All posts by jlfleur

Jordan is a writer, specializing in fiction and entertainment journalism.

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture Review

A Little Tenderness


The newest game to be developed by The Chinese Room and Santa Monica Studios, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is likely to become the next greatest example where critics can point in the blossoming art medium of gaming. Much like The Chinese Room’s 2008 PC title Dear Esther (spiritual predecessor to Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture), this first-person, story driven adventure game allows players to explore and interact with its world in order to uncover the mysteries surrounding its quiet, abandoned landscape, and to delve into some of the more subtly colored fabrics of humanity. Sounds deep, right? Well it is, but quite like arguments aimed at Dear Esther, it makes us question the definition of “game,” and whether that definition even has a place in modern day entertainment.

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Game of Thrones: A Nest of Vipers Review

SNAKES… I HATE SNAKES


If you weren’t expecting Game of Thrones Episode Five: A Nest of Vipers to ramp up the action, then you’ve clearly not spent enough time in Westeros. As the penultimate episode of the season, Episode Five finally shows just how far some Forresters will go in order to defeat their enemies. While Telltale Games chose to give certain characters a bit more screen-time than others, it seemed warranted in order to build to a finale to rival the first episode of the season.

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Batman: Arkham Knight PC Version: Credit Where Credit is Due

Unless you’ve been too busy side-stepping the haunted streets of Bloodborne‘s Yarnham, slaying the baddest baddies in the Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, or still in deep space fulfilling your Destiny, you’ve probably heard something about the controversy surrounding the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight.

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Game of Thrones: Sons of Winter Review

SOLID AS ICE


The first three episodes of Telltale Games‘ six-episode season of Game of Thrones have taken us to Essos, King’s Landing, to the Wall, and even north of it. These episodes sufficiently introduced the point-of-view characters as well as some decent peripheral characters, demonstrating that making friends in Westeros can often be no easy task. Although this season’s harkening to the HBO series can sometimes feel a little shameless, it doesn’t detract from the dynamic storytelling Telltale is known for. With Episode Four: Sons of Winter, the plot has finally fully broken into its own stride without relying on familiar faces and familiar themes. Rather, the entire episode seems to be sprinting towards a climactic conclusion to the Forrester tale, while also making sure no detail is lost before the end.

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Toren Review

LOST IN TRANSLATION?


Toren is the first game by Brazilian developer, Swordtales. This stylish platformer is also one of the first games to come out of the country’s Brazilian Cultural Incentive Law, which allows any Brazilian corporation to pay a percentage of its income tax to finance “cultural projects.” Suffice it to say that Toren takes the nurturing of that imaginative culture very seriously through its abstract and, at times, ambiguous plot. Poetry plays a large part in Swordtales’ storytelling here, and the developer’s artistic style is hard to ignore even at a glance. Still, even with such seeming care and attention to bring a video game into the realm of “high art,” could it be that the drive to build a game got a little lost?

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Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster PS4 Unboxing

Take a look at what’s inside the Limited Edition version of Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster for the PlayStation 4.

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