Metroid Fusion is a game designed around secrets: as Samus explores a dangerous space station, finding secret passageways and items, she is also uncovering the truth about the place, shedding new light on the hidden agenda of her employer. It’s a tense, suspenseful adventure, packed full of dark corridors, somber music, and a scary double with piercing, empty white eyes that hunts Samus down relentlessly.

Fusion begins with the protagonist, bounty hunter Samus Aran, recounting the general events of the previous games. The Galactic Federation hired her to commit genocide on SR388, killing all surviving metroids on the planet, since they’re dangerous creatures that suck the [...]

The road to Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 was a short, but still bumpy one. The first game was an uneven adventure that set up the plot of its sequel with a post-credits twist that made absolutely no sense, while Mirror of Fate made poor use of its classic Metroidvania format and told its story with a disastrous structure. And here we are, with the last game of the trilogy, Lords of Shadow 2, which manages to be worse than its predecessors: although it still shares most of their problems, it also displays an alarming lack of creativity and direction.

The premise was already set. Dracula is alive in the twenty-first century and Zobek warns him that Lucifer is about to free [...]

When it was released back in 2010, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow shook the franchise to its core, switching genres and rebooting the entire storyline. Instead of being a Metroidvania, putting the focus on the exploration of a labyrinthine environment, the game follows the God of War approach of creating awe-inspiring set-pieces punctuated by brutal action. The game mostly succeeds at what it tries to do, building a melancholic atmosphere while telling a tragic and exciting tale, but it is also dragged down by strange narrative decisions, a baffling post-credits scene, and problematic controls.

The protagonist is Gabriel Belmont, a knight of the Brotherhood of Light chosen to [...]

Here’s the thing about repetition: it’s an ambivalent element. On the one hand, it’s the ultimate learning tool, commonly used by tiny humans, called children, to mimic big humans, called adults, to discover how to act and behave in life. It’s how humans of all sizes learn how to speak a language, how to write, how to build objects and structures, how to cook, how to live in society – actually, some never learn this last part. Repetition can be relaxing, especially when it creates a routine: the familiarity of some elements and events can make us feel safe, in control of things. But on the other hand, repetition is also intrinsically tedious, since it’s anathema to change: we feel we [...]

Last Stop is a narrative adventure game that mixes family drama with the fantastical with mixed results. It presents three different stories set in the same city, which are mostly well-told, presenting endearing characters and some neat ideas. These stories, however, take too long to converge into a climax, which feels rushed and underdeveloped.

There are three main characters in Last Stop. We have John Smith, a middle-aged white man that is stuck with a terrible desk job, but finds solace in caring for his daughter, Molly. One day, his neighbor, Jack, bumps into a strange man in the subway and is cursed alongside John, who was there just trying to defuse the situation: when [...]

Drakengard 3 is a narrative-driven action game that shows some promise at the beginning, when it presents intriguing characters and mysteries with a striking, aggressive tone, and a serviceable combat system. As the game goes on, however, it gets dragged down by repetition: characters never evolve beyond their initial characterization, levels are reused ad aeternum, and the combat boils down to using the same combo over and over again.

The game – which serves as a prequel to the first two Drakengards – opens with a narration typical of the genre, the one that functions as an introduction to the fantastical world where the story takes place. The narrator talks about the sudden [...]