Brett Makedonski

Assassin's Creed Valhalla mimics the Odyssey formula but takes a step backward in almost every way, as we explain in our review.

Synchronicity is a theme, or at least a phenomenon, that’s used in Control. Through its elaborate and convoluted story, it’s established that spectacular results can be achieved when distant and separate things are attuned to one another. They share a purpose, and that unity is enough to form a meaningful bond.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey betrays its lineage. For a series so deeply entrenched in ancestral history, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey strays from nearly everything its predecessors have accomplished. Its DNA is mismatched at times. It’s the furthest limb on the family tree.

Are you a good person? It’s a simple question: Are you a good person? It’s conditional and it’s negotiable. Everyone has their justifications.

Are you a good person? It’s a simple question: Are you a good person? It’s conditional and it’s negotiable. Everyone has their justifications.

Lara Croft has always lived in her father’s shadow. This famed archaeologist devoted the latter years of his life searching for The Divine Source, a Fountain of Youth-type mythological key to immortality. Like Ponce de León, he never found it. His quest eventually killed him.

Shadow of the Colossus is a timeless masterpiece. Some of the greatest games exist as the best representatives of an era or a genre. They were groundbreaking and influential in ways that guided and evolved future game design. They’re remembered fondly but maybe they don’t hold up as well as they used to.

Beating Cuphead should come with a complimentary Mensa membership. It’s a tough game, but Cuphead‘s difficulty lies more in exhaustive pattern recognition than anywhere else. Reactive shooting and jumping only go so far. Eventually, it’s hardly reactionary anymore; it’s muscle memory at that point.

The heart of Prey isn’t in an obvious place. It isn’t in its scientific moral quandary or its inky aliens or its ever-escalating plot. It isn’t in its retconned 1960s history that serves to justify this research center or in its numerous combat abilities or even in its constant sense of tension and dread. No, the heart of Prey lies in its stories.

“I think that we’ve been surrounded by death for so long that we’ve just gotten used to it.” Edith Finch muses this aloud right before she walks into the family’s graveyard. She’s talking to herself because there’s no one left to talk to. Edith is the last living Finch and that’s meaningful because the Finches have one hell of a tough time staying alive. By my count, there are 37 tombstones in the cemetery — 12 for the humans and 25 for the pets. I probably missed some.

Normally, it’d feel disingenuous to directly compare games during a review; this is a unique case where I think it may be impossible not to.

Perched atop some large edifice in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate‘s London, I hesitated. Many slickly-presented columns of light reached toward the sky in all directions — each one indicating yet another thing to do in an effort to satisfy the game’s calling for you to do everything. I was frozen less from indecision and more from just simply being overwhelmed. There’s so much to do. So much.