Written by Josh Malerman, Bird Box is a post-apocalyptic horror novel about a world where people are haunted by unfathomable creatures that drive everyone who lays eyes on them mad. The book, however, fails to take advantage of this terrifying premise, unable to present compelling characters and scenes packed with tension. The protagonist is Malorie, a woman who finds herself …

This review contains some small spoilers. The Tales of series is marked by its character-driven stories, where their quirks and relationships receive much more attention than the actual plot itself. This is Tales of Arise saving grace, as it boasts a touching love story and a great cast of characters that do a lot of the heavy lifting that the …

Developed by Platinum Games, Bayonetta is an action game that has an unusual heroine and a very engaging combat system. The action, however, is constantly interrupted by long cutscenes that tell a boring, barebones story. The main character, Bayonetta, suffers from amnesia, only knowing that she is an Umbra Witch – a European sect in collusion with demons that is …

  Written by Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs is a great urban fantasy novel that frames its narrative around religion, persecution, and war, excelling when it comes to worldbuilding, but faltering when it’s time to build suspense at the beginning. After an important Saypuri historian is found dead in the ancient city of Bulikov, Saypur tasks a young female …

Gone Home is a narrative-adventure game that focuses on exploration and environmental storytelling but relies too much on red herrings to fully work: its attempts to build suspense – and even horror – fall flat, serving only to distract us from the important themes being discussed. We control Kaitlin Greenbriar, a young woman who has just returned home from a …

Abzû is an adventure game very similar to the last title directed by Matt Nava, Journey, which also they aimed to tell a touching story almost exclusively through exploration, traversal, and interactions with the environment. In Abzû, the player controls a mysterious diver (their face is hidden in shadows inside a mask) who is alone in the open sea, right …

A tiger never changes its stripes. This is the great problem of flat characters: they do not change, they do not evolve, which may end up giving little purpose to their journeys. They are usually either stereotyped or mnemonic characters, being defined by their one or two notable traits even after the end of their stories. The great sin of …

If Octopath Traveler were a book, it wouldn’t be a novel but a collection of short stories. The game is not your typical epic JRPG, ambitious and epic, but is very modest in scope, telling stories that never intertwine to form a big narrative. Nevertheless, it excels in what it sets out to do, presenting a beautiful world while discussing …

A society where just a handful of people have control over the transmission of information, where history is being constantly revised to hide the nature of uncomfortable events, where certain gestures and thoughts are subject to severe punishment – not because they’re harmful to other people, but to the status quo -, and where the government doesn’t hesitate to violently …

The novella Carmilla, written by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, presents a female vampire who begins a peculiar relationship with her victim: instead of treating the young Laura just as prey, Carmilla tries to befriend her. For the female vampire, sucking blood is not enough; she must enter her victim’s private life, becoming a part of it. However, that intimacy, homosexual …