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Past Presence

Past Presence
A screenshot from Octopia shows the main character standing on a bridge overlooking a beautiful mountain valley.

Octopia is a Sweet Farming Sim That Rewrites Eastward’s History

By Emily Price • March 29th, 2024

Simple stories don’t have to overcomplicate themselves to be good.

Past Presence
A screenshot from In Stars and Time shows two characters sharing a bench and looking off towards an ephemeral castle in the night sky.

What Time Loops Mean to Me

By Emily Price • February 29th, 2024

Time loop games give us the opportunity to grow alongside the main character.

Past Presence
A screenshot from Coffee Talk showing a pixelated cup of coffee with the words, "Black Lemon. A perfect – if unlikely – combination of sour and bitter."

Romanticize Your Life!

By Emily Price • January 31st, 2024

If these things are the glue that makes real “mundane” life less boring, they are hollow pleasures.

Past Presence

Object Lessons #3: Megadungeon

By Emily Price • December 27th, 2023

What is a dungeon? This is the kind of question you think about when you draw your fiftieth square grid room that contains yet another statue and another random battle.

Past Presence

Jenny from Thebes Review

By Emily Price • December 5th, 2023

Jenny from Thebes is trying harder than maybe any previous album to create a specific place, but it still feels unmoored, somewhere between Greece and Austin.

Past Presence

Taking the Cullens to Uniqlo

By Emily Price • October 26th, 2023

You can wear Uniqlo anywhere. Its styling is bizarre and frequently, ugly. I don’t know of a better way to summarize Twilight’s fashion.

Past Presence
A screenshot from Neo Cab shows several cars traffic jamming around cool, neon-lit city streets.

Object Lessons #2: Smartphone

By Emily Price • September 26th, 2023

How do you represent a technology that’s had an earthquake’s impact, that almost everyone owns and that has made our private lives public?

Past Presence
Concept art for Hyrule Field in The Legend of Zelda. Across its wide expanse, one can see a distant mountain wreathed in smoke and the hazy outlines of a many-spired castle.

Object Lessons #1: Field

By Emily Price • August 31st, 2023

Are fields a stage for action to take place on, or are they the action themselves?

Past Presence

The Wake of the Wake

By Emily Price • June 30th, 2023

Folk-punk, increasingly experimental band AJJ is best listened to when you randomly remember them, like a book of poems you skim through annually and then put back on the shelf.

Past Presence
Artwork from an early iteration of the Animal Crossing franchise, featuring the male and female villagers with Blathers the owl and K.K. Slider the dog close at hand.

Virtual Citizen

By Emily Price • May 25th, 2023

A legend, per the OED, is “a story from ancient times about people and events that may or may not be true.” If the residents of Wild World are anything in my memory, they are that: ancient stories.

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