Games

“You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?” the Happy Mask Salesman – his name both mocking and reinforcing his creepy disposition – asks Link, when we meet him in a strange world, cursed, spooked, and incredibly lost. The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask remains to this day the most narratively ambitious game in the franchise: establishing an oppressive atmosphere …

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 with an unusual heroine and a very engaging combat system. Its tone is bonkers all around, and the action is appropriately over-the-top and insane: it’s high octane madness in videogame form… that’s being constantly interrupted by long cutscenes that tell a boring, barebones story. The main character, Bayonetta, is one of …

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 …

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 it’s 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 …

Kingdom Hearts is an ambitious crossover between Disney and Final Fantasy that, much ironically, is at its best when it’s not covering either brand, but being its own weird thing. The protagonist is a boy named Sora,  who lives on an island and dreams of traveling with his friends, Kairi and Riku, to discover new places. One day, they start …

Zero Time Dilemma, the third and final entry in the great adventure series Zero Escape, has a narrative structure as complex as those of previous games, although it introduces less interesting characters and ends with a couple of questionable twists that don’t survive retrospection. The game begins when nine people wake up trapped in a cell and are approached by …

The multiplayer moments that Mario Kart games provide are always entertaining. It’s an ever-shifting chaos of flying shells and exploding items, but the secret is that it’s usually a controllable one. A rookie can take advantage of the speed boost and invulnerability of special stars to not finish in the last place, for example, while experienced players can break when …

After the Assassin’s Creed franchise became very successful, its producer Ubisoft adopted the strategy of releasing one title per year: they must make money while the iron is hot. It was inevitable, then, that the games would eventually show clear signs of a rushed development cycle, being devoid of any creative reason to exist. Assassin’s Creed Revelations is the first …