Reid McCarter

Excellent atmosphere and a strong setup are let down by thin character work in the survival horror franchise's latest spin-off

Monthly magazine for long-form articles and podcasts on videogames

Monthly magazine for long-form articles and podcasts on videogames

Monthly magazine for long-form articles and podcasts on videogames

Monthly magazine for long-form articles and podcasts on videogames

Monthly magazine for long-form articles and podcasts on videogames

Monthly magazine for long-form articles and podcasts on videogames

Monthly magazine for long-form articles and podcasts on videogames

Monthly magazine for long-form articles and podcasts on videogames

There’s a quote from a 1992 New York Times article on Cormac McCarthy where McCarthy says that he doesn’t like authors who don’t “deal with issues of life and death.” This was an opinion that McCarthy returned to often in the scant press he took part…

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is an adventure. That nebulous term, “adventure,” is deployed constantly in games—as an oblique genre descriptor, as a marketing term so overused it’s detached from any semantic potency. In its full meaning, though, an adventure is…

Videogames are terrified of love. Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden is suffused with it. Every one of the stories that intertwine to create its overarching plot is an examination of love—a big and broad enough topic to support this attention—and the ways…

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth This article discusses plot details from throughout Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Here’s the big question, the one that insists upon an answer the longer you spend playing Final Fantasy VII Rebirth: Why is it an open world…

Kazuma Kiryu, a legendary ex-gangster in the Japanese underworld, stops before a bridge, a café, a nightclub, or an office building, suddenly awash in memories of bygone times. Scenes flash before his eyes of lost loves—of old rivals and friends from…

Alan Wake II This article discusses plot details from throughout Alan Wake II. It's also meant to be read after Ed's article on the game, "Television is More Fun Than Mirrors." Pretty much nobody in Alan Wake II has a clear idea of what’s happening…

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a game about making choices. Encounter an imposing, demonic creature in the depths of a cavernous underground temple and, depending on how the player has created their character, the monster may be convinced to kill off its hellish…

Nearly two dozen hours into Starfield, the latest action role-playing game from Bethesda Game Studios, I stumbled upon a side story that was far more thrilling and formally inventive than anything else in the main plot up to that point. In it, the…