Birth. Movies. Death.'s Reviews
I hate and love Dark Souls II, much as I hate and love myself. In presenting such a challenge that I question why or even if I truly love video games, Dark Souls II achieves exactly what it sets out to do. Is it for everyone? No. I'm not even sure if it's for me. It does keep me trying, trying again though, and that's something.
No, The Banner Saga hasn't reached its destination yet, but again: it's all about the journey.
Like the terrific TV miniseries The Staircase that appears to have inspired it, Her Story is less about determining guilt than growing to understand a set of characters. That's more interesting than a guilty or not guilty verdict anyway: a verdict closes the book, while understanding leaves it open for further contemplation. And as a narrative and as a game, Her Story is worthy of much contemplation indeed.
In the first game, there was a sense of progress and achievement, and of variety in gameplay. Now, we're faced with repetitive rabbit-hunting and the bane of all open-world games, meaningless collectibles.
It's all too rare that we get games like this, where the mysteries are genuinely intriguing and can be played at one's own pace. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is weird and macabre in delicious and often surprising ways. Its tales of madness intensify an already-oppressive atmosphere of decay, telling a compelling story of a town gone mad and a kid trying to make sense of it all. It's just that those stories are so well-hidden behind invisible game mechanics that players themselves may go mad in the process.
By pulling off an unforgiving juggling act of resource-management and survival, it nails the atmosphere of despair it aims for. But there's a point where the statement has been made and players need something more - and unlike Sgt. Burden and his crew, the player can simply walk away from Gods Will Be Watching.
Among the Sleep wants to be a combination of Gone Home and Slender, but doesn't quite reach the emotional and storytelling highs of the former or the bowel-rending scares of the latter. Krillbite have done some fine design work, though, and the core idea is new and unique enough to give the promise of greatness to come from the new studio.
Jazzpunk ends with an unconventional boss fight culminating in an excellent subversion of boss-battle tropes. If the whole game were as smart as the final confrontation, it'd be a much easier recommendation. As it stands, I still don't know whether its worst jokes are intentionally bad or not.
Titanfall makes big AAA shooters fun again.
Gravity Ghost is a prime demonstration of gameplay metaphor used for emotional effect, where everything has dual purposes and interconnects in clever ways. The story presentation may be obtuse, but that seems to be the point - it's about someone who's died trying to make sense of and fix what they've left behind. The result is a game full of understated melancholy and beauty.
[SPOILER WARNING: Major spoilers contained in this review] Overall, I was more satisfied with "Amid The Ruins" than "In Harm's Way", but unfortunately I'm no longer hopeful that this season could top the first.
The final ten minutes or so make it worth the purchase, and I really liked where the Carver storyline ultimately went here, but don't be surprised if you get a bit bored getting to that point.
[SPOILER WARNING: This review contains spoilers.] If you're invested in this story, your nerves may not survive the constant stakes-raising.
Continue?9876543210 asks big questions, whether direct or hinted. It doesn't provide answers, but perhaps that's the point. You see what you want to see.
For this wheel-spinning middle chapter, The Wolf Among Us sits back, chuckling at a crack it's made in the middle of an epic joke, while its audience restlessly waits for the punchline.
"Smoke and Mirrors" has converted me. Shorn of the need to introduce the game's world and characters, it quickly gets to business developing and telling a story with them.
Fallout 4 keeps surprising and delighting me. Few other games have the depth or idiosyncratic character to get me consuming their content this greedily or obsessively. Clearly made by a passionate team, it's my favourite Bethesda game to date, and one of the finest games of the year, warts and all - one whose likely destruction of my already-struggling social life I welcome with open arms.
Destiny: The Taken King is a testament to game-as-service that feels richer, less random, and more fun than the game Destiny started out as. It's telling that the base game is being phased out in favour of a "complete" package: this is much closer to what Destiny should have been from the beginning.
There are moments when I f***ing adore Mad Max, and it feels awkward to attack it for trying too hard. But I really think The WB Open World Game is the wrong genre for the license, or at the very least the wrong application of genre.
For all the time-travel hocus pocus Remedy dropped into Quantum Break, the one superpower missing is the ability to get your time back.