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 Millenium 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, Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor is a game that fails to harness its own potential. While its main story is hopeless, being shallow, repetitive, and contrived, when it comes to gameplay, it actually presents a great new idea even if it keeps sabotaging it at every turn. Shadow of Mordor’s story takes …

“When education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor” – Paulo Freire. Dragon Age II is a rare type 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 …

Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories, the 3D remake of the GBA title Chain of Memories, is a strange, disjointed, complex beast. It continues the story of Sora directly from where the first game left off, but with even more bizarre characters and plotlines, while introducing a new combat system that is as cumbersome and it’s unbalanced. The story starts with …

Expanding even more the world of this already mammoth of a series, The Malazan Book of the Fallen‘s fifth volume, Midnight Tides, is an epic about zealotry, suffering, lack of compassion, and the intrinsic problems of a capitalist culture. Steven Erikson continues to build complex societies and tragic characters, cleverly mixing humor, drama, and action with social criticism in a …