September 21st

Welcome back readers.

Behold! A rare on-time-ish Sunday post! If you are as amazed by that feat as I am, what would you say are the odds we can translate that amazement into Patreon support? Eh? Eh? Well, worth a try.

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

Art and Access

Our first section this week brings together productive conversations on industry censorship, difficult art, and content warnings.

• The Games Behind the Bans: Vile: Exhumed and Girls Purgatoriem | Endless Mode
  Grace Benfell sits down and plays a couple games that have been talked about a great deal more than they have been sat down and played (Further Reading: Willa Rowe checks out 8 games from the Toxic Yuri VN Jam).
• Grotesquerie Erotica — Beyond Citadel Review | Gamesline
  Lilith takes stock of Beyond Citadel‘s heady cocktail of sex and violence and relates it to the larger context of anti-sex censorship efforts going on in entertainment media (Further Reading: Skeleton on the current critical landscape’s difficulty with games like Beyond Citadel).
• I Am The Trigger: What Adult Games Can Learn From Fandom | BP Games Inc.
  Lindsay Ishihiro compares the culture around content warnings between (adult) games and fandom, and identifies the productive and empowering strategies the former might learn from the latter.

“Adult games have a lot in common with the playful spaces of fandom communities. They can both be places of great vulnerability, not just for the creator but for those consuming it. Both encourage the player or reader to be fully embodied in the text, to see themselves within it. This agency, and the raw desires and discomforts that arise from it, are encased in a frequently upsetting stew of sexual baggage, assumptions, intimate memories and, sometimes, trauma. Adult content can turn you inside out, and just like in real sex, that can be welcome or disgusting… or both.“

People Also Liked

Now let’s look at some thoughts on remakes, discovery, and industry trends.

• Don’t Let an Algorithm Pick Your Next Game For You | Endless Mode
  Bee Wertheimer pushes back against the decay of discovery into algo-driven genre handwringing in favour of a more community-and-conversation-oriented approach (Further Reading: Wallace Truesdale on doing your videogame homework).
• There’s a Right and Wrong Way to Remake A Classic Video Game—And The Iliad Explains How | Endless Mode
  Marc Normandin takes a literary editions approach to understanding Trails in the Sky and the artistic priorities of its two-decades-later remake (Further Reading: Emma Kostopolus on narrative fidelity in remakes).

“If games are to be remade and remade again, then, at the least, they should have purpose and vision to those remakes, a dedicated focus as to why that doesn’t come back to dollar signs at the top of the list. The existence of a remake should not preclude the continued availability of the original, or any other remakes or editions that exist, either: like in the literary classics world, the options should all be laid out before us, with the audience each work was intended for reveling in their chosen favorite. And for those who want to experience a game in every possible “translation,” all they will need is time and room on the shelf to do so.“

Pallet Town

These next four pieces continue some lines of inquiry explored in the previous two, but the guiding line here is nostalgia–different axes and outcomes.

• Returning to the Start – Pokémon Yellow | Pixpen
  Sam Howitt revisits a game and its abstractions that helped spark a lifelong love of RPGs.
• Neyyah review: A seven year love letter to the best point-and-click adventure ever made | Thinky Games
  Devin Stone evaluates an endearing if unexceptional standard-bearer for the likes of Riven (Further Reading: Andrew Plotkin on Riven‘s own remake).
• New Gods, Old Enigmas | Bullet Points Monthly
  Luis Aguasvivas finds Mafia: The Old Country more emblematic of the industry’s contemporary extractivist excesses than it does any imagined Good Old Days (Further Reading: Yussef Cole’s take on Mafia: TOC).
• Classics of Contextlessness | Medium
  Davy R. Howard contrasts the ClassicsOfGame YouTube channel with the ahistorical LLM-generated 80s nostalgia bait that pops up on social media.

“On the surface ClassicsOfGame may appear to share some similarities with GenAI TikToks. They are both shortform Internet videos of “retro” content that could be described as contextless. However as I alluded to earlier what COG does may better be described as recontextualization. Generative fasctalgia on the other hand is more than decontexualized, for it never had a context to begin with, it is noncontexualized.“

Like a Boss

Now let’s look to more recent contemporary games with the next three picks.

• Saints Row and Digital Gender Euphoria | Unwinnable
  J.M. Henson lays out why The Boss’s irreverent and chaotic experience of gender is preferable to what they’re doing with Dragon Age these days (Further Reading: Stacey Henley on transing her voice in SR4).
• Suda 51 discusses Romeo Is A Dead Man and wanting to make a Batman game featuring BLACKPINK | Shacknews
  Lexi Luddy chats with Suda 51 about Romeo Is A Dead Man, collaborative artmaking, punk rock, and more.
• Hornet Makes Silksong Sing | Endless Mode
  Maddy Myers sees Silksong putting in the effort.

“It’s entirely possible that a more Samus-like, reticent Hornet could have worked well in Silksong, and it’s frankly what I expected from the game. I know she talks in the first Hollow Knight, but not much, and with her whole “tough gal” persona, I just didn’t expect her to be doing much more talking in Silksong beyond the bare necessities. Instead, Hornet talks constantly in Silksong, sharing her opinions openly with every NPC she meets, and indeed having an entire emotional arc of her own as she learns and discovers more about the world around her. I didn’t realize how much it was going to change the way that it felt to play a Hollow Knight game—and, in my view, the change significantly improves its storytelling and emotional pull.“

Critical Chaser

Upping the ante with our closing section this week.

• Rally Point: The ants are willing to die for me in Empires Of The Undergrowth | Rock Paper Shotgun
  Sin Vega Versus The Ants.

“My first memory is of ants. Just ants. It’s one of those very early ones that are nothing but a momentary snapshot now, long since worn with use and subconsciously filled in with probably inaccurate details and context. They were moving around on a white doorframe, and I don’t remember the surroundings, or what I was doing, what I did with this observation, or whether anyone even told me what ants are or whether I already knew. But I remember a fascination that never left me. I will, as ever, die for them. To be fair, I’d die for basically anyone who is a cool animal and/or passably feigns friendship, but whatever. The point is: ants.“