Sun’s Ball x Pit, a game that is the totally normal combination of Breakout, Vampire Survivors, and ActRaiser’s town building mode.
Read moreDecember 18, 2025 by Greg Noe
2025 was an incredible year of gaming for me, I loved a bunch of games and there are a hundred more titles that I didn’t even get to play. It wasn’t quite as grand for the industry though, as consolidation and layoffs continue. EA will soon be owned by the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund where they will attempt to gameswash their image, and the BDS boycott of Microsoft is still necessary, even if the Xbox itself has flatlined. I would have more hope for 2026 if AI wasn’t looming over everything, ready to smother creativity in the crib.
But the games persist. Here’s our top 10 games of 2025, now stamped with the First Hour Seal of Quality.
Read moreDecember 08, 2025 by Greg Noe
From the first bump of playing Angeline Era, I knew I was in for something fantastically weird. Blocky but expressive 3D graphics, terrific writing that reads like a pitch perfect 90s JRPG localization, and most important: bumpslash combat harkening back to the early Ys games. Developer Analgesic Productions is channeling a few periods of games so specifically with Angeline Era, not to mention fueling inspiration from Takeshi’s Castle and Irish folklore, it feels targeted at me personally.
Announced back in 2023, to nail down what Angeline Era is feels like an impossible task. At its core it’s a 3D action game focused on movement and managing multiple enemies at once. However, there are innumerable facets beyond that to not only add depth to the gameplay, but give its characters and world a singular uniqueness. This is a land where Christian angels have fallen to earth and now mythologies mix and bump up against each other in unexpected ways.
I played through Angeline Era entirely on my Steam Deck, a Steam key was provided to me by the publisher.
Read moreNovember 26, 2025 by Greg Noe
Way back in 2012, a few writers here huddled around a 2006 point and click adventure game called The Blackwell Legacy. Available in “Wadjet Eye's The Blackwell Trilogy Remastered” bundle, at the time our team was attempting to focus more on indie games. I grew up on Monkey Island and other point and click adventures so checking out Blackwell seemed like an obvious choice.
Then the most unexpected and delightful thing happened: I fell in love with not only a game and series, but an entire indie publisher in Wadjet Eye. Now thirteen games and thirteen years later, I still pick them all up and am constantly impressed by not only the games themselves, but how Wadjet Eye is able to drag the entire genre forward.
I’m getting a little ahead of myself though, because we’re here to discuss Blackwell Epiphany, the fifth and final game in the series. It’s a fantastic send off to our characters and the best game of 2014.
Read moreNovember 14, 2025 by Greg Noe
Back in 2009 I found a random Wordpress blog from Paul Abbamondi about LEGO Harry Potter games and made a comment. He immediately emailed me and we started chatting about video games, writing, television, and life. He began writing for this site in early 2010 and we kept in close touch for years. When the site started winding down and my kids headed to school, Paul and I slowly grew apart, nothing dramatic, but still regretful. In 2019 Paul lost his battle with cancer and passed away at 35 years of age.
Read moreOctober 29, 2025 by Greg Noe
This October I made a game in PICO-8 for a month-long game jam. As an experienced non-game developer of over 20 years, I thought I’d write down my thoughts on the pros and cons of PICO-8, along with a quick walkthrough of the design of my game’s puzzles and code. Plus how it’s easy to be over-ambitious in a month-long jam!
On October 27th I released Step and Deliver on itch.io, it’s a puzzle game with some basic roots in Sokoban, but the catch is you have a limited number of steps before you’re zapped back to your starting location. I’m reasonably happy with how it turned out, I think the step feature worked to create some interesting puzzles but also generally railroaded each stage with the limited actions available.
Let’s step into it all.
Read moreSeptember 25, 2025 by Greg Noe
In 2013, the games industry unknowingly stood on a precipice. Fascism in the United States and around the world was on the rise, and it manifested in 2014 in the form of Gamergate. A whole bunch of online losers harassed developers, critics, writers, journalists, and more in the name of misogyny, racism, and fascism.
Many of these same losers are still around today, shouting into the void about feminists and trans people and when a woman is in a video game. Generating harassment campaigns against YouTubers and swatting streamers. There's no appeasing them, no amount of firing developers or writers will quench their thirst for more violence. This has been their strategy in the United States starting with Gamergate in 2014 and it continues until this very moment.
One of the games involved in the Gamergate groundswell was Gone Home, a 2013 indie game from The Fullbright Company. Called a “walking simulator (derogatory)” at the time, I will now call it a “walking simulator (affectionate)”. It carries LGBT themes, a female protagonist, and little traditional gameplay, so of course it was an easy target for junior fascists.
It was also the best game of 2013.
Read moreSeptember 18, 2025 by Greg Noe
In 2024 I completed my multi-year journey of playing every single NES game released in North America. I booted up 766 games in total, beating 141 of them. As I gathered my thoughts on the huge library I had just waded through, two impressions rose to the forefront:
The inaugural First Hour Seal of Quality goes to Summer Carnival ‘92: Recca, the best shmup on the NES, exclusive to Japan for 20 years.
Read moreAugust 20, 2025 by Greg Noe
First Hour returns after a long hiatus with an updated site and all the original reviews.
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