April 28th

Welcome back readers.

Behold! A rare, even-later-than-Monday (It’s 2:30 AM local time) post! As I warned last week, contributing to our Patreon will not make posts happen on Sunday more often, but it absolutely does help the posts happen! Thank you, as always, for supporting our stuff, and for tolerating my hokey fundraising bits.

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

Abundant Sickos

Our first section this week takes as its theme the idea established in its first piece–so much so that I’ve tagged it under the word “abundance.” Starting with Em Reed’s framing of games beyond the commercial/productive, we move to new frameworks for appreciating games–separated from their high-ticket value on the secondary market, or even experienced indirectly through notes–before arriving at a look at a game that I think fulfills the values laid out in Reed’s piece.

• Reframing Abundance | Em Reed
  Em Reed challenges you to stop apologizing for your “unproductive” creative hobbies, reminding us that doing stuff for the love it is always the older and greater form that precedes the commercialized thing (Further Reading – Marina Kittaka’s call to divest from the games industry.)
• When a game’s identity becomes wrapped up in its rarity, what happens when it’s re-released on Steam for 20 bucks? | PC Gamer
  Kerry Brunskill contemplates the critical reputations (or in some cases reappraisals) of obscure and expensive curiosities made widely available and affordable once more.
• Fez Notes Fixed Me | Talking Videogames, With Robots
  Rob is a huge sicko for other people being huge sickos about their stuff. Got it?
• Sudokuvania: Digits of Despair is one of the most impressive works of pure game design I have ever seen | @wirewitchviolet on Tumblr
  I have no idea what this is about, looks sick, don’t let me play it.

“Again I am just completely blown away that someone made something so meaty in a standard sudoku site’s normal UI, and really managed to make it feel so much like playing a DS Castlevania. Some real proof of game design being an art form here. And now you too can just completely lose a day or two to it!”

All Manor of Things

We’re talking about puzzle games now–can I call them that?–but thinking about them from a bunch of different angles–as stories, as texts, as designs, as allegories, as, well, puzzles.

• The Family Drama of Blue Prince | Gamers with Glasses
  Don Everheart considers Mt. Holly as a work of design–narrative, mechanical, diegetic, allegorical.
• It Seems I Have Found Myself In Another Mysterious House | ROBLEM SOLVING
  Rob Dubbin contemplates Blue Prince‘s position in the contemporary roguelike landscape and its picture-book forebears in equal measure.
• Botany Manor Isn’t Afraid to Have Thorns –Botany Manor (PC) Review | Gamesline
  Spencer is all-in on Botany Manor‘s narrative and character building (Further Reading – Jermey Signor’s thoughts on narrative in the same game).

“Botany Manor surprised me, to say the least. While its plant-based puzzles, detailed corridors, and well-kept gardens were what drew me in, I did not expect to be drawn into the life of Ms. Arabella Greene so vividly. Her story is told not through bombastic cutscenes or epic expositions of her storied lineage. It is quiet, and quaint, and gradual, blooming in the light of a lazy midday sun, but it is no less stunning for it.”

King of Writers

These next four picks run along a spectrum from review to impression to critique, unpacking recent games of all genres, teasing out their complexities, and sometimes their compromises.

• Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves review: one last show in South Town | Digital Trends
  Will Borger finds SNK’s newest fighter to be great, with a load-bearing “but. . .”
• From Hops to High Heaven: A Review of Ale Abbey | Sidequest
  Cress comes away charmed by a monastic brewery management sim (Further Reading – Emily Prince on the poetry of recursion in Dwarf Fortress).
• The best part of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is it explains nothing | Polygon
  Maddy Myers appreciates how Clair Obscur does more showing than telling.
• Crow Country Is a Game About Climate Change | Sidequest
  Kathryn Hemmann finds Crow Country to be in close dialogue with its 90s corporate and climate-anxious forebears in more than just aesthetics.

“Could we have made a different decision if we knew how quickly and severely we’d be affected? Even if we knew, would we have done anything differently? The answers fall within the realm of speculation, but Crow Country steps up to the challenge by offering a viscerally concrete scenario to explore these questions.”

Off the Beaten Path

Here’s some neat stuff you probably haven’t seen before!

• The Lacerator is an upcoming horror game from a Brazilian solo dev who wants you to laugh | Game File
  Ronald Gordon chats with indie dev Fernando Tittz about embracing jank and the humor in horror.
• Galaxian 3: What a ride | Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster
  Kimimi contemplates the unlikely delights of a PlayStation downport of one of the most ponderous and unwieldy arcade installations Namco ever built.
• We’re All Going to the Conclave Larp | mssv
  Adrian Hon checks out the actually-quite-thriving scene of papal conclave LARPs (Further Reading – Florence Smith Nicholls on Disco Elysium LARPing).

“While it’s possible to imagine an online conclave RPG, the embodied nature of larps allows sensations like exhaustion and hunger – though hopefully not starvation – to register, a reminder that politics is not merely a mental exercise in power. Players can feel overawed by their monarch’s magnificent costume and threatened by their guards; they can look for tells that someone is lying or that their mind can be swayed.”

Critical Chaser

I am often thinking about the Phantasy Star II Weapon Shop Vendor.

• The 12 Merchants You Meet in JRPG Heaven | Paste
  Dia Lacina celebrates the mercantile greats. Yes Torneko is on the list.

“If there’s a sapphic hottie nexus in the Algol Star System, it’s not Nei and Nei 2’s epic (and literal) catfight (but that’s good). It’s the glam rock soft butch who knows exactly the kind of Scalpel, Shot, or Slasher you need, and just so happens to have a store in every city in the star system.”