August 17th

Welcome back readers.

The Queer Games Bundle just crossed another fundraising goal! You’ve got three more weeks to see how many more goals it can smash.

Ultra-compact Patreon plug! On with the show.

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

Not Safe for Workers

We’re opening things up with three new pieces about the NSFW-crackdowns plaguing Steam and Itch. For the Further Reading here I’ll just point you to our back issues, particularly our July 27th issue, because we’ve read new articles on this topic continuously since the initial stories broke.

• Vile: Exhumed Responds To Ban By Launching For Free And Donating To Charity | Inverse
  Robin Bea reports on solo dev Cara Cadever’s response to getting her game pulled off Steam.
• Itch Was A Bastion For ‘Taboo’ Developers, Now They’re Not Sure Where To Go | GameSpot
  Grace Benfell talks to indie developers about Itch and the need for both collective action and viable alternatives.
• Who’s Talking Seriously About Adult Games When They’re Not Being Censored? | Exalclaw
  Wallace Truesdale chats with Bigg about the state and importance of producing and elevating critical writing on adult games.

“If something is unspeakable – if it literally isn’t spoken of – then it makes it that much easier to make it disappear without anyone noticing or caring. I think people might finally be realizing that adult games represent a crucial bulwark in the struggle to have games that deal with challenging, interesting subjects, and I really hope that manifests as increased coverage of adult games in the future.”

Play, Together

These next three picks are all about different kids of shared play experiences of different sizes and different relations.

• Mass layoffs, studio closures, and the live-service graveyard are no match for the legally distinct Nightmare Kart arcade cabinet | GamesRadar
  Ashley Bardhan talks to Lilith Walther and the folks at Arcade Commons about bringing Nightmare Kart to the cabinet and creating spaces and communities of play (Further Reading: Nate Schmidt on Nightmare Kart).
• Playing Video Games With My Kid Hasn’t Gone How I Expected | Crossplay
  Mike Woodham thinks about player values across generations, from Atari to Minecraft, parent to child (Further Reading: Joseph Earl Thomas on playing FFXIV with his kids).
• Take My Hand | Unwinnable
  Jay Castello reflects on PEAK gaming (Further Reading: Lotus on PEAK and the “friendslop” label).

“The game knows you don’t care about the mountain. You care about holding hands with your friends. And they care about you.”

Short Rest

Now let’s do a genre-specific section, this time on RPGs across vintages and subgenres.

• Shiroki Majo Mouhitotsu no Eiyuu Densetsu: New home, new fun | Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster
  Kimimi has a great time with a streamlined Saturn RPG that strips out the random encounters.
• And I’m Not Scared of the Dark — Off (PC) Review | Gamesline
  Lilith reckons with a legendary indie RPG and the outsized repeutation that precedes it (Further Reading: Jay Castello on the localization history of Off).
• Rally Point: The wonderful vibes of Aetheris are a hint about its design goals | Rock Paper Shotgun
  Sin Vega sits with a meaty strategy RPG with enough sense to keep out of the way of its own aesthetic strengths.

“The first striking thing about Aetheris is its strange and colourful look. The second thing that strikes about Aetheris is the gorgeous animations and storybook trappings of its presentation, even in its loading screen transitions. The third is the strange vulnerability radiating from the village of lizardy people you’re responsible for, and the parties you form with them. The fourth striking thing is that this a roguelike, it’s a bloody roguelike isn’t it, oh goddamn it.”

Sleight of Hand

How about some conversations and reflections on design theory and practice?

• How Sam And His Crew Design All The Devious Game Changer Episodes | Kotaku
  Zack Zwiezen chats with Sam Reich about Dropout, Game Changer, and becoming a game designer.
• How some of the best puzzle games are a lesson in magic and misdirection | Thinky Games
  Devin Stone offers a magic show theory of puzzle design (Further Reading: Kasiski on La-Maluna).

“Puzzle game designers, please, don’t be afraid to exercise a little “attention curation”. Sure, stroke our egos. Teach us to be better thinkers. But most of all, remind us that even at our intellectual peak, we’re capable of error. Show us we don’t know everything. Slap us with our own misconceptions. Fool us.”

Large Labour Mugging

This section brings together a variety of throughlines on life, labour, tech-as-progress, and the industry.

• From Nintendo Power Hotline To Now, Human Labor Has Always Been The Soul Of Video Game Guides | Aftermath
  Fergus Halliday investigates the history, production, modes, and future of guide writing in conversations with vets of the scene (Further Reading: Kimimi on GameFAQs guides).
• These Are The Last Good Days of Your Life | Stop Caring
  Andrei Filote weighs two lives–the life of work and duty, and the realer, truer life the first seeks to obfuscate–as they are expressed in Final Fantasy XV (Further Reading: Maddi Butler on FFXV as a hangout game).
• Death Stranding 2 is the World’s Fair we deserve | Eurogamer.net
  Alexis Ong has Death Stranding 2 on the brain at the World Expo in Osaka, and finds that the former has the juice in ways that the latter has not in decades.

“Death Stranding 2 is as far removed from reality as it possibly can be on so many levels, except arguably the most important one – Kojima and co. are masters of weaponising optimism to elicit the correct (and sometimes the most maudlin) emotions about one’s place and purpose in a much bigger world. Tomorrow rightfully doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing for a lot of the game, or how she’s going to fit into the bigger picture of the world (there are also some really corny pop quiz segments where you have to teach her basic logic) – and you know what? That’s real. That’s relatable. Girl, neither do I.”

Critical Chaser

Ever wonder where the word “Gerudo” came from?

• Hylian 101: The Secrets Hiding in the Language of Zelda | Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games
  Drew Mackie presents a morphological tour of the early Zelda games.

“I think the scant evidence we have for any sort of linguistic continuity is more likely proof that the people who work on these games share our love for them — and understand what it means to be fluent in the worlds that these games inhabit. Sure, some additions to the series come from out of nowhere, but a lot of them call back to the games that came before, sometimes in subtle ways, and that attention to detail lets superfans know that the creatives tasked with making new Zelda games have done their homework.”