for the little things you might have missed
It's as if the player is walking over an anthill, unaware that this complex and convoluted warren exists beneath their shoes. And over the course of the game, this conceit will be used again and again and again, sometimes with added flourishes or small tweaks to its simple formula. Every level is circular, just as the game itself is, with the end of each circle adding a final revelation.
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.
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 drummer—Casey—had 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 novel Doki Doki Literature Club looks like an attempt to capture a bit of Undertale's signature metafictional magic. A game that begins as a piece in a well-defined genre ends up being anything but—picking 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 kingdom—beginning 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 shape—the story of a clever, ancient being usurping its creator and granting its subjects a new form of enlightenment.
My favorite moment in 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 mantises—for Hollow Knight's kingdom of Hallownest is a land of insects and bugs—sat on tall wooden … Continue reading You Might Have Missed: Hollow Knight
A game’s 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
Now, where Bastion really comes in is in the second half of that law: the isolated system. If a process is kept in a vacuum, entirely alone, its entropy will only ever increase. However, we can decrease entropy locally by various methods—mainly 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 played Bastion, you might now realize where I'm going.
There is no such thing as a perfect film. But, at least in my view, there are films that are in and of themselves and as pieces of their respective genres the best they could possibly be. And as you can probably imagine, I could count all of them on one hand. That's not necessarily … Continue reading You Might Have Missed: The Handmaiden
There has been a recent spike in interest for what people sometimes refer to as "art games"—a subgenre of gaming that includes legitimately interesting pieces like Campo Santo's Firewatch, flawed yet thought-provoking experiments like Davey Wreden's The Beginner's Guide, and walking simulators of questionable intent like Dear Esther and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. But more often than not, the implications behind … Continue reading The Minimalist, Ethereal Storytelling of Hyper Light Drifter
Sunset Over Ithaca 