Norco is a point-and-click adventure that moves in a frantic place, structured like a fever dream, depicting a land immersed in chaos, where the people are confused, lost, and dangerous. It’s a game that is not afraid to double down on the bizarre, providing a strange and memorable experience.

It opens with a series of descriptions that set the pace and tone of the story, leaving you bewildered as they move quickly from one subject to the next. The first ones show an industrialized society where pollution is a part of life – it harkens back to the shot in Blade Runner that introduces the setting with refineries and plumes of fire. You click and the scene changes, you are now [...]

Don’t let the charming, cute look of Tunic fool you: this game is more akin to Dark Souls than to the remake of Link’s Awakening. Its welcoming aesthetic is a ruse, locking you into a harsh and cryptic world, where enemies are merciless and the way forward is often concealed. It’s a game about secrets hidden in plain sight, about discovering things that were always there in front of you all along – you just didn’t know how to spot them.

In Tunic you play as a nameless fox, who wears a green tunic and brandishes a sword and shield. The game wears its inspirations on its sleeve: its aesthetic and top-down perspective harkens back to Zelda while the way you save, heal and, most [...]

The Order 1886 is a third-person shooter that wastes too much potential. It makes a lot of promises it doesn’t intend to keep, leaving so many elements underdeveloped that it ends up feeling like the first couple of episodes of a TV series, instead of a full season.

The game opens in media res, during a prison escape. The protagonist, Grayson, is being tortured by two English soldiers, who are drowning him, intending to extract info on his collaborators. The scene goes into a first-person view each time Grayson is put underwater to make his suffering more impactful, but a simple button press is all that it takes for him to fight back and even drown one of his torturers – in a [...]

Based on a Russian novel of the same name, written by Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter that focuses on atmosphere and worldbuilding. It provides a tense and memorable experience due to its striking setting and quirky details, but its bare-bones story, filled with paper-thin characters and a noble, but naïve anti-war message, ultimately rings hollow.

The world of Metro 2033 is its selling point. The story takes place in a post-apocalyptic Russia, where people were driven underground by hordes of devilish monsters and demons. They live in the subway, with scarce resources, and are under constant attack from creatures and other desperate humans. While the [...]

The Forgotten City is a first-person adventure game concerned with the bearing culture and religion have on people’s lives: how they shape their worldview, dictate what is right and wrong, affect everyday decisions, and push them to certain behaviors. It’s also a time loop story and a rare one at that, in the sense that it cares much more about its themes and setting than about the gimmick itself.

The protagonist (we can select their gender and a brief backstory) wakes up on a riverbank one day with no memory of how they got there. Soon they meet a strange woman named Karen, who urges them to go look for a friend, who went to search the nearby ruins and never returned. [...]

On paper, Resident Evil: Revelations 2 is a perfectly competent entry in the series, getting a lot of the basics of a survival horror right, successfully building a tense atmosphere while giving limited ammo to the player. The problem is that, just like its many monsters, the game lacks a soul: its design choices and storyline are so bland and uninspired that, even though Revelations 2 is far from being the worst entry in the series, it’s certainly one of the most forgettable Resident Evil games.

The game opens with an ad about the dangers of bioterrorism, advertising how politicians and big companies should not be trusted. It’s selling a private organization called TerraSave [...]