Dominated by a melancholic atmosphere and a strong allegorical structure, Rime is a touching adventure game whose problems lie in its repetitive narrative and the way its level design discourages exploration with lots of points of no return: we may still want to see what’s out there, but sadly, it’s impossible now that we’ve crossed an arbitrary part of the …

The Lovecraft Project: Howard Phillips Lovecraft is the father of cosmic horror – the genre constructed around the notion that we humans are just a tiny, insignificant part of the universe, which holds much bigger, ancient, more powerful beings. We are nothing compared to what lies out there, beyond our reach and understanding. The plan is to write a few …

“What if this fear is worth listening to?” a voice asks Senua while she’s heading up a hill alone at night, watching the trees move by themselves, opening a path to her, while the sound of drums booms in the distance, disturbing the torches’ flames. She can hear the grunts and growls of the dead, too, echoing around her, mixed …

Call of the Sea is a first-person point-and-click adventure that tries to put a new spin on the Cthulhu mythos. With a colorful and vibrant art style, the game is unfortunately marred by exposition-heavy writing and questionable puzzle design. It’s the 1930s, and a woman called Nora Everharti is traveling to a remote island in the Pacific in search of …

Blackfish City is a book of two halves that don’t merge very well: it wants to discuss the problems of an ultraliberal society and the rise of a rebellion in a cruel city, all within a story where a family finally reunites after many years of being kept apart. That sounds great, but the novel fails to merge these two …

Birth by Sleep, originally released for the PSP, is a great prequel that excels when it comes to expanding the Kingdom Hearts’ universe and lore, even though it never quite succeeds at justifying its burdensome narrative structure: there’s this great expression in Portuguese, which can be translated literally to “forcing a friendship,” that is basically how anyone feels about the …

Full of wit and whimsy, Astrologaster is an excellent comedy set in the Elizabethan era. Its characters are always introduced with song, its themes are carefully developed and subverted, its twists are made to be silly and humorous: boasting some great writing by Katherine Neil, the game more than makes up for its simple visual design. The protagonist is doctor …

“The protesters outside are getting louder. Their chants are still faint, but somehow clearer than before. Or maybe that’s just Ophelia’s guilty conscience.” Ophelia’s guilty conscience will be the true ghost haunting her in the mysteriously abandoned planetary station she’s assigned to work in, and where she eventually gets stranded after some strange happenings. Ophelia is a therapist in need …

Resident Evil: Revelations is a game of two halves: the first one offers a claustrophobic environment immersed in a carefully built horror atmosphere, while the second offers mediocre action sequences with endless amounts of similar, shallow enemies. The story begins when Jill Valentine and Parker Luciani – two agents working for a counter-terrorism group – are tasked with investigating a …

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a peculiar children’s story: its most striking moments are not of joy, adventure, discovery, or magic, but those that are traumatic, violent, and – unfortunately – realistic. The wondrous elements serve almost as an excuse to deal with those more grounded issues: fantasy is not the goal of the story, but …