Review:
This calls itself a history of gothic video games, and there is indeed some gaming history info here. However, it mostly reads like a collection of game/game franchise descriptions, with a little about gameplay, atmosphere, etc. of specific games mentioned. Games are almost always accompanied by a single screenshot.
This is the weakest of the White Owl video game-related books I've read so far, and I don't think it's just because fewer games were mentioned that I'd ever be interested in playing. It felt a bit like the author really wanted to write about Castlevania, the Ghosts 'n Goblins series, and a few other games/franchises but didn't have enough info for a whole book. As a result, we have this book, covering games in a huge variety of genres, with often very different tones/atmosphere. There were occasionally games included that I wouldn't have considered to be gothic video games, such as the Baldur's Gate series.
The game descriptions themselves were decent enough, and I appreciated the screenshots, but, as a history of gothic video games, this wasn't very good. It might have been better if it had worked in information about the features/history of the gothic genre in general, and how that influenced gothic video games. Instead, it acted as though gothic video games existed in a vacuum, completely separate from literature, fashion, etc.
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