The Water Knife, a sci-fi thriller written by Paolo Bacigalupi, presents a dystopian world that is disturbing in its verisimilitude. The novel, however, is ultimately dragged down by shallow main characters, having to resort to shock value to hold our attention. The story is built around three main points of view: there’s the journalist Lucy, who needs to find out …

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is both an effective detective story and a powerful cry about the situation of women in modern society. Stieg Larsson creates, in the first volume of the Millenium trilogy, a fascinating cast of characters and an engaging plot, but really excels when putting at the foundation of the story the problem of how women …

Observer is a first-person cyberpunk game with a horror twist that quickly loses its appeal: the main horror scenes build an unbearable atmosphere but drag on for too long, repeating the same tricks over and over again. The game’s protagonist is a Polish police detective called Daniel Lazarski – played by Blade Runner’s Rutger Hauer – who, after receiving a mysterious …

Fragments of the Forgotten Past is an excellent entry in the Dragon Quest franchise (maybe even the best), offering a multitude of complex, touching, and tragic short stories. It certainly can be accused of overstaying its welcome, and its gameplay is too easy for its own good, but Dragon Quest VII still manages to shine by the force of its …

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 …

Unlike its predecessor, Magician: Master, doesn’t suffer too much from the split of the original novel into two books. Its problems are mostly its own, with a narrative that is unable to justify the strange focus on some of the supporting characters while failing to conclude any plotlines in a way that is not anticlimactic or arbitrary. The story of …

Despite being the remake of Fire Emblem Gaiden, one of the series’ first installments, Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia has the best story since Path of Radiance, developing relevant discussions and tragic characters in a well-constructed narrative. However, it also brings back from Gaiden some uninspired level design alongside some problematic gameplay changes, making it one of the most …

At the very beginning of The Fault in Our Stars, the protagonist makes a metalinguistic comment about her favorite novel: “it’s not a cancer book, because cancer books suck.”John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars indeed isn’t a book about cancer but a romance populated by characters who must face the prospect of death every day. The difference between genres …

After the series’ brief diversion in the high seas, Unity marks a return to what Assassin’s Creed has always excelled at: parkour inside famous churches. Building a new foundation for the series, based on more elaborate sidequests and freeform assassinations, the game mostly falters with its disappointing story that is too afraid to delve deep into the complicated politics of …

Written by Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere is an urban fantasy novel that can amuse with its whimsical world as much as it can annoy with its unbearable protagonist. Offering a funny but shallow story, the novel is far from being one of Gaiman’s best works. Neverwhere accompanies Richard, a young Englishman who lives a quiet life, pretending to be happy with his office …