Games

Developed by Platinum Games, Bayonetta is an action game that has an unusual heroine and a very engaging combat system. The action, however, is constantly interrupted by long cutscenes that tell a boring, barebones story. The main character, Bayonetta, suffers from amnesia, only knowing that she is an Umbra Witch – a European sect in collusion with demons that is …

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 is 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, 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 …

3D Mario games have always excelled at renewing themselves, making their most basic mechanics – like jumping – more interesting in the most imaginative ways possible, either by abusing and twisting gravity in Super Mario Galaxy or by prolonging the jump in Super Mario Sunshine. The current 2D titles appear to follow a different guideline, basing their design on familiar …

Released in 1998, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has become one of the most influential titles in the action-adventure genre. The game surprised players at the time by reinventing the Zelda formula established in A Link to the Past, adapting it to accommodate the arrival of the third dimension in gaming. Despite a couple of flaws, Ocarina of …