Gaymer Pride By Jeremy Signor • June 19th, 2019 Identities are great and necessary tools for understanding yourself and establishing communities. But it’s not worth losing yourself to their darker tendencies.
Masquerada and the Heart of the Queer Family By Jeremy Signor • June 12th, 2019 The status quo values blood and legacy while othering those that differ in the name of “family values”. The queer family is built from something else.
The Space Between Lacks Meaning in Its Metaphor By Jeremy Signor • June 5th, 2019 Metaphor can be a powerful tool to lead audiences to some sort of meaning. The Space Between seems content to just bludgeon you with it.
The Ballad of EarthBound’s Gay Tony By Jeremy Signor • May 29th, 2019 Gay representation isn’t about explicit labels, and it isn’t about hollow lip service. It’s about writing characters that are believably queer.
Shakedown: Hawaii Shows Why Capitalism Sucks By Jeremy Signor • May 22nd, 2019 Placing you in the shoes of an unapologetic rich capitalist shows how much of a nihilistic circle jerk capitalism is.
A Sekiro Journey: Isshin, the Sword Saint By Jeremy Signor • May 15th, 2019 The final boss encounter of Sekiro shows just how well paced a video game boss can be.
Katana ZERO Offers Only Excuses By Jeremy Signor • May 8th, 2019 For a game that channels Hotline Miami so heavily, Katana ZERO is unusually generous in granting players absolution for their eventual murder spree.
Preserving Ideas with Blaster Master Zero II By Jeremy Signor • April 24th, 2019 Bold ideas should persevere, but they need room to grow.
Baba Is You Rules By Jeremy Signor • April 3rd, 2019 By letting you manipulate the implicit rules of its world, Baba Is You reveals how underlying assumed rules shape how you play games.
Hypnospace Outlaw Finds the Horror in Viruses By Jeremy Signor • March 26th, 2019 An eerie tribute to the early days of the internet, Hypnospace Outlaw reveals the hidden hell of computer viruses.
Rethinking Action with Devil May Cry 5 By Jeremy Signor • March 20th, 2019 Though very much a Devil May Cry game, 5 hints at a new future for the character action genre.
Searching for Souls in Reverie By Jeremy Signor • March 13th, 2019 What exactly makes a Dark Souls-like experience? And do we do games a disservice by searching for it?
The Shonen Flowmotion of Kingdom Hearts III By Jeremy Signor • March 5th, 2019 Kingdom Hearts III succeeds at putting you in the driver’s seat of a shonen anime fantasy.
Choose Your Own Adventure with Slay the Spire By Jeremy Signor • February 13th, 2019 Slay the Spire lets you craft your own narrative with branching choices that harken back to Choose Your Own Adventure books.
The Heavy Footsteps of Resident Evil 2’s Mr. X By Jeremy Signor • February 6th, 2019 The whiff of threat of him is enough to completely change the game you’re playing, warping your entire awareness around the possibility of him.
Katamari Damacy: Keep Going By Jeremy Signor • January 23rd, 2019 Katamari Damacy might be the most affirming experience in gaming.
GRIS: Her Journey By Jeremy Signor • January 16th, 2019 GRIS wants to be Journey, but ultimately learns the wrong lessons and loses its voice.
Road Trip By Jeremy Signor • January 2nd, 2019 When you’re trapped in a car with nothing to do but play handheld games, you start to see their inherent worth.
The Master of Unlocking By Jeremy Signor • December 19th, 2018 Unlocking aspects of a game is an old bit of gameplay feedback that’s still satisfying.
The Catch By Jeremy Signor • December 12th, 2018 The raw feeling of capturing a Pokémon is augmented in Pokémon Let’s Go.
Figure it Out By Jeremy Signor • December 5th, 2018 Return of the Obra Dinn uses gameplay lines more synonymous with tabletop deduction games than traditional videogames.
Pivot By Jeremy Signor • November 28th, 2018 How two games handle their key moments forever codified the Metroidvania genre.
Abstract Art By Jeremy Signor • November 20th, 2018 When abstraction boils down what you end up doing in game, the limits of what is possible start to encroach.
Hell is Other People By Jeremy Signor • November 14th, 2018 Empathy is good, but how do we hold onto it in the face of those that have none?
We Are the Monsters By Jeremy Signor • October 31st, 2018 “Maybe we as queer people often have such kinship with monsters because we had to make pals with them when we were all hidden away inside the closet.”
Hold On By Jeremy Signor • October 17th, 2018 We all need something to hold onto, but what happens when that thing turns sour?
The Message By Jeremy Signor • October 3rd, 2018 Level design never stands alone. It’s all in how you look at it.
Art Divine By Jeremy Signor • September 26th, 2018 When you marry art style with theme, the results can be simply divine.
The Gay Normalcy Fantasy By Jeremy Signor • September 12th, 2018 Sometimes we just want to escape into a power fantasy. For many gay people, there’s power in the fantasy of normalcy.
Who We Are By Jeremy Signor • August 16th, 2018 Embodying a role can allow us to step outside ourselves and examine what makes us tick.
The Board Soul Let’s Get Physical By Jeremy Signor • May 24th, 2018 Catacombs may be a game about flicking discs, but it brings the action of dungeon crawling to life in surprising, intuitive ways.
The Board Soul You Can’t Go Home Again By Jeremy Signor • April 30th, 2018 Something built on nostalgia doesn’t have to be stuck in the past as long as it keeps an eye on the future, too.
The Surreal Cognitive Dissonance of Paratopic By Jeremy Signor • April 2nd, 2018 By inverting your expectations, Paratopic becomes a strange exercise in video game surrealism.
Where the Water Tastes Like Wine Betrays the Heart of Storytelling By Jeremy Signor • March 26th, 2018 Storytelling is dynamic. Where the Water Tastes Like Wine makes it feel static.
The Board Soul Choices By Jeremy Signor • March 8th, 2018 Painful choices are what makes games interesting. Fact or Fiction embodies this philosophy.
The Board Soul Drafting 102 By Jeremy Signor • March 1st, 2018 Though its many options can overwhelm absolute beginners, Bunny Kingdom’s very visual gameplay language makes it great for teaching the finer points of drafting.
The Board Soul Nonsense By Jeremy Signor • February 19th, 2018 Not every board game’s mechanics have to make thematic sense to be a ton of fun.
The Board Soul Pieces By Jeremy Signor • February 8th, 2018 Game pieces are supposed to represent something specific, transcending their forms and letting us manipulate representations of objects and people. But what happens when a cube is just a cube?
The Board Soul Together Alone By Jeremy Signor • February 1st, 2018 Even a little player interaction goes a long way towards making a game feel dynamic and exciting. Karuba shows what happens when you take all those things away.
