“We receive the due reward of our deeds.” So reads the inscription on an artifact discovered in the early hours of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. It’s a passage from the Bible, spoken by Saint Dismas, a man crucified on the same day as Jesus. He spent years robbing and murdering innocent people before being…

How amazing that a turn-based game can feel so urgent. In invisible, Inc., I have as much time as I need to position my agents just so, but I’m always paying attention to the security level at the top right of my screen. That meter tells you when security will be heightened during your heist,…

At their heart, adventure games are about delivering a narrative. They’re mechanically simple. At their most complex, they offer puzzles that give the player some agency in the world, and slow their progression so they don’t just blast through the narrative content. This means that in order to be successful, adventure games need to precisely…

Like failed empires of the past, I found myself caught in a hyperbolic debt spiral in Offworld Trading Company. My Mars-based colonial corporation had invested into energy production, and one of my rivals detonated an EMP through my plants, disabling them. As the market for electricity boomed, I had to purchase it at increasingly higher…

The second episode of Hitman opens with Agent 47 lounging on a bench in the idyllic vacation destination, Sapienza. With a newspaper in hand and a crisp Italian shirt on his back, you could be forgiven for mistaking Agent 47 as a proxy of Daniel Craig’s James Bond–if it wasn’t for his shaved, barcoded head.…

What We Deserve feels personal, a narrative so steeped in familial heartbreak that it almost plays more like a visual stream-of-consciousness diary than a choose-your-own-adventure zombie apocalypse story. What started as a typical tale about how to survive the zombie apocalypse shifts in its final episode into a fascinating tale that asks the most relevant…