October 20th

Welcome back readers.

We’ve got a bunch of reading for you to catch up on this Sunday Monday, so let’s dig right in!

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

Crit for Treat

With Halloween coming up it feels appropriate to open with a selecton of pieces about horror games, spanning formats from review, to interview, to critique.

• Blumhouse Games’ First Release Is A Low-Poly High School Nightmare | Kotaku
  Ashley Bardhan connects with the core characters and more measured horror beats in PS1-esque Fear the Spotlight.
• A Difference in the End | Bullet Points Monthly
  Grace Benfell finds Soma‘s meditations on suicide, suffering, and survival incomplete without the social contexts that give our own struggles substance (content notifications for discussions of suicide).
• Interview with Adam Vian, creative director of Crow Country | Gamers with Glasses
  Don Everhart chats with Adam Vian about cultivating horror, environmental design, character and theme, and more.
• Nurse With Wound | Bullet Points Monthly
  Astrid Anne Rose surveys the sanctification of sex, sickness, and suffering in Silent Hill 2.

“He keeps probing the wound. He fetishizes the act itself, the illness, the hospitalization, all of it metastasizing into a tumorous labyrinth to house his sin. The incarnation of Mary-Maria that James ultimately finds on the hotel roof is a saint of suffering, wearing a filthy habit and crucified upside-down like Peter in a metal cage, swarming with moths in her resplendent decay. The flower of James’s sin blooms in her; here is the full weight of his perversions, immobilized, fetishized, willful and yet an object, dead and yet forever in pain.”

Neva

There’s a follow-up out from the Gris folks and there’s been some chatter about it. From the selections sampled here, it sounds like a lot of folks don’t think it’s as complete as the prior work, but that it might still captivate the right audience.

• Neva Review: Gris Devs Deliver A Disappointing Follow-Up | Kotaku
  Willa Rowe finds Neva to be strong on premise, less so on follow-through.
• ‘Neva’ Review: A Beautiful Platformer That Never Finds Its Footing | Inverse
  Robin Bea sees moments of wonder in a larger noncommittal structure.
• Neva review: A devastating, beautiful, playable watercolor painting | Polygon
  Nicole Carpenter reflects on Nomada’s latet meditation on grief.

“In these moments, I think about my own dogs, about Alba and Neva, and the wolf who came before. I’ve thought a lot about how my relationship with the new pup will change and grow — about how it’ll be different or the same as with my best friend. There is no replacement to what I’ve lost, to what Alba and Neva have lost. But even forged in grief, something beautiful will grow. We’ll just move forward. Alba and Neva do, too.”

Blood and Iron

We’ve got two more meaty reviews for you from the specialty sicko genres of soulslikes and mech games, respectively.

• Souls of Italy – Enotria: The Last Song Review | Gamesline
  Rose checks out a carnivalesque new soulslike that takes a big stylistic swing even if it doesn’t cleanly hit.
• MechWarrior 5: Clans Review | Paste
  Dia Lacina leans into the absurd, tedious magic of MechWarrior‘s latest expansion.

“Ask yourself, how many times can you hear a loudly bleated “Aff!” instead of “Yes” or even “Affirmative” or any other word that denotes confirmation, before wanting to shoot a volley of 20 long range missiles into the back of your best (and genetically-related) friend? How many times will you put up with Star Commander Jayden (his name really is Jayden, it’s incredible) co-signing some truly wild fascist nonsense before you snap and wish you could embody anybody else in the BattleTech universe? The answer might surprise you.”

Systems Abstraction

Our next section explores the intersections between simulation, ideology, and play.

• Citybuilders and the culture fantasy play | Ko-fi
  alex looks at the designed limitations of simulation-as-ideology across examples in the city-building genre.
• The Reign of Play: ‘Suzerain’ and Practicing Politics | Cosmonaut
  Sam Dee moves beyond strategy to consider narrative and conversation in games seeking to expand our political imagination.

“A lot of leftist games make use of procedural rhetoric to provide agitprop or political education. I think Suzerain, with its fictional, alternate history, is doing something different. It does teach about a political subject (it has a lot to say about the Cold War) and it does give you a glimpse into a particular subjectivity (the world as a map with game pieces, your life as strings of text). But it is also teaching political skill. All of the ideologies present within the game world are represented in the individuals that speak to you. How you treat them, personally, shifts your own ideological alignment.”

Arts and Stats

Here’s a loose coalition of articles examining design, development, industry, and genre.

• Positive feedback loops (The power of choice, digital independence, and building something better for everyone) | Game Developer
  Nathalie Lawhead describes the creative and community value of making playful tools for game development, web design, software art, and more.
• How Granblue Fantasy: Relink Successfully Adapted Mobile Gacha | The Punished Backlog
  Eithan Rosemberg runs the numbers on a successful translation from gacha to console action RPG.
• Operation STEEL JA Translation Postpartum | Indie Tsushin
  mojilove breaks down the nuts and bolts and the design considerations that went into localizing indie shmup Operation STEEL.
• The Lost Crown-ZAU | Aguas’ Points
  Luis Aguasvivas highlights two of the year’s finest platformers to examine the limitations of genre, the forward-thinking representational possibilities of the medium, and the design philosophy of Pac-Man.

“Gamers and some critics haven’t come a long way since Pac-Man. “Metroidvania” as a descriptor is indolent. It’s tied to the dark niches of gamer culture. ZAU and The Lost Crown are not. They point to a better future for the industry.”

Story Worlds

Now let’s dig into narrative, worldbuilding, and storytelling.

• Good Enough To Criticize | BP Games Inc.
  Bigg digs into the narrative and worldbuilding stakes of a porn game with enough range and scope to benefit from the critique.
• Pokémon’s Unreleased Myths and their Context | Gamesline
  John implores the Posters to chill out; myths are weird and Pokémon‘s rough drafts aren’t nearly as weird as the real ones can get.
• The role-playing conversation according to Archipelago | Asked Questions
  Hendrik ten Napel considers a tabletop approach to communal, conversational worldbuilding.

“Archipelago puts its conversational moves in front of the players and says: this is how you can help create an interesting story. Every option seems to originate from the desire to write a framework that will support coherent, daring storytelling. By putting it in the hands of all the players, it distributes control and responsibility for that story equally. It gives players equal control over the tone and content of the story, keeps them from pulling their punches, and helps them to signal what’s important to them.”

Critical Chaser

Untitled Closing Segment.

• To Be a Wild Animal | Unwinnable
  Samantha Trzinski sizes up the sauce behind the recent string of games that let cute animals sow some chaos.

“Wild-animal games stand counter to popular AAA games that lean heavily into their dense plots, relatable characters, or high-definition graphics. By affording players the opportunity to don feather or fur, the wild-animal subgenre invites a casual and low-stakes gameplay; there is nothing grand at stake when playing as a feral animal.”