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July 24th

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“The deliberate design and intent behind the camera in Session is incredibly important when it comes to skating because the main way we’ve consumed skateboarding up until the Instagram age has been through street skating videos shot on these imperfect cameras with imperfect lenses and lighting. There is an endearing rawness there that Session mimics honestly.”

Diablo Immortal’s microtransactions aren’t an anomaly — they’re expected | Polygon Still in the present, we now turn our mechanical attenion away from the satisfying and towards the predatory. Here, then, Kazuma Hashimoto situates Diablo Immortal’s monetization model in

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…a lof of writing and/or mindshare that week. This time, it’s the game Immortality, and I’ve found that there’s a lot of agreement on what it does well and what invites scrutiny, with the differences in opinion coming down to which of these elements spoke louder to the writer. Here, in four installments, is a snapshot of that conversation, which I suspect will continue into future weeks.

Immortality review | PC Gamer Kaile Hultner weighs the cost of art in the match-cut, as told by Immortality.
Immortality review: a peeling apart of stories, power and film that

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October 30th

…is an equally empowering experience.”

Horror Picks

Our holiday coverage continues with two more horror-tinged examinations of games and play.

My OCD Doesn’t Want Me To Play Horror Games, But I Do It Anyway | Kotaku Ashley Bardhan reconciles her brain with a hobby that triggers it.
The New Age Monsters of Tetris Effect: Connected | Gamers with Glasses Don Everhart asks: is Tetris Effect: Connected actually a work of cosmic horror?

“In co-operative multiplayer, the screen orbits a dark polyhedron, surrounded by other particles. Each CPU is given a zodiac…

November 13th

…some colorful world full of coins and spells and power ups. Another power fantasy with which to show off our petty prowesses to each other. Resident Evil is decidedly not this.”

Let Us Crit Together

An old TRPG looking forward and a new (?) one looking backward come together in our next section.

Throwing it all away – Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster Kimimi looks in on the third installment of the Langrisser series, which breaks new ground in the series and genre to mixed effect.
Review: Tactics Ogre: Reborn is a Product of its…

December 4th

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“What I’m more interested in is how the context for how we all gather, talk and create for the games industry will change. In some ways, the online games community is going back to a previous internet model of being distributed over a number of different forums. Games releases and the discourse surrounding them will still be a common denominator for these different forums. But talk of games will be more segmented, idiosyncratic, and in some instances depending on the platform more private.”

Communal Effort

These next two pieces unspool some larger ideas about community and…

December 18th

…much of your time on in the original Phantasy Star, not some random location introduced solely for this purpose — is destroyed instantaneously, and it’s something that happens mid-game. Your heroes become fugitives, the paradise of the climate- and artificial intelligence-controlled Algo solar system is shown to be a fiction, and in completing the game, you potentially doom its people. It would take two more games, the entirety of the original Phantasy Star series, to finish sorting through the ramifications of everything that happened in PSII.”

Weird Games

Weird games. Weird games! Exactly what it says on…

January 8th

Welcome back readers.

We’re back from break, and ready to kick off a new year of outstanding crit with a double-wide issue to catch us up. Hope everyone found some kind of rest over the interregnum.

This week’s around-the-site update: our Year-In-Review is live, courtesy of Kris’ peerless efforts. There was lots of excellent writing for us to recap from the span of 2022, so please do check it out!

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

Working at Play

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First Foot Forward February – writing / video jam

…of the developers – for example, naming the dog in Kentucky Route Zero, or choosing which sensitive content to filter out in Glitchhikers.

How to join in

Work in any medium will be accepted, but this writing jam is particularly suited to short-form videos of 3 minutes or less
Post on Tiktok, Instagram, or Youtube with the hashtag #firstfootforwardfeb,
and/or use the #jam channel on the Critical Distance Discord to share what you’re working on.

At the end of the month, we’ll share a roundup post to show off all the jam entries.

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February 19th

…of critical perspectives on an equally assorted collection of games.

Card Shark and Justifiable Identity | Uppercut Sorrel Kerr-Jung remarks upon the trope of genderfludity being less an identity and more a lack of one.
Year of Games #7: Yakuza 5 Remastered | No Escape Kaile Hultner, deep into the Yakuza games, sees the bigger picture emerge in the fifth installment, even as the series starts to stumble.
Unpacking: Our Lives in Boxes | Sidequest Cress walks through the rooms, memories, and lives of Unpacking‘s unseen protagonist.
Sable Is a Self-Discovery Game with an Identity

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March 12th

…player agency, and a speculative future canon of post-pandemic games.

“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.