June 28th

Welcome back readers.

We’ve got eighteen cool-and-new picks for your this week.

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

Tag In

We’ll start this week off with different constructions of community, including two debriefs on the recent Manifesto Jam.

• Fighting Game Pros Grapple With Saudi Arabia’s Evo Takeover | Kotaku
  Ian Walker talks to folks in the FGC as its linchpin event is sold out to the PIF (Further Reading: Will Borger on the EVO buyout).
• Manifestos, Posting, Community | The Ebonheim Chronicle
  Brianna Townsend reflects on the material circumstances of the Manifesto Jam, and the longform blog as an antidote to microblogging Posters’ Madness (Further Reading: Autumn Wright on the need for more durable critical conversations).
• Why Not Manifest? | Hotel Paintings
  Em Reed debriefs on the 2026 Manifesto Jam, the moving goalposts of professionalization, and the mischaracterizations brought to bear by the jam’s unexpected breaking of containment into wider discourse.

“It’s not like, there’s one single point, an itch game or warpdoor post or whatever, which makes someone actively decide I’ve had enough of these weird, unprofessional people making experimental free or pwyw games, they’re harming the industry, or they didn’t end up making the industry more prestigious or broader or stable, they don’t have anything to say, they’re getting attention my project should get, they’re annoying, writing about them doesn’t get me enough clicks… etc… though thanks to the advances in access to others’ unfiltered consciousness that poster’s madness offers, all of these sentiments come up explicitly on social media from time to time.”

City Limits

Next up we have a series of meditations on urban spatiality and locality, both abstract and specific.

• FALLSTRUKTUR/Automaton Lung – notes on Platforming/Postmodernism | GlitchOut
  Oma Keeling ruminates on platformers, megastructures, and a streak of postmodernity inherent to the genre (Further Reading: Edwin Evans-Thirlwell on Lorn’s Lure).
• Visual novel Coffee Talk Tokyo serves up an image of ‘Cool Japan,’ but not much more | Rock Paper Shotgun
  Ashley Schofield elaborates on Coffee Talk 3‘s superficial engagement with its new Tokyo-based setting (Further Reading: Hiero de Lima on Inkonbini).
• Detective Saburo Jinguji: The Shinjuku Central Park Murder Case | Tsundoku Diving
  Baxter Burchill considers topography, abstraction, and complexity at the beginning of the Japanese mystery game boom (Further Reading: Ara Maybury on The Portopia Serial Murder Case).
• Kowloon’s Gate and the Global Hong Kong Imaginary | Ogre Run
  Ogre Run situates the 1997 adventure game in the hauntology of its liminal, transnational setting (Further Reading: Kastel on 1000xRESIST).

“How are we to understand Kowloon’s production in relation to the real world history it’s inspired by? Released in February 1997, the game arrived only five months before the British handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China. Much like the films of the Hong Kong New Wave—Chungking Express (Wong Kar Wai, 1990), Made in Hong Kong (Fruit Chan, 1997), and Let’s Love Hong Kong (Yau Ching, 2002), to cite a few examples—the specter of change hangs over Kowloon, a city out time in that it should no longer exist and must be banished.”

Late Fees

Let’s shift the focus, albeit incompletely, from space to time with a pair of ruminations on memory.

• Skating Through The Mire of Fear | Stop Caring
  Ryan Wagahoff sizes up Skate Story as a game that understands what it means to get back on the board after you fall off (Further Reading: Kaile Hultner on Skate Story).
• The Video Store in My Mind | Gamesline
  Lilith revisits the PlayStation 2 on her own fragmentary terms (Further Reading: Grace Benfell on the PS2).

“Give yourself permission to love something imperfect. Find the things which speak to you, and if they don’t exist, you can make them. At any point, you can become the person you most need yourself to be. Video games might be a silly hobby meant for people who enjoy the tactility of virtual experiences interfacing with mortal flesh, but I think such things are best enjoyed when you’re the one holding the controller. Give yourself permission to love something only you can love.”

Choice Picks

Critical engagements with theory and design.

• You Are a Super Scholar! | Medium
  Davy R. Howard traces Mario’s early footprint, key topics of inquiry, and at times mischaracterization in academic scholarship before the popularization of game studies as a formal discipline (Further Reading: GwG on Mario at 40).
• YOU MUST FREE YOURSELF FROM THE TYRANNY OF “MEANINGFUL CHOICES” | Azhdarchid
  Bruno Dias proposes a rhetorical consideration of choice design rather than just a functional or consequential one (Further Reading: Jon Ingold on choice and uncertainty in dialogue-driven games).

“I don’t think you have to abandon the idea of consequential or “meaningful” choice—but you don’t have to let it rule you, either. It is one thing you can do. Some games have different experiential goals (while still having a lot of use for choice-based narrative). And even in games with big consequential choices, they often only want to use those as part of a palette of different techniques.”

Off Script

We frequently feature articles that grapple with questions of identity. This time around it’s brand identity.

• In Resident Evil Requiem, a brand is a prison | Skybox
  Thomas Wilde locates the point at which Resident Evil gets too self-aware for its own good (Further Reading: Emma Kostopolus on RE Requiem).
• Earn the Number | Bullet Points Monthly
  Willa Rowe spies an identity crisis along several axes in IOI’s new Bond game.

“This is the central conflict of 007 First Light. Is it a spy game or a Bond game? These are not the same thing. Videogame espionage is (largely) synonymous with stealth. The likes of Metal Gear Solid and Splinter Cell have become standard bearers for the genre by employing a mechanical emphasis on remaining undetected. Even when violence is employed, it must be performed with precision. Stealth games are more puzzle boxes than anything else. Cinematic spies like Bond need to show off, meaning within a game the ubiquitous mechanics of the genre clash with the narrative needs of the character.”

River and Brush

Intersections between games and ecocritical theemes and actions.

• Okami: Challenging the Smokestack | Unwinnable
  Perry Gottschalk contemplates Okami, climate action, and how to blow up a mako reactor.
• The Shadow Pricing of Forget-Me-Not | TIER
  Phoenix Simms dwells on clicker games, magic shops, and the impossible question of how to put a price on a meaningful life (Further Reading: Phoenix on the work of Kara Stone).

“Forget-Me-Not’s subtle critiques of how much an individual is willing to exploit their environment in order to achieve emotional satisfaction or experience a fleeting moment also recalls for me some of the themes of exploiting vulnerable others to avoid inevitable entropy in Urobuchi Gen’s Puella Magi Madoka Magica. In both narratives, figures like Organa and Madoka have a gift that keeps a corrupt system running and enough naïvete that their master can manipulate them into a sense of obligation toward that system. Though Madoka becomes wise to Kyubey’s manipulation, Organa is more or less Irene’s puppet and as a sentient cat her logic is much more limited. A lot of this feels outsized for a satirical clicker game, but philosophical questions and scenarios are often explored at some length in even the most silly of this genre’s concepts.”

Novel Visions

Some picks from the latest writing on adult games.

• An Interview With Amelie Doree | Adult Analysis Anthology
  Kastel chats with adult VN critic Amelie Doree about the state of the art, the state of the crit, and more (Further Reading: Wallace Truesdale’s interview with Bigg).
• “Like an Industrial Solvent for Your Soul”: PASSENGER x PRINCESS: NO HOPE // MUST DIE | Gamers with Glasses
  Sophie Atkinson plays a chaotic and cathartic road trip about trans self-image and trans agency.

“Passenger x Princess isn’t exactly a fun game. It’s so messy, uncomfortable and frustrating to watch these two disaster beings and their train wreck of a relationship develop, but that’s also what makes it such a compelling experience. Despite spending only an hour with Clover and Lotus, I can sense so much history behind these characters that makes the story feel more real. While playing, I felt scared, related to, disgusted, and oddly hopeful. Despite the subject matter and tone, I do think it is a hopeful game.”

Critical Chaser

At least Barbie comes with a disc.

• Barbie Is The Only One That Can Stand Up to GTA VI in November | This Week in Videogames
  Maddie Agne has a hear-me-out on Atari putting out a Barbie games compilation during the GTA6 release window.

“Come November, Barbie Rewind knows it will be appealing to people like me who played The Barbie Diaries: High School Mystery on their parents’ PC after school, and to those of us who owe their interest in this industry to the defiance of early girl games. That means Rewind knows it doesn’t have to fight GTA VI for attention — Barbie has its own dedicated, finally-grown-up-with-adult-money audience that it knows will buy Barbie Rewind in a heartbeat.”