for the little things you might have missed
This is an article I wrote for First Person Scholar, a really awesome website that does work in the space between academic journals and popular games criticism. It's about a game that's very close to my heart for how it's helped me work through anxiety and depression.
But in the aftermath of that feeling, I realized something elseāthat the euphoria I'd felt in the wake of that fight came alongside the dropping of the game's initial facade. Kratos is not redeemable. He is a monster, and those blades represent that. Only a monster can wield them as he does. Only a monster can descend into Helheim and fight his way back out. Only a monster can harness that fiery maelstrom to survive those hordes of ice.
About an hour into Night in the Woods, a modern adventure game from a small team called Infinite Fall, Mae Borowski reuintes with her high school bandmates for practice. Since she'd left for college, their drummerāCaseyāhad disappeared, and their guitarist and singer, Gregg and Angus, had recruited another old classmate named Bea to take both … Continue reading You Might Have Missed: Night in the Woods
From one angle, Team Salvato's (free) visual novelĀ Doki Doki Literature Club looks like an attempt to capture a bit ofĀ Undertale's signature metafictional magic. A game that begins as a piece in a well-defined genre ends up being anything butāpicking apart both the mechanical and narrative tropes that a player might expect from, respectively, a visual … Continue reading How Doki Doki Literature Club Paints an (Almost) Authentic Picture of Depression
Hollow Knight expands from the journeys of a wanderer through a vast, decaying kingdomābeginning with a simple descent into the Forgotten Crossroads and ending with something much like deicide. And in between, a retelling of the Prometheus myth takes shapeāthe story of a clever, ancient being usurping its creator and granting its subjects a new form of enlightenment.
My favorite moment inĀ Hollow Knight came about a quarter of the way through my forty hour playthrough, when I descended through the Fungal Wastes and found myself in a giant pit at the center of a hidden village. Three mantisesāfor Hollow Knight's kingdom of Hallownest is a land of insects and bugsāsat on tall wooden … Continue reading You Might Have Missed: Hollow Knight
A gameās qualifications for this loosely-defined series of mine usually begin and end with my belief that not enough people have played it. And while Rune Factory 2 is far from an indie game, I doubt the cross-section of audiences that enjoy both intensive dungeon crawling and Harvest Moon-style farming-and-relationship simulators is all that large. … Continue reading You Might Have Missed: Rune Factory 2
It was an fortunate coincidence that I ended up playingĀ PreyĀ andĀ SOMAĀ at virtually the same time. It wasn't even back to backāI played them more or less alongside each other, and finished each (the first a ~25 hour immersive sim in the mold of System Shock 2, the second a 9 hour, linear survival-horror venture at the … Continue reading SOMA, Prey, and What it Means to Be Human
Each episode of Dontnod Entertainment's Life is Strange begins with a disclaimerāthat you, the player, are about to make choices that will affect the characters' past, present, and future. And while the latter two seem like common sense in a branching path game, the first made me wonder. Was I about to see that storied … Continue reading A Reading: The Shared Trauma of Life is Strange and Ocarina of Time
Now, whereĀ BastionĀ really comes in is in the second half of that law: the isolated system. If aĀ process is kept in a vacuum, entirely alone, its entropy will only ever increase. However, we can decrease entropyĀ locally by various methodsāmainly by bringing in other sources from outside that system (like eating food, which our bodies then convert into other forms of energy). If you've playedĀ Bastion, you might now realize where I'm going.
Sunset Over Ithaca 