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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]