Cicerone53

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a protagonist from a lowly station sets out in pursuit of an outsized dream. Their ambitions lead them to something bigger than themselves, and after engaging in theft, property destruction and wanton disregard for others’ safety, they push beyond the boundaries of what seems possible to carve […]

As living creatures ourselves, it’s easy to forget just how strange and downright miraculous organic life actually is. Earth is the only planet we know of where life has evolved, which is breathtaking in and of itself, but as it’s quite literally our own backyard we frequently become inured to the wild, wonderful strangeness all […]

There’s a part of nearly everybody that recoils instinctively from anything that tries too hard to imitate a human face, be it a mask, mannequin, or makeup job. Whether it’s simple trust issues or some evolutionary holdover from a time when recognizing camouflage meant life or death, one rarely feels totally at ease around a […]

No two people experience a moment the same way: you can pass a pair of children playing in the park without sparing them a second thought, while they may cherish the memory long into adulthood. There’s a gap between reality and memory, too, so that the way we perceive an event in retrospect—the impact it […]

“How will future generations remember us?” It’s an age-old question, and those who ask it almost never receive an answer in their lifetimes. In tumultuous times like the present, when technology advances further and faster every day and humanity becomes ever more aware of its own destructive impact on the planet, concerns about our relationship […]

There are few conceits so well worn in western fiction as that of the “Chosen One:” an individual selected by a higher power to combat some great evil and bring the world back from the brink of annihilation. As a plot device it’s driven such modern epoch-defining blockbusters as Star Wars, The Matrix and the […]

Well. Here we are. As I write this it’s the beginning of 2021, and the world is holding its breath as vaccine distribution provides what seems like the first glimmer of light in the long darkness of the COVID-19 pandemic. For most of 2020 it felt like waiting was the only thing anybody could do, and […]

Fantasy has always been a powerful tool for conceiving a better world; after all, change can’t come until someone has imagined what it might be like. A quotation popularly attributed to G.K. Chesterton says that, “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can […]

What a long, strange trip it’s been. After Red Candle Games flew out of the gate with Detention, their acclaimed 2017 horror adventure, expectations were sky-high for the Taiwanese studio’s next project. Two years later it arrived in the form of Devotion, an exploration-based horror title inspired by recent first-person hits like P.T. and What […]