October 18th

Welcome back readers.

As a heads up, I’m planning on observing a slightly shorter submission window for next week’s issue for a simple and selfish reason: Desert Bus for Hope’s 20th anniversary edition kicks off next weekend, it’s my favourite live broadcast in games, and I want to spend most of my time that weekend watching it. To that end, anything you want read for consideration in next week’s issue, which I will be putting together on Friday, should be submitted to our Discord by Friday, October 23rd at 12:00 PM EST. Discord is overwhelmingly the more timely way to bring writing to our attention since our email address, beleagured as it is with spam and marketing, is not closely monitored. The issue will still be published sometime on Sunday for consistency.

If you like what we do here, and want to help us stick around doing it, please consider signing up for our Patreon. Our financials remain hovering a few inches above “breaking even”, and we’d like to improve that situation, so I’ll continue to keep you updated on where we stand financially.

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

Slide Around, Find Out

Lots of single-game sections this week. Let’s start with four up top on Penguin Colony.

• Penguin Colony – Foul Men and Noble Birds | startmenu
  Artemis Octavio is possessed by a spirit of penguiny mischief (Further Reading: Emma Kostopolus on Still Wakes the Deep).
• Penguin Colony Slides Through Eldritch Horror | Unwinnable
  Alyssa Wejebe chats with Naphtali Faulkner about moving away from singular anthropocentric protagonism in favour of plural penguins and sick flips (Further Reading: Ruth Cassidy on Umurangi Generation).
• The Consequences of Mythmaking | Exalclaw
  Wallace Truesdale contemplates mythmaking and myth-breaking below the ice and in the wider world (Further Reading: Tof Eklund on Sucker for Love: Date to Die For).
• Digging at the Ice – On Penguin Colony | Clockwork Worlds
  Austin Walker sits with a game holding antifascist critique and familiar mechanical orthodoxies in a kind of knowing and gleeful equilibrium (Further Reading: Skeleton on Umurangi Generation).

“For days after playing, I was left wondering about this intersection between its wonderfully angry distaste for the self-serving illogic of Nazi (and broader, white, western) racism and its core design that has you instrumentalizing the qualities of different Types of Penguins. Is it self-critique? Is it limits of the form? Is it just ORIGAME DIGITAL falling in love with their game feel, and wanting one penguin type that jumps good and one that swims fast?”

Next Exit

This one’s nominally game-specific as well, looking at horror (?) game The Exit 8, but also extends an eye towards adaptation thoughts, since this game also got a film.

• Exit 8: o mais perfeito filme de jogo | Backlogger
  Belmonteiro praises a close union of game-feel and cinematographic technique (Further Reading: Julián Ramírez on the recent Resident Evil fim).
• The Exit 8 (Kotake Create, 2023) / Exit 8 (2025) | exp.
  Mathew Kumar muses on adaptation while trapped in a Japanese subway tunnel (Further Reading: kalechipskid on Mugen Houyou).

“In The Exit 8, you’re on your own. If you miss something, you’ll never know what it was. If you don’t move forward, the game will never end. It’s funny to say that experiencing game and film back to back had me feeling pandered to simply by the nature of cinema. “Pfft, it shows me what I need to know? It plays itself? Christ, baby much?””

Crash and Burn

Well, this one’s a bit of a bummer. I have no small number of AC sickos (Ace Combat, Armored Core, take your pick) in my orbit and it seems precious few of them have greatly enjoyed their time with Wings of Theve.

• Ace Combat 8 kinda sucked and I’m bummed about this | No Escape
  Kaile Hultner did not like Wings of Theve (Further Reading: Autumn Wright on Strangereal).
• Ace Combat 8 Chases Ghosts to a Dead Horizon | Remap
  Dia Lacina is exhausted by the tedious indulgences that drown out Ace Combat 8‘s autonomic extravagances (Further Reading: Will Borger on Wings of Theve).

“even the occasional satisfying dogfight in impressive clouds with very expensive toy models can’t save how tedious, stifling, and flat-out miserable Wings of Theve is. I hate what this game imagines as the future of the franchise. Loot crates, extractive sycophancy, and imaginary celebrities singing “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” into their iPhones. A squawking, player-fixated, mollycoddling vision of immersion, where scripted events run regardless of input, where risk and expressivity are sanded down into an onanistic blob that gestures at things I used to care about.”

Themes of Production

This week’s kind-of-sort-of-but-not-really industry-oriented section examines both indie and AAA as production practices and cultural signifiers.

• Beat, Heart, Beat | Lakespirit
  Lakespirit takes the occasion of an early access rhythm game to take inventory of the ways in which genre and production, with a few narrow exceptions, seem to put videogames at odds with any clear notion of “indie” (Further Reading: Aura Triolo on “pivoting to indie”).
• Everything Old is New Again | Stop Caring
  Micaela Deitz perforates the Sony method for pursuing prestige when it might have done better to trawl for trash (Further Reading: Jake Steinberg on Wolverine and aesthetic experiences).

“I did not like Marvel’s Wolverine. More than that, I don’t respect it. This isn’t trash. It’s compost, dirt mixed together with the refuse of other experiences that should be fertile ground for something new in the industry to blossom from. Something needs to change; the cycle needs to end. I can only hope that the response to Wolverine provides the kindling to burn the cinematic game complex up. Something better will come from the ashes. It fucking has to.”

Risk and Reward

We’ve got design meditations now, examining tradition, orthodoxy, popular wisdom, and homage.

• Navigating the Flaws and Friction of NES Metroid | PancakeTime
  Pancakes reappraises the original Metroid as a self-directed, sidescrolling dungeon crawler (Further Reading: Niko Stratis on Samus Aran).
• vehemently’s review of Risk System | Backloggd
  Vehe Mently takes a heretical shooter as an opportunity to examine one the STG genre and community’s most dearly-held orthodoxies (Further Reading: Ephemeral Enigmas on Radirgy de Gojaru).
• Spheres of Chaos | faea’s house
  faea comes to grips with a cacophonic Asteroids love letter with the dip switches left exposed (Further Reading: Lakespirit on Annalynn).

“A combination of some slightly slow-paced default settings and a huge bevy of customisation options, alongside the game’s default mode of play being spatially-suffocating with random invader spawns and largely contingent on winning the power-up game above everything else, implies a certain lack of deliberate tightness and tuning, not coming off as a game begging to be taken to its highest level of play – yet even through all the chaos, the sharpness of its core still shows through: that of the Asteroids foundation with interesting and varied enemy behaviours and overlap, tight and precise enemy prioritisation, and panicked dodging with a movement system not too well-explored against the game’s enemy density and aggression. As a passion project that started as an Asteroids clone built for RiscOS in 1992, and remained worked on and updated as an Asteroids clone for Windows 20 years later, it feels like somewhat of a cry to continue showing earnest interest in exploring and iterating on the infinite potential of these earlier frameworks.”

IF Statement

I’m less certain exactly how these next two fit together but I carry a conviction that they do fit all the same.

• Poirot Fanfiction, Post-Post-Vampires, AI Slop Bans: The Interactive Fiction Competition in 2026 | Remap
  Bruno Dias chronicles the history of IFComp and the ways in which its community is dealing with the same influx of vibed and prompted LLM trash that all other creative fields find themselves beseiged by (Further Reading: Kaelan Doyle-Myerscough on submitting to IFComp).
• I am sick of writing about hidden indie gems | Mimidoshima
  Kastel seeks to identify and practice a stricter boundary between criticism and advertising (Further Reading: Leeroy Lewin on unprofessional games criticism).

“I don’t want to be an indie Geoff Keighley and celebrate the financial success of the video game industries. I want to instead examine the necessity of cultural workers like artists and why they are invaluable in producing different strains of discourse. Without their work, I wager our capacities to imagine ourselves will be diminished. These subversive works and their subsequent analytical pieces have steered me away from living an intolerable life.”

Hall of Mirrors

Next we’ve got a pair of rich thematic analyses of very different games.

• Of Search Engines and Logic Circuits | TIER
  leanne rahel traces authorial tensions between genre and ludic expressivity in a bridge from SaGa to Atelier (Further Reading: Phoenix Simms on Collar X Malice).
• A Lonely Reflection | Kenopsia and ECHO
  Florence Smith Nicholls meditates on class disparity in the empty halls of a virtual Versailles (Further Reading: KM Nelson on Phoenix Springs).

“The infinite Palace in ECHO is Versailles on steroids. The elites who ordered its construction not only wanted to languish there, they planned to spectate as lower classes would attempt to traverse its halls and fight copies in the hope of achieving immortality. It is a theatre of cruelty, one that you as the player become trapped in, both as victim and viewer. Just as the excess of Versailles has become synonymous with the vast inequality between the monarchy and lower classes, the inhuman, endless repetition of the Palace embodies the twisted ideals of its patrons. As En says: “The creators expected to be Gods here and designed everything to constantly remind them that they were”.”

Critical Chaser

What are you playing at?

• Why are you playing at your age? What is its use? | Medium
  Lene Clement imagines games and play uncoupled from the utilitarian grind (Further Reading: Jay Castello on Fields of Mistria).

“We need the ‘useless’ just as we need essential vital functions to live. There are activities that are ends in themselves and which, being selfless and detached from any practical or commercial ties, can play a fundamental role in the cultivation of the spirit and in the civil and cultural development of humanity.”