• Beyond: Two Souls (Sony, PS3)

    December 11, 2013 - By 

    It’s fair to say that Heavy Rain, the last outing from development team Quantic Dream, changed the way people think about videogames – and the way they play them. Deeply cinematic in nature, it attempted to weave together multiple storylines into one coherent and engaging whole. A noir murder mystery at heart, it starred the classic archetypes of spent detectives, deadbeats and sinister loners but imbued them with the kind of humanity which rarely appears in this medium. Further, it was at times deeply unsettling: a sequence in which a father searches in vain for his missing son in a crowded…

  • Spelunky (Mossmouth, PS3)

    November 28, 2013 - By 

    There are, so the internet viral says, so many dumb ways to die. This way of thinking inspires Spelunky, a shamefully retro platformer with a devious sense of humour that manages to bridge the elusive gap between “oh, just one more go then” and “oh, I want to impale my own eyes with my joypad”. Your character, an intrepid explorer in the Dr. Jones mould, can be crushed by a boulder, bitten by a snake, manhandled by a yeti, gobbled by piranhas, melted by an ancient mummy’s noxious breath, brain-fried by an alien’s gaze… the variety of deaths is almost endless,…

  • The Last Of Us (Sony, PS3)

    June 25, 2013 - By 

    There is an infamous moment in The Happening, M. Night Shyamalan’s justifiably maligned vision of the apocalypse, in which Mark Wahlberg talks to a plant lest it get angry and secrete a neurotoxin which hastens his madness and eventual suicide. The scene is as ridiculous and cringe inducing as it sounds, and illustrates how in the wrong hands a concept can be totally bungled. The link between this box office disaster and The Last Of Us, the most accomplished and original videogame to be released this year, is that when nature turns angry it can be very deadly indeed. The simple yet…