August 11th

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

Herald of D’Ni

This week let’s start with design, with our first featured picks looking at mingames, card-game metas, and the lost Art of CD-ROM Multimedia Experiences.

• No, Queen’s Blood From ‘Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’ Should Not Be Its Own Standalone Game: Here’s Why | Epilogue Gaming
  Flora Merigold breaks down, narratively and mechanically, why Final Fantasy VII Rebirth‘s card game is not readily separable from the game it’s already in.
• My favorite puzzle game has an unskippable Peter Gabriel interlude | Polygon
  Susana Polo celebrates the big, absolutely on-brand swings of design and presentation in the Myst series’ underappreciated fourth entry.

“Rand Miller, who maintains that he strongly dislikes acting, played Atrus in Myst from efficiency and necessity. And he’s been stuck reprising his amateur performance ever since, because fans wouldn’t have it any other way. It simply wouldn’t be Atrus without the awkward vibes! And if I’m here for Rand Miller’s Atrus, how can I turn up my nose at Peter Gabriel’s spirit guidance? How can I love Myst games and not love their biggest risks? I’m already lying on the stone slab. It’s not hard at all to complete the circuit with my mind and have a chill time flying around this Winamp visualization while a boppable song plays. This is the Zen of Myst games.”

Pen and Paper

Let’s keep the design thread running, but narrow the focus in a few ways: to RPGs, to RPGs with at least some analog constituent, and to the push-and-pull between systems and experiences.

• Deep Dungeon Madou Senki – Review | cohost
  Elephant Parade delves into the mapping pleasures of perhaps the Famicom Disk System’s emblematic dungeon crawler.
• Mothership: Engine Malfunction | A Knight at the Opera
  Dwiz digs into a systems-rich sci-fi TTRPG in want of meaningful outcomes for those systems.

“If you prefer a game where the rules are only ever a rare interruption, then don’t you want them to be a worthwhile interruption?”

Possibility Spaces

Our next two picks align the stakes and circumstances of virtual worlds with the material worlds that produce them.

• Bio Domes | Unwinnable
  Phoenix Simms thinks through different rhetorics and applications of biomes and organic language, as well as their consequences for worldbuilding and world-preserving on both sides of the screen.
• Nine Sols, Two Utopias | Paste
  Perry Gottschalk reflects on the false promises and human cost of the engineered utopia in Red Candle’s parrying parable Nine Sols.

“Eugenics, whether it be through genetic modification, forced sterilization, or a hive mind consciousness, is plain and clear genocide. The extinction of a cultural identity like Taiwan involves less explicit bloodshed—but it’s still a genocide. Nine Sols pleads with us to recognize the false promises delivered by these engineered utopias.”

Assorted Vibes

Our next three featured writers pursue different emotional beats in wildly different games.

• Why A Link Between Worlds Is a Perfect Spooky Summer Zelda Game | Sidequest
  Kathryn Hemmann makes a case for the low-key horror vibes in Zelda’s 3DS outing.
• A Short Hike reminds us to take joy in diversion | No Escape
  Kaile Hultner applies Melos Han-Tani’s relational playworld to better understand respite in playful spaces (curator’s note: Kaile works for CD).
• HR is Having a Field Day: Still Wakes the Deep as the Lovecraftian Banal | Unwinnable
  Emma Kostopolus investigates the cosmic horror of surviving your horrible coworkers in Still Wakes the Deep.

“I have argued before in this column that cosmic horror needs to get as far out from under the racist legacy of H.P. Lovecraft as possible (also because his prose is pretty bad), and I think Still Wakes the Deep goes a long way in doing so, through flipping the script of inscrutability on its head. These monsters aren’t incomprehensible – we have to make small talk with our personal versions of them in the break room. The horror of this game is effective not because we can’t really comprehend it, but because we know it so very well already.”

Critical Chaser

Some further beats for your reading pleasure, but this time make it hip-hop.

• We can thank Hideki Naganuma for putting Malcolm X in a Sonic game | Polygon
  Ana Diaz sheds some light on the creative process of one of gaming’s most eclectic and stylish composers.
• The 5 Best Video Game Hip-Hop Soundtracks | PopMatters
  Luis Aguasvivas plays the hits with this banger of a list.

“This list is not exhaustive but an exemplary one. These games boast soundtracks fit for classic status. The music in each of these titles is utilized inventively. Some of these games even innovated with their audio-visual presentation via hip-hop aesthetics—out the hood and into the screen for your amazement. Not to be outdone, other elements of hip-hop culture are vital in informing the style and even gameplay of these games.”