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2 months ago | 
slantmagazine.com | Niv M. Sultan
Every season of Mike White’s black comedy anthology series The White Lotus begins at the end—namely, with a flash forward to the aftermath of a murder. In season one, it was to a body being loaded onto a plane heading out of Hawaii, and in season two, it was to a corpse floating toward a Sicilian beach.
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Dec 5, 2024 | 
slantmagazine.com | Niv M. Sultan
In a cultural landscape dominated by corporatized “intellectual property” and gargantuan franchises, what’s the purpose of a series like Secret Level?
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Nov 25, 2024 | 
slantmagazine.com | Niv M. Sultan
Filled as it is with anthropomorphic cats, acrobatic clashes, and ruminations on Taoism, Nine Sols has the air of a wuxia fable. Taiwanese studio Red Candle Games’s atmospheric Metroidvania begins centuries after a remarkably advanced feline race, afflicted with an untamable genetic disease, fled the planet they had bled dry, only to discover fatal flaws in their exit plan.
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Nov 25, 2024 | 
flipboard.com | Niv M. Sultan
4 hours ago10 Most Disappointing Games of 2024, RankedWith another year of gaming coming to a close and the holiday season fast approaching, along with it comes the awards season, where we heap praise …4 hours agoStalker 2 Players Are Tired Of Enemies Spawning Out Of NowhereStalker 2's Buggy Launch Isn't Going To Matter In The End Hardcore fans are going to stick with GSC Game World's sequel no matter what.
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Oct 24, 2024 | 
slantmagazine.com | Niv M. Sultan
Kiryu Kazuma (Takeuchi Ryôma) needs a new suit. In Like a Dragon: Yakuza’s second episode, the former enforcer, fresh off a decade-long stint in prison, tries on an outfit in a store, only to be harassed in his fitting room by a trio of ruffians. When their leader gets overly pushy, Kiryu wallops the group with an obvious lack of both effort and enthusiasm. After the posers scurry off, Kiryu takes one more look in the mirror.
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Oct 10, 2024 | 
slantmagazine.com | Niv M. Sultan
PlaySide Studios’s Kill Knight begins with its titular warrior, clad in medieval armor and wielding a pair of pistols, standing on a cliff’s edge that overlooks a chasm of swirling red mist. A monkish figure approaches, clicks a sword onto the champion’s back, and then steps away as the knight dives into the maw below. Woe to those who don’t breathe deeply during the plunge, for what follows this moment of calm is a chaotic ride through the abyss.
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Sep 19, 2024 | 
slantmagazine.com | Niv M. Sultan
In the opening scene of Zack Snyder’s Twilight of the Gods, Leif Völsung (Stuart Martin) tells his men how he met his betrothed, Sigrid (Sylvia Hoeks). The animated series cuts to a kinetic depiction of the Norse king’s story: At the height of a battle on a wintry field, a warrior tears her way through an invading army and, with a feat of preternatural skill, saves Leif’s life.
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Sep 4, 2024 | 
slantmagazine.com | Niv M. Sultan
With a war raging among the stars, the supersoldier Demetrian Titus leaps out of his ship and dives toward the surface of a planet below. As he streaks through the sky like a meteor, dodging flotsam and explosions, the near silence of the atmosphere foregrounds his muffled breathing, whose steady pace conveys the calm with which he faces all but impossible odds.
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Aug 28, 2024 | 
slantmagazine.com | Niv M. Sultan
Early into Point N’ Sheep’s Bloodless, the ronin Tomoe finds a sword thrust into the ground. “There was a time I thought I needed one of these,” she thinks to herself. The line is double-edged: Tomoe, haunted by the carnage she once wreaked in service to an ambitious master, has forsworn violence, but when forced to fight, she skillfully defends herself with nothing but her bare hands. The weapon is useless to her both morally and practically.
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Aug 12, 2024 | 
slantmagazine.com | Niv M. Sultan
Over the course of seven seasons of Rick and Morty, the titular duo has visited myriad parallel universes and met numerous alternate versions of themselves. Each jaunt through spacetime has, in turn, rendered the unfathomable cosmos ever vaster—and their own place in it more insignificant. In a multiverse swimming with innumerable Ricks and Mortys, their state of being is but one of untold possibilities, the inevitable product of choices made with and without their consideration.
