Nostalgia is a hugely important facet of how the games industry operates. Especially in AAA spaces, the creation of increasingly expensive and enormous products — often powered by widespread labor exploitation — relies on constant iteration on known-viable formulas. Games are costly to produce and often demand a lot of time and energy from the…
GOTY 2021: Best Attention Grabber
It’s day 2 of my Game of The Year series! Today’s award goes to the game that best kept my attention when it launched. What, you might ask, the hell does that mean? Well, it turns out that video games release all the time throughout the year. And sometimes I find that the moment that…
GOTY 2021: Kickoff
I spent a long time this week trying to figure out how I wanted to do my annual Game of The Year blogging. I’ve never had a consistent approach in the past (I wrote a big top 10 list in 2018, a top 10 countdown in 2019, and in 2020 I split my list into…
‘Unsighted’ is Greater Than the Sum of its Parts
Yes, that is a pun about robots… No, I’m not sorry. Unsighted is a game that’s flown under the radar amidst a deluge of promising indie titles and a few big releases from major studios (yeah, yeah, I admit it; I finished Metroid: Dread before circling back to Unsighted). But it’s a game I’m incredibly…
‘Sable’ Imagines a Different Kind of Open World
Sable has gotten attention for its striking art style and its lovely soundtrack composed by Japanese Breakfast. But Sable is much more than that. The ambient soundscapes and the stenciled vistas are spectacular, but what made me fall in love with it is the game’s structure and writing, particularly through the voice of its young…
Top 5 Games of 2020
Finally, on January 2, 2021, I’ve finished writing about my favorite games of 2020. And once again, I wrote way too much for even a very patient person to read. So for the regular people who probably aren’t looking to dive into each of my longer-form pieces, here are my short, punchy summaries. 5. Hades…
GOTY 2020 #1. Umurangi Generation
Few games find ways to elegantly blend their environmental storytelling with their actual gameplay. Great environment design and art direction can tell a story in the margins of an experience, but calling attention to those details is a delicate art. Immersive sims like Bioshock or Prey often use audio logs, documents, and other threads of…
GOTY 2020 #2. Paradise Killer
Paradise Killer feels like a natural extension of lovably bizarre series like Danganronpa and Zero Escape. It has plenty of familiar pieces: a cast of over-the-top characters, a tangle of mysteries to solve, and a surreal world to explore. It has the same brazen and self-assured strangeness, but brought to unprecedented new heights. Paradise Killer…
GOTY 2020 #3. Blaseball
Blaseball is a game about tracking stats, betting on games, and watching play by play live “games” as they unfold. These are not usually things I like to do. Blaseball is also, however, a procedural horror game about changing the rules, incinerating players, and even fighting gods. Many of the games on my list don’t…
GOTY 2020 #4. Signs of the Sojourner
Game mechanics — the rules that govern the way you interact with a game — can often be understood as metaphors. It’s easy to forget this sometimes. What begins with individual actions mapped to buttons becomes a set of verbs that represent something more complex, like a battle or a . Some game mechanics are…