Games

The Eyes of Ara is a first-person point-and-click adventure that tries to harken back to the genre’s golden era, evoking games like Myst with its puzzle design and mysterious, eerie atmosphere. The game, however, is ultimately dragged down by its shallow story, uneven puzzles, and cumbersome control scheme on the Nintendo Switch. The game opens with the protagonist – who …

Beyond: Two Souls is a game that doesn’t work on any level: the story is dragged down by a disconnected structure and shallow, boring characters, while the gameplay is even less interesting, offering us choices that have absolutely no impact over the game’s main events. The protagonist is Jodie Holmes (Elliot Page), a woman who has spent her entire life …

Call of Duty WWII has the series returning to its roots but also once more playing too safe to be truly great. Offering a derivative campaign that fails at developing both its characters and themes, and a bunch of multiplayer modes that any series veteran will have already played hundreds of times, the game’s lack of ambition is the only …

Shin Megami Tensei IV is an RPG with great narrative ambitions – trying to discuss the purpose of religions and forms of society – that presents a complex – albeit unbalanced – battle system. Its narrative, however, is very erratic and often puts the focus on its least interesting elements. The game’s protagonist, called Flynn, works as an avatar for …

God of War 2 is a fairly safe sequel that capitalizes on the core elements of the first game for great effect, bringing a violent revenge-driven protagonist, and a simple yet effective combat system, while expanding the scope of the adventure. It brings some new ideas to the table, but they could have been more developed. In the story, the …

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker boasts a unique art style – a wondrous cel-shaded look that simulates a cartoon – and a great story – with the best antagonist in the series to date –, but it is sadly bogged down by some uninspired dungeon design and an overly repetitive structure that focus too much on combat. The …

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 …

Pierre, the purist, doesn’t like change. Every day, he cooks two boiled eggs with three crispy strips of bacon for breakfast, with just a touch of honey, because this was the way his late mother did it when he was little. He takes comfort in the repetition, in the idea that things can persevere, remaining the same, unspoiled by 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 …

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 …