The Best of

The Pillars of the Earth has the foundation of its narrative solidly set: the characters’ greatest conflicts are outlined at the beginning, serving as solid columns for the structure that will organize the most important events of the story, with actions always generating consequences, making the scale of the events gradually increase until the climatic end. The novel’s various plots …

“I don’t believe whoever wins or loses, or whoever loses or wins, will lose or win. Everybody’s gonna lose,” Dilma Rousseff. The Last of Us Part II is an improvement over the first game on basically every level. It’s a harrowing experience, offering a gut-wrenching story about the never-ending cycle of violence perpetrated in the name of justice that is …

Expanding even more the world of this already mammoth of a series, The Malazan Book of the Fallen‘s fifth volume, Midnight Tides, is an epic about zealotry, suffering, lack of compassion, and the intrinsic problems of a capitalist culture. Steven Erikson continues to build complex societies and tragic characters, cleverly mixing humor, drama, and action with social criticism in a …

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is both an effective detective story and a powerful cry about the situation of women in modern society. Stieg Larsson creates, in the first volume of the Millenium trilogy, a fascinating cast of characters and an engaging plot, but really excels when putting at the foundation of the story the problem of how women …

Fragments of the Forgotten Past is an excellent entry in the Dragon Quest franchise (maybe even the best), offering a multitude of complex, touching, and tragic short stories. It certainly can be accused of overstaying its welcome, and its gameplay is too easy for its own good, but Dragon Quest VII still manages to shine by the force of its …

Deadhouse Gates, the second volume in Steven Erikson’s The Malazan Book of the Fallen fantasy series, is an even better book than the first one. Beautifully structured and written, the novel offers an incredibly pessimistic story with a wide range of tragic characters, whose arcs always come back to the same question: how to face the horrors of violence? The story …

City of Blades – the second book in The Divine Cities trilogy written by Robert Jackson Bennett – manages to easily surpass its already great predecessor. The novel offers a complicated discussion on the problem of soldiering, juxtaposing the idealized purpose of the military with their real one in a narrative tinged with blood and violence, but also deeply melancholic. …

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 …

Professor Layton is a franchise that has never needed constant revamps to work well. Its games, after all, are about only two things: their story and puzzles – and two puzzles are never the same. The fact that Miracle Mask doesn’t do much to reinvent the wheel, then, is far from a problem, as it still offers the franchise’s best …

Despite being developed in just one year, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask remains the most narratively ambitious game in the franchise. Establishing an oppressive atmosphere from the very first few minutes, Majora’s Mask presents a doomed world that forces people to come to terms with death and loss. The game begins soon after the events of Ocarina of Time, …