Sections
“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 [...]
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 [...]
Close to the Sun is a narrative adventure game that falters when it comes to its most fundamental part: its narrative. With shallow, boring characters and undeveloped themes, the game even foregoes some conclusion in favor of leaving doors open to a sequel.
The story takes place in 1897 in a reality where Nikola Tesla has built a futuristic ocean linear named Helios, which is supposed to house the best and most prominent scientific minds of the world. Tesla builds a miniature Rapture inside his ship, promising that in Helios scientific research will not be bound by laws or morality. One of the posters you find very early on in the game promises, “Invent and innovate without [...]
This review contains spoilers.
Developed by Frictional Games, Soma is a sci-fi adventure game that mixes horror with philosophical discussions about identity. However, with poorly developed characters and troubling design decisions, the game ends up sinking under the weight of its own ambitions.
The protagonist is Simon, a young man who gets into an accident after proposing to a woman without success – an accident that causes her death. Weeks later, he decides to take an experimental test and have his brain scanned. All seems well until he wakes up and realizes he’s no longer in the doctor’s office, but in a ruined underwater facility filled with corpses, robots [...]
Developed by Quantic Dream, Beyond: Two Souls is simply a mess: its narrative doesn’t work, thanks to a disconnected structure and shallow, boring characters, and its gameplay even less, offering a tiny, inconsequential level of control over the events.
The protagonist, Jodie Holmes, played by Elliot Page, has spent her entire life in the company of a spiritual entity named Aiden. Harassed by her father and shunned by society, Jodie ends up growing up in a laboratory, studied by the kind scientists Nathan Dawkins (Willem Dafoe) and Cole Freeman (Kadeem Hardison). However, when the CIA demands her help, Jodie realizes that she is only being used by the government and runs [...]
One of the main elements distinguishing the Gothic genre is the ghostly presence of the past, which returns to haunt the characters and remind them of the things they want to forget. The setting in What Remains of Edith Finch is a house built on memories, which hide the key to understanding the curse that plagues the Finch family. The game’s gothic narrative is enveloped by a melancholic atmosphere marked by grief and loss, with stories that are impactful because of the inevitability of their tragic outcomes and the unique way in which they are presented.
The player controls the young Edith Finch in the first person, observing the world through her eyes while reading the [...]