July 19th

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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.

Hard Reset

There’s a justifiably sour mood in our opening industry section this week, with Sony and Microsoft tripping over one another in the bad news contest they seem to be holding. The image of jangling keys is invoked in more than one of our first five picks.

• Video Game Studios Aren’t Monoliths | An Evening at the Inn
  Hayes Madsen does not care who you think would be a great pick to make the next Halo.
• AI Made Cloning Games Easier Than Ever | 404
  Nicole Carpenter connects the recent trend of LLM-enabled ripoffs to older industry traditions of overproduction and knockoffs (Further Reading: Thomas James on the intrusion of LLM hucksters into fan translation spaces).
• IT’S TIME TO GROW UP | killjoy
  Will Butler finds that the remake fad does nothing to quell doubts about the leadership of the industry’s largest platform-holders (Further Reading: Alli on the technofeudalism of platform holders).
• StarFox Is Modern And I’m Tired | Bloomed Wings Blog
  Cind finds that Star Fox‘s fifth go-round has pruned playability and personality in pursuit of polish and perfectionism (Further Reading: Kimimi on the actual Star Fox 64).
• Xbox Is Begging Us To Think About Fallout 5 Instead Of Layoffs | Kotaku
  Rebekah Valentine reels at the cognitive dissonance of Microsoft’s messaging.

“it has become abundantly clear that shaking keys at us, as if we are toddlers, is the strategy it has chosen to save itself from reputational ruination in the wake of carving a massive scar right through the industry. It has done this several times in the weeks since as the news coming out of the company grew more and more dire. It did this again today. I have no doubt it will jangle the keys again in the future.”

Nova Fabulas

Then again, the industry was never just the platform-holders–and games were never just the industry. Our next three selections invoke different ideas of community in pursuit of alternative possibilities.

• The groundwork for resilience – musings from The Glasgow Independent Games Festival | The Candybox Blog
  Nathalie Lawhead seeks–and finds–where a real community spirit for making and sharing games perserveres (Further Reading: Em Reed on the 2026 Manifesto Jam).
• Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike | Retro XP
  Ashley Schofield muses on conversation, community, and the indomitable parry game of 3rd Strike.
• Final Fantasy XIII’s Anarchist Dream | Unwinnable
  Kaile Hultner encourages players and agitators alike to keep the faith, keep the focus (Further Reading: Kathryn Hemmann on Final Fantasy VII).

“Final Fantasy XIII ends with one final explosion of joy. The party accomplishes a seemingly impossible feat and defeats the fal’Cie Orphan. Fang and Vanille become Ragnarok together. Cocoon starts to fall from the sky, and Ragnarok uses their powers to create a crystalline pillar that encompasses the nonfunctioning shell. Lightning, Sazh, Snow, and Hope appear back on Gran Pulse, unharmed. They’re reunited with their families – Serah, Dajh, the rest of Cocoon – as a new day dawns free from Sanctum control. Deep inside the crystal pillar, Fang and Vanille sleep, hands intertwined, their focus fulfilled. Another world was possible for them—and it can be for us as well.”

Broadband Access

I just got through saying platform holders aren’t everything, but platform histories have much to teach us about the present material conditions in which the commercial games industry participates. Two more for context.

• I’m allowed a moment of navelgazing nostalgia | Laura Michet’s Blog
  Laura Michet recollects the Flash game era and its connection to Web 1.0 (Further Reading: Nathalie Lawhead on the Flash website indie scene).
• The Ghost in the Coax | ROMchip
  Skot Thayer examines the Sega Channel as a forerunner to the precariously ephemeral digital infrastructure of today’s industry.

“Though the service was unplugged decades ago, its ghost haunts the modern broadband network. The very coaxial cables that once looped its data stream now provide the high-speed, always-online infrastructure that allows this rental model to flourish globally. By examining this service not as a failed console add-on but as a critical piece of network infrastructure, we can see that the history of video games is inextricably linked to the material history of the internet itself. The ghost in the coax is not just a metaphor; it is a reminder that the seemingly immaterial world of the cloud is built upon a very real, often messy, and heavily contested material foundation.”

Femininity in Play

Histories–both personal and societal–are also mutable. Feminine reinscriptions of those histories feature in our next section.

• The Women Who Kill Are the Ones That Saved Me | Stop Caring
  The author seeks out bodily affirmations from avatars of digital femininity (Further Reading: Skeleton on the ten women she’s had to be).
• Women at Play | ROMchip
  Meixu Zhan offers a new history of women in the Chinese games industry, independent from both patriarchal and western feminist orthodoxies (Further Reading: Meixu’s previous writing on Chinese indie game Laughing to Die).

“A Western-centric perspective alone cannot explain how postsocialist state regulation, consumer culture, moral governance, and nationalism shape women’s participation in Chinese gaming, or how these intertwined pressures structure women’s professionalism, desire, and platformed femininity. It thus pushes feminist game studies beyond dominant Western frameworks.”

Porn, Playfully

Orthodox histories of games also tend to leave a lot of stuff out, and porn games are a common casualty. Two picks here to rectify that injustice.

• Dokyusei and the Maturation of Eroge
  Ogre Run situates a key work of PC-98 eroge at several crossroads of genre, industry, and narrative sophistication.
• Sanctuary In Vulnerabilty: Hazelnut Latte & Creeping Censorship | Adult Analysis Anthology
  Eternal_Savvy seeks games and conversations that more openly acknowledge our relationships to sex (Further Reading: Kastel’s interview with Amelie Doree).

“Porn games are uniquely positioned to be able to allow us to explore ourselves without worry of hurting other people or being subjected to something we cannot escape from. Porn can help us find answers about ourselves, and how we interact with our partners, that can otherwise be scary or impossible to discover. To deny people the ability to look at those parts of themselves is heartbreaking, because these games and stories have the ability to connect us to one another through experience and discussion. But finding the joy to openly love porn and sex can be done by continuing to engage with these stories and talk to one another honestly and with an open heart so we can understand the passionate, inexplicable, and sometimes ugly parts of us that spawn from sex and how we like to have it. So I don’t intend to stop talking about it.”

Story Bible

The text itself also moves in time, and can be reinscribed by author and audience alike. Authenticity, lore, and their associated burdens feature in this section on narrative.

• Perfect Tides: Station to Station and art as frictionless | Skybox
  Bee Wertheimer finds that Mara doesn’t show enough struggle in the one thing that ought to make her the most relatable (Further Reading: Nate Schmidt’s review of Station to Station).
• FINAL FANTASY 7: CRISIS CORE: stories are not universes | a weapon to surpass blaming yourself or god while knee-deep in the dead
  Chuck Sebian-Lander critiques the perfunctory narrative holding pattern of Final Fantasy VII‘s ever-expanding cinematic universe.
• The Copied Cathedral: Grimoire Nier
  Erin D chronicles the subsuming and undermining of the original Nier by a rising tide of lore and retroactive continuity (Further Reading: Jake Steinberg on killing your inner lore master).

“Grimoire Nier is well and truly the introduction of Lore to the DrakeNier aesthetic, a marked contrast from a series of games that largely rejected it. If one wishes to point to a singular moment where the Taro Aesthetic coheres, where his shared universe fixations and stylistic flourishes become an expected, pre-packaged routine, it’s right here in Grimoire Nier.”

Pallet Cleanser

After an extended run (one might even say a marathon) with the historical angle, let’s return once more to the present in a series of critical meditations on recent games.

• What the heck is happening to Love and Deepspace? | Respec
  Rebecca Jones catches you up on the hullabaloo about the LaDS.
• Online Games that Let You Feel Lonely | Medium
  WordsMaybe dwells on negative space in games and film (Further Reading: Phoenix Simms on Blue Prince).
• Pokopia, cosy games and the problem of escapism | Red Pepper
  Stephanie Farmsworth wonders whether Pokopia, and cozy games like it, need to show a little more teeth to meaningfully critique the extractive hegemonies that birth them (Further Reading: Emma Kostopolus on Pokopia).

“With Pokopia, the shadows of deforestation, climate change, pollution and the devastating impact of extractive capitalism, are made visible in our virtual refuges. Perhaps a cosy game needs to be confrontational to begin to truly represent socialist politics. We cannot truly escape, so we must work to save the world before us.”

Critical Chaser

Metacritic on this one must go crazy.

• Gambling, a Review | Critical Theorycraft
  Did… did Patrick Fiorilli enjoy himself?

“Gambling is a long running live service game that’s recently seen a slate of updates in the form of smartphone app integration and alternate reality mechanics. But how do its bones hold up in 2026?

To find out, my esteemed editors at Critical Theorycraft put me up at a hotel and casino in Las Vegas, Nevada—known far and wide to gamers as the home of the world famous HyperX Esports Arena—for the purposes of reviewing Gambling with our brand new, totally objective and unbiased scoring system.”