July 13th

Welcome back readers.

I have a few links for you before we begin the issue part of the issue. First up, Kaile’s monthly recap is out and it’s a banger, taking stock of the last two years of criticism and games media more broadly. You can read it for yourself by joining our Patreon for free, or for a small monthly amount if you really like what we do here.

Next up, got an itch bundle you might be interested in, if you like TTRPGs and don’t like ICE. Good Deal!

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

Skip to My Lou

We’ll start things off this week with three pieces unpacking variously unpacking both of the Death Stranding games from different angles and axes (And for Further Reading I’ll link our previously highlighted picks from Diego Nicolás Argüello, Julián Ramírez, and Gabrielle de la Puente).

• The Women of Death Stranding 2 Are Stuck in a Sad Cycle | Endless Mode
  Maddy Myers examines motherhood, babies, aging, and the gender essentialism of it all in the Death Stranding games.
• Tomorrow’s Hope | Bullet Points Monthly
  Yussef Cole remarks upon Death Stranding 2 and children in a future that is never promised but must always be strived towards.
• frogheaven’s review of Death Stranding: Director’s Cut | Backloggd
  frogheaven reflects on playing through the original Death Stranding with a friend.

“Death Stranding is more than anything a quiet and contemplative game. Hours of walking. Walking carefully and looking around. It is often peaceful. And on the face of it, it is lonely. Until you look down and see your BB there with you. Boss was my BB. We didn’t talk, we didn’t even make any sounds to each other at all, but we were together and looking forward in the same direction and that was everything for a while.”

Double Negative

These next two pieces both take some tough critical looks at recent broadly popular games, because sometimes you just gotta.

• Street art, strength, and selling out: How Street Fighter 6 sacrificed its identity to chase brand synergy | Skybox
  Ashley Schofield sees less and less that’s street about Street Fighter 6 as the game dips its toes in corporate crossovers and LLM nonsense (Further Reading – Will Borger on Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves‘ own ethical entanglements).
• Date Everything Is Peak Millennial Cringe | Endless Mode
  Grace Benfell finds no purchase in Date Everything‘s lack of challenge, friction, or consequence (Further Reading: Kerry Brunskill came to some similar conclusions in her review).

“A great rom-com, like the glowing Moonstruck or the shatteringly lonely The Apartment, can be as profound (and funny) as anything else. Perhaps others are content settling for cutesy shenanigans. But nothing about Date Everything is really new or novel. So many video games treat its characters as objects; I fail to see what being cheeky or meta about it adds. I want more, not just from video games as an abstract category, but from anything I spend my limited time doing. By skimming over the surface of its themes, the game feels more bound to its weird implications, not less. Date Everything may be cringe, but it is not free.”

Critical Closeups

Next let’s talk about the form and practice of criticism itself, in both dialogue and book review (and as Further Reading for both, I can think of no better companion piece than Autumn’s prior dialogue with Jacob).

• A Dialogue with Joshua Rivera | Unwinnable
  Autumn Wright chats with Joshua Rivera about the journalism-criticism divide, the albatross of GTA6, and an industry that is kind of evil.
• A Record for Our Times: Jacob Geller has a Book | Unwinnable
  Luis Aguasvivas wrestles with the structural wrinkles as Jacob Geller branches out from the precarious intangibility of YouTube to the material prestige of the coffee table book format.

“do not dismiss How a Game Lives as a baroque vanity project – ornate, expensive, and full of contradictions. Its existence in our current perilous space of videogame criticism makes this an event. Regardless, if the book is partly inaccessible as a form to the non-Geller fan, How a Game Lives is infused with depth and beauty beyond even its gorgeous presentation. The words win out against ornamentation as faithful transposition of scripts.”

Version Control

This one’s a broad grouping, bringing together themes of ports, modding, and making games last.

• 17 years after it was released, I’m tracing Undertale and Deltarune back to Toby Fox’s spooky Earthbound mod | GamesRadar
  Miri Teixeira does a little media–and artist–archaeology.
• Not the Same Experiences – Final Fantasy Ports | Pixpen
  Sam Howitt reckons with Square Enix’s long and convoluted history of ports and remasters (Further Reading: Perry Gottschalk on FF7 Rebirth and Square’s philosophy of remakes).
• Broke and Plugged In | Inner Spiral
  Alli muses on how growing up poor tilts–and enriches–your relationship to games and tech (Further Reading: Adam W on Sonic Robo Blast 2).

“We’d reuse and repair old components well past their prime. I built my first PC from an old home computer, swapping in parts over time until it could barely run Minecraft. I learnt to problem solve hardware, and even Jerry-rig physical setups, like mounting a thrifted monitor on a dinner table with a homemade shelf. These acts of making do really did feel like victories to me, because each game that successfully booted and repaired controller, was a small triumph over my lack of resources. Disadvantaged youth often engage in “remixing, reworking, and repurposing” media in their own ways, which is exactly what I’m sure a lot of us were doing with the games and shows we liked. In hindsight, our relentless improvised tinkering was a hands-on tech education. We weren’t just consumers of entertainment; scarcity had turned us into active creators and problem-solvers within our hobby.”

Thought Cabinet

Ok, I’m out of witty pairings. These next four picks are all just strong pieces, all with different formal approaches, on mostly-recent games.

• The source of overwhelm: Fantasy Life i and Promise Mascot Agency | Backlog
  Grayson Morley makes the case for why the new Fantasy Life is just too damn busy (Further Reading: Wallace Truesdale on Promise Mascot Agency and community care).
• Disco Elysium and Genre | Appendices and Omissions
  This one maps out Disco‘s literary strengths in relation to both modernism and detective fiction.
• ‘NORCO’ Should Be A Cult Classic | Defector
  Lucy Bloom thinks you ought to try it (Further Reading: Phoenix Simms on different scales of grief in games).
• the year in clears #10 – BBB’25 game 5: dragon’s dogma ii | Backloggery
  etcetega works through cycles of meaning across the Dragon’s Dogmas (Further Reading: Renata Price on DD2).

“vermund, battahl, and the volcanic island are made of stories. the terrain, a story of how the people before you walked this path, and a story of how the designers wanted each combat encounter to feel. the people, myriad stories of how history has played out. every pawn, a story of someone else spending time wondering at this world, every dungeon, a story of treasure to uncover and foes to defeat.”

Critical Chaser

Match Point.

• Seven (Plus One) Classic Tennis Games for the Last Seven Days of Wimbledon | Endless Mode
  Dia Lacina serves up a listicle the way only Dia does.

“Maybe it was just prolonged exposure, an osmotic infection. Why fight the inevitable? I started asking questions and I started actively watching tennis. And before I knew it I learned to appreciate tennis, even if I hated running around like a molting penguin in the Carolina heat chasing balls. So that’s when the tennis games started… First with a stray rental. Then habit. And soon after that I was developing opinions and preferences about tennis video games and how they translated the real sport to the digital game.”