When I started playing this game, I went into it with practically no expectations. Perhaps that is why I finished it with practically no objections. In its twenty-something hours, I had nothing but fun taking twenty-something Lara Croft through her first adventure. The visuals are stunning, the environments detailed and evocative, the difficulty of various challenges seemingly tailored to my taste. And then there’s the addition of skills to develop and tools to find, craft or improve, and for the first time, a sense of character to accompany Lara’s fancy moves. What’s not to like?
Category: Reviews
Dear Esther vs Gone Home
In the past few weeks, I played two short, experimental games: Dear Esther by The Chinese Room, and Gone Home by The Fullbright Company. The mysterious vibe, the focus on storytelling, the surprisingly fine audio and visuals and the undeniably unorthodox character of both games make it impossible to not draw comparisons, so that’s exactly what I’ll do.
Frozen
It’s been years, or so it seems, since I last watched a Disney cartoon. It’s still weird to see the 3D models and connect the computer-generated imagery and modern-like impressions to what I remember adoring as a kid. The last one I really got into was The Lion King, I believe, and that was back in the 90s. Things have changed, and I don’t mean only the visuals. The themes, the references to Real Life, the humor – it’s all new, and, to borrow my own words from Fruit from Palaven, it makes me feel old.
Altered Carbon
I read Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan, and liked it a lot. It’s a noir-ish SF novel set in a somewhat dystopian future where, thanks to the discovery of the relics of a technologically advanced alien civilization on Mars, humanity managed to spread over a number of distant worlds, and, more importantly, work out a technology of digital human storage which allows one’s mind and memories to be saved after the death of the body, and downloaded into another. Takeshi Kovacs is an ex spec-ops soldier who gets killed in the prologue and then ‘re-sleeved’ into a new body when hired by one of the most powerful people on Earth to solve a bizarre murder mystery. It’s through the challenges this tasks presents for him that we learn both about the setting and Tak’s not-exactly-amiable character.
The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings
I was thrilled when this game (hereafter TW2) appeared, yet it took me two years to finally play it from start to finish. And even after doing so, I can’t say for sure why it failed to lure me in the way its predecessor (hereafter TW), one of my all time favorites, did in 2008. A mystery by anyone’s standards, because TW2 has it all: the story, the visuals, the combat, the humor. It’s rare that I have so few (next to no) objections to a game. Yet if I was to choose one to replay, I’d still rather go to TW than to TW2.
Among Others
Acting on a hunch, and seeing how it won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards, I picked up Jo Walton’s “Among Others” and – couldn’t put it down.