Written by Raymond E. Feist, Magician: Apprentice is a fantasy novel that presents a familiar universe, built on genre tropes, with a story with wasted potential, suffering from some shallow worldbuilding and a highly problematic climax. The book follows a young orphan named Pug and his best friend, Tomas, who see their lives drastically change the moment they come across …

The God of War franchise’s success is largely based on the spectacle it provides. The first three main titles boasted huge environments that contained titans, monsters, and gods fighting epic battles while the protagonist, Kratos, was dismembering his enemies and shouting in fury. But they also tried to add to the combat system with each installment, either with new weapons …

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 …

Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest is a much better game than its counterpart, Birthright. With a more engaging story and some unique, complex stages, the game manages to maintain the usual quality of Nintendo’s tactical RPG franchise. Fates’ protagonist is called Corrin. The character, despite having their own personality, functions as an avatar for the player, who can modify their name, …

One of the most important elements of a game – or any other piece of art – is its consistency. It’s important to observe how its various elements connect with each other: whether they work together to expand the core ideas being discussed or end up contradicting one another, diminishing the overall impact of the experience. There is even a …

Memories of Ice, the third volume of The Malazan Book of the Fallen series, further expands the scope of the main story. Although the narrative is less careful about exposition than in previous volumes, it makes up for this with the complexity of its storylines and character arcs. The story returns to the main characters of Gardens of the Moon at …

Assassin’s Creed Rogue is Black Flag with a new coat of paint. Offering the same systems and overall structure, it shares similar problems to its predecessor: it’s shallow, bloated, and repetitive. Its story follows suit, showing some promise at the beginning, but quickly falling into similar pitfalls, packed with one-dimensional characters that have little to say about anything. The story …

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess offers a much more complex and cinematic version of the formula adopted by the series after A Link to the Past. With a story marked by melancholy, and with more elaborate dungeons than its predecessor, the game impresses with its epic scope, although, for that, it gives up the element of mystery that surrounded …

This review contains spoilers. A crime thriller written by Stephen King, The Outsider has a great start, pushing its characters to their limits while making them face questions regarding the limits of reason and, paradoxically, the terrible consequences of acting based on emotions alone. Its second half, however, brings the pacing to a halt, with the introduction of an uninteresting …

God of War III is all about spectacle. During the visually impressive intro, Kratos is tearing his enemies apart on the back of a titan who, in turn, is climbing Mount Olympus and battling a gigantic aquatic creature controlled by Poseidon. The camera is constantly moving in and out of the action to display how the scope is now even …