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 …

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 …