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October 17th

…both specifically and broadly.

  • The video game review process is broken. It’s bad for readers, writers and games. | Launcher Mikhail Klimentov argues for why and how the time-crunched, SEO-driven review cycle serves absolutely nobody.
  • You Can Criticize the Cockfighting in Far Cry 6 Without Being Racist | Paste Kate Sánchez breaks down how a little self-awareness of positionality can enrich your critical perspective.

“In truth, as the “discourse” shifts from “cockfighting bad” to “the people enjoying this minigame are bad,” it’s weird being brown in this space. I assure you the pixels on

…

October 31st

…off with a hearty serving of critical pieces charting the highs and lows of recent (and not so recent) horror games big and small. So. . . I’m doing that. Enjoy!

  • We Need To Let Go Of Silent Hill 2 – Uppercut Jessica Hill reflects on the ways in which our continuing rumination on Silent Hill 2 holds the wider genre back and poisons its attendant discourse.
  • House Of Ashes Review: Supermassive’s Latest Misses The Mark | Kotaku Sisi Jiang concludes that the latest installment of the Dark Pictures Anthology fails to hold the balance between its

…

November 7th

…a path of least resistance through a narrative that while I feel could be more challenging, largely evokes a nostalgic, nuanced zest for building life.”

Halloween, Continued.

I don’t know about you, but I put together, like, two and a half different costumes this year. One month isn’t enough, so here are a few more horror and horror-adjacent highlights.

  • Battle Chef Brigade: Reality (TV) Is Scarier than Fiction — Gamers with Glasses Tof Eklund finds something singularly disquieting in Battle Chef Brigade‘s specific convergence of beast hunting and reality television.
  • The Ultimate Apocalypse Team…

December 12th

…

  • OutRun [1986] – Arcade Idea Art Maybury presents the eternal life and fast times of Dude and Babe.

    • “BABE: So what are we OutRunning [1986] anyway?

    DUDE: Death, baby.“

    Critical Rearview

    Now, let’s look back, be it one year or ten, as two authors examine what has changed, what cannot change, and what should change in our critical understanding of tentpole titles from yesteryear.

    • One Year On, Cyberpunk 2077’s Biggest Issues Can’t Be Patched Out | TheGamer Stacey Henley argues that, a year later, Cyberpunk‘s most enduring faults aren’t merely

      • …

    This Year in Videogame Blogging: 2021

    …Points Monthly Astrid Anne Rose examines Cyberpunk 2077‘s juvenile, yet sanitized and ultimately hollow approach to sex, sexuality, and sex work.

  • Spectacular | Bullet Points Monthly Autumn Wright struggles with 2077 as a work of hollow spectacle.
  • Other Flesh | Bullet Points Monthly Molly Zara-Esther Bloch describes how 2077‘s ‘braindances’ are an uncritical and transmisogynistic echo of an already fraught cyberpunk trope caught up in colonial flesh tourism.
  • Virtually Ideological: Neoliberalism, History and Resistance in the Video Games of 2020 | Jon Bailes Jon Bailes examines what games such as Cyberpunk have to say–or shy away from…

    • Esther Wright | Keywords in Play, Episode 18

    …point of focus just on kind of doing textual analysis of the games themselves. In certain instances, especially when they were talking about the kinds of broader cultural references these games were making, or the historical kind of claims they were making, sort of sometimes led to critics or writers kind of maybe overdetermining intentions or connections or reading connections based on their own kind of experience, interests and kind of disciplinary approach, which, obviously, is a fundamental part of what we do in games studies or in historical research, obviously. So it’s not a kind of sort of criticism,…

    April 24th

    …of substance to do.

  • The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind changed everything | Polygon Bianca Ryckert looks back upon Vvardenfell as a place equal parts enticing and uncompromising.
  • Why I Left the Lands Between to Return to Yharnam | Paste Dia Lacina returns to Bloodborne as a game of fricative contradictions, a frustrating, ideal counterpoint to the expansive, frictionless Elden Ring.

    • “The reward is in the mayhem, turning a corner into a dead end. Smashing a squad of powered up Garden of Eyes and then backing into a hallway to nowhere only to barely survive a…

    May 15th

    …outside; this experience won’t urge you to do so. But despite being tied and crafted around specific commentary on the times, it is an experience that can open up the silence we’ve been holding within our areas of solitude. Instead, we can open that silence up to a shared, better sense of solidarity of all the pains and changes we’ve been keeping in.”

    Let’s pop back in time again–within a year of our last foray backward, actually–to another game played by the critic squarely on their own terms. Utopia might not be the first sim game, or even…

    June 19th

    …invasiveness. Fifteen hours into Dark Souls, I wormed my way back through Undead Parish, an area that once gave me grief, and I noticed myself deflecting unthinkingly, one-shotting enemies. I had learned how to survive efficiently, saving my energy for the true battles ahead.”

    The Feminine Virtual

    Now let’s look at both the limiting and evolving depictions of femininity in games and adjacent spaces.

    • Krafton’s Latest ‘AI’ Woman Recycles The Usual Sexist Tropes | Kotaku Ashley Bardhan reflects on the intersections between games, AI assistants, and the limiting gender tropes that inform their design and…

    July 10th

    Welcome back readers.

    We’re running a wee issue this week, a portable one even, so we will once again dispense with the usual format and get right to the good stuff.

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

    • The Diablo is in the details | GamesIndustry.biz In our first selection of the week, Brendan Sinclair unpacks the PR-speak and numbers games that further obfuscate the realities of the F2P business model, in Diablo and elsewhere. I’ve appreciated that the high-profile launch

    …