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 …
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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
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 …
Read More »Gone Home
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 …
Read More »Abzû
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 …
Read More »Octopath Traveler
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 …
Read More »Assassin’s Creed Revelations
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 …
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