Games

The Night of the Rabbit follows the classic formula of the point-and-click adventure genre: it tries to immerse us in a fantastical world, with a strong focus on story and atmosphere, while structuring the action around puzzle-solving. Here, Daedelic Entertainment presents a fairy tale – with talking animals and evil magicians – and is successful at building the narrative’s optimistic …

Affordable Space Adventures is a puzzle-adventure game that manages to make better use of the Wii U gamepad than any of Nintendo’s own titles on the system. Telling a story that confronts the exploitative practices of large corporations while offering innovative mechanics that create unique puzzles, the game only falters when it comes to its difficulty curve, which falls sharply …

The traits of the classic Greek hero differ substantially from those of a contemporary one. While the latter is tied to the morality of their society, the former is barely concerned with notions of right and wrong: their vocabulary, instead, circles around the concept of glory. Kratos, the protagonist of God of War, is one of these heroes. He massacres …

“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 …

Bayonetta is an insane action game with an unusual heroine and a very engaging combat system. Its tone is bonkers all around, with over-the-top set pieces and unhinged dialogue: it’s high-octane madness in videogame form… but one that’s being constantly interrupted by long cutscenes that tell a quite bare-bones story. The main character, Bayonetta, suffers from amnesia: she only knows …

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 …