Seize the Sandbox By Levi Rubeck • August 23rd, 2018 I don’t want to craft my own tale in the game, I want to live vicariously through a meticulously arranged narrative.
Chasm Emerges from the Depths By Levi Rubeck • August 7th, 2018 Chasm ticks all the boxes, but at the same time suffers from its own success. I want it to be just a little bit more.
Mini-Operas in Grind and Glitch By Levi Rubeck • July 26th, 2018 How grindcore taught me to appreciate Tierra Whack.
Daughters Split Open Their Satanic Chrysalis By Levi Rubeck • July 18th, 2018 This country has had no shortage of crusty street preachers, split-lip soothsayers crawling across glass-littered asphalt to cough up a truth few are brave enough to bear.
Ill Considered’s Sublime Echolocation By Levi Rubeck • July 12th, 2018 I watched Lost Highway alone at midnight, on a sweltering Northern California summer evening, and when it was finally over I only really retained two thoughts.
Netrunner is Dead, Long Live Netrunner By Levi Rubeck • July 5th, 2018 It’s a lifestyle game, and like the word implies, to live the Netrunner life is to let it consume your thoughts at all times.
A Mandala of Space Bullets By Levi Rubeck • June 27th, 2018 In bullet-hell, tactics, and life, man plans and god/nature/the universe laughs. You can drill those fingers or try to anticipate every possible outcome, but in the end we are flawed beings living at the whims of the cosmos.
The Swamp Sweat of Young Widows By Levi Rubeck • June 20th, 2018 Young Widows tweaked their smoldering incantations from album to album, and DECAYED does more than collect the detritus.
The Ethics of a Human Whopper By Levi Rubeck • June 14th, 2018 These ideas, of food in games as something more than a vessel of health or the act of consumption, settles like a river mist over Vampyr.
Red Hare Refuses to Fade By Levi Rubeck • June 6th, 2018 What can be expected from a community mostly fueled on youthful energy? Life hits with a closed fist, and subsisting against the grain is suspiciously similar to a real job. Except working for yourself has even worse benefits.
Epistolary Voicemail By Levi Rubeck • May 31st, 2018 Enjoying a recent New Yorker online poetry experiment where Natalie Diaz and Ada Limón are explicitly communicating with each other, and we are shepherded on the atmosphere that extends between them.
Poetry at the Crossroads of Self and State By Levi Rubeck • May 23rd, 2018 Sharif, an American poet whose parents were exiled from Iran, is taking stock of her homes and houses in this and all of her work
Squaring the Circle Pit By Levi Rubeck • May 16th, 2018 It’s shameful, because let’s be honest, moshing is the worst. It’s amateur rugby for shut-ins and ex-quarterbacks, almost totally disconnected from the music and a flying middle finger to the personal space of everyone else around.
Boyfriend Dungeon Weaponizes Cuddles By Levi Rubeck • May 9th, 2018 Boyfriend Dungeon wears a dating sim on its sleeve but bears a dungeon crawler as its beating heart.
Rend Wants to get the Team Back Together By Levi Rubeck • May 3rd, 2018 Like Overwatch meets EVE Online crashing into Minecraft, Rend is an MMO sandbox RPG that requires a clan that can work together and evolve to confront not only the other online antagonists, but the toothy bite of the world itself.
Wavecrash!! Literalizes the Puzzle Brawler By Levi Rubeck • April 25th, 2018 Dreams are often only interesting to the dreamer, but occasionally some gold can be dug up from a seemingly random, chaotic assemblage of our brain dumps.
Putting a Cooperative Hex on Fascist Scumbags By Levi Rubeck • April 18th, 2018 Hexadecimate is a poignant reaction to the state of the world that has no false ambitions about singularly smashing the state.
Suda-51 Strikes Again By Levi Rubeck • April 11th, 2018 That Suda voice just comes naturally to him, it is his default mode of expression.
Rest In Power Caleb Scofield By Levi Rubeck • April 4th, 2018 A memorial for Caleb Scofield, bassist of heavy metal crushers Cave In, Old Man Gloom, and Zozobra.
A Tumultuous Smoke Break By Levi Rubeck • March 28th, 2018 Emma Kidwell’s Got a Light? gracefully outlines the confusing and powerful internal combustion engine of sentiment, that heavy fire that drives us all to smoking and other activities hazardous to our health.
Polishing Up the Ol’ Dragonlance By Levi Rubeck • March 21st, 2018 The War of Souls continues the Dragonlance series’ penchant for a willingness to let its characters fail—to be broken down completely while chasing meaningless power, given the chance for redemption, and convincing the reader when they stand or fall.
Hot Snakes Carves the Surf By Levi Rubeck • March 7th, 2018 Rick Froberg still hollers in the key of vinegar.
Cascading through the Mud with Coalesce and Meatwound By Levi Rubeck • February 28th, 2018 It was orchestrated chaos that kept even the die-hard karate kids in the pit at bay, which is no small feat.
Your Spoony Speedrunner By Levi Rubeck • February 21st, 2018 To watch Final Fantasy IV get flayed so fluently, with a mind-boggling grace not unlike a stolen car getting stripped for parts in seconds…
The Dioramic Ambiance of Overland By Levi Rubeck • February 14th, 2018 It’s very Hemingway-ian in it’s simplicity, which fits the Overland modus operandi so far: by doing less they’re planting the seeds for player generation of the narrative, tending their own stories of failure and maybe success, eventually.
The Sweet Illogic of Cultist Simulator By Levi Rubeck • February 8th, 2018 The body withers, decays, and rots with whatever insight you thought you’d gained back into the earth. Until you start a new game, echoing a past barely remembered.
Getting Tight with my Bros from Insomnia By Levi Rubeck • January 31st, 2018 Eventually we meandered on separate paths, and while I still keep in contact with a couple, most have drifted away or explicitly cut themselves off from their teenage buddies, going incognito and evaporating out into the world.
Blaming the Unchecked Algorithm By Levi Rubeck • January 25th, 2018 Nihei synthesizes the aesthetics of precision manufacturing with a cellular improvisation, crafting the humans and the silicon life out of the same inky molecules.
The Tentacled Spirit of Yharnam, in Card Stock By Levi Rubeck • January 16th, 2018 The pitch void and tentacled spirit of Yharnam has come to your table, in a much more accessible package of thick board stock and gory ink, as Bloodborne: The Card Game.
Eat the Rich and Dance By Levi Rubeck • January 9th, 2018 What better way to roll out 2018 than immediately accounting for what one may have missed in 2017.
Cardboard Fallout is Worth its Weight in Caps By Levi Rubeck • December 19th, 2017 These days I think about the collapse of civilization quite a lot, but this version of Fallout carries the series’s radioactive torch of wasteland fun.
Three Billboards and the Farce of American Society By Levi Rubeck • December 12th, 2017 Her sushi-knife-sharp rebuttal to moral authority was exactly what I wanted and, upon receipt, I was sure her victory could not last.
Gunsword, Casual Repartee, Chess and Dragonlance By Levi Rubeck • November 28th, 2017 Gunsword whipped my head right over with delicious high fantasy visuals that brought to mind the Larry Elmore Dragonlance covers of my youth, and the only thing better than guns and swords is the fusion of the two.
Lazer Ryderz Bring Light Cycle Racing to Tabletop By Levi Rubeck • November 21st, 2017 Lazer Ryderz is loud: it blasts your eyes with glimmering color, and each surfer praises their luck for snatching glory and curses their competitors for sniping it away
Saturday Morning Star Rides in Flinthook By Levi Rubeck • November 14th, 2017 Where Flinthook oozes Saturday morning charm is in the sum of its parts, aesthetic and ludological.
California Gothic By Levi Rubeck • November 7th, 2017 Nearly twenty years later, I’m afforded the chance to correct the failings of my youth and catch The Black Heart Procession on tour again
The Heart that Swings the Hammer: The Last of Us: Part II By Levi Rubeck • November 1st, 2017 It doesn’t take much peeling to find implications that the Last of Us: Part II will contain something more than non-stop slaughter.
The Ecstatic Solitude of Hollow Knight By Levi Rubeck • October 25th, 2017 While I delight in these various directions and surprises, my most sublime joy in this game is found as I walk the path of the humble insect warrior.
Tables for Days By Levi Rubeck • October 17th, 2017 The internet is the cow’s stomach, all us users the swirling sea of bacteria and acids breaking down and reconstituting the itinerant parts of language
Just Another TIE in the Death Star By Levi Rubeck • October 10th, 2017 The massive laser-based Battlefront II experience is not unlike kindergarten soccer.
