You can keep a room full of monsters waiting while you decide where to roll your head. In Demon Lord: Just a Block, enemies take their ordinary turns in response to your actions, leaving you free to study the grid before committing. There is something immediately welcoming about that arrangement. An attack cue can register as useful information before it becomes a reason to panic. Moving into an enemy deals damage, but it also lets the room respond, so even a basic attack asks you to accept what happens next. Hesitation becomes part of playing. That comfortable pause makes the...

The premiere lets us see Moth accept Dean before it lets us understand the decision. At an art exhibition, Moth dismisses unwanted attention, then responds to Dean and ends up kissing him in a restroom. You Maniac rewinds a month, turning that encounter into a question about how someone so protective of his privacy made room for this particular man. Showing a later event first is a familiar storytelling device. Here, it gives the early flirtation a useful focus: we watch for the choices that could make Moth’s interest believable. Those choices arrive through surprisingly ordinary channels. Moth considers blocking...

Silhouetted against a stormy sky, Jim Caviezel’s Fitz acquires the stature of an avenging monument. The composition reduces a man to his outline, stripping away the facial information through which we might read hesitation or fear. Darkness confers authority here. William Eubank’s Ghost Soldier borrows the visual mystique of the dangerous outsider for a hero whose righteousness requires very little investigation. The image invites us to contemplate his power, and the people around him supply its justification. Consider the boy who runs into a burning home to retrieve the folded flag that commemorates his father’s military service. Jack’s attachment gives...

Silhouetted against a stormy sky, Jim Caviezel’s Fitz acquires the stature of an avenging monument. The composition reduces a man to his outline, stripping away the facial information through which we might read hesitation or fear. Darkness confers authority here. William Eubank’s Ghost Soldier borrows the visual mystique of the dangerous outsider for a hero whose righteousness requires very little investigation. The image invites us to contemplate his power, and the people around him supply its justification. Consider the boy who runs into a burning home to retrieve the folded flag that commemorates his father’s military service. Jack’s attachment gives...

Vladimir knows what his prisoner has read because he once studied under him. Now the gifted pupil interrogates the professor in Lubyanka Prison, demanding testimony that would implicate an Orthodox priest in counterrevolutionary activity. Set in Moscow in 1938, Václav Marhoul’s Confession casts Rob Lowe as Alexei, the teacher, and James Franco as the student entrusted with breaking him. Their shared education gives the encounter a disturbing intimacy. Vladimir is soliciting the cooperation of someone whose judgment he once respected. The state has its accusation; it needs Alexei’s voice attached to it. A signed statement would make coercion resemble testimony....

Question a child with his mother nearby in Hillthorn and the response arrives as a card depicting her disapproving gaze. There is no dialogue exchange to explain her objection. You have to read the relationship, recognize an obstacle, and decide what this encounter permits. The card supplies a social fact rather than an answer to the missing-person case. It is a small, effective way of placing the player outside the settlement’s accepted company: you can see that a rule exists before you understand everything it protects. Developed by Montreal studio Fool Moon with Finnegan Motors, Hillthorn gives detective noir and...