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journey

March 24th

…Miguel Penabella resists the trend of lumping Apex in with hero shooters and battle royales and instead finds the roots of its ping system in Journey.

  • The Importance of Phones in Devil May Cry 5 – Timber Owls Lilly positions the humble phone booth save point as an acknowledgement of and counterpoint to DMC5‘s absurd, anachronistic protagonists.
  • The Colonial, Non-colonial and Decolonial in Video Games | Why Not Games Nikhil Murthy proposes organizational frameworks and nomenclature for studying colonial elements in video games.

    • “There are a lot of things that get rolled up in colonialism,…

    September 29th

    …to greater competency, and what that journey should be like, ideally.”

    Saturday Morning Silliness

    Here’s a pair of fresh critical perspectives on some fresh and popular games.

    • ‘Code Vein’ Injects Anime Into the Heart of Dark Souls – VICE Aevee Bee spends some time with the most extra soulslike in a good while and maybe ever.
    • River City Girls (review) – DEEP HELL Skeleton meditates on the airy, Saturday-morning silliness of a beat-em-up revival done right.

    “River City Girls won’t entirely re-define the wheel: it is yet another nostalgic throwback to…

    October 6th

    …and histories decentred from the eurocentre.

    “I was bringing 30 years of baggage with me when I started on my journey in 80 Days. That made playing it again that much better.”

    [Honking Intensifies]

    The finest in goose discourse from around the web this week.

    • Untitled Goose Game Subverts Stealth Gameplay | Unwinnable Jeremy Signor meditates on Tactical Espionage Honk-tion.
    • 56: Untitled Goose Game | Into The Spine Elizabeth Henges expresses a playthrough of Untitled Goose Game through a narrative sequence of images.
    • Untitled Goose Game reveals the true power…
    Abstract image evoking bird silhouette

    October 2019

    Welcome, readers, to the first edition of This Month In Videogame Vlogging. Yes, we’ve decided to give video-based criticism its own column (again), rather than include it in the weekly blogging roundup. This pivot-to-video will be happening monthly, subject to change. You probably worked both those things out from the title. But hi, hello. I’m looking forward to sharing this journey with you.

    Videos about video games are a formally diverse lot. Video essays, let’s plays, video reviews, roundtable discussions, documentaries, industry exposés, unclassifiable and misc – all of these are of interest to us, so long as

    …

    February 2020

    …(18:58)

    Mark Brown explains the pyramid of Environmental Storytelling, Level Design and World Building, and how these are used to assist narrative cues, using examples from games including Bioshock, God of War, Portal, Celeste and Journey. (Manual captions) [Content note: mentions of child abuse]

  • Analysing the OTHER Missions in Hitman 2 (The Bank and Haven Island) – Writing on Games (12:46)

    Writing on Games analyses two of the missions in Hitman 2 for world building, level design and the use of environmental detail. (Manual captions) [Note: contains embedded advertising]

  • Wattam: Keita Takahashi and the Power of

    …

    • April 12th

    …some correct hard truths.

    “Dragon Age 2 is possibly the most political game of the series, but it’s also got an incredible cast of characters, an interesting, personal story, and is one of the best games to deconstruct ‘The Hero’s Journey’. It’s also got Isabela, Varric, and Merrill as main characters, which I feel is reason enough.”

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    Have you read, seen, heard or otherwise experienced something new

    …

    New Call for Critical Compilations!

    …Death Stranding

  • Deus Ex series
  • Disco Elysium
  • Earthbound/Mother series
  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
  • Fallout series
  • Far Cry series
  • Final Fantasy X and X-2
  • Final Fantasy XIII
  • Fire Emblem series
  • Gone Home
  • Grand Theft Auto series
  • Heavy Rain
  • Journey
  • Kentucky Route Zero
  • L.A. Noire
  • The Last of Us
  • The Legend of Zelda series
  • Mario series
  • Metal Gear series
  • Metro series
  • Minecraft
  • Nier series
  • No Man’s Sky
  • Papers, Please
  • Portal and Portal 2
  • P.T.
  • …

    • May 24th

    …Found Review: an emotional journey from start to finish – Gayming Magazine Aimee Hart thinks through relatability, identity, and love in If Found.

  • If Found and Relatable Queer Alienation | Jeremy Signor’s Games Initiative Jeremy Signor muses on the queer relatability at the heart of If Found.
  • Dreamfeel’s If Found… Creates a Beautiful Story Through Its Destruction – Uppercut Jess Cogswell appreciates a queer game that takes time to highlight the beauty of creation after the crucible of destruction.

    • “If Found is a game about the slow descent into a place without light- a place…

    Pathologic

    …Edwin Evans-Thirlwell adds to this focus on the various items and economies scattered throughout Pathologic, comparing its inventory system to other survival games but also more significantly to Ursula K Le Guin’s carrier bag theory (which functions in contrast to the model the hero’s journey).

    You are not the narrative’s propulsive force, dragging a chain of events behind you, but a single cell churning through the body of a town that changes, day to day, without your permission or awareness. Understanding that body as it sprouts, bleeds and decays requires curiosity, patience and a sensitivity to the resonances

    …

    Kentucky Route Zero

    …in the first place.

    In his article for Heterotopias, Sam Dibella provides an engaging analysis of the Consolidated Power Company—the proverbial “puller of strings” in the Cardboard Computer’s magical realist world.

    Writing for Slate, Laura Hudson lauds Cardboard Computer for presenting a world where the naiveté of the American Dream is confronted with a harsh reality of “foreclosed houses, abandoned mines, and lost, discarded people”:

    An emptiness permeates your journey, a sense that we are at the end of a story that is slowly trailing off into silence. Everywhere you go seems either abandoned or…