The Order: 1886 makes a lot of promises it doesn’t intend to keep, leaving so many elements underdeveloped that it ends up feeling like the first couple of episodes of a TV series, instead of the full season. The game opens in media res, during a prison escape. The protagonist, Grayson, is being tortured by two English soldiers, who are …

This review contains some spoilers. They’re not that big, though. Despite being a cosmic horror novel, The Hollow Places is a bit afraid of scaring us too much. The narrator is frequently making jokes and downplaying the grotesque events she’s witnessing, which may add to the character, yes, but also hampers the overall tension. This narrator is Kara, a recently divorced …

One of the main distinguishable elements of the Gothic genre is the spectral presence of the past, which returns to haunt the characters and remind them of the things they want to forget – and usually the more we live, the more we want to forget. The setting in What Remains of Edith Finch is a house built on memories, …

“The past, even dead, especially dead, could continue to work harm.” – Leslie Fielder. “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” – William Faulkner. The past is an uneasy thing. Suffering constant historical and political revisions, it’s restless, rarely remaining rooted in time, revealing a worrying tendency to extend its claws to the future and, just like Palpatine, somehow …

Replaced is quite beautiful. The framing of the scenes, the buildings in the background, and especially the striking use of lightning and depth can all make us gasp in wonder. The HD-2D pixel art is atmospheric, and the environments are all incredibly detailed, layered, and bustling with life. We fully believe in Replaced’s world and are immersed in it just …

The Red Strings Club is a cyberpunk bartender game in which you pour special drinks to get information out of people. And although it largely succeeds in developing its discussions on free will, power, and (the lack of) agency, its all-over-the-place structure hampers some parts of the experience. We mainly play as Donovan, the bartender of The Red Strings Club, …

Developed by Bloober Team, The Medium tries to blend the point-and-click with survival horror, failing to live up to both genres. With a problematic story that quickly derails after a promising start and a main gimmick that is wasted by poor puzzle design, The Medium eventually falls short of all its ambitions. The game starts with Marianne, a young Polish …

Some stories are much more interested in developing their core themes and ideas than a complex plot full of twists and turns. Such is The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, a science fiction novel that leverages the quirkiness of its unique cast of characters to shed light on many of our society’s problems. The protagonist is Rosemary, a …

Remember, red means danger. This review contains spoilers. Metro: Last Light is a fitting sequel to the good but problematic Metro 2033, sharing many of its strengths and weaknesses: if it still excels at creating an oppressive atmosphere that enhances its survival-horror aspect, it still fails at building its stealth sections against human enemies, which tend to morph into cluttered …

Stephen King’s Revival experiments with cosmic horror to tell a story much less interested in providing cheap scares than in discussing how our search for order (and justice) in life leads us to embrace a religion. The real horror of its narrative is not crafted around the danger of eldritch monsters, but how our concept of an afterlife shapes our …