“Time marches on and sooner or later you realize it is marching across your face.”
Lake is a game about a specific time in some people’s lives, usually when they are in their thirties or forties and suddenly realize that everything has passed in the blink of an eye. It was just yesterday that they were going to school, worried about grades and homework, and now they’re adults with bills and responsibilities. Their childhood friends are now married and with kids, living in another town. They were so busy working, studying, producing, and meeting deadlines that when they finally stop to take a breath, they realize that more than a decade has gone by. It’s a game about nostalgia [...]
Chorus is a competent space combat shooter that offers fast-paced action and a fascinating if underdeveloped story. The lack of mission variety can hold the experience back, but the game’s space dogfights are usually exhilarating enough to make up for it.
The protagonist is Nara, a former ace pilot of the Circle, a religious group that is wreaking havoc in the galaxy, trying to make people submit to their doctrines by force and killing those who refuse. She is a deserter in hiding, working as a simple scavenger for a man named Sav in the reclusive settlement of the Enclave.
Nara chose a job that wouldn’t let her forget her past deeds: while scavenging, she often comes [...]
Battle Chasers: Nightwar, a turn-based RPG based on Joe Madureira’s fantasy comic, boasts a beautiful art style and a serviceable, if repetitive combat system. Unfortunately, its barebones story leaves much to be desired: Nightwar may look and play alright, but the narrative element that could have improved the experience is just not there.
The story follows a group of misfits, led by a girl named Gully, who wears a pair of magical gauntlets from her dead father, who was once a great hero. This puts a target on her back, but fortunately, she has some friends (the swordsman Garrison, the golem Calibretto, the rogue Red Monika, and the wizard Knolan) to protect her. These [...]
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 with a focus 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 of 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. [...]