The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow is an effective point-and-click adventure game that excels at creating an ominous atmosphere that carries most of its cosmic horror story. 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 …

Beware: this review contains psychic spoilers that will be sent straight into your mind. Through a psychic technique called “reading.” It’s late at night when Pierre, the purist, flies over to Retro Studios headquarters, looking for some executive to drink. To his dismay, however, he finds no one there but some tired programmers and artists working overtime, who are people …

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 …

Spiderlight picks a classic fantasy story – the hero’s journey that revolves around the battle against an evil dark lord – and subverts it to shed light on how its tropes are mostly rooted in a binary worldview. With strong characters and a great discussion on the dehumanization of the “other,” the novel offers a thoughtful, funny, and quite self-aware …

Based on a Russian novel of the same name, written by Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter that excels in atmosphere and worldbuilding, providing a tense and memorable experience due to its striking, stress-inducing setting. However, the game’s bare-bones story, with its paper-thin characters and a noble but naïve anti-war message, ultimately rings hollow. The world of Metro …

Do you remember, in Black Panther, when Killmonger had a point until he decided to go full bonkers heartless villain because that’s what villains are supposed to do? Or, in The Batman, when Riddler had a point until the third act, when he decides to ruin Gotham in a way that betrays his own history and ideals? I thought a …

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 …