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The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow is an effective point-and-click adventure game that excels at creating an ominous atmosphere that carries most of its cosmic horror story. With a focus on characters and setting, the game only falters in the abruptness of its ending, whose anticlimax avoids some important confrontations. We play as Thomasina Bateman, a young archeologist who receives a …

Beware: this review contains psychic spoilers that will be sent straight into your mind. Through a psychic technique called “reading.” It’s late at night when Pierre, the purist, flies over to Retro Studios headquarters, looking for some executive to drink. To his dismay, however, he finds no one there but some tired programmers and artists working overtime, who are people …

Based on a Russian novel of the same name, written by Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter that excels in atmosphere and worldbuilding, providing a tense and memorable experience due to its striking, stress-inducing setting. However, the game’s bare-bones story, with its paper-thin characters and a noble but naïve anti-war message, ultimately rings hollow. The world of Metro …

Dominated by a melancholic atmosphere and a strong allegorical structure, Rime is a touching adventure game whose problems lie in its repetitive narrative and the way its level design discourages exploration with lots of points of no return: we may still want to see what’s out there, but sadly, it’s impossible now that we’ve crossed an arbitrary part of the …

Call of the Sea is a first-person point-and-click adventure that tries to put a new spin on the Cthulhu mythos. With a colorful and vibrant art style, the game is unfortunately marred by exposition-heavy writing and questionable puzzle design. It’s the 1930s, and a woman called Nora Everharti is traveling to a remote island in the Pacific in search of …

Full of wit and whimsy, Astrologaster is an excellent comedy set in the Elizabethan era. Its characters are always introduced with song, its themes are carefully developed and subverted, its twists are made to be silly and humorous: boasting some great writing by Katherine Neil, the game more than makes up for its simple visual design. The protagonist is doctor …

Resident Evil: Revelations is a game of two halves: the first one offers a claustrophobic environment immersed in a carefully built horror atmosphere, while the second offers mediocre action sequences with endless amounts of similar, shallow enemies. The story begins when Jill Valentine and Parker Luciani – two agents working for a counter-terrorism group – are tasked with investigating a …

Length is a curious thing. Some say that a good movie (or game) is never too long and a bad one is never short enough, but there’s also the kind that is almost there, almost reaching greatness, where we feel more time was needed because the end result is, for the lack of a better word, undercooked. Arietta of Spirits …

The JRPG that began it all, establishing the tropes and structure of the genre, the first Dragon Quest has just received a substantial new coat of paint with this HD remake that presents a by-the-books, but very charming story with an intriguing combat system that is fun precisely because of its apparent unfairness. We play as the descendant of the …

Ori and the Will of the Wisps is an outstanding – if too safe – sequel to the already great Ori and the Blind Forest, boasting the same mesmerizing aesthetic, haunting soundtrack – dude, this series’ main theme is ridiculously good –, and engaging mechanics, like that lovely bash ability. The story in Will of the Wisps revolves around the …