Jacob Owca

Watch the first movie before starting this one. Smile 2 follows a pop singer a year after she recovers from drug abuse and the death of a loved one. The commentaries on the music industry are smart without being overbearing. The characters are believable. Naomi Scott does a heartbreakingly convincing job depicting what a trauma does to someone. The gore is extreme and vomitus without being distasteful. I don't often gag at violent movies, and I don't cry at emotional ones. This one made me do both. Even if it has a disappointingly predictable ending, this movie is a hell of a ride worth enduring [if you can].

In BFE, America, a professor and his few students suffer a bus accident that leaves them stranded in the abandoned, aptly named town of Little Hope from decades past. They learn as they venture through the town and encounter who or what still lives there that its dark history spans longer than just the decades during and following its abandonment. Many people complain about the game's story and ending being grueling, miserable, unfair, and a total insult to all of the decisions the player makes during the game. Those details are precisely what I love about this game. Little Hope makes the player experience the unfair misery of a town and its residents' lives decaying, be it from religious unrest, economic collapse, or long repressed familial trauma. Don't go into this game expecting to win it. You can't. Go into this game hoping to experience a heart wrenching yet enjoyable story.

Much like the rest of the games in the Dark Pictures Anthology, this one has a fascinating premise. The player controls of a group of soldiers on both sides of the Iraq war. An earthquake erupts mid-battle, opening a fault line and swallowing them. They wake up trapped in a cave deep beneath the surface. It becomes clear that they're not the only ones to have set foot there. Like the caves you traverse in this game, the story becomes more strange and elaborate as you progress. It's a bit flawed and outlandish, but never so absurd that you can't take it seriously. The characters are thoughtfully written and complex like the real fighters from the Iraq war that they're meant to represent. The plot takes many twists and turns depending on how you play the game - each of them telling a deep and solicitous story about the worth of war and if it there even is any. While not their best work, you can tell that House of Ashes was made with a lot of love and respect for the historic events that its's (loosely) based on. This game deserves your attention at least for a single playthrough.

The premise of this game is interesting - you and your friends end up trapped on an abandoned warship and find out that you might not be alone. This is easily Supermassive's most scary game. I jumped several times. The scares in this one are effective and well done. The story is lackluster. The characters are vague and uninteresting. There's not much mystery behind the ship you're trapped on. It's pretty easy to figure out what the game's twist will be about halfway through the campaign. The game is short at about three to four hours and the ending feels super abrupt. There's a lot of exposition at the beginning of this game. Once it's over, it's not long before the game comes to a close. You should definitely give this game a shot, but it's only good for one playthrough. Wait til it's on sale or rent it.

This is an above average sequel to the original Last of Us game. Admittedly, the story can be annoying at points and the characters can feel unfaithfully stupid relative to their portrayals in the first game. This is still a thoughtfully put together, harsh, bone chilling story about the harm one causes by seeking revenge. There are a lot of morons on Google reviews complaining about how the game is supposedly too political because it has a masculine female character and a lesbian character. Don't let them dissuade you from playing this.

How Supermassive Games took such a stellar cast and fun concept and made it so boring is totally beyond me. Nothing of interest happens in this game until roughly the last hour and a half of the eight to nine hours you'll spend playing it. The overwhelming majority of this game is taken up by cutscenes whereas Supermassive's other games like Until Dawn or House of Ashes had relatively equal parts gameplay and cutscene. It felt less like playing a game and more like waiting for the longest movie ever to let you make a seemingly inconsequential decision that somehow leads to every character's death. You're better off watching a playthrough of this one.