Disco Will Not Save the World Unless it Saves You First
At its core, Disco Elysium is a game about the “post-” in words like postcolonial, postrevolutionary, posthistorical, postmodern; it is about living in the nebulous after, in the shadow of a happening much larger than whatever small piece of the world we can identify ourselves. And so, its version of a new way forward becomes…
Marvel’s Spider-Man and the Allure of the Carceral State
Superhero comics, as it is, are usually a far more complex medium than their adaptations let on. But as with Spider-Man, comics are typically at their best when their focus narrows and becomes more intimate — when writers focus on characters and their relationships, and on the idea that these are real people behind their…
In Abandoning Perfection, Rain World Finds Nirvana
Rain World has a certain reputation in the gaming sphere: a hellishly difficult 2D platformer largely panned by critics at release, but that found a second life via a relatively small and deeply dedicated community of fans. I had tried to play it several times over the past few years, emboldened each time by various…
Statistics, Probabilities, and a Reading of Sixteen-Inning Baseball
See, that’s the weird thing about probability and chaos—and, by extension, baseball. There’s always a chance, however small, to see something rare and special; to watch an electron tunnel through a barrier, or a particle burst into existence, or a player bat a home run off a position player nearly six hours after their game…
In Outer Wilds, They Blew Up the Sun, and There Was Nothing We Could Do
Outer Wilds is infused with a lingering tinge of melancholy, coupled with an overwhelming sense of smallness… All of these systems operate like clockwork, unfazed by your minuscule intrusions. In much the same way the Sun will never respond to your pleas. As you uncover the story of the Nomai, you learn—through implication and observation,…
On Dark Souls II: Ephemera, Entropy, and the Inevitability of Loss
The ragged white knights in Heide’s Tower of Flame don’t even rise when you first enter the area; they wait for you to slay the area’s first boss before even bothering to stand. The soldiers in Drangleic Castle begin as statues, shaking themselves to life as if awaking from a thousand-year slumber. They still fight,…
Six Years before Breath of the Wild, Dark Souls Reinvented The Legend of Zelda
But the bond between Dark Souls and Ocarina of Time runs far deeper than their initial obtuseness—to a point where the first Soulborne game feels like a crystallization of the first 3D Zelda’s design ethos. Both present the player with complex, interlocking worlds; spaces that revel in a secret, paradoxical linearity that curves and bends…
Metroid, and the Art of Getting Lost
Metroid wants to disorient you, to leave you confused and scared and wondering wait, have I been here before as you backtrack through its labyrinthine world, and the result is an environment that feels like its own kind of enemy. And its lack of a visual map — a design choice almost unheard of in…
Metroid II: Return of Samus: Crafting the Genocide Run
There’s something eerily beautiful about the ending to this game. In a way, it does mirror the first Metroid — the shafts filled with metroid larvae that appear just before Samus fights the queen feel much like the entrance to Tourian, and it fills the space after its final boss with an ascent. But this ascent isn’t…
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Sunset Over Ithaca 