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“What if this fear is worth listening to?” a voice asks Senua while she’s heading up a hill alone at night, watching the trees move by themselves, opening a path to her, while the sound of drums booms in the distance, disturbing the torches’ flames. She can hear the grunts and growls of the dead, too, echoing around her, mixed …

All good foxes know that chaos reigns. And when talking about the aesthetics of chaos, there’s one important word – a crucial concept, really – that must be discussed beforehand. A technical, deeply academic, almost inscrutable term that can confound even the analytical German mind of Theodor Adorno, who (an AI told me, so it must be true), gasped in …

Harold Halibut lives under the sea. The city of Fedora was haphazardly founded decades before his birth, after a ship crash-landed on a strange planet with no habitable landmass, and its people have been trying – and failing – to leave these alien waters ever since. But Harold’s worries are not that meaningful or grandiose. No, one night, when he …

The Fifth Season talks about revolt with remarkable fury and finesse, building a bold and challenging narrative that uses the second-person in a meaningful way while presenting us a trio of main characters who are as fascinating as they are tragic. The book starts with the world ending twice. On a microscale, there is the world of the woman Essun, …

Indika is mad, there’s no doubt about that. But there’s a method to her madness. You see, we could say the same about her game, which plays with its own aesthetic, interspersing a more grounded, somber tone with sudden bursts of playful retro elements, while growing increasingly unhinged as time goes by. Indika is a nun in an isolated, snow-laden …

Based on Norse mythology, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is psychological horror disguised as dark fantasy: its suffocating atmosphere is the consequence of tackling such themes as depression and grief while diving into the mind of a character whose mental illnesses infuse each event with hopelessness and despair. Hellblade feels quite claustrophobic because it doesn’t observe these issues from a safe distance, but …

Tales of the Abyss is an excellent RPG that tells an engaging story full of complex characters and fascinating discussions about identity and free will. The core of its combat system may be too simple for its own good, but the quality of the narrative more than makes up for that. The protagonist is a young man named Luke, the …

Charles, the snob, and Bob, the cynic, are FaceTiming together: Charles is walking down the sunny streets of Thebes, thousands of years ago, after a hearty breakfast in a famous local cafe, using his iPhone 16 Pro Max, while Bob is at home (where else) alone at night, after a couple of strong drinks and doomscrolling on Twitter for an …

“And they say marriage is such hard work,” someone ironically concludes in Gone Girl, a novel that employs a typical thriller structure to deconstruct the institution of marriage and, through the conflicts of deeply troubled characters, expose the difficulties of maintaining a long-lasting relationship. On his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne receives the news that his wife, Amy Dunne, has …

Experimentation has been a common ethos in The Legend of Zelda series. Whether it’s by introducing the third dimension in Ocarina of Time, changing the structure of exploration in The Wind Waker, or shaping the gameplay according to the peculiarities of each console with Phantom Hourglass and Skyward Sword, Nintendo is always demonstrating a clear desire to evolve the franchise …