February 23rd

Welcome back readers.

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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.

Red Check

Let’s start things off this issue with a series of pieces on choicemaking in games, with object texts ranging from historically (in)famous to just-out-now.

• Something Conclusive – Mass Effect 3 | Pixpen
  Sam Howitt contemplates a culmination of choice–for good and ill–in Mass Effect 3.
• Too many RPGs don’t get that ‘choices that matter’ isn’t just about cause and effect, but Avowed does | PC Gamer
  Lauren Mortron weighs choice, consequence, and context in Obsidian’s latest RPG (Further Reading – Robin Bea on Veilguard and the baggage of choices).
• Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector imperfectly builds on its imperfect predecessor | No Escape
  Kaile Hultner thinks about Starward Vector‘s more holistic narrative approach to failure.

“The most important thing I think Citizen Sleeper 2 does is show that there are different kinds of “failure,” and not all of them are bad. Like, in the very first contract, you can choose to deliver a ship mind core to a parts dealer or let the hacker you brought with you download the data and destroy the core. If you do the delivery, the dealer tries trapping you in their warehouse to get money for the bounty on your head; if you let the hacker destroy the data (failing the contract), she’ll help you steal the part you needed from the dealer. Strict failure in these terms meant opening a path to other opportunities. A lot of the game is like this. You will have to weigh the consequences of your decisions carefully, but even “bad ends” can lead to positive outcomes.”

Local Backup

Our next two pieces pursue topics of memory and archive.

• The Save File Knows More Than You Do | Inner Spiral
  Alli invites you to archive not just your games, but your play experiences (Further Reading – Rae Maybee on memory and haunting in social simulator games).
• You don’t see me at the club? Well I don’t see you in the 2006 MMO Wurm Online | Florence Smith Nicholls
  Florence Smith Nicholls juxtaposes Microsoft AI preservation marketing hype with giving a critical seminar over karaoke. I’m not explaining that further.

“Preservation, like game development, is process, is labour. It’s a song and a dance, and if you can only understand it is a marketable output, well. There’s no orchestra, only emptiness.”

Underappreciated

Now let’s look at some historically important games that don’t typically get a lot of mindshare among English-language audiences, but which have defined entire genres and gaming cultures.

• Angelique Special: A monumentally important game that’s consistently overlooked | Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster
  Kimimi examines the genesis of the otome genre.
• The Early Years of the MMORPG Market in Brazil (2004–2010): The Golden Era of Level Up Games | SuperJump
  Vitor M. Costa presents a history of Brazil’s distinct culture of MMO gaming and the Filipino publisher that made its business exporting Korean MMOs there (Further Reading – Pedro Paiva on building local game development communities in Brazil).

“Level Up was a key company in the early days of the MMORPG market in Brazil, contributing significantly to mainstreaming Asian pop culture beyond Japan. Today, the experience of playing an MMORPG has changed a lot but still consists of living in a world that is incorporated into our real world. No matter how different the gaming market is in Brazil, the influence of our history cannot be underestimated.”

Are You Not Entertained?

Art, spectacle, and abjection bring together our next two picks.

• Illusory Control | Bullet Points Monthly
  Yussef Cole traces powerlessness, the abject, and violence in Manhunt (Further Reading – Gab Hernandez on playable death and powerlessness).
• Notes on Lorelei and the Laser Eyes | The great and shameful archive
  Matthew Parsons situates Lorelei‘s questions of art and audience in the larger context of Simogo’s oeuvre.

“Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a wild creation whose parts don’t always seem to add up, until suddenly they add up too neatly. But as the culmination of everything Simogo has done before, it could not be more perfect. It strikes me as a reflection of fifteen long years spent constantly thinking about how the audience will respond to something–a howl of frustration at the struggle of making art that welcomes everybody without losing its soul. It is the most melancholy victory lap I’ve ever seen.”

Heart and SOUL

Queerness, desire, and love comprise the core of this next section.

• Trails through Daybreak proves games can be normal about trans people | Digital Trends
  Autumn Wright chronicles 20 years of Trails writing, localizing, and normalizing queer characters.
• You Are Filled With Determination – and Narcissistic Robot Love | Gamers with Glasses
  Samantha Trzinski meditates on Mettaton, Undertale, and love.
• Inscrutable Desires, or, The Heart Wants What It Wants | TIER
  lotus root unpacks queerness and desire at the Heart of Heisei Pistol Show (Further Reading: Phoenix Simms’ thoughts on the same game, also for TIER).

“Heart “enjoys” the attention and adoration of men, but unlike the fairytale princess, he is also at the mercy of men’s violence and capacity for betrayal. If Heart doesn’t go so far as to identify as a woman (and the use of quotation marks in the above is worth noting), Heart sees himself in relation to feminine archetypes—the princess, the sex worker, the woman scorned. These figures provide models for how Heart sees himself, “woman-like” in his suffering as well as his longing.”

In Short Order

We’re bringing back the list. Here are some good lists!

• Manygame Collection (February 2025): My Turn (Based) Now | Press SPACE to Jump
  Taylor Hicklen takes stock of indie highlights from the past month.
• Five Japanese Games Set in Fantasy America | Sidequest
  Kathryn Hemmann looks at five games across genres that draw more implicit or explicit inspiration from American geography and culture.
• The best sex video games according to an expert | Polygon
  Annie Whitacre deliveres an adult-oriented list that spans genres and flavours (Further Reading: The Adult Analysis Anthology – I’ve linked the store landing page for the complete volumes but individual Cohost posts can also be found in our archives).
• Final Fantasy vs. Dungeons & Dragons | Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games
  Drew Mackie itemizes Final Fantasy‘s early history of borrowing its monsters from tabletop.

“To one degree or another, all RPGs re-create aspects of the tabletop experience, but how much they use and how blatantly they pull from Dungeons & Dragons could put them at risk — of seeming derivative, I suppose, but also of infringing on intellectual property. For this reason, a lot of attorneys would tell creatives to avoid using intellectual property they don’t own and, better yet, come up with their own ideas so they can own them. To a degree this is what Final Fantasy has done, as it moves away from using most but not all D&D monsters, but it’s tough guessing whether the motivations are legal, creative, or some mix of the two.”

Critical Chaser

Last week a blunt, this week a stein.

• Refusing to get drunk in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is an oddly captivating act of rebellion | Rock Paper Shotgun
  Edwin Evans-Thirlwell pours one out to KCD2 kind of accidentally revealing something about alcohol culture in 15th century Europe the games industry (Further Reading – Flora Merigold on Yakuza, alcohol, and reaching out for support).

“It’s impossible, I think, to play Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 without playing a boozer, even if you’re only boozing in cutscenes. The game’s 15th century world is greased by many splendours of hooch, from the wine used in potion-brewing through the finer vintages at banqueting tables to the viral pondwater they sell in seedier taverns. A lot of the time, the writing views alcohol as a means of teeing up some slapstick debauchery reminiscent of Paul Bettany’s character in A Knight’s Tale. It venerates the spectacle of having a large one, with custom dialogue and voice-acting for protagonist Henry when you woozily explain your antics to guards. But sometimes, perhaps despite itself, it expresses something about the culture of drinking and the unpleasantness of being militantly exhorted to drink.”