March 2nd

Welcome back readers.

This issue was published fifteen minutes later than it otherwise would have been because after a couple of months of sustained plugging I was a little stumped on coming up with a new way to plug our Patreon. With some additional financial support, we can hire a dedicated plugger-upper person and relieve our long-suffering senior curator from the burden of contemplating all things plug-shaped.

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

Live and Drink

This week we start out with different inquiries into story, performance, and narrative.

• Surviving a Disco Elysium LARP | Eurogamer.net
  Florence Smith Nicholls hangs out with a Czech art collective and makes Disco even weirder (Further Reading – Sharang Biswas on queer community-building through LARP).
• The 2025 Nebula Award for Best Game Writing: a Case for Caves of Qud | Medium
  Jason Grinblat pitches the speculative literary chops of the game and world he spent a decade and a half co-authoring.
• Super Fire Pro Wrestling Special | Talking games
  Baxter Burchill unravels the intimacy and inquietude of Super Fire Pro Wrestling Special.

“Super Fire Pro Wrestling Special is a heartbreaking, contradictory death wail of intimacy and distance, a profound, heartbreaking exploration of a man every inch as unknowable as you and me, searching for wholeness in the ecstatic connection of touch, in pixel meshes together until two become one. It’s a tragedy, as honest and empathetic and cruel and real and true as they come.”

Mystery Machine

Here’s a genre-ish focused section on different kinds of mystery.

• Type Help: design ruminations | Zarf Updates
  Andrew Plotkin considers the latest gem in a coalescing genre of narrative deduction games (Further Reading – Kastel’s coverage of mystery deduction game The Centennial Case).
• Misericorde: White Wool and Snow Review | Unwinnable
  Emily Price unpacks the second volume of Misericorde as its characters and conflicts begin to take a stronger focus.

“What happens when your worldview is cracked open? What will you do? It’s possible to make a lot of reductive statements about that – medieval people can be evil, nuns can be sexy – but overall what this volume requires is empathy for people reacting with extreme prejudice to hidden parts of themselves.”

History Lessons

Histories in and out of games inform these next two selections.

• ¿Qué relación tiene Iansán de Genshin Impact con la virgen de la candelaria? | Gamerfocus
  Julián Ramírez unpacks the historical colonial syncretism between Catholicism and the Yoruba pantheon to contextualize Genshin Impact‘s Iansán.
• Valhalla – “You are in an icy waste in Hell” | Super Chart Island
  Iain Mew chronicles an absolute Legend of a Spectrum RPG–technically ambitious, feature-rich, arguably unplayable (Further Reading – Kimimi’s coverage of another ambitious–but good?–game for the Speccy).

“One popular repeating story in games history is that of technical advances powering improved experiences. Being able to do more technically allows you to make better games, the idea goes. Often, it’s a story told to promote individual games. A lot of marketing over time hasn’t talked about mechanics, narrative, or the interplay of the two, but has instead been about marvelling at advances in technology. Better graphics. More things on screen. More polygons. Ray tracing! Blast processing! The usual hope from a business perspective is that out of that also comes more popularity, higher sales, and a pathway to growth. History also offers lots of examples of other outcomes. A particularly strong and early such cautionary tale is that of Legend software, the creators of Valhalla.”

Reel Play

We now step outside the game into the topics of archive, modding, and addiction.

• On Archiving Games History | The Stacks
  Joey Wawzonek shares some theory, practice, and rationale for archiving Japanese print gaming media publications, documents, and artifacts.
• You Weren’t Supposed to See This | Inner Spiral
  Alli reflects on debugging, modding, hacking, the oppression of anti-cheat, and the praxis of putting Shrek in Tony Hawk’s Underground 2 (Further Reading – Elijah Beahm on the importance of mods).
• To Kill a Dragon: Video Games and Addiction
  Joey Schutz muses on videogames, flow, slot machines, the zone, and the near-universal game design practices that make the former look a lot like the latter (Further Reading – Niko Stratis on Balatro and addiction).

“I teach a class on digital game environments, and I am constantly fighting against the current of contemporary level design ideology. No matter how much I try to get my students to reflect on how a space makes them feel, they invariably focus on what it’s making them do. I speak with them of lighting, of the difference between soft light and hard light, warm and cold, the emotional conveyance of shadows and form – but inevitably they focus on how lights lead the player to the next path instead. When I try to get them to think of the disruption of sightlines, how the act of piecing together a picture makes them feel and react, they instead focus on where the sightlines are leading their eye…once more, to the next path. Tell me where to go. Level design has become a tool of domination and control. Never let the player get lost, lest they think about stopping.”

Fuck the Chantry

Next we look at queer and trans topics both in and out of games.

• The World Wasn’t Ready for the Nuance of Dragon Age II’s Bisexuality | Sidequest
  Melissa Brinks presents an expansive character study of Anders–a mess of a mage, and bisexual besides.
• They Called Me Slurs While You Dragged Their Bodies | Unwinnable
  Autumn Wright would like to know where all this Indiana Jones nazi-punching energy was when they were getting piled on by gamergate-types for sticking up for Dustborn.

“The fascists in Dustborn are mostly robot cops. Fictional ones, too (though human fascists, even real ones, elicit no more sympathy from me). There’s nothing redeeming about the side they’re on, either. It’s a stereotypical evil dystopian megacorporation. Nonetheless, I was, apparently, “fantasizing about killing anyone who isn’t on the left,” a “fascist fucking racist,” and a “presstitute.” This was the reactionary backlash against a game for and about queers kindled by the resurgent Gamergate. And as I wrote all this in a preview, I had made my bed before the game ever reached the front lines of a culture war.”

Critical Chaser

The Imperial Sewers in Shadows of the Empire didn’t make the cut. Good.

• Seven Intriguing Video Game Sewers | Sidequest
  Kathryn Hemmann gives an underappreciated ludic locale the list treatment.

“Sewers combine the allure of secret underground tunnels with the chance to study old artifacts that have been thrown away and forgotten. These areas often have a strange beauty as well, with the slow drip and flow of water enhancing the dance of the light reflected on the mossy walls.”