October 13th

Welcome back readers.

I swear Monday isn’t the new Sunday around here! This is a holiday weekend in Canada, and there were a bunch of longreads to dig into this issue. Let me share what I’ve been tucking into.

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

Talk in Play

Interview-shaped pieces lead the issue this week, with a pair of conversations looking both at how games impact the world and how the world impacts games.

• “Even the smallest of gestures can lift somebody up” – developer Popcannibal on the lasting impact of Kind Words | Eurogamer.net
  Victoria Kennedy chats with Ziba Scott about the development context, moderation strategy, and enduring impact of Kind Words.
• Hurricane Helene’s Impact on Tabletop | Rascal
  Rowan Zeoli talks to tabletop designers and proprietors impacted by the hurricanes about the vitality of play in the face of climate disasters.

“When the worst is no longer a distant hypothetical, but an immediate reality lapping against your doorstep, games remind us that other things are possible when people come together to build community within suffering.”

Silent Hill 2

We’ve got two game-specific sections this week (sort of). The first unpacks the legacy (or perhaps the long shadow) of Silent Hill 2 and its would-be successors, both implicit and explicit.

• Silent Hill 2 review | PC Gamer
  Kerry Brunskill comes away more satisfied than not with the high-profile remake, but the modern game-isms that do make themselves apparent bring the experience down some.
• They Should Have Made a Hundred Silent Hill 2s By Now | Bullet Points Monthly
  Ed Smith invokes Silent Hill 2–the original–as a yardstick to show what games as an industry, as a culture-producing field–both can and routinely fail to accomplish.

“I feel like Silent Hill 2, as the years roll on, is becoming more and more feeble. It’s proof that not everything is Warzone and Fortnite and Diablo Immortal and whatever else people like Asmongold play, but it’s 23 years old, and there are so few games that come close to it, even fewer that draw equal, that eventually you have to reckon that Silent Hill 2 and everything else in the Really Good Game canon amount to a teaspoon, and you’re trying to shovel the sea. I wish there were way more games like Silent Hill 2. I’m surprised there aren’t.”

Metaphor

Following on the previous section, this one’s about the new Atlus joint.

• Metaphor: ReFantazio is a metatextual, politically-anxious RPG that makes Persona feel like a prototype | scrmbl
  Alicia Haddick offers initial impressions of Atlus’ latest chaotic take on RPG-as-sociopolitical-thought-exercise.
• Metaphor: ReFantazio’s music is all in the hero’s head, which is weird | Polygon
  Maddy Myers zooms in on the implications of one of Metaphor‘s more peculiar diegetic quirks.

“Sometimes a tune will kick off and I’ll think to myself, “Is this one really appropriate, Gallica? Seems a little too jaunty for the vibe of the conversation I’m having!” And on that note (ha, ha), does the music ever distract our hero from listening to what other people are saying to him?”

Legacy Content

Presented here are a blend of reviews, impressions, and play reactions for a variety of games past and present. The writer’s touch upon crossovers, satire, misogyny, knowledge systems, and more.

• Never-ending Battles – Dissidia 012 Final Fantasy and Dissidia Final Fantasy NT | Pixpen
  Sam Howitt sees potential in the crossover fighter premise, but that potential isn’t wholly borne out in Square Enix’s Dissidia games.
• Planescape Torment: Never meet other people’s heroes | Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster
  Kimimi posits that Planescape‘s juice–fermented in stark misogyny–might have been expired on arrival.
• The Mismatched Puzzle Pieces of ‘Phantom Liberty’: Why the ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ DLC Expansion Falls Short | Epilogue Gaming
  Flora Merigold distills her time with Cyberpunk 2077‘s expansion to piece together why it doesn’t quite click.
• Anthology of the Killer is the State of the World | Gamers with Glasses
  Tof Eklund plays…. you know what, they put it better than I can in a blurb, go read the article.
• One By One, Step By Step, Always In The Dark | TIER
  Grace Benfell observes OVERWHELM‘s play upon known and unknown, context and archetype.

“There are no answers. There is only the hunt and its mystery again and again. It is akin to Devil Daggers, where all the terror of the form is revealed by tearing out every extraneous part. In OVERWHELM, there is only the red of blood and muscle, the white of laser fire, and the dark’s sightless mystery.”

School House

There’s a hazy transition here in this next section to longer-form critical examinations of games with rough or even hostile narrative edges. Here are the findings.

• Masked Gods, Mortal Blood | Bloomed Wings Blog
  The author (I have yet to find a name or handle) plays a pair of ludic meditations on cycles of divine retribution.
• Gothic Gaming: The Ill Body and the Haunted House in Kitty Horrorshow’s Anatomy | Game Studies
  Amy LeBlanc investigates the body as a site of gothic horror in Kitty Horrorshow’s Anatomy.
• Class of 09: The Flip Side | idea at ease
  Danna peers through the edgy meanness of Class of 09 to identify the VN series’ meditations on power dynamics and corruption in the US education system.

“I think the writers of Class of 09 are aware of that futility because that’s what makes Class of 09’s humor hit hard. The jokes are coping mechanisms for unaddressed structural problems that Nicole’s subject to, and the morbidness of it all is impossible to keep a straight face with. It’s terrible when every adult and every person is morally and comically corrupt in exactly the ways Nicole accuses them to be and there’s no support system for Nicole to lean on. It’s also terrible when Nicole ruins someone life for no good reason to vent some stress that doesn’t make her day better anyway. It’s impossible not to laugh at the absurdity of it all because what else can you do?”

Embedded Systems

These are also deep dives, but extending beyond their object texts into business practices, media canons, etymological antecedents, and more.

• Why Does Street Fighter Have a Character Named ‘Sodom’? | Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games
  Drew Mackie unpacks the in-and-out-of-universe history (metallurgy?) of Street Fighter‘s peculiar cross-linguistic otaku.
• Can Roblox beat the “pedophile hellscape” charges? | Unlosing Writer
  Brendan Sinclair pushes against the media’s singular focus on Roblox‘s already-known “pedophile hellscape” accusations, lest the wider context of their opaque and unsustainable business strategy be obfuscated by that focus.
• Minecraft but I review “Minecraft but I survive in PARKOUR CIVILIZATION [FULL MOVIE]” [FULL REVIEW] | Shill Seekers
  wadapan reviews a literary work and nascent canon for the post-Homestuck generation.

“Evbo claims that as of just a couple of years ago, he didn’t even view himself as a storyteller. And I guess if we’re in agreement that he has some genuine talent, the question is… can he leverage this viral success, the strange machinery of the internet, to collaborate with artists, animators, and musicians who will shore up his weaknesses and take him to greater heights? He can’t do it alone.”

Critical Chaser

When you think about it, recipies are also a genre of poetry.

• Self Portrait as a Nobody in Transition | Videodame
  Latonya “Penn” Pennington muses on gender identity and transition via Kingdom Hearts.
• Molokhia | Unwinnable
  Jay Castello takes the occasion of Venba to pass down a little culinary culture.

“At the end of the game, there is some hope. Kavin flies to visit Venba, who has moved back to India. They cook together. My father has one recipe he makes. He calls it molokhia. Wikipedia says that’s not a valid spelling – it can be spelled mulukhiyah, mulukhiyya, molokhiyya or melokhiyya – but this is my dad’s recipe, and it’s not exactly the same thing, anyway.”