Category: Excerpt

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Watching Myself Die

By Phillip Russell • September 22nd, 2020

On Blackness in The Last of Us

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Four Brief Discussions of Cultist Simulator and Planescape: Torment

By Violet Adele Bloch • September 22nd, 2020

A sketch.

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Talkin’ ‘Bout Bugsnax

By Melissa King • August 28th, 2020

A look at how Kero Kero Bonito came up with gaming’s happiest bop of the summer.

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The Relatable Dystopia

By Mark Hill • August 28th, 2020

Mirror’s Edge is one of the few franchises to acknowledge that every dystopia is someone’s utopia.

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Your Choices Matter: The Real Power Fantasy

By Ruth Cassidy • August 28th, 2020

An interview with the co-narrative leads on Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire about subverting that power fantasy of the Chosen One.

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Maternal Legacies

By Emma Kostopolus • July 30th, 2020

Death Stranding doesn’t erase motherhood: it is, in several important ways, defined by it.

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Being Alone

By Alma Roda-Gil • July 30th, 2020

When talking about the problems with Firewatch’s ending, general consensus is that it invalidates the events of the game – but that’s looking at it backward.

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Digital Phantasmagoria

By Phantom • July 6th, 2020

On the art of DataErase – glitch witch, anime porn historian and DIP switch devil.

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Still Fallen: The Delicious, Open World Mystique of Fallen London

By Khee Hoon Chan • June 5th, 2020

Failbetter Games’ impeccable prose has kept this browser game alive for a decade now.

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Everyone’s Already in Jail: Astral Chain, Freedom Wars, and Social Control

By Don Everhart • June 5th, 2020

While the main characters in one game are police and in the other they are prisoners, there isn’t much difference in the rhythms of their lives.

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Sticks and Stones Might Break My Bones But Words Will Never Hurt Me

By Autumn Wright • May 4th, 2020

Marvel’s New Warriors series is an attempt to land the most expensive “how ya doing fellow kids” meme in the history of late capitalism.

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In the Suburbs I: Stardew Valley and Arcade Fire

By Alyssa Hatmaker • May 4th, 2020

No matter what artists might be trying to convey in their music, we inevitably tailor their message to fit ourselves.

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Expanding Worlds with Video Game Tabletop RPGs

By Scott Roepel • April 2nd, 2020

Unlike in roleplaying videogames, for tabletop roleplaying, all you need is an imagination, a good storyteller and a set of dice.

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Carrington’s Dreamscape

By Daniel Lipscombe • April 2nd, 2020

Videogames, especially those of the horror variety, could seriously stand to take a leaf from surrealism’s book.

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Accepting Death as the Sun Goes Out

By Ryan Cooper • April 2nd, 2020

The Outer Wilds’ tragic time-loop helps Ryan Cooper process real-world struggles.

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Picking Fruit in Hyrule: Playing Breath of the Wild Like It’s Animal Crossing

By Alyssa Wejebe • February 21st, 2020

If you’re sick of emptying your pockets to Tom Nook and microtransactions, another Nintendo mainstay may be exactly what you’re looking for.

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Heavy Metal Hits the Tabletop

By Tom G. Wolf • February 21st, 2020

For both metal and tabletop gaming, the allure of the forbidden draws in similar crowds.

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Searching for Kirby(‘s) Air Ride, a Game that Does(n’t) Exist

By Don Everhart • January 28th, 2020

Nostalgic for a game that never existed, Don Everhart considers how he has carried a torch for the never-released Nintendo 64 version of Kirby’s Air Ride. Chasing an online game swap for the Gamecube game Kirby Air Ride may have been the next best thing.

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The New Age of Nollywood

By Oluwatayo Adewole • January 28th, 2020

A new generation of Nigerian filmmakers is finally putting quality over quantity.

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Undercurrent: Sea of Solitude’s Monsters Undermine a Mental Health Journey

By Caitlin Galiz-Rowe • December 20th, 2019

The protagonist’s inner demons seem to get the least screen time for a game about monsters.

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The Art of LARP

By Sharang Biswas • December 20th, 2019

LARPing is as much about community and art as it is about roleplaying.

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What Lies Beneath: Subtextual Storytelling Techniques in Videogames

By Jeff Spoonhower • December 2nd, 2019

Jeff Spoonhower discusses how stories can be told during gameplay through the use of powerful subtextual audio-visual techniques.

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Games About Death (Are Stuck In a Rut)

By Mark Hill • December 2nd, 2019

Why has the treatment of death in certain indie games become so predictable?

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The Horror of the Tortured Artist

By Rachel Watts • October 24th, 2019

Both Layers of Fear games tap into the horror of what happens when artists become desperate chasing their muse.

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Two Hands Off the Wheel: Learning to Embrace the Chaos of Zweihander

By R. M. Jansen-Parkes • October 24th, 2019

Most tabletop RPGs boil down to a roll of the dice.

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Grim, Perilous and Inclusive

By Adam Brown • October 24th, 2019

Zweihander: Grim & Perilous is a fresh take on dark fantasy and tabletop RPGs.

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Dwarves in Space

By Ian Williams • September 24th, 2019

The gig economy is everywhere, even in our videogames. At least Deep Rock Galactic makes it fun.

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Ghost in the Machine

By Harry Mackin • September 24th, 2019

Both the psychological thriller Personal Shopper and Breath of the Wild explore what happens when we allow technology to shape us.

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Taking Control of my Sobriety

By Blake Hester • September 24th, 2019

When you take addiction out of your life, you’re left with more hours in the day than you know what to do with. Luckily, there are games like Control.

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The Year Videogames Blew Up Shanghai

By Mark Hill • August 26th, 2019

Unlike most first-person shooters, these two titles make you think about the very real city destroyed in the wake of your protagonist’s outsider crusades.

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What Makes a Game Trash?

By Evan Dennis • August 22nd, 2019

While it’s easy for a game to fall into being trashy, it takes a bit of lucky circumstance for a game to be fully trash.

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I Wanna Be Your Dog

By Jeremy Signor • August 22nd, 2019

That awkward moment when giving up your free will to a supercomputer-powered hive mind brings out your inner sub.

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Silly Old Bear

By Dick Page • July 22nd, 2019

The review-bombing of Devotion was never about Winnie the Pooh.

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Springfield Forever

By Noah Springer • July 22nd, 2019

Some mobile games are only entertaining for a few hours. For Noah, The Simpsons Tapped Out has proven fun for nearly a decade.

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Lo-Fi Hip Hop Beats To Have a Nervous Breakdown To

By Ana Diaz • June 25th, 2019

At least an entire generation working themselves to death can listen to some cozy beats while they do it.

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Order and Chaos

By Justin Reeve • June 24th, 2019

Behind Hitman 2‘s stark, modernist buildings lies a symbolic crusade to reclaim the architectural style.

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Godzilla is Political

By Haru Nicol • May 6th, 2019

It’s impossible to untangle Godzilla from the nuclear anxieties that lead to the kaiju’s creation.

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Hints of Depth in Pikuniku’s Flat World

By Jon Bailes • May 6th, 2019

While Pikuniku’s narrative mostly sticks to the shallow end, it offers neat observations about the distractions of consumerism

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Donut County and the Boisterous History of White Guilt

By Jason Dafnis • March 26th, 2019

The quirky indie game makes a statement on gentrification, capitalism, and – in the raccoon BK’s character – the weaponization of racial guilt.

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Replaying Deus Ex In An Age of Conspiracy Theorists

By Mark Hill • March 26th, 2019

Nineteen years after its release, Deus Ex’s story reveals its age far more than its clunky graphics ever could.