Welcome back readers.

Before we dig into this week’s issue, Friends-of-the-Site No Escape are doing a fundraiser to finance new projects and expansions for 2023. The plural subject isn’t rhetoriacal: they’re expanding the crew! Anyways, while the grim focus is on tech companies at the moment, games media outlets have seen a lot of shutterings and layoffs this year, so support independant games crit, eh?

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

Holding Tension

Binaries, parallels, dichotomies, and parallel readings lead us through this week’s opening segment.

Shattered Memories speaks power to the idea that, on some level, all our recollections of our fathers are selective. Sometimes, we can accept why they did what they did, and try to embrace the person they are if they’ve changed. Others, the pain of just thinking about them hurts too much to consider building that bridge.”

Novemberween

…is over when we say it’s over.

“We were lost. We had thought this was just another ordinary videogame, another careless stroll through some colorful world full of coins and spells and power ups. Another power fantasy with which to show off our petty prowesses to each other. Resident Evil is decidedly not this.”

Let Us Crit Together

An old TRPG looking forward and a new (?) one looking backward come together in our next section.

“While its gameplay systems may feel archaic in this new age of tactical RPGs, it somehow enhances the harshness of its narrative. This will no doubt make it daunting for those unfamiliar with this style of tactics title. It certainly won’t be for everyone, but remains a tried and true classic.”

Made it

Now for a segment on game dev–both at the jam-level and the retired-to-a-yacht-level.

“Ken found it baffling. Roberta, in the cave, found Roberta Williams—and her fortune.”

Critical Chaser

Some cool poetry out of Spine!

“We reach the dance party,
hum along to the theme song,

flex our stiff fingers, twist
a cookie off the baking sheet.”


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