September 20th

Welcome back readers.

I’m going to keep opening our issues with mini Patreon updates for the next little bit, because as I’ve been talking about recently, we need a bit more wiggle room to keep ourselves healthy. Since last week, we’ve ticked up by a few more members and a few more monthly dollars, and honestly, that’s very heartening. That’s a positive trend and I’m hoping we can keep that trend going! Patreon support is our financial lifeblood and is the primary reason Critical Distance has managed to stick around for a decade and a half. Let’s keep it going for thirty years and beyond.

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

Week-in-Review

Let’s start things off with a series of reviews and review-ish pieces that caught my eye, on games new and new-ish.

• Control Resonant review – more scale, but less narrative bite than its sibling | Eurogamer
  Alexis Ong comes to grips with the highs and… mids?… of Control‘s larger but more diffuse sophomore outing (Further Reading: utilitymonstergirl on Control).
• Esoteric Ebb Soothes Where it Should Incite | Gamesline
  Ava Ayers laments Ebb‘s inability to paddle past the shallow end of its own political thinking (Further Reading: Ela Bambust on Esoteric Ebb).
• Denshattack! (Undercoders, 2026) | exp.
  Mathew Kumar is on a hatestreak lately. . . (Further Reading: Lakespirit on Denshattack!).
• Trails In The Sky 2nd Chapter: The Kotaku Review | Kotaku
  Harper Jay MacIntyre reflects on the value and joy of a remake that “gets it” in an age of their broad commercial oversaturation and wildly fluctuating artistic goals (Further Reading: Lilith on Trails and the mundane).

“It sometimes feels like two out of every three new games announced are remasters or remakes. Hurry now to buy the Gold Edition! It’s hard not to roll your eyes. But every now and then someone does it right. Every now and then it makes sense. I’m never going to tell you that the remakes of Trails in the Sky and its sequel are better than the originals. But with the release of the second chapter’s remake, Trails In The Sky 2nd Chapter, which improves on a few key mistakes that the first half let slide, I do think they make sense. Falcom has extended its hand in invitation. You’d be a fool not to take it.”

Eight out of Ten

Now let’s talk about reviews themselves, digging into format, genre, cultural context, and audience expectations.

• Perfectly Functional | Jake Should Be Writing
  Jake Steinberg sees an absense of the aesthetic object in the consumer review (Further Reading: Taylor Hidalgo on the folly of distilling a review into an algorithm).
• We should celebrate a range of review scores | Critical Verdict
  Tauriq Moosa implores folks to stop metagaming the metascore (Further Reading: Mikhail Klimentov on killing the CEO in your head).
• Platoon – “The first casualty of war” | Super Chart Island
  Iain Mew recounts a contentious movie tie-in from Ocean that reveals the fault lines in the consumer review format (Further Reading: Skeleton on Harry Potter Videogame).

“Reflecting on Platoon and its reviews to Retro Gamer, Simon Butler said that “story, narrative and morals were virtually impossible on the machines of the day. Reviews stated it was one of the best movie tie-in titles, so perhaps we did succeed.” The way that those reviews struggled to fit their objections within a framework of graphics/playability/value for money/addictiveness wasn’t new, and was one more thing about Platoon that pointed the way to the future.”

Invisible Walls

Speaking of aesthetic objects, here are three texts which perturb the blurry boundary between play and player.

• Inside Out, Outside In – Alterity, Identity, and Helix: Descent N Ascent | Unwinnable
  Christopher Spina unfurls a dualistic, self-reflexive aesthetic experience provoked by a puzzle-strewn adventure (Further Reading: Artemis Octavio on Pathologic 3).
• Nice girl. Dark Hallway | Plant or Beast
  Ashley Bardhan dreams of Jill Valentine and death inside a haunted house of her own (Further Reading: Amy LeBlanc on ill bodies and haunted houses in the work of Kitty Horrorshow).
• A dangerous castle | Chloe Mashiter makes things
  Chloe Mashiter pulls at problems with the magic circle in evaluating mechanisms and practices of safety and concent in a two-layer LARP of characters playing characters (Further Reading: Gabrielle de la Puente on Crisis Acres).

“That’s what I keep coming back to: so much immersive work (not all, it’s important to stress) fetishises the magic circle, the creation of this other world, this perfect escapism, this impressive maintaining of character, and this can have knock-ons for safety of those involved. This might sound like an extreme take, but it’s one shaped by 15 years working in the industry and seeing how other adjacent fields like LARP and TTRPGs handle the whole ‘play pretend’ thing. The more I think about it, the more I think a lot of issues I have with productions I’ve experienced tracks to creating an impermeable magic circle – really, there I should be using a different term here, it doesn’t feel fair to talk of an ‘impermeable’ magic circle, because any genuine magic circle should be one people can move in and out of at all – it’s not play if you’re being forced to do it. In some cases, it’s shows seemingly both asking people to pretend (no one actually committed suicide in the above-mentioned show, for instance) but also finding some pretending (that there isn’t a member of support staff in the corner, for instance) too much. In others, it’s about wanting to confront people with ‘reality’ (eg the show where someone came out over voicemail) but not taking proper responsibility for the fact reality exists outside the bounds of the show.”

Detective Friction

There’s lots of synergy between our next two selections, which examine detective stories as well as the contested boundaries between self and world.

• The Psychological Strain of Seeking Order in Strange Horticulture | Eteo Archetypes
  Katie Wickens muses on the mediation of chaos and control in Strange Horticulture (Further Reading: Malindy Hetfeld on Japanese detective games).
• A Cure for Malice | TIER
  Phoenix Simms weighs the struggle to balance public and private selves in an otome detective work that couches these conflicts in questions of crisis and reform (Further Reading: ludzu on Club Suicide).

“One of the big takeaways from Collar x Malice is that everyone has their own “invisible collar” of malice that they must free themselves from. The collar for Hoshino is her striving for police reform, so that she can exist without performing in her professional capacity even when pursuing a relationship or supporting her brother’s creative dream of being a musician. Okazaki’s collar is his resentment over failing his past mission and feeling responsible for his former mentor’s death, resulting in his death drive throughout his path. Both people are only free of their collars when they don’t have to identify solely as an police officer.”

Route and Passage

Now let’s turn our attention to virtual spaces, both open-air and claustrophobically constrained.

• Tucked-Away Spaces | Medium
  Abram Buehner slows down and seeks out secret sanctuaries in Mario Kart World (Further Reading: Madeline Blondeau and Cindy on Mario Kart World).
• Essential experiences: Dungeon crawlers | Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster
  Dungeon Crawler Kimimi is all about the blobbers this week (Further Reading: Jackson Tyler on Wizardry).
• When The Scenic Route Is Worth It | Exaclaw
  Wallace Truesdale signals the storytelling returns of slow travel through the entrenched street-level racism of Mafia III‘s vision of 1968 New Bordeaux (Further Reading: Willa Rowe on Dragon’s Dogma II).

“It’s far from a 1-to-1, but, as Terrence Wiggins gets at in his 2016 review, it’s still surreal how well this captures the anxiety of driving while Black, or being Black in predominantly White neighborhoods, even a decade later. It doesn’t matter how quietly or loudly you play the radio. It doesn’t matter if the car you’re driving is freshly cleaned or covered in mud. It doesn’t matter how presentable or unassuming you try to be. The moment a cop car appears, accompanied by a curved blue line that lets you know they’re watching Lincoln’s Black ass, the edge that was, and still is, always there makes itself explicit again.”

Timed Presses

The design-minded inquiries we’ve gathered this week focus on both macro tendencies and micro moments.

• It’s Always Sunny in Mistria | Unwinnable
  Jay Castello is not as locked in to Fields of Mistria‘s cozy utilitarian grindset as the game might believe (Further Reading: Niko Stratis on the flattening of labour in cozy games).
• The impact of a frame | re:frame
  Toussaint Egan squeezes the anime juice that makes Prince of Persia: Lost Crown‘s parry sequences pop (Further Reading: Khee Hoon Chan on what goes into a good parry).
• Pop’n Twinbee, Chaos, and Co-Operation | faea’s house
  faea gushes about a classic Konami score-chaser that effectively extends its manic cognitive (over)load across a coordinated co-op experience (Further Reading: Ephemeral Enigmas on Radirgy de Gojaru!).

“It almost feels like a happy little accident that the TwinBee game with the highest amount of explicit multiplayer verbs also happens to be the one whose mechanics most naturally fit the form of a co-operative experience: one that encourages communication and problem-solving with the other person, and where each player’s performance meaningfully trickles down into the overall results of the group as a whole – but also one that gently transforms decision-making and play on the individual end purely due to the presence of a second player. I’ll never stop dragging my friends through weird and wonderful shoot ‘em ups, but Pop’n TwinBee feels the most as though I’m playing and interacting directly with them, not just experiencing a game in parallel.”

Critical Chaser

You may be surprised!

• What’s the Correct Way to Pronounce Mario’s Name? | Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games
  Drew Mackie busts out the International Phonetic Alphabet for this one. My long-atrophied linguistics degree is tingling. There are charts. There are maps (Further Reading: Davy R. Howard on Mario’s academic paper trail).

“English is actually quite good at taking foreign words and bending them to its rules. That’s why we have our own way of pronouncing bruschetta, champagne, and karaoke. Purists of Italian, French and Japanese might object, but it’s foolish to argue that English can’t make any word its own — or any name, even Mario’s.”