“Come gather, both the young and the old!
Come enjoy the show
A show of lies and gods”

It’s as existential as horror can get and, in the ocean of indie top-down horror RPG, it’s the only trilogy worth the entry price from beginning to end. This time, the world is broken from the very start, every wish for everyone to be happy has failed and death is destined to come no matter what. After three games of journey through etherane’s personal hell-scape, we are addressed directly to accept that nothing in it is alright, and probably can never be as long as we think of it as a story. Individuality is questioned to rationalize the game logic that make it possible to treat people and feelings as items. It is worthless. The only normalcy that can be achieved is to recognize ourselves as individuals that need to be together.
It’s corny to treat your own story as a parasite, to see it being carried over into the world outside, trying to scare the viewer with the idea of being endlessly, helplessly seen, to no end. Stuck is a world soaked in ugly colours, being tainted, incapable of achieving the pure white. It’s a world of regrets, but it’s also a world where we can inject love. Because, all this time, we have listened.

For better or worse the Dark anthology series and Supermassive games as a whole is something I certainly have.... opinions about. House of Ashes though is the bloody worst of them all, by a long shot.
The lingering feeling of having missed or got an input wrong in previous games is here turned up to the max where frequently there seemingly is no correlation between what you try to achieve and what you actually get out of the game, unless what you wanted to achieve was meaningless walking and meandering looking for clues, collectibles and any semblance of having your actions as a player matter to the outcome of the story.

And by the Lord, do we have a story here. Little over a month since the end of the Afghan war, House of Ashes delights us with one of the most tone deaf presentations of the war in the middle East that was ever given in fiction. And that's just the thematic surface because below that we have a wide array of cinematic references to cult classic horror sci-fi movies such as Alien, and Aliens, or Alien³, and Alien Resurrection, Alien vs Predator and, sometimes, it will spice things up by bringing in Prometheus and Alien Covenant. And it will always, categorically, refuse to do anything interesting with any of its inspirations and rather just give us the barebone experience of boring military dudes stuck in a midly interesting situation and you have to just take the controller maybe a couple of times because this is an interactive movie and apparently that's how we do horror today.

Too bad all this series has been so far is covering for annoying cliches and taking what could amount to a bad hour and a half long movie and stretch it to a four to five hours slog, which isn't made better by playing it with your friends. At all. Watching horror movies with your friends is fun, at best they can be deeply engaging, visceral, camp even, but playing one of these pile of manure even with company is just passing around the controller to give inputs to meaningless chores, like picking up paper documents and opening doors and fucking breathing of all things, while a movie devoid of personality and character plays, diserargind pacing, enjoyment or any semblance of quality narrative.

To hell with all this.

Compared to other entry in the franchise, Resident Evil 3 Remake is not a tale about facing adverse odds through camaraderie, but a story of a rivalry. Throughout the game, the fight between Jill Valentine and the aptly named Nemesis is always at the centre of the scene, a fight which is not only physical but ideological. Coming from two opposing yet equally bad factions, the shady Umbrella corporation and the American police force, Jill and the Nemesis face each other at the moment of the greatest divide for Raccoon City, and the issue at hand being: should a private corporation be given endless funding to produce a weapon to kill all human life on the planet? Also, there is a zombie apocalypse.
Jill and the Nemesis clearly have diverging opinions on the matter, thus the impasse between the two is formed but, as much as this stalemate is fascinating, what really elevates RE3R is the character development of the Nemesis himself. We learn late into the game that the Nemesis was created to be controlled with a brain parasite, a clear metaphor for modern day brain parasites that control us all, like Twitter. He is an inhuman being with no free will nor desire of his own, a true redditor, shielded in black and covered from head to toe the first time we meet him, metaphorically and literally blind to what is happening in front of him. It is only through Jill that the layers around the Nemesis are gradually peeled off, by repeatedly setting him on fire, thus shedding unto him a light of clarity, which in turn reveals his real form both to us and to himself. The Nemesis is, of course, resistant to this at first, scared of having to question his own life up to that point, having lived for a whole of three days before meeting Jill. He tries to debate Jill’s facts and logics using his own feelings on the situation, and a rocket launcher. His flaws are obvious for all to see, he tries to mansplain his reasoning about the good that Umbrella can achieve by brutally murdering Jill Valentine, but slowly he can’t help but develop a begrudging respect for her.
It is only after being drowned in acid that he finally lets his heart out, bare for all to see and fry with a rail-gun, maybe defeated in his ideas, but nonetheless the Nemesis knows that he has been understood by his peers, and that recognition is what ultimately matters. He may be a gargantuan monster capable of growing ten stories tall and full of filthy appendages, but at the end of the day he is human, just like us.
Resident Evil 3 Remake is about humanity, the rivalry that may form between men and women, and how the key to succeed together is through mutual understanding. What a beautiful game.

Minus one star because the fucking dogde button never works.

“Well… We’ve been through a lot together. […] But for you, it’s just the start of an even greater adventure.”

For sure, this journey was a memorable one.

Okami is the quintessential old school adventure videogame: a large world made of multiple interconnected maps, subsequently opened to the players by precedingly unlocking new unique abilities. The different scenarios also offer a wide variety of side activities, quests and collectible, without choking the game full of time-consuming nothingness or making the players deviate much from the main quest: moreover, even the apparently most trivial side mission ultimately brings the player to unlock a new weapon, helpful accessories or ability upgrades, so there will never be a minute of gameplay lost just to achieve an empty 100% competition rate.

Certainly, there is not a tight world building behind every encounter, or interesting written stories for all the characters, like for example in the Witcher and Souls series, yet what Clover studio achieved by blending the Zelda formula with Japanese folklore resulted in a most unique product, even amid the vast catalogue of niche games for the Playstation2. No surprises Okami achieved a strong cult status among past generations of video gamers, other than receiving various porting and remaster.

The story itself sets the game as a niche product right from the beginning, as it explores themes and events reimagined from Shinto mythology, and as such it has many details and references that may be understood uniquely by a Japanese audience, or well versed in this particular cultural background. The whole premise of Okami reinvents the legend of the slaying of Yamata-no-Orochi, an 8-headed and 8-tailed dragon serpent, by the hand of the gods Susanoo and Amaterasu, with slightly differences such as Amaterasu, while still being the Sun goddess, as well as the players’ character, is represented as a mute wolf (Okami is a word play that while being written as ‘great god’ could be read as ‘wolf god’).

Other characters coming from different myths are Issun, Okami’s Navi although arguably more talkative and amusingly obnoxious, who serves as a narrator and as Amaterasu only mean to communicate with the world, aside from barking and headbutting; Urashima Tarou, Otohime and the Dragon Palace on the bottom of the sea, the shapeshifting fox spirit with nine tails, Fusehime and her eight dog warriors, Kaguyahime from the tale of the bamboo cutter, as well as actual historical figures such as Himiko, a real queen from the early days of Japan. The vast assortment of characters gives a pantheistic feeling to Okami’s otherwise primarily light-hearted and goofy plot, making the players immerse in a scenario akin to an Olympus, where the deities intertwine with each other to serve the purpose of a greater story.

What immediately strikes about Okami is certainly its visuals, the peculiar art design with broad black outlines and a soft colour palette that heavily borrows from various Japanese traditional art, such as ukiyo-e, sumi-e (ink painting) and even calligraphy on some degree. The end result is a less rough and more glistening rural world immerse in nature, with sparkling of true beauty but with the simple recognizable designs of a children story book. The gameplay also fits with the artwork of the videogame: Amaterasu can use her tail, the Celestial Brush, to enter a sort of otherworldly dimension from where she can utilize different strokes to unleash various effects on the game world: these effects range from manipulating the elements to fix broken or missing artefacts, slow time, evoke explosives and cut through most objects.

The Celestial Brush also heavily plays in the combat system, as aside from Amaterasu’s quick fighting style mix of Divine Instruments (beads whips, greatswords and mirrors) the brush techniques can also be implemented with various effects on the enemies to facilitate crowd controls or hit weak points. Despite the fast-paced combat, the use of the Celestial Brush also serves as a pace breaker, stopping the frenetic action and putting the players in a dimension of stillness from where strategies can be elaborated and executed with ease and calm.

The last impressive factor about Okami is its soundtrack: over five hours (if one were to listen to it from start to end) of classical Japanese music inspirations that range from soothing and atmospheric pieces played with relaxing woodwind instruments, to more rhythmic, frenetic and bombastic percussions fighting themes. The ambience is probably the most sublime aspect of this game, since the first opening of the main menu the players are hit with the slow tempo of traditional flutes and almost immaterial and echoing drumming, that immediately stages the Eastern opera that Okami sets out to be; a relaxing fantasy journey in a fairy tale land.

Whilst The Elder Scroll: Skyrim succeeds in putting the player inside an immersive, fabulous world, it fails at giving it any sort of depth or interesting content. I didn’t complete the game, I just stopped going around once I visited every location of the map.

I really think one couldn’t be blamed for doing so: the mods add some sort of fun content but not so much you’d stick with the wooden narration, the terrible combat and the general feeling that no one around you is acting like more than a few millions of soulless pixels put together.
The plot is abysmal, dull and predictable but without charismatic characters or an interesting lore to redeem it: you are given orders by random strangers with no reason or rhyme and almost every quest can in some sort boil down to “Fetch me this”, “Kill some of those”, without anything gripping enough to let the players feel like they are accomplishing something noteworthy. Even the Dragons, supposedly the main appeal of the game, after a while feel repetitive, predictable, lose their mysterious charm because you quickly realize where they usually nest and how to kill them since there are never new mechanics added to the fights.

Skyrim is a chore, and endless shopping list of tedious checks which expands in every new city full of cardboards giving you empty missions for empty rewards and empty felling of accomplishment. You’d better be playing Dragon Age Origins or The Witcher if you wanted both a more compelling narrative and a more interesting world to explore.

Solid groundwork for a fantasy turn-based strategy game that hopefully will see more content being added in the future.
The gameplay is very quick and intuitive to pick up, experimentation with the magic and essence system is incentivised while managing armies and towns is relatively easy to balance, so it never feels like you are playing wrong.
The pixel art is simply stunning, colorful, detailed, rich and vibrant, it's just pure joy to look and units and building idling their animations.
There are also campaigns to add a narrative to the game but it is very barebone and not much interesting. It plays a lot like Thronebreaker for example, where you ran your character and their army across the map to collect stuff and clear events until you unlock the following chapter and start over again. It's as engaging as it needs to be, doesn't overcome its welcome and leaves plenty of room to just play the game.

There was a large part of this novel I absolutely despised, yet it would be unfair to advise against reading it mainly because I was not probably the target audience for its contents. To tell in short, Fata Morgana answer the need of feeling constantly depressed, reminded that life is a never-ending stream of suffering, much like reading Wuthering Heights or Judas the Obscure but with a more mundane, easily accessible, japanese-ish anime-ish narrative.

At its core, The House in Fata Morgana is a bizarre yet somehow familiar story made of mystery and supernatural tropes that are neither foreign to Japanese and Western literature, as it really does read as a – inferior – gothic novel from the 19th century with a more modern take on character interactions and fantasy. It directly borrows from medieval folklore and superstition and it mixes it with mildly historical contents and a long tale of guilt, revenge and forgiveness.

My main issue with Fata Morgana was not with its overall plot though, rather with the weird delivery of its content. There are many ways to describe how the narrative works in this novel, in Japanese it is called ‘utsuge’, which directly translates in the English language as misery lit, or misery porn. What this means is that most of the time the reader will be presented with an endless stream of depressing and graphically brutal content, often missing any sort of convincing delivery behind the suffering of the characters. Sure, there are many movies where the point is to witness the desperation and death of a character, notoriously there are the Passions of Jesus Christ and Joan of Arc, but we are comparing relatively short movies to a 30 hours long novel, where the satisfactory reward will not show up until the last three to four hours of gameplay.

In Fata Morgana you are asked to root for characters that apparently do not know what happiness is in life, or rather, there are happy times in their life but they are mostly treated as a justification to the pain and misery, as footnotes necessary to understand the story. The most striking example of this might be a character who supposedly lived just three years of their life as the most beautiful and blissful, and whilst these three years are often mentioned during the long depictions of grief the character has to go through, they are almost never actually showed or described, and if so in very brief detail.

Then there are random complaints about the characters themselves. I appreciated their depiction as flawed and complex human beings, but this depiction was ultimately biased: there are maybe two characters you have to actively appreciate, as they are pristine, faultless, immaculate, Mary Suecough I mean, fundamentally constantly good people. They are also the worst written characters as most of their traits and dialogues can be summed up with dumb anime tropes and jokes that may seem reasonable to read in a YA novel. Then there are all the others characters, a nice mixture of either sympathetic of plainly despicable human beings that might have worked as a believable depiction of humanity worst sins, but ultimately failed to be so. These characters are presented in black and white, firstly you have to know about them being horrible people and then the story will reveal that they do have – questionable – motivations to act as they did. This biased presentation prevents the readers from forming their own opinion on the story and the characters, it leads your judgment because the story is more interested to deliver shock and cheap twists to the readers than actual human portraits.

Moreover, thorough the latter half of the game, there is a huge chunk of the same events being told from different perspectives but with very little added to the overall narrative, giving unnecessary padding to a novel already long as it is. Not to mention how most of the story takes place during different historical periods yet all the characters seem to talk using the same pattern, particularly during a section in the Middle Age where the dialogues are made of unbearable anachronistic onomatopoeias. So much for the immersion, I guess.

All in all the story was compelling and interesting, but the structure could have been done much better.

Technically, Fata Morgana was nothing short of sublime. While the art may have had its ups and downs with some weird looking facial expressions and overly complex drawings, the eerie atmosphere given from the sound design, the photographical backgrounds and the beautiful musical score all helped in providing the mansion a magnificent aura of both magic and obscurity.

If one were to wish buying Fata Morgana, my only advise would be to carefully consider how much unending, and many times superfluous and pointless, suffering could be endured before reaching the payoff, otherwise on a similar note I’d recommend reading Umineko (much, much longer to read and greater in scope) or Cross Channel.

In the midst of the ending of the warring states era of Japan, a time of intense struggles and conflicts, of subterfuges and heroes, where both history and myth were in the making, From Software and Hidetaka Miyazaki bring us another bleak depiction of the conclusion of such age. This is no surprise as, since the Souls series, they made their standard to work with stories set during, or shortly after, the demise of what was once a great and powerful entity, only to be now being ruined by excess, misfortune and human faults.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice sets to portray the land of the Ashina clan, shortly after the end of a major conflict during the Sengoku jidai, the aforementioned Japan warring states era, but to anyone with a mild interest in the matter should be known that there was nothing left of the land nor the clan once the era was over. The game begins showing Isshin Ashina, the faction leader, obtaining a huge victory for himself and his clan, but as the player get control over the protagonist actions, we are immediately treated to a sad look over his domain. Despite, or probably because of, his victory, Isshin brought on himself the attention of the central government of Japan, always in fear of any daimyo gaining power as they might become exceptionally threatening in the power struggle going on at the time. Over the course of the game this situation will only exacerbate, as the conflict between the Ashina and the government will bring further ruin to the former clan, slowly erasing any of its member from history.

Thus, we are presented to one of the central themes of Sekiro: the cycling shifts in history, between one power to another, in a seemingly never ending spiral where everything comes full circle and begin anew, repeating itself over and over again. This is mostly and directly symbolized by the main character’s, known solely as Wolf, ability to resurrect after death, one of the main features of the game, but it is also shown by the many references to immortality, rebirth and ascension scattered thorough the story. As it is bursting with references and themes borrowed from the Buddhist mythos and Japanese folklore, it is only natural that Sekiro would tackle leitmotifs such as the cycle of death and rebirth, and the underlying essence of escape from the mortal coils and sins to achieve a higher state of being, of purification almost.

In the context of the story, the journey towards purification for the main character and his protégé and master, Kuro, last descendant of the extinct Hirata family, is filled with references to self-sacrifice and how to achieve liberation from their roles in the sad history of the Sengoku era by means of death. Directly in contrast with this view, there is Genichiro Ashina, heir to the clan name and willing to sink to any low possible to avoid the Ashina demise and save its land from ruin; and those lows will go very, very deep over the course of the game. What is this conflict between two opposed morality if not the same contrast between the inevitable conclusion of the Age of Fire, a time of deceit and conflict, and the eerie vision of an Age of Dark, which sure sounds undesirable in its bleakness representation of death, but is it really so much worse than a never-ending state of lies and suffering?

The players should decide for themselves, there are enough endings and viewpoints among all the different characters to develop a personal standpoint on the matter.

Gameplay-wise, Sekiro takes the quickness of Bloodborne and turns up the notch. A lot. Whilst Bloodborne incentivised the player to be constantly near enemies to attack, recover life and stagger for delicious critical hits, Sekiro gives the player one of the most intuitive and rewarding parry mechanic to ever be conceived. Just like in real sword fights between blade masters, Sekiro doesn’t play on the clunkier balance between hit and run, but rather block and counterattack. The enemies – particularly bosses – health bars are going to look massive and impossible to reduce to zero, if not for the possibility to play along with this mechanic of parry and counterattacking to reduce the enemies’ posture, so to strike a fatal blow. The genius behind this is how that can be achieved when the enemy still has over half of its health bar, with enough focus and precision in the movements. Sekiro highly rewards patience and perfect reflexes and, whilst the enemies hit hard, since the parrying is very lenient on the frames and the blocking can nullify almost all damages, it is far more accessible than a first blind run on Dark Souls.

The setting of the decayed Ashina and its environs are varied but beautifully interconnected, and it really looks like traveling through an organic territory which includes cities, castles, mountain paths, temples and so on. It is a very linear scenario, it rarely presents to the players tricky mazes or multiple choices as to where to go next, yet as it plays more as an action title than a dungeon crawler RPG it never feels like is lacking for content or variety. The enemy placing might be one of the best in the series, with the right balance between isolated opponents and large groups of mobs, which can both be dispatched with ease and intuition using both one’s prowess with the sword or with the engaging – albeit underdeveloped – stealth mechanic, which allows to act like a true shinobi, by striking deathly blows from the shadows, run away and instil fear and confusion in the enemies.

Bosses have, for the most part, anthropomorphic features, as to maximize the use of the sword mechanics and fit the setting, but there will be some interesting fantastic designs of folkloristic creatures to roam the land of Ashina. Most of these bosses will prove quite challenging and each of them presents in some way a new step to the learning curve, always fairly rising and requiring at each turn for the players to have mastered some aspect of the abilities and skills the game has to offer. These abilities may include passive boosts or actual techniques to utilize against enemies with particular movesets and resistances.

The musical score sees the return of Kitamura Yuka, already a veteran on previous From’s titles such as Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3, and it proves again a rightful choice as the atmosphere of the medieval Japan is perfectly conveyed by her tunes, played with traditional Japanese instruments, full of mystery and nostalgic melodies. The tracks are somewhat less noticeable and memorable than previous examples in other games, yet they will undoubtedly play the right atmosphere for the players immersion in the game.

Some of the downsides of the game can include the lack of real replay value, since there are not many different builds to experiment with, even considering all the different abilities at hands, since by the end of the first playthrough the players will have obtained almost all of them with enough care and the most overpowered and useful are clear the moment one tries them for the first time. Bayonetta it is not. The Dragonrot mechanic is also very downplayed and useless on the long run, except for being a somewhat hint that the player is sucking too much at the game all at once and various lore implications. The camera works better than in previous games but it will still lead the players to many moments where no possible divine help could have saved them from being brutally massacred in a corner with no escape.

Sekiro will certainly prove a delightful experience for any From fan in love with their style of show-don’t-tell storytelling and subtle worldbuilding, as well as the grim depiction of the dread of humankind. And if that won’t suit any personal preferences, the rewarding combat system is going to prove an immensely immersive and fun challenge for any who want to feel the thrill of handling a blade as it is meant to be handled.

"I will not die until I achieve something.
Even though the ideal is high, I never give in.
Therefore, I never die with regrets.
Alas, Ikaruga is going . . .
Undesired, unwanted them, What makes them go?
It is nothing else than the principle of the man who has the reason for being."
music kicks in

This game is f-ing lit.

In a time where horror games are either first person jump scares fest or RPGmaker-made jump scares fest, it’s rare to find a game which gives a good example of the meaning of horror without the need of scaring the viewer. Taking the definition from the Oxford dictionary, horror refers to “an intense feeling of fear, shock, or disgust.” The reason most horror games and movies fail to me nowadays it’s because they all focus too much on the fear and shock part of the equation, forgetting the importance of that ‘intense feeling’. By that I’m not saying making a louder, piercing scream or a bigger monster but rather something that will stick with the players, that will haunt them during nights and waking hours, something strong enough to leave a mark even after the experience is passed, something that, in particular cases, might be realer and scarier than your average zombie or serial killer.

Detention is not scary because there are ghosts, sudden loud noises or because it puts the player at peril, rather these circumstances happen in very rare occasions during the game. It is scary because it presents a scenario far too real and common, based on real events moreover, and spins on it so that the player is forced to realize the reality of what is presented, the truth behind the shown atrocities and just how frightening human beings can be in certain environments.

It is not surface horror, it’s pervasive horror, which seeps into the mind and brings psychological consequences on one’s perception of reality, akin to what other more famous titles such as Silent Hill 2 or Rule of Rose managed to achieve. The horror is not something necessarily stranger or far from us, it might be near, behind you, or even inside of you.

This game is endless. Not in the sense that you’ll never finish a single playthrough (though the chances are pretty high considering its difficulty and unpredictability) but because the possibilities are limitless. In Crusader Kings II you play as whoever you want to be, count, duke, king, emperor, ruling your dynasty from scratch until you are uplifted to great power or until you fail miserably and get wiped out in a cleanse war or deathly plague.

I certainly never once finished a game, it was hard enough to grasp every little mechanic you could use in the first twenty to thirty hours and after that I mostly focused on exploring possibilities and the hidden events, role-playing as a wise king and caring father or a ruthless unforgiving tyrant that had everyone who even dared to look at my wife beheaded.

Hilarious combinations are daily occurrences, there are plenty of reviews, memes and threads about Satanists popes, centuries old inbreeding dynasties, dumb rulers being murdered by their own stupidity, comedic cuckoldry, disastrous wars, you name it. One might complain that it’s mostly a RNG game where every risk calculation is bound to be wrong, but that’s exactly the point. There is a reason why Ironman mode has only one automatic save slot, so that you can experience your campaign, your story, as a real medieval life simulator: you carefully planned the assassination that will lead you into a sure-win succession war for the reign of your brother? Too bad, the assassination failed, everyone knows it was you, rebels arise, vassals revolt and your brother calls his allies to wreck doom upon your sorry head. That’s life, not every thing plays the way we imagined or wanted it too and more often than not it screws you in the behind, hard.
Not like you couldn’t play in normal vanilla mod with a plethora of cheats, if you just wanted to chill and cause havoc all around the world with unlimited resources and armies, as I said the game possibilities are limitless.

Play this game if you want to experience the unpredictable, the unavoidable, the unexpected, the unsolvable and generally to have a great time in the most complete, complex and vast strategy and role-playing game ever conceived.

War stories are powerful. Not because they necessarily depict strong men handling big guns, accomplishing heroic, almost suicidal deeds, or for the popular recent Call of Duty’s mentality of one-man-armies power fantasies. Much like horror, war isn’t a genre that manages to fully realize its potential on itself, rather they make for perfect settings for a plethora of themes which succeed thanks to the backgrounds portrayed by harsh situations. Silent Hill 2 worked so well as a story because it was first and foremost a tale about psychological distress and the descent of a man in the madness of his own guilt, and these themes married magnificently with the visual imagery of a decaying city, slowly turning into hell itself.

Likewise, Valiant Hearts thrives as a war story because its narration revolves around a cast of characters dealing with motivations to act, self-sacrifices, loss and regret, all of which could be found plenty during World War I. Other videogames like Spec Ops: The Line or Valkyria Chronicles might try to do something different with their genre, but there is still a mechanic of rewarding the players (by progressing the story or unlocking achievements) for committing un unbecoming number of killings. Meanwhile Valiant Hearts puts the players in side-scrolling, cartoon-ish levels, and actively gives them any sort of objective that has nothing to do, or never results, with murdering other people. More often than not, rather players will be asked to save others.

Valiant Hearts’s story is that of four different characters, a young German boy and his French father-in-law drafted under different flags, a nurse scouting the frontlines in search her father and an American volunteer looking for vengeance after his wife was killed in a German raid. Their paths intertwine on famous battlefields, deathly trenches, ravished cities, and they’ll have to cooperate to achieve the ultimate goal of every soldier: to survive and return home.

Such strong premise is certainly unusual in market filled with military shooters where violence is almost glorified and the feeling of repulsion and fear of guns and violence is removed, and for this exact reason Valiant Hearts is something war games needed. It is almost ironic how the most grounded take on the horrors of war comes from a game built with the UbiArt Framework engine and with a gameplay made of simple puzzles and platforming, easy collectibles and an art design that make the game look like an adventure title appropriate for children: which it kind of is and kind of isn’t.

Valiant Hearts arguably is as suited for children as movies such as Paths of Glory, Saving Private RYan and Letters from Iwo Jima are for children: all of them contain strong imagery and some of recent history’s most abhorrent events (one of Valiant Heart’s earlier levels is set during the first battle in which chloring gas was employed as a weapon) but eventually these are stories of capital importance that need to be known for what they signified and for what the characters in them stood for. As a matter of fact, the developer aim while releasing the game was probably more didactical than entertainment; an adult audience will probably be turned off by the bare minimum difficulty of the puzzles in each level, and the slight challenge might come only from the collectibles, which can’t be stressed enough how important are to find. They are a handful in each level and don’t serve any practical purpose, but all contain tiny details about the life of people in the early 20th century who found themselves thrown in the bloodiest conflict ever seen in history, left in disarray, disillusioned, and scared.

These are feeling often overlooked in war media, especially videogames, and why it is important to stress what actually is behind the glorification of action and heroism that military shooters depict. Even the beautiful soundtrack of Valiant Hearts wants to convey this message, just with some of the tracks’ titles, such as ‘evil’, ‘horror’, ‘loss’, ‘empty’, ‘sadness’, ‘no hope’, ‘hope for better’ and, the notorious and heart-breaking, ‘nurture’.

Valiant Hearts is not an uplifting story, it’s not a rewarding game and certainly won’t account as one of the most fun gaming experience, but it stands as a proof that some developers at Ubisoft cared to give their players something more, something to remember and understand, why so many people died, be it for nothing or for a reason, and why is it important for us nowadays to study history and never forget such sacrifices and mistakes.

Rance it is not. It is unfair to bring up similar titles when discussing a game own merits but this one tried way too hard to be Rance to ignore its haughtiness.

Eiyuu Senki - the World Conquest is a turn-based strategy RPG visual novel type of game, a genre mixture of which many examples exist in Japan but it is still abundantly rare in the west. The Rance series has long been the most famous example in the western niche interested in this kind of games, but it is important to understand how influential this name has been for over 30 years in Japan and realize how many similar titles have been developed with mixed results.

Some like the Eushully games have tried to revamp the strategy RPG aspects of the games, other like Utawarerumono tried to focus on the narrative. Others like Koihime Musou and Eiyuu Senki just tried to the same exact thing without the distinctive gameplay, narrative or charisma of the aforementioned games. If the Steam version allowed to utilize the 18+ content of the game – and, in some way, it does, – I would say that this is just a costly masturbation simulator, with some boring cutscenes between erotic scenes. Since, at least on the paper, the players are supposed to enjoy the gameplay and the story, do they have any interesting feature to make worth the experience?

No, they do not.

The gameplay is so bare and pointless, there is no challenge or strategy involved in just clicking enemies and letting your overpowered heroes win the game, heroes you obtain since the start. There are some upgrades if you also want to make it easier, for some reason, but even if you beat all the main and side missions all you are treated to are unimpressive vignettes of banter between uninteresting characters. The protagonist is a blank slate for the players immersion but he hasn’t any substantial, role-defining choice to make him fit the role of the players’ avatar, the plot will stay the same no matter how you imagine him to sound and feel because he acts the same regardless. The heroines, which are supposed to be the meat of the game, are nicely drawn and colourful but they too lack any interesting personality or trait, the event in which they are protagonists are uneventful at best and trite at worst; each of them will sound the same after a certain point, so despite having different traits they hold the same unimportance to the game.

Eiyuu Senki is a game for those who will take absolutely everything as long as it is from Japan, is an eroge or in general just has a decent character design for its heroines. Those seeking something worth investing time and attention, as a video game experience, won’t find anything here.