Tag Archives: Narrative Adventure

This review contains some general spoilers. Batman: The Telltale Series offers a great take on the Batman mythos, focusing its attention on Gotham and the role the Wayne family has in shaping it as a hopelessly corrupt and violent city. Despite following Telltale’s uninspired formula, the game’s story shines by framing politics and wealth disparity as the core reasons for …

Close to the Sun is a narrative adventure game that falters when it comes to its most fundamental component: its narrative. With shallow, boring characters and undeveloped themes, the game even commits the modern sin of foregoing a proper conclusion in favor of leaving doors open for a sequel. The story takes place in 1897 in a reality where Nikola …

AI: The Somnium Files is a fascinating adventure game whose convoluted plot is easily outshone by the quirky characters that inhabit its absurd world – which is a great thing, as the story by itself is a bit shallow and quite, quite repetitive. On a rainy day, a woman called Shoko Nadami is found dead on a merry-go-round with an …

The tricky thing about mysteries is that the answers to them are rarely more fascinating than the questions themselves, which can lead to a disappointing payoff if those answers are the only thing that matters to the narrative. Observation falls into this trap: it successfully builds an intriguing atmosphere of dread in its first hours, telling a story about a …

Dear Esther’s story is told by enigmatic voice messages that eventually contradict themselves, causing disorientation and confusion. Its setting is eerie, enveloped by a dreamlike atmosphere that rejects common logic. It’s a fascinating game that only falters when it tries too hard to make us replay it. The gameplay in Dear Esther could not be simpler. Our character is stuck …

Observer is a first-person cyberpunk game with a horror twist that quickly loses its appeal: the main horror scenes build an unbearable atmosphere but drag on for too long, repeating the same tricks over and over again. The game’s protagonist is a Polish police detective called Daniel Lazarski – played by Blade Runner’s Rutger Hauer – who, after receiving a mysterious …

Beyond: Two Souls is a game that doesn’t work on any level: the story is dragged down by a disconnected structure and shallow, boring characters, while the gameplay is even less interesting, offering us choices that have absolutely no impact over the game’s main events. The protagonist is Jodie Holmes (Elliot Page), a woman who has spent her entire life …

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 …