Call of Duty WWII has the series returning to its roots but also once more playing too safe to be truly great. Offering a derivative campaign that fails at developing both its characters and themes, and a bunch of multiplayer modes that any series veteran will have already played hundreds of times, the game’s lack of ambition is the only …

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 …

Shin Megami Tensei IV is an RPG with great narrative ambitions – trying to discuss the purpose of religions and forms of society – that presents a complex – albeit unbalanced – battle system. Its narrative, however, is very erratic and often puts the focus on its least interesting elements. The game’s protagonist, called Flynn, works as an avatar for …

God of War 2 is a fairly safe sequel that capitalizes on the core elements of the first game for great effect, bringing a violent revenge-driven protagonist, and a simple yet effective combat system, while expanding the scope of the adventure. It brings some new ideas to the table, but they could have been more developed. In the story, the …

The Damned, a horror novel written by Andrew Pyper, works better than the author’s previous foray in the genre: although it’s still full of problems, the book at least has a better protagonist than The Demonologist and a more efficient structure. The story follows Danny Orchard, a man who was pronounced dead for a few minutes during a fire when …

The Sword of Shannara, a fantasy novel written by Terry Brooks in 1977, tells a classic, derivative story that is marred by repetition and the unwillingness to detach itself from its greatest inspiration: The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien. The protagonist of the book is Shea, a half-elf who, one day, receives a visit from a …

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker boasts a unique art style – a wondrous cel-shaded look that simulates a cartoon – and a great story – with the best antagonist in the series to date –, but it is sadly bogged down by some uninspired dungeon design and an overly repetitive structure that focus too much on combat. The …

City of Blades – the second book in The Divine Cities trilogy written by Robert Jackson Bennett – manages to easily surpass its already great predecessor. The novel offers a complicated discussion on the problem of soldiering, juxtaposing the idealized purpose of the military with their real one in a narrative tinged with blood and violence, but also deeply melancholic. …

Tails Noir (formerly known as Backbone) is a strange point-and-click adventure. Its story moves from one extreme to the other too fast, going from dabbling into complete cliché material to “holy hell, what’s going on” after a single twist. However, it never commits to both approaches, abandoning important elements for the twist while also not giving it time to breathe. The …

Paper Mario: Sticker Star is one of the most unusual entries in its franchise thanks to some controversial design decisions: treating the great volume of story in the previous games as unnecessary fat, Nintendo has decided to rip it out from this adventure as much as possible and shift the game’s genre from RPG to puzzle-solving. Amid festivities celebrating the …