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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 [...]
This review contains spoilers.
Metro: Last Light is a fitting sequel to the good but problematic Metro 2033, sharing many of its strengths and weaknesses. It still excels at creating an oppressive atmosphere that enhances the survival-horror aspect of the narrative, and it still fails at building its stealth sections against human enemies, which tend to morph into cluttered firefights. Its story, meanwhile, returns to the anti-political message of the first game, still trying unsuccessfully to defend empathy and condemn ideology (in its broad, general sense) at the same time, but now in a much more complex and fascinating way.
The prologue [...]
Telling the story of a frustrated writer who suddenly sees himself as one of his creations, Alan Wake is a great horror game that successfully operates under the logic of a nightmare, blurring fantasy and reality through the veil of horror.
Author of a couple of best-sellers, Alan Wake has been unable to write anything for almost two years, and because he’s getting increasingly frustrated with his writer’s block, his wife Alice decides to go with him on a vacation to a small, isolated town in Washington, called Bright Falls. They are to stay at a cabin on a lake, but as soon as they arrive, they start to quarrel and when Wake storms out of the cabin, furious at her, the lights [...]