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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 [...]
This review contains spoilers.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is an ambitious project that succeeds in revitalizing the franchise and bringing it back to its 2D roots: with great synergy between its combat and platform challenges, and brilliant art direction, the game only falters when it comes to its half-baked story, which seems almost unfinished.
We play as Sargon, the youngest member of an elite force of Persian warriors called the Immortals. The introduction focuses on their battle prowess, showing them repelling an invasion force and reversing the course of a lost battle almost on their own. The Immortals will appear often during the fight to assist Sargon, [...]
The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow is an effective point-and-click adventure game that excels in creating an ominous atmosphere that carries most of the cosmic horror narrative. With a focus on characters and setting, the game only falters in the abruptness of its ending, whose anticlimax avoids some important confrontations.
We play as Thomasina Bateman, a young archeologist who receives a letter from one Leonard Shoulder telling her of a historical site in the rural town of Bewlay, named Hob’s Barrow. However, when she arrives in the isolated village, her contact is nowhere to be found, people avoid talking about the barrow, and some residents even urge her to leave at [...]
“But can it run Crysis” was a humorous question back in 2007, as the game was infamous for testing the power of any PC when it was originally released. The 2021 remaster of Crysis aims to make it a demanding game for current hardware as well, but the more important question should have always been “should it run Crysis” instead: is this game just a piece of demanding software, a glorified tech demo, or is there something more to it that makes it worth our time?
The game opens with a distress message from a female scientist, who claims to have found something strange on an island right before the North Koreans took over her operation. We hear this message while looking at what [...]
Bramble: The Mountain King is a great cinematic platformer that presents a dark fairy tale punctuated by some striking imagery. Telling some macabre stories based on Nordic folklore, the game only falters when it makes these tales a bit disconnected from the protagonist’s journey.
The story begins when a boy named Olle wakes up from a nightmare in the middle of the night to find his older sister, Lillemor, gone. Olle decides to venture into the woods in search of her, but they both end up falling down a hill right into a world of fantasy full of wonderful creatures and terrifying monsters, which kidnap Lillemor.
The narrative is framed as a fairy tale, told by a female [...]