Welcome back readers.

Abortion should be safe, legal, and accessible everywhere, no reasons, no qualifiers. That’s it!

Anyways.

This Week in Videogame Blogging is a roundup highlighting the most important critical writing on games from the past seven days.

Yeah We’re Still Highlighting the Queer Games Bundle

Let’s start this week with some interviews, bringing together two more of Caroline Delbert’s mini-interviews with creators, as well as Ruth Cassidy’s chat with the organizers!

““[There are] enough queer games that you could play a new game every day for a year and not run out,” McCue says. “More valuably, it buys a future where queer artists aren’t desperate and can live as human beings with the dignity to be able to afford what they need while doing what they love. It buys a future.””

The Boys Are Back in Towns

What’s Final Fantasy about? I’ll defer to two better-informed writers on this matter.

“Towns are the framework where the guys exist to do more than fight monsters. It expands the verb set of the field to include conversations with townsfolk, rest and recovery at the inn, learning about the world and why it matters. These are where guys come alive while shopping and peering down old wells together wondering about the possibility and shape of their world. These are the safe spaces for guys to bare their hearts to other guys, and remind themselves of why they set out on these journeys anyway.”

“For over 30 years, Final Fantasy has been providing some of the best Guys around. Auron? That’s a Guy. Vivi? One of the all time Guys. Palom and Porom? Guys so good that Sakaguchi just used them again in Lost Odyssey.”

Identity at Play

Here we’ve got a selection of pieces examining different identity tensions in games, how they are constructed in-universe, out-of-universe, and more.

“The authorship that Forbidden West extends its players has caveats: you can play the game on the game’s terms. Unlike The Witcher 3 or Breath of the Wild, where much of the joy of play comes from figuring out how to solve a problem—beating a boss, reaching a new location, discovering a sidequest—within the rules of game’s world, Horizon Forbidden West will tell you exactly how to solve the problem. The player simply needs to be skilled enough to solve it.”

Pattern Recognition

Now, two very different pieces with a loose theme of patterns–patterns in data, patterns in play.

“To play Battle Platform Antilles is to pit your most human impulses – pattern recognition,  prediction, risk aversion – against an enemy who neither thinks like you nor benefits from thinking like you. It’s asymmetry with a purpose. The Antilles doesn’t simply have a goal and strategy antithetical to yours, but an entire way of being that stands in opposition to your own. You are fighting the alien – not the humanoid, but the truly inhuman: that which is utterly incommensurate with us.”

Adventure Awaits

Next up we’ve got a pair of lookbacks at influential RPGs.

“Insofar as I love Dragon’s Dogma, it is a waste of time to look for a single key—I am wrapped up by it, not by a single metal rope, but by dozens. The way it feels to break into a sprint. Locked. The voice of the Blacksmith—masterworks all.  Locked. The sinking realization that I dropped all my healing items into storage, and have only whatever I scavenged here, deep into the shadowy isle. Locked. The escort quests—I hated these once, and now they are a pleasing punctuation in the ritual, the last thing I do before advancing to the next stage of the game’s campaign. Locked.”

Critical Chaser

We close this week with the latest Elden.

“A mausoleum for giants, a palace of ownership. All of the ways I can turn a phrase to describe it, and really only one word is the truth: empty.”


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