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Mouse: P.I. For Hire Could Have Bent the Rules More.
You don’t have to look hard to find Mouse: P.I. For Hire’s inspirations. Detective Jack Pepper’s weapons bend and sway in the breeze, sometimes reloaded with a sharp slap to the side of the barrel. The 1930’s Disney pioneered ‘rubber hose’ animation makes for a wonderful showcase of creativity, especially when pressed against the grunge,…
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Games About Unpacking: Grief, Identity, and Abuse
Content note: this article discusses grief, depression, domestic abuse, and trauma. Fishbowl is a beautiful game. But it is also painfully domestic. It follows Alo, a young woman who moves to the city for a new job, only to find that her new life begins in the total isolation of a global pandemic. Her apartment…
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Mixtape: Can You Be Nostalgic for Someone Else’s Childhood?
It feels comfortable skating down long, winding roads beneath the soft glow of a golden-hour sunset. Satisfying to launch a softball out of the park and watch your friend trudge off to retrieve it. And exhilarating to attend one final house party before stepping into a world of endless promise. Mixtape, the new game from…
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Spire Pressure
Is Slay the Spire 2’s Early Access Giving Players Too Much Control? The first Slay the Spire taught me how to succeed. When to remove cards, when to take a curse, when to block, when to take a risk, when to pass on a card because it looks powerful now, but it might be the…
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Talking to NPCs
1. Link to video essay version at the end of the post. This is a discussion about language. More specifically the language systems NPCs use to communicate, how we communicate with them and how, overtime, those systems have evolved to the point where NPCs have started to sound frighteningly human. For me, Oblivion was the…
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The Live-Service Dream is Dying and It’s Taking the Games Industry With It
In the wake of Epic Games’ March 24, 2026 layoffs, the industry’s obsession with eternal games looks less like ambition and more like a slow-moving disaster. Epic said it was laying off more than 1,000 employees, with reporting putting that at roughly 20% of the workforce. For years, the live-service pitch has sold a vision…
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Knowing The Future Wouldn’t Save Them
1 The Drifter was the scariest game I played last year. I don’t mean that as hyperbole – rolling credits left me with a creeping sense of unease that refuses to let go. The game is about one man, Mick Carter, who – within the first hour – has a bag put over his head,…
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The Politics of Play: Examining Take Us North
There is a difference between watching someone cross a border and being asked to lead them across. When a game hands you control and when progress depends on your choices, that distinction begins to blur. Even if it is only a collection of pixels on a screen, the decision feels personal. You are no longer…
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Video Games and the Psychology of Pain
Unlike other narrative forms, video games allow players to explore deep, unsettling, and confrontational themes interactively, while maintaining the comfort that comes from viewing events through a screen. They let us live in someone else’s shoes without fully surrendering ourselves to their experiences – a crucial distinction when those experiences involve pain, trauma, or mental…
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2025: The Year of Unapologetic Gaming
In 2024, Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke took to the stage and delivered an iconic speech – one that practically called out the entire video game industry for its shortcomings: corner-cutting, creative compromise, and crunch culture. He proclaimed that he would not only be the first person to know who would win Game of the…
Gaming Acuity 