Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag builds on the foundations of its predecessor to set its story in the Caribbean and put the focus on pirates and naval warfare. Black Flag’s many mistakes are old ones in the franchise, with the game being dragged down by clunky stealth, weak combat, a repetitive mission structure, and an underdeveloped story. The main character …
Read More »Switch
Emio: The Smiling Man
Despite being the first R-rated Visual Novel from Nintendo, Emio: The Smiling Man offers a surprisingly touching story about grief and loss, focusing not on violence, but on the emotional pain, the guilt, and powerlessness those close to its victims feel. “It was a nice day. The kind of day where you want to take a deep breath and savor …
Read More »The Last Remnant
The Last Remnant is pure, crystalline perfection. Every facet of the game, every element, every design decision, they all work in unison to create the most excruciating experience possible. If you are looking for something that can annoy and infuriate you in equal measure, there’s no other option around that is so flawlessly, impeccably constructed to fulfill and even surpass …
Read More »The Eyes of Ara
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 …
Read More »Tails Noir
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 …
Read More »Twelve Minutes
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 …
Read More »Super Mario Odyssey
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 …
Read More »Assassin’s Creed III
The ambition of Assassin’s Creed III is both its strength and its Achilles heel. The scope of its world and the number of activities available for the player is certainly impressive, since in one moment we will be bombarding ships during a storm on the high seas and, in the next, we will be hunting foxes with hand-made traps in …
Read More »The Night of the Rabbit
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 …
Read More »Bayonetta
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 …
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