Welcome back readers.

We’ve got a little bit of everything this week, with the highlights spanning DOOM WADs, interviews, viral hits and sleeper hits. Let’s tuck in.

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

Following Up and Circling Back

We’re splitting the Zelda-related pieces up for theme reasons, and our first theme this week is sequels! Good sequels, mid sequels, old sequels, new sequels.

“Overall, it gives the themes a somewhat melancholy, bittersweet mood that I appreciated more than Coffee Talk‘s fiery take on social issues. How do we show care for one another? How do we ensure our legacies live on? I daresay these are questions asked not just by the characters in the game, but the team at Toge Productions throughout the process of creating Coffee Talk Episode 2: Hibiscus & Butterfly.”

From the Source

Next up, we’ve got interviews and interview-ish investigations.

“Moon noted that it’s not exactly that other studios can’t reach this level of technical innovation, but that they don’t prioritize the resources needed to do it. Often, that comes down to supporting the humans who make the games we play.”

Mind Palace

Our next two selections involve different approaches to memory, forgetting, identity formation, and identity loss.

“This DOOM WAD tries to insert itself, like a cancer, into that mental presence. It intends to hijack its player’s mental model of the 1993 game and through gaming’s capacity for iconographic projection portrays the loss of all mental models, whether via the ravages of Alzheimer’s or the less pronounced but no less inexorable decays of age. It recreates the process of losing one’s mind within the mechanics and experience of gameplay.”

What’s Old Is New

Our final pairing this week brings together remake and genre conversations in examinations of two very recent, very different, and very successful games.

“It’s a life simulator crossed with soothing busywork crossed with parasocial relationships. As a game, its battle system is dreadful; as a world, it’s deeply engrossing; and as a business, it’s troublingly efficient.”


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