In Gone Home, you play a girl who comes home to the new house that her sister and parents moved into, while she was touring Europe for a year. It’s a little after midnight, there is a thunderstorm and no one is around.… Read the rest
Filter Kafka through the sensibilities of Douglas Adams and you might end up with something like The Stanley Parable. It is not so much a game as a bewildering tree of short stories to explore, all featuring the same main character and all circling the themes of free will and purpose, while lampooning videogame mechanics.… Read the rest
The Uncharted and Tomb Raider games owe a lot to each other and to Indiana Jones. With a small tweak to their back-story, Nathan Drake and Lara Croft could easily be revealed to be Dr. Jones’ grandchildren. They are ancient artifact-chasing adventurers who spend an inordinate amount of time climbing around giant rooms activating very complex mechanisms that somehow didn’t break down despite being inactive for centuries.… Read the rest
The first word that comes to mind when thinking of Batman: Arkham City is ‘stuffed’, possibly even ‘overstuffed’. The second is ‘detailed’. The game crams a plethora of Batman’s foes into a part of Gotham City that has been rendered in beautiful detail.… Read the rest
Dishonored is a rare thing: a successful, big league game that is not a sequel. That’s not to say that the game is entirely original, as it remixes a lot of familiar elements. When it comes to gameplay, imagine a more stylized, steampunk version of Deus Ex: Human Revolution with gloomy flavoring reminiscent of Bioshock (though it actually looks more like the upcoming Bioshock Infinite).… Read the rest
I just took a break from being Batman and running around Arkham City to cross two non-games off my to-do list. I say ‘non-games’ because each of the two in its own unique way is an interactive experience rather than a game.… Read the rest
I do not like military shooters and tend to avoid them like the plague. A lot of them are morally awkward, featuring mostly white Westerners shooting at whichever group of ‘others’ seemed the most threatening at the time the game went into production.… Read the rest
When Max Payne is around, any glass that’s half-empty is soon to be entirely empty, literally and figuratively. The guy can’t catch a break and has decided to drown his grief in alcohol. Having lost his family in the previous installments of the Payne franchise, he gets entangled in all sorts of nastiness again this time around, when a gig as a bodyguard in Sao Paolo goes south.… Read the rest
The Walking Dead is a comic book series about the survivors of a zombie-apocalypse. While the shambling, hungry corpses loom as an ever-present threat, the series is really more about the behavior of people in a desperate situation. (Note that the title possibly refers to the survivors rather than the zombies.) The comic has been adapted for television and is now also a point-and-click adventure game which is being released in five installments, each part taking a couple of hours to play through, together forming a ‘season’.… Read the rest
I tend to have a hard time being a bad guy in video games. Whenever there is a choice between doing something moral and something immoral I tend to go with the first, because it helps my feeling of immersion: my character is acting close to the way I imagine I would in similar, far-fetched circumstances.… Read the rest
