Review
Evil has a spotted history, as far as video games are concerned. Despite the omnipresence of ‘bad guys’ – you can barely swing a righteously murdered minion without slapping the smug grin off some villain’s face – the concept of evil is curiously under-illuminated. Most games aren’t really interested in
Horror
Horror games are usually also survival games, forcing you either to dismember monsters in self-defence, or running away from them to avoid being dismembered yourself. From Silent Hill and Doom to Five Nights at Freddy’s and Alien: Isolation, there have been many brilliant and/or popular examples of that
Musings
I’ve recently written about how stealth games allow us to play with the trickster. Looking over my notes for the piece, I realised there’s some miscellany thoughts that I’d have liked to include, but that somehow didn’t seem to fit. So this article will discuss some
Review
Indulgent fantasies and wish fulfilments that stroke the player’s ego have been the promise of video games for dozens of years. Be a hero saving the world; a super-soldier dominating the battlefield; a tycoon raking in vast fortunes. Only rarely will a game dare to withhold power from the
Musings
Picture a sight that catches your eye, captures your imagination. Whatever you were doing, you stopped dead in this specific spot. It’s more than just the place, though. It’s a random confluence of things; a vantage point, a moment in time, a state of mind… If you returned
Review
As a lonely diver, you swim through colourful, lush eco-utopias teeming with thousands of fishes, sea mammals, algae, and more. The creatures do not threaten you, not even the sharks, and you’d be almost forgiven for thinking that you are one of them. The shadow of Journey by Thatgamecompany
Review
Playing Hyper Light Drifter made me think again about my article Trespassers in Forbidden Lands. In it, I argued that games like Dark Souls, Journey, and Shadow of the Colossus should be seen as members of the same genre, despite their differences when it comes to mechanics and affordances; a
Review
Our fantasies of space travel encompass a whole universe of ideas begging to be explored, but there are three main facets that can be found in every work of science fiction to some degree: First and perhaps foremost, space serves as a surface for our projections of escapism and imagination.
Review
This review is a contribution to Felipe Pepe's crowd-sourced CRPG Book Project. I’ll start with a confession: I didn’t play Deus Ex until many years after its initial release in 2000. And even after I discovered it, I remained skeptical at first. After all, it is
Musings
Shadow of the Colossus, Dark Souls and Journey are some of the most haunting games ever made. They’re also quite different from each other. SotC is an action-adventure faintly reminiscent of The Legend of Zelda games, but stripped-down to bare essentials. The game is set in a vast, open
Review
Writing about a game that rejects words in favour of non-verbal language feels strange. If I happened to be an artist, I’d probably try to deliver a wordless review in pictograms, drawing sketches of the game’s wonderful landscapes and a caricature of my own face, mouth agape (right
Musings
I was taken on a drive around Waltham this morning. It seems a pleasant enough town. I saw no horrors, no drug-testing laboratories, no factory farms, no abattoirs. Yet I am sure they are here. They must be. They simply do not advertise themselves. They are all around us as