Welcome back readers.

Thanks for coming out, as always! Stay a while, pull up a chair, and tuck in with twelve new selections.

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

Forbidden Fruit

We open this week with two fresh perspectives on Immortality.

“I do think that, for its many exquisitely played ‘normal’ scenes, Immortality’s design relies on the thematic reveal, the interface meta, to pull a twist on an already compelling story. A piece of fiction about people trying to make films, be human and take joy in art, to have sex and resist abuse, then to tell stories about sex and abuse, is heightened supernaturally in a way that ultimately never captures me as much as Marissa’s mortal conflicts do.”

Killers in Paradise

Mythmaking and storytelling, the gods old and new, and the players who walk among them all feature front-and-centre in this next segment.

“If Fortnite is anything, it is the true face of Video Games. It’s that wild and unruly dream of colorful and exciting environments Nintendo 64 and PlayStation gave you. It’s the battlefield you fought on in CounterStrike and Team Fortress 2. It’s the emoji filled chat rooms of the past. It’s going to consume everything. And if it doesn’t, it’ll shift, and you’ll be confronted with the new thing that will. And you’ll only have the Gods to fall back on.”

Cyberpunk Apawcalypse

A double portion of catly goodness courtesy of Gamers with Glasses.

Stray may not communicate what it’s like to be a cat, but it does raise questions about what it means to be human. It sends players into a process of becoming-animal. This has less to do with imitating an animal species than with experimenting with life.”

Gone But Not Forgotten

Next up, we’ve got three meditations on old games, dead games, weird games, and of course: bad games.

Lula 3D has to rate as a complete failure, with no hope at presenting any sort of redemptive feature that’d save it from my utter contempt. I mean, I’ve only spent tens of thousands of words so far completely eviscerating it, and making it clear there’s nothing to love about it, right? I’d have to be a goddamn hack to suddenly attempt to hand-wave away everything I’ve said about it so far, and try to close this review on some sort of positive note! Well, uhh… as it turns out, I’m totally about to try and do that. Whoops.”

To Meet or Miss the Mark

Two play meditations–one game decades old, the other weeks–united, I think, by expectations not quite fulfilled.

“I found it hard not to come to the conclusion, halfway through Cult of the Lamb, that this was a world that would be better off without me, without The Lamb, in it. Perhaps I could be of service by slaying the greater and more dangerous monsters who surrounded my little village – but, that done, what could I offer the world except to leave it behind? I suppose I did leave it behind, anyway, when I stopped playing and uninstalled it.”

Critical Chaser

I thought this was cool.

“To make the simplest statement; postcolonial doesn’t mean nonviolent. Due to colonialism being fundamentally violent and certain postcolonial movements being tied to nonviolence, the two are often joined, but they are far from synonymous. Furthermore, hunting has a history that well predates colonialism.”


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