Ready Player One, a sci-fi novel written by Ernest Cline, uses the vastness of the geek universe to compose the base of its narrative without capturing a fraction of its wonder. The book is plagued by one-dimensional characters and fails to deliver anything more than glorified references. The story takes place in a decrepit society dominated by mega-corporations, where hunger, …

Super Mario Odyssey is a marvelous achievement, not only successfully moving the series back to its sandbox structure, but also expanding it in exciting new ways. It’s a game brimming with energy and creativity, one that fully develops its many ideas and lets the player free to explore its fascinating worlds packed with things to do and discover. The story …

The first book in The Wheel of Time series, The Eye of the World, is an epic fantasy novel that wears its inspirations on its sleeve – even to a fault: its story is clearly based on Arthurian legends and The Lord of the Rings, but it’s Tolkien who most shackles Robert Jordan’s novel. The Eye of the World shines …

The ambition of Assassin’s Creed III is both its strength and its Achilles heel. The scope of its world and the number of activities available for the player is certainly impressive, since in one moment we will be bombarding ships during a storm on the high seas and, in the next, we will be hunting foxes with hand-made traps in …

Professor Layton is a franchise that has never needed constant revamps to work well. Its games, after all, are about only two things: their story and puzzles – and two puzzles are never the same. The fact that Miracle Mask doesn’t do much to reinvent the wheel, then, is far from a problem, as it still offers the franchise’s best …

Daemon is a book that seeks to illustrate the mastery of technology over humanity. While many stories focus on technological dependence and create apocalyptic settings based on the horrible scenario where people suddenly no longer have it available – the total absence of electrical energy is a recurring device –, Daniel Suarez’s work has another purpose in mind: to show …

  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 …

Titanfall is an excellent example of the problem of restricting all modes of a game to online matches. After all, despite injecting into its worn-out genre new mechanics that finally renew and expand the possibilities of an FPS, Titanfall fails to develop them fully, limiting the player experience. The game’s story, which is told in an online campaign mode, is …

Altered Carbon is little concerned with the philosophical implications of its incredible premise, preferring to put all its focus on the political aspects of its fantastical world. Written by Richard Morgan, this cyberpunk novel is not interested in how the characters deal with issues of memory and identity, but in how they manage to resist the constant oppression of a …

The Night of the Rabbit follows the classic formula of the point-and-click adventure genre: it tries to immerse us in a fantastical world, with a strong focus on story and atmosphere, while structuring the action around puzzle-solving. Here, Daedelic Entertainment presents a fairy tale – with talking animals and evil magicians – and is successful at building the narrative’s optimistic …