Heaven from the Other Side By Yussef Cole • February 8th, 2021 Blasphemous serves as an aesthetic exploration of the mind of the devout.
Another Look Crowded Apocalypse By Yussef Cole • December 7th, 2020 “A vibrant wasteland, a sparkling new way to experience a dull old formula.”
Another Look Sing It Out By Yussef Cole • October 30th, 2020 Lovers Rock, one of the films in Steve McQueen’s brilliant new “Small Axe” anthology about the UK’s West Indian community from the 1960s through the 1980s, is full of a palpable and irresistible energy.
Another Look Tragedy Erased By Yussef Cole • October 5th, 2020 “Bury my mother, pale and slight, bury my father, eyes shut tight! Bury my sisters, two by two, and then when you’re done, let’s bury me too!”
Another Look Learning How to Share By Yussef Cole and Vivian Chan • August 14th, 2020 Sharing credit shouldn’t feel like sacrificing your reputation or taking away from what you have accomplished, especially when you are sharing it with someone close to you.
Another Look The Grind By Yussef Cole • July 15th, 2020 Yussef reflects on what loving the peculiarly bristly and uncompromising style of the Souls series says about him.
Another Look Software Object Crossing By Yussef Cole • June 8th, 2020 Animal Crossing’s villagers are carefully calibrated to fall somewhere between comforting, digital companion and glorified gashapon capsule.
Another Look Resource Extraction By Yussef Cole • May 4th, 2020 Why not have a game that recognizes that in order to have that perfect garden world, that communal utopia, you must endlessly fight and sacrifice for it?
Another Look Fantasies of Fatherhood By Yussef Cole • March 13th, 2020 In Death Stranding, players get a chance to parent less a child than the idea of one.
Another Look Spectating at the End of the Universe By Yussef Cole • January 29th, 2020 Mobius Digital’s Outer Wilds rebels against the shortcomings of traditional perspective.
Another Look Fallen Men By Yussef Cole • January 10th, 2020 Like most Star Wars IP, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order isn’t interested in shaking the status quo of its narrative universe.
Another Look Tea and Warfare By Yussef Cole • December 9th, 2019 In Fire Emblem: Three Houses, tea is a pleasant diversion that holds a deeper meaning.
Another Look Planting Seeds in the Apocalypse By Yussef Cole • November 7th, 2019 Mutazione owes its narrative to those who now survive in spite of colonialism and it’s world-ending tendencies.
Another Look Making Lore Personal By Yussef Cole • September 4th, 2019 Yussef sees a reflection of his own relationship with games in others’ deep dives into the minutia of their mythology.
Another Look Evangelion and Endings By Yussef Cole • August 1st, 2019 Twenty years later, what’s it like to watch the anime that made you stop watching anime?
Another Look Dogs and Cities By Yussef Cole • June 4th, 2019 One very good boy navigates newfound sovereignty in the upcoming indie game Home Free.
Another Look The Silent Rot of Sekiro By Yussef Cole • May 9th, 2019 Repeated failed attempts in Sekiro have wide-reaching consequences, but does the player’s persistence leave permanent scars?
Another Look Alone at the End of the World By Yussef Cole • April 1st, 2019 Why developers continue to make post-apocalyptic games is well studied. Yussef Cole instead examines why players like himself love returning to their ruined worlds.
Another Look Art School, Demystified By Yussef Cole • March 11th, 2019 With Art Sqool, Yussef deals with his academic FOMO.
Another Look Corrupted Architecture By Yussef Cole • January 8th, 2019 In both Bloodborne and The Favourite, wanton avarice rots leaders from within, spreading like a plague to their surroundings.
Another Look Writing About Games: Learning to Love the Compromise By Yussef Cole • December 6th, 2018 There is only so much compartmentalization you can do in separating a game from its production process and the worldview it espouses before you, as a writer, become morally compromised.
Another Look The Snowman Gets the David Cage Treatment By Yussef Cole • November 8th, 2018 Paper-thin characterizations and women stripped of their power? Yep, sounds like a Cage game.
Another Look Couples Fighting By Yussef Cole • October 5th, 2018 Unlike the anonymous nastiness of online competition, “couch co-op” games like Overcooked engender a different, more personal form of stress.
Another Look The Grandeur of Overwatch League’s Grand Finals By Yussef Cole • September 11th, 2018 An arena’s gravitas and a bit of Blizzard showmanship make OWL feel like a real sporting event
Another Look Hood Cyberpunk By Yussef Cole • August 7th, 2018 Cyberpunk stories don’t generally want, or need, to change society. It seems, rather, that they’re perfectly content partying in the rubble.
Destiny 2’s Quiet Moments Do the Story’s Heavy-lifting By Yussef Cole • July 13th, 2018 While much of Destiny 2’s narrative is delivered to the player in bombastic cutscenes, its strongest storytelling can be found in the game’s margins, through the quieter mutterings and conversations of its non-playable characters.
Feature The Origins of Assassin’s Creed By Yussef Cole • June 26th, 2018 Yussef Cole explores the complex relationship between Assassin’s Creed: Origins, Egypt and blackness.
Another Look The Mass Effect Issue: Artificial Immortality By Yussef Cole • June 6th, 2018 Mass Effect makes us question our preconceived notions about artificial intelligence.
Another Look Edge of Titanfall By Yussef Cole • May 17th, 2018 Titanfall 2, Edge of Tomorrow and the detachment of war as entertainment.
Another Look Surrounded by Strangers By Yussef Cole • March 28th, 2018 It is uniquely difficult coming to terms with your own identity when parts of your family, whether through language, distance or culture, feel like strangers.
Another Look PaRappa and Me By Yussef Cole • March 7th, 2018 Playing PaRappa now, I feel nostalgic about not only its mechanics and aesthetics but also its place in the long, weird journey I’ve taken with coming to terms with hip-hop and its implications for my own identity.
Another Look “Villains” By Yussef Cole • February 12th, 2018 Assassin’s Creed Origins is too quick to dispose of women of color antagonists who deserved a chance at redemption.
Another Look Dujanah By Yussef Cole • December 22nd, 2017 There’s a responsibility that comes with using the art, language and symbolism of another culture.
Another Look Cuphead and the Racist Spectre of Fleischer Animation By Yussef Cole • November 10th, 2017 I see a game that’s haunted by ghosts; the specter of black culture, appropriated first by the minstrel set then by the Fleischers, Disney and others.
