It’s the last day of 2021, and it’s time to finally talk about my game of the year. There’s no one way to choose what makes a game my favorite, and I’ve had a whole bunch of positive and interesting experiences with games of all sort this year. The ones that stood out most this…

Obviously, the crux of what makes a video game a video game is what it’s like to play the game, what makes it interactive. Gameplay often exists for its own sake, but in many cases it’s also a storytelling device just like music, art, sound design, writing, etc. Gameplay design can also play off of…

This is certainly a less abstract category than previous ones. I debated whether or not to include it, because on some level it feels superficial. But I hope that the reasoning behind my choices is justification enough. A refrain that I hear from game critics over the years is that what once impressed them is…

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…

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…

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…