May 26th

Welcome back readers.

25 articles this week folks! I am now, as the cool kids might say, well and truly eepy. If you’d like to make my reading list even longer next week, come say hi on our Discord.

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

Senua’s Sequel

The big new release this week is Hellblade 2, and we’ve collected some critical impressions from some of our favourite writers in the biz. I’m looking forward to seeing this conversation continue, as I know folks who played the first one have a lot of investment in the series.

• Hellblade 2’s stunning world is alive with horror | The Verge
  Tauriq Moosa is drawn in by Hellblade‘s larger-than-life storyworld.
• Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 Review – Hell And High Water | GameSpot
  Jessica Cogswell concludes that Hellblade‘s sophomore effort ups the spectacle but doesn’t hit the same high notes on substance.
• Hellblade 2: Why You Should Play It Twice (At Least) | Kotaku
  Claire Jackson suggests taking Senua on a victory lap with the added context of an additional playthrough.
• Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 is less personal, more spectacle | Polygon
  Yussef Cole remarks how Hellblade 2‘s expanded scope and stakes undermine a bit of the nuance and intimacy of the original.

“By shifting the focus from the small and personal to the grand and epic, Ninja Theory wound up changing something fundamental about the series. Though we still hear the gallery of psychosis-generated voices who add commentary to Senua’s actions, they don’t feel as important to a story that is far more interested in what she’s doing, rather than what she’s thinking or how she’s feeling. Here, she’s taking on tremendous tasks and facing impossible odds, and the dramatic tension lies simply in whether she can accomplish what she’s set out to. It’s less nuanced than the first game, which exists in a constellation of trauma and memory and the ways in which her psychosis impacts her life.”

Storied Stakes

Our next section collects close thematic readings of recent top-end titles, exploring what they have to say about the worlds in which they have been produced.

• Learning the Script | Bullet Points Monthly
  Renata Price walks the path of a storyteller in Dragon’s Dogma II.
• Dads, Daughters, and the Living Dead | Gamers with Glasses
  Samantha Trzinski examines the impacts and outcomes of father-daughter relationships across recent survival horror.
• The Avalanche Guide To Insurrection | Aftermath
  Janus Rose reflects on Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and the moral imperative to stand up against the violence of militant imperialism.

“Shinra may be a fictional world government from a video game about magical twinks with giant swords, but it draws vividly from a history of real-world imperialism. That history shows us that sometimes, states must be pushed to the brink in order for any real change to occur. Before being assassinated by Israeli forces in 2017, Palestinian activist Bassel al-Araj wrote, “The beginning of every revolution is an exit, an exit from the social order that power has enshrined in the name of law, stability, public interest, and the greater good.””

Like a Fine Wine

Lots of interesting games are celebrating numerically significant milestones this year (10 years, 25 years, err, 21 years?). This naturally invites critical reflection on how these games bridge two points in time and space. Here are five highlights.

• Simulated City: Supergiant’s Transistor at 10 | Paste Magazine
  Emily Price looks back on a decade of recursive realities.
• An Attempt Against Muscular Demonstrations of Power: Child of Light at Ten | Unwinnable
  Luis Aguasvivas looks back at a different games industry landscape in 2014 and chronicles the efforts of one studio to make something refreshing and different.
• The Legacy of Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike, 25 Years Later | 8Bit/Digi
  Stephen Wilds chronicles how a game both out-of-time and ahead-of-time came into its own and found its community.
• The Last Starfighter | Game Informer
  Elijah Beahm tells the tale of an ultra-rare Star Wars arcade cabinet and the couple who have restored it for their community to enjoy.
• Paying Respects to Press F | Remap
  Duncan Fyfe curates many histories–public and private, complex and contradictory, developmental and cultural–of one of gaming’s most enduring memes.

“In February 2020, Rick May suffered a stroke, and was moved to a nursing home. Two months later, he was gone. After his death, Jeremiah Foglesong, a gamer, whose father-in-law was May’s cousin, informed the family of the wealth of tributes that had been posted online: art, poems, Valve’s memorial inside Team Fortress 2. For Diana Lilly, May’s widow, an actor herself who wasn’t particularly tech-savvy, Foglesong printed hard copies of everything. “I did have to explain the lists of ‘F, F, F, F,” Foglesong says. He didn’t know the reference was from a Call of Duty game, but he told her it was “like throwing up a heart emoji, or a thumbs up.””

Cinema Sims

Here we’ve collected reflections on the intersections between play, performance, games, theatre, and film.

• Video game movies mostly center on the wrong kind of violence | Polygon
  Ashley Bardhan finds that a great deal of videogame adaptations (and game-like films) falter when they elevate action above all else.
• THEATRE OF THE MILLIONSTAR. ENTERTAINMENT FICTION. | GlitchOut
  Oma Keeling on bodies, performance, spectacle.

“They consider the differences smoking outside the theatre one night, each distinction they draw there’s a frame they can think of to make it so that really they’re the same. No distinction. No need to separate. Entertainment fictions. They finish their smoke and head back inside.”

All by Design

Next we’ve got a selection of pieces approaching different axes of design, including theory, practice, critique, culture, and claymores.

• The story of my first A MAZE (and why I wish we had an event dedicated to solo-devs) | The Candybox Blog
  Nathalie Lawhead debunks the myths of solo developers, including greatly-exaggerated reports of their non-existence.
• What makes a greatsword great? | Polygon
  Patrick Gill commits to the bit–or rather the swing.
• Mobile games should stop reminding me how annoying my phone is | Polygon
  Zoë Hannah weighs successes and failures in how games adapt (or entirely replicate) smartphone UI.
• Metroid: Dread – How Metroid Lost its Way | Kayinworks
  Kayin indulges in a little Productive Haterism to dissect the Dread out of Metroid.

“Despite the myth building, despite all the cutscenes, the world of Metroid gets smaller and smaller with each release. It’s like a star collapsing under it’s own gravity. We can’t escape Metroids, we can’t escape biomes, we can’t escape colored doors. Metroid has calcified. It’s about playing the Greatest Hits. It’s about Shinespark puzzles(Speedbooster was a mistake), and fighting the same bosses, and canned pre-designed sequence breaks. Because you see, ages ago we lost the plot.”

Have You Played These?

Maybe you should. Looks like a good week over at Gamesline.

• Crow Country (PS5) Review | Gamesline
  Rose sums up recent survival horror title Crow Country as a pretty satisfying nostalgia trip, indulgent in the right ways.
• Forsooth! A Clever Game Doth Approach O’er Hill – Felvidek Review | Gamesline
  Maverick has a great time with an offbeat medieval RPG with an irreverent streak and a banger soundtrack.

“There’s a trend recently to make expansive games filled to the gills with capital C Content to try and create justification for inflated price tags. Rather than drone on and on about this being an injustice, which it surely is, I’ll just say Felvidek is less than 5 hours to get through and costs eleven bucks. The countryside is calling, and your lord awaits the aid of your sword!”

Meta Critics

Apparently someone has invented formalism in media criticism again and we have to talk about it. But not just that! Let’s also talk about critical practices in games media more generally.

• Games Media in Review: Noclip | Breaking Arrows
  Steven Santana highlights the gaps and flaws in the gamedev documentary format, drawing primarily but not exclusively on Noclip.
• Does Games Criticism Need Quality Standards? | No Escape
  Kaile Hultner critiques the latest attempt to granulate human authorship out of media criticism through the sober lens of actual quality standards evaluation (curator’s note: Kaile works for CD).
• IT’S TIME TO BUY THE VAN | DEEP-HELL
  Skeleton reminds us you can’t spreadsheet a greater sense of purpose out of the media you engage with, no matter how granular the scale–that’s gotta come from someplace else.

“My dream job? My dream job is meticulously sorting a spreadsheet back and forth, back and forth. There are numbers and associated meetings with words like “frictive” and “essential storytelling”. We will invent new courses of anguish to describe camera a shake and 3D spit splatter effects. These are words that can mean numbers, I swear to god: and I’ll swear to the audience next. You can be right about videogames, about movies. Follow the well forever until it gets so dark not even the flick of a lighter can register on the cave wall. This is a great way to live – and that’s a deep-hell.com promise.”

Critical Chaser

You made it to this week’s checkpoint! Nice work. Take a load off with our closing picks.

• The Lonely Skies | Into The Spine
  Monique Barrow muses on the inevitability of change in Tears of the Kingdom.
• A taste of paradise | KRITIQAL
  Kat mixes it up in this tasting tour of Paradise Killer.

“Places, tastes, sounds and feelings fuse together in a sensuous synesthesia – the magic of ancient gods at work. Listening to the soundtrack, I am transported instantly back to that glistening realm, and against my better judgment, I find myself succumbing to its strange sorcery.”