Strap in for my tiered ranking of every Metroid game — from the ones I struggled to make it through to the ones I wish I could experience for the first time over and over again.
Tag: horror
Screw Attacks, Third Impacts, and Other Interstellar Horrors
As a medium, video games are defined by different forms of touch. Both the interface between player and game and the action of most games itself relies upon a set of simple rules — what kinds of responses a particular touch will engender, and what groups of pixels can and cannot be safely touched. Games have their own language for these interactions: collision detection defines the act of in-game touch, and hitboxes measure where and when that touch brings pain. In most games, this becomes a kind of broad and neutral framework: a foundation on which mechanical and narrative structures can be built. But in Metroid, touch becomes its own singular kind of horror.
On the Creeping Horror of Salt and Sanctuary, and its Island of Twisted Reflections
In doing so, Salt & Sanctuary builds one of the most rewarding final acts I've experienced in a video game, that translates an atmosphere of mounting dread into a sequence of sudden, heightened horror, and then, in its final moments, a rush of catharsis.
The Refreshing Horror and Heart of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom has, at its core, two very different movies fighting for dominance. One is the modern mediocre action movie, with its clichéd, easy-to-predict one-liners and bland, slightly-stubbled leading man and elaborately choreographed yet snore-inducing hand-to-hand combat sequences. The other is a genuinely deep and compelling iteration on the series it carries on—a series that has rarely managed to capture any of the magic of Spielberg's original masterpiece, but here comes the closest it ever has to understanding what made that first movie so good.
You Might Have Missed: Night in the Woods
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
How Doki Doki Literature Club Paints an (Almost) Authentic Picture of Depression
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
SOMA, Prey, and What it Means to Be Human
It was an fortunate coincidence that I ended up playing Prey and SOMA at virtually the same time. It wasn't even back to back—I 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
Sunset Over Ithaca 