The Escapist
HomepageBloodstained: Ritual of the Night, Koji Igarashi's first proper effort since 2008's Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, is a Rococo masterwork.
SNK's Samurai Shodown is both an act of worship and discipline. The canonized developer and publishing house behind The King of Fighters and the classic Samurai Shodown brawlers is now decades out from its '90s heyday, when it defined the genre as much as Street Fighter creator Capcom. Playing this new Samurai Shodown, you can...
Judgment is as magical and grounded as true city life
The zombie apocalypse isn't worth surviving at first glance. Enduring a lifetime of horrible food, abysmal cellular reception, and the constant paranoia associated with living a day-to-death existence sounds overwhelming. Forget about whether or not we can strategically out-sprint an undead horde or can ruthlessly murder other survivors if necessary: the more important question is...
Stephen Hawking, real killjoy that he was, ruined the possibility of time travel in the span of a single sentence in A Brief History of Time. "If time travel is possible," asked the cosmologist, "where are all the tourists from the future?" Think about it: the nitwit snapping a selfie at the signing of the...
"I just want you to know: I hate-respect you." I think about Alec Baldwin saying these words to a dramatically lit Will Arnett on an early episode of 30 Rock approximately 82,000 times a day. It's a little Zen Buddhist koan I use to rein in my critical brain when I experience revulsion. Two things...
Devil May Cry 5 is 99 percent about doing things that are totally sweet and looking totally sweet while doing them. There's no thematic depth waiting beneath its bombastic, blood-drenched glamour and its vulcanizing, improvisational violence choreography. But when Hideaki Itsuno's unlikely sequel drew me into a meditative flow of stabbing angry skeletons with a...
I did enjoy the mess that is Crackdown 3. In chunks, it can be exciting, but the story, multiplayer, and milquetoast character progression inhibit the Crackdown 3.The promised mayhem is here. But it isn’t more.
It only took 22 years of soul searching, but Resident Evil has finally found itself. The series has from the beginning shifted in tone, scale, and action that it's never been entirely clear what Resident Evil should be. Is it a first-person thriller? A campy survival spook out? A cooperative blast ‘em up where T-rexes...