Welcome back readers.

Please enjoy a mini-issue of sorts this week, with seven new-and-cool highlights. Game Studies published their latest issue just as I was hitting publish here so I may yet have my reading work cut out for me in the coming days.

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

Free Play

To start us out this week, our first three selections are all engaged in some way with questions of player agency, whether that’s in opening up or limiting the influence players have on the game world (or. . . both?).

“The atomization of Hemera’s world is both physical and psychological, which gets at the deep feelings of uncertainty and radical hope in the tangled underpinning of the pandemic. But it’s also about highlighting how someone with a limited amount of agency, like the average player, can help during times of crisis.”

Serial Format

Our next two featured authors this week each situate their game-specific critiques in the context of the wider franchise, as ideas develop (or spiral out of control) over subsequent installments.

Requiem cannot bear to cut anything off its bloated runtime, and the story feels less cohesive for it. No single part of this game is broken in a way that strikes me as objectively bad, there’s just a glaring issue with this game’s unblemished cutting room floor. You could clearly eliminate at least one-fourth from this game, and Requiem would be stronger for it.”

Critical Process

Finally, our next two featured writers use their object games in part as an opportunity to reflect on their own critical processes.

“I liked the gentle photography game but stubbornly ignored the signs that INFRA was eccentric until, finally, the dam broke. There was no going back after that.”


Subscribe

Critical Distance is community-supported. Our readers support us from as little as one dollar a month. Would you consider joining them?

Contribute

Have you read, seen, heard or otherwise experienced something new that made you think about games differently? Send it in!

Tags from the story
, ,