City of Blades – the second book in The Divine Cities trilogy written by Robert Jackson Bennett – manages to easily surpass its already great predecessor. The novel offers a complicated discussion on the problem of soldiering, juxtaposing the idealized purpose of the military with their real one in a narrative tinged with blood and violence, but also deeply melancholic. …

Tails Noir (formerly known as Backbone) is a strange point-and-click adventure. Its story moves from one extreme to the other too fast, going from dabbling into complete cliché material to “holy hell, what’s going on” after a single twist. However, it never commits to both approaches, abandoning important elements for the twist while also not giving it time to breathe. The …

Paper Mario: Sticker Star is one of the most unusual entries in its franchise thanks to some controversial design decisions: treating the great volume of story in the previous games as unnecessary fat, Nintendo has decided to rip it out from this adventure as much as possible and shift the game’s genre from RPG to puzzle-solving. Amid festivities celebrating the …

Here’s the thing about repetition: it’s an ambivalent element. On the one hand, it’s the ultimate learning tool, commonly used by tiny humans, called children, to mimic big humans, called adults, to discover how to act and behave in life. It’s how humans of all sizes learn how to speak a language, how to write, how to build objects and …

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 …