The Order is a difficult game (I don’t mean in the difficulty sense): it’s flawed, it’s unusually paced, and the constant shifting between relinquishing control and having it sometimes arrested the flow of seamless events that developer Ready at Dawn aimed for this experience to have. But when it hits the mark it does so in an impressive, often thrilling fashion.

Critics and reviewers have so far been mixed across the board; and so here I come to tell you why I think The Order | 1886 is a good game, and how I don’t think it’s all that dissimilar from another AAA Sony exclusive.

This is going to sound weird probably but evidence suggests that I’m a pretty good teenage girl. My exuberant performance as Gaige in Borderlands 2 is legendary – ask anybody – and before that I managed a highly effective troupe of Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble.  Put me in a tartan skirt and I’ll change the world, or at least the school’s immediate environs. So it probably comes as little surprise that I enjoyed the first part of Dontnod’s odd, sweet, beautiful Life is Strange, an episodic consequenture from the creators of Remember Me.

Do you love learning about upcoming games and their developers? Well… you know the drill by now! I talk to developers on the East Coast who make neat things, and ask them stuff about their neat things. I caught up with several developers at the IndieCade East event in New York City last weekend, so for the next few weeks, I’ll be discussing projects out of New York City, Baltimore, and of course my home town Philadelphia.

I’m going to start off covering my IndieCade East finds with Extreme Exorcism, a game by Golden Ruby Games. I sat down with game producer Mike Christatos in the IndieCade East Esports arena to ask him a few questions. And I got to try out the demo right there on his laptop, pure indie developer style.

I’ve accidentally lost a couple of late nights to Hyrule Warriors, because of the powerful compulsion to play “just one more map.” Sometimes I’m saved by the battery life on the WiiU controller. So in spite of the few things I’m iffy on, I’m pretty sure I love this game.

A new year brings some new editions of my Local Flavor series, where I talk about and with local game studios on the east coast, especially indies, and especially around my home base of Philadelphia. In this article, I’m chatting with local shop QuadraTron Games, a team that works out of the Philly Game Forge co-working space. My questions were answered by studio head programmer Zenas Bellace, who moved into game making full time in 2013, with a little input from the rest of the studio. Q&A after the jump!

Joel Goodwin and I are now nine whole Great British episodes into our collaborative video series Side by Side which aims to cover an assortment of local multiplayer games both old and new, from the familar to the foreign, the physical to the frightening. If you haven’t checked it out yet then here’s a slice of what you’ve been missing:

2014 was the year I took a step back from writing and dug into my backlog without worrying too much about whether I should pen my thoughts or not. Yet, despite playing more than usual, this list is somewhat shorter than my previous years’. That probably makes it about normal size then.

If you’re a Tap-Repeatedly veteran you know our Game of the Year lists are not always lists, not always games, and almost never devoted entirely to the previous year. This year, when discussion about the feature began shortly before Christmas, everyone said it had been a bad year for games. “I don’t know what I’ll write about,” they moaned, meaning what games. Me, I worried I wouldn’t know how to write about them. It’s a feeling I’ve become familiar with in the last twelve months, to my sorrow and my detriment.

Hi Tappers! Thanks for tuning in for our Games of the Year lists. Once again it seems like I’m the one to kick this series off here in January, so let’s ring in the new year and with a list of my favorite or most interesting games of 2014.

At first impression, Bravely Default is actually terrible. It is the JRPG that Zynga would make.  … the story is the most generic JRPG tale possible, an epic where one must take a magical priestess and her fairy sidekick to a temple to “Activate the Wind Crystal” and then three other elemental crystals of increasing power thereafter.

I knew, hour one, that I was going to play it for a hundred hours anyway.