“I don’t believe whoever wins or loses, or whoever loses or wins, will lose or win. Everybody’s gonna lose,” Dilma Rousseff. The Last of Us Part II is an improvement over the first game on basically every level. It’s a harrowing experience, offering a gut-wrenching story about the never-ending cycle of violence perpetrated in the name of justice that is …

This review contains spoilers. Falling is a shallow thriller that heavily relies on overused tropes and stereotypes to tell a by-the-books story of a plane being hijacked by terrorists: full of one-note characters and predictable twists, the novel is also marred by a strong reluctance to delve into its own themes. The book opens with a shocking scene full of …

This review contains spoilers. The Last of Us is a competent post-apocalyptic zombie game about a troubled, violent man making troubled, violent decisions. It may never quite manage to successfully integrate its gameplay systems into the story, which leans too heavily on the clichés of the genre, but still offers a carefully built nihilist narrative and a couple of memorable …

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is a competent, albeit problematic, conclusion to the Millennium series, written by Stieg Larsson. The book brings together the trilogy’s best features, with a narrative that is socially engaged and deeply concerned with violence against women, but also many of its worst flaws, such as useless plotlines and dialogues full of exposition. The …

Based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s most famous work, although greatly diverging from it in tone and message, Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor is a game that fails to harness its own potential. While its main story is shallow, repetitive, and contrived (hopeless both in its suffocating atmosphere and overall quality), when it comes to gameplay, the game actually presents a …

“When education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor” – Paulo Freire. Dragon Age II is a rare breed of RPG: instead of offering an epic, episodic adventure, filled with exotic people and wondrous locales to explore, it has a single, almost barren location and a thematically focused story. Its reused assets and simple …

Brandon Sanderson’s first published novel, Elantris, fares much better when it comes to handling the twists and turns of the story than when it’s time to develop its characters and social discussions. The book’s main setting is the city of Elantris, a place wrapped in an aura of mysticism. Its inhabitants, once powerful, shining, and immortal, now find themselves cursed, …

Dear Esther’s story is told by enigmatic voice messages that eventually contradict themselves, causing disorientation and confusion. Its setting is eerie, enveloped by a dreamlike atmosphere that rejects common logic. It’s a fascinating game that only falters when it tries too hard to make us replay it. The gameplay in Dear Esther could not be simpler. Our character is stuck …

The Turing Test is a puzzle game that is often at odds with itself, packed with design decisions that work against the discussions present in its story. It’s a game that contradicts itself at every turn. You play as Ava Turing, an engineer on board a space station above Jupiter’s Europa, who one day is awakened from cryosleep by an …

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 …