for the little things you might have missed
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
Each episode of Dontnod Entertainment's Life is Strange begins with a disclaimer—that 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, 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.
So Breath of the Wild is the apex of open-world design. It's filled with secrets, and it makes exploration itself feel rewarding. Its narrative has depth and resonance, and its characters feel three-dimensional and relatably real. It takes the tropes of post-apocalyptic fiction to a new level—depicting a world not irradiated and destroyed, but retaken by wilderness. And in … Continue reading An Exploration of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Part V: The Heroes’ Legacy
I've spent far too long now extolling Breath of the Wild as the best that open-world game design has to offer, but open-world games pose a huge narrative challenge for developers trying to tell a coherent story. Because the game's events can be played out in any order, it's quite difficult to build a satisfying, well-plotted narrative, especially … Continue reading An Exploration of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Part IV: The Post-Post-Apocalypse
So Breath of the Wild is open world in the best sense of the term; it presents you with a vast world to explore, where everything you see can be reached, every mountain climbed, every river sailed, every canyon traversed... but so what? I've extolled its world design and its exploration mechanics and rambled about its well-crafted mapmaking, … Continue reading An Exploration of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Part III: Into the Wild
In modern game design, "open-world" has become something of a buzzword; after series like GTA and Elder Scrolls popularized the genre, developers (especially Ubisoft) embraced it and began to churn out game after game after game in that mold. Open-world games, in short, discard the notion of linear progression and instead throw the player into what is … Continue reading An Exploration of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Part II: “Open World”
Rarely, if ever, does a game like Breath of the Wild live up to its expectations. I still remember the first time I watched the trailer for what was then known only as "the Wii U Zelda"—a mysterious, supposedly open-world title that Nintendo had spent almost three years developing for its flagging console. It starts with a black … Continue reading An Exploration of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Part I: A Genealogy
It's been almost three years since Yacht Club Games released Shovel Knight, a long-awated Kickstarter project featuring, well, a cerulean knight wielding a trusty shovel. From that whimsical, retro-inspired concept, they built a game that was simple yet not simplistic, zany yet never pretentious, and controller-smashingly difficult but always satisfying. The original Shovel Knight has remained one … Continue reading Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment, or How to Make a Prequel
If you're reading this, and have ever read many of the other posts I've made about games on this blog, you're probably aware that I spend more time than is physically or mentally healthy playing, thinking about, and writing about videogames. But all obsessions start somewhere, and for me, my love affair with games began Christmas … Continue reading Pokémon Sun and Moon: Finally, A Story Worth Telling
Sunset Over Ithaca 