This review contains spoilers — a lot of spoilers, all of them. Think of a spoiler: it’s in here.

Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright is a crossover as ambitious as it is unexpected, with a complex story that ably mixes the disparate elements of its source materials while crafting its own tale about grief, faith, and collective hatred.

Professor Layton and Phoenix Wright seem an odd mix at first. Excluding their protagonists’ peculiar penchant for pointing forward during climatic moments, there’s little alike between these two series: they each have their own distinct art style and gameplay mechanics, with one focusing on exploration and puzzles, while the other, [...]

Star Wars: Jedi Survivor is an unremarkable sequel to Fallen Order, addressing some of its predecessor’s faults, but only slightly, for its real aim is to just offer a bigger, more complex experience.

The story still follows the Jedi Cal Kestis, now working alongside Saw Guerrera in the revolution against the Empire. After a job goes awry, however, Cal needs replacement parts for his ship and so lands on the planet Koboh, searching for his friend Greez. There, he stumbles into an abandoned temple that may contain a key to the location of the hidden planet of Tanallor, which Cal believes can be turned into a safe haven for all those persecuted by the Empire.

Cal spends [...]

The third installment in the Dark Pictures Anthology, House of Ashes, is a much-needed improvement over its predecessors, abandoning the psychological twists that so marred those narratives to instead offer a more basic, but effective horror adventure.

The story starts with an Akkadian king obsessed with blood sacrifices, and so deemed mad by his own general, facing an imminent invasion during an eclipse. The enemy charging the Akkadian temple seems fierce and unstoppable, but when the general flees through the temple’s catacombs alongside an escaped prisoner, he finds out there are even more horrible things waiting for him in the dark. We then jump a few years in time [...]

“Everything is different, boy. Try not to dwell on it.”

God of War represents a radical shift in the classic franchise, which used to live and die by the quality of its many jaw-dropping set-pieces – the reason why its more modest portable outings never stood a chance with their limited budget and scope. Now, with this sequel/reboot, the whole approach has been revamped, resulting in a game that is much more concerned with the depth of its characters and their troubled relationships than with the scale of their many battles. If God of War as a series used to be about outward spectacle, this game revolves around inner conflict. And it’s all the better for it.

The first [...]

This review contains all the spoilers. All of them.

The second game in the Dark Pictures Anthology, the collection of short horror stories presented by a sinister entity called the Curator, Little Hope is a disappointing follow-up to the already mediocre Man of Medan, falling into the same narrative pitfalls that so marred the first game: it once again suffers from a deeply problematic ending that retroactively breaks the story, and from an overreliance on cheap jump scares that quickly overstay their welcome.

It all begins with a bus driver getting into an accident when he’s arriving at the town of Little Hope. Since it’s too dark inside the bus, we don’t see his [...]

Luigi’s Mansion was a launch title for the GameCube back in 2001 and it still holds up today as a great little game: it excels in its whimsy and charm, creating a playful horror atmosphere that is a perfect match for its funny protagonist. However, the whole experience can get a little repetitive by the end, thanks to a stiff structure that has very few surprises in store for us.

After discovering he won a mansion in a contest he didn’t even enter, Luigi follows the directions on the flyer and ends up finding it right in the middle of a spooky forest. Inside the mansion, he’s soon greeted by a professor named E. Gadd, who tells him that the building didn’t exist until a few [...]