What separates Celeste from masochistic games like The End Is Nigh is that it’s not bleak or unyielding.
By keeping things so simple, the game is able to keep our focus entirely on the joy of discovery.
The game sacrifices specificity of environment, story, and characterization so as to ensure that the car is king.
The sight of a murderous, misogynistic troll brought down by the women he abused offers unabashed pleasure.
It aims to tell a story of the brotherhood of soldiers, but it’s ill-served by undeveloped characterizations.
The episode manages to get back to the inspired lunacy of the season’s first few installments.
The episode is at its most effective when charting the gut-wrenching effect of Kai’s madness.
In single-player or multiplayer, Hidden Agenda is a game in which winning almost always feels like losing.
The latest Cult understands how Kai Anderson’s power is made possible by concentric circles of enablement.
There’s plenty of room here to send-up Trump’s distraction politics, but Cult isn’t landing the punch.
Almost everything in the latest episode of American Horror Story plays a bit too much like a thesis presentation.
As the series elaborates on all the things that brought Ally to madness, she’s been placed on the backburner.
The latest Cult manages to imbue its eventual villains with a level of empathy that’s new to American Horror Story.
The episode all too happily reminds us that strong emotions make people do crazy, often nonsensical things.
For better and worse, the horror on American Horror Story: Cult is all text and no subtext.
Knack 2 falters when it stops reinventing elements from other games and starts cannibalizing itself.
The premiere episode’s random acts of violence don’t confront fear so much as exploit it.
Violence is teased, but tantalizingly withheld, throughout the season-seven finale of Game of Thrones.
When the game settles into straightforward action, it comes across as a retread of past Uncharted entries.
The episode offers up a battle between CGI dragons and CGI zombies, to pulpy effect but no moral consequence.