December 7th

Welcome back readers.

This week we’re rolling out with 19 fresh picks ranging in topic from storefront censorship, strategy RPGs, player identification, SegaBlue, and much more. If you appreciate our work, give the Patreon a look, won’t you?

One quick reminder before we proceed: you’ve got until December 15th, or a little over a week, to get your submissions in for our annual recap!

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

Discourse, Disc Horse

We begin once again this week with Horses. Two of these opening pieces are direct commentaries on the game. I’m bringing Alli’s piece in as well, as while she doesn’t talk about the game directly here–indeed, her examples are primarily to do with anime–I think her insights on how fandom puritanism erodes critical literacy are very relevant to the conversation.

• All that fucking bullshit about “HORSES” and for what? | No Escape
  Kaile Hultner TLDRs a discourse that didn’t need to be (Further Reading: Matt Wales’ interview with Pietro Righi Riva on Horses‘ Steam ban).
• Steam And Epic’s Ban Of Horses Is A Grim Sign Of The Times | Inverse
  Robin Bea weighs Horses‘ critique of power against the power of the storefronts refusing to shelve it.
• Purity and Plague | Inner Spiral
  Alli examines the corrosive effects of purity culture on online fandoms and the resulting erosion of critical literacy across artistic media (Further Reading: Kastel on the cycles of moral panic and censorship instigated by right-wing groups).

“Being a fan of something once functioned as a site of informal education, where people learned to read subtext, argue, interpret, and understand. They developed literacy in discomfort, learning that art could disturb without corrupting you, a character’s cruelty wasn’t an endorsement of it, and that fantasy and morality occupied different planes. That literacy has completely eroded. Now, to engage with something transgressive requires a public defense of said thing. Fictional violence or eroticism must be justified in advance, often with a political statement attached. The possibility of engaging in contradiction and not being black or white in your thoughts, is treated as moral weakness.”

RP OGs

Our next segment brings together a range of conversations on roleplaying, player character identification, and games as a conduit to memories–good and bad–of youth.

• Roleplaying in video games is bigger than ever (but it’s always been around) | Skybox
  Victoria Rose chronicles the past and present, precedents and persistence, of the roleplaying server (Further Reading: Florence Smith Nicholls on Disco Elysium LARPing).
• Hear Me Out: On the Pitfalls of Resident Evil 4 | Unwinnable
  Emma Kostopolus offers a hater’s perspective on RE4 and its impeccable player character.
• “keep driving” is sad in the way that teenagers with cars almost always are | leaving the party
  Kerry muses on how Keep Driving captures the liminal emotional landscape of being young and stupid with a car (Further Reading: Nicholas O on Keep Driving).
• The Hero of Time | Bee Sprawlbug Discorporated
  Bee Sprawlbug meditates on dissociation, silent protagonists, networks of care and their absense, and The Legend of Zelda.

“It says a lot about me, I think, that I’ve never actually seen Link as a happy kid embarking on some wholesome adventure to save the world. To me this is a kid who’s being made to carry a heavy burden alone. He’s left to wander in a world filled with monsters, and populated only by old folks hiding in caves. He’s enduring violence at every turn, and he’s doing it because on some level this is what everyone expects him to do: It’s his duty, apparently, to get killed by monsters over and over again in a quest to save everyone around him from the kind of violence that is currently happening to him.”

Tacti-Crit

How about a genre-specific section? This week it’s strategy RPGs: of mecha, high school, and high school mecha varieties.

• Power Dolls: Stat-tastic | Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster
  Kimimi locks in to the granular decision-making of a PC-98 strategic mecha sim (Further Reading: Kimimi on Fantasy Maiden Wars).
• Demonschool review | Rock Paper Shotgun
  Ashley Schofield is charmed by Demonschool‘s relentlessly charismatic spin on the SRPG.
• I Don’t Wanna Go To Demonschool | Gamesline
  Rose wants to like Demonschool, but,
• Gunparade March and the JRPG at the Turn of the New Millennium | Ogre Run
  Ogre Run examines the transmedia context and endurng influence of a mecha SRPG itself little-known outside of Japan (Further Reading: Elephant Parade on one of the Famicom Disk System’s earliest dungeon crawlers).

“The world of Gunparade recalls the idealized life Shinji creates for himself within Instrumentality. It is a cocoon, one where social reality has largely been erased. The only inhabitants of the town are those belonging to the 5121^st platoon and the handful of clerks running the local businesses, with the larger Kyushu region being abstracted as data—points in a wargame’s map. Here, players can eternally live out their teenage post-apocalyptic fantasy. But, this dream can only last so long and Gunparade seems aware of that. Partake in its social system to learn the truth of the war and see the cracks in the world. The game begins to make this apparent relatively early on when Takigawa asks: just who is Atsushi Hayami?”

Short-Term Memory

Our industry-minded picks this week focus on preservation and authorship across both digital and tabletop.

• Is This Really What We Want? – AI Art in Board Games | Meeple Mountain
  Andrew Lynch lays out the manifold case against allowing LLM art in tabletop and in creative spaces generally (Further Reading: Lucas White on Mary Skelter).
• Yakuza 0: Director’s Cut erases gaming history | AV Club
  Elijah Gonzalez takes Sega to task for pulling down a classic to sell you a worse version with bigger graphics for more than double the price (Further Reading: Ashley Schofield on RGGs selective and protective approach to recasting and revision).

“The obvious reason that many publishers do this is because they can charge more money for the new thing than for the old one—again, the Director’s Cut of Yakuza 0 costs an additional $30, even though it’s mostly the same 10-year-old game (but worse). However, the pervasiveness of this problem goes beyond commonplace greed and speaks to a deeper issue: video games being viewed more as software to be updated and eventually discarded rather than art to be preserved.”

Style and Substance

We’ve collected a variety of inquiries in this next section evaluating style and design, artistry and mechanics.

• Scrabdackle turns a notebook into the best vehicle for discovery | AV Club
  Wallace Truesdale scrys an adventure game with a Bombers-notebook approach to questing and learning about the world.
• Baby Steps (Cuzzillo/Boch/Foddy, 2025) | exp.
  Mathew Kumar finds Baby Steps‘ ambulatory joys at odds with the punitive thrust of its level design (Further Reading: John Warren on Baby Steps).
• What goes into a good parry system? | Game Developer
  Khee Hoon Chan parleys about parries with a gathering of experts.
• Big/House | Unwinnable
  Emily Price ponders the touchstones and nuances of a contemporary and literal house style in games across genres (Further Reading: J.M. Henson on Myhouse.wad).
• The Blue-Sky Optimism of Skies of Arcadia | Eteo Archetypes
  Gareth Damian Martin on the horizon of possibilities in Skies of Arcadia (Further Reading: Alli on SegaBlue and Dreamcast futurism).

“There’s a playfulness to its world that is deeply felt in the architectural games that Sailor’s Island stages with its bobbing rocks and balconies, that still, even now, evokes a sense of brighter futures and bold new adventures in me.”

Critical Chaser

Spine closes us out with a short and poignant piece.

• The Weight of Expectations | Into The Spine
  Tomás Neumann Aspee takes the shot (Further Reading: Robin Bea on Many Nights a Whisper).

“Whether I light the Chalice or not, the outcome will be the same: I will no longer be the Dreamer. That feeling is as terrifying as it is freeing.”