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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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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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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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When Games Forget How to End
TLDR: Live-service games promise ever-evolving worlds with endless content. But the longer they go, the harder it becomes to stay invested. Nobody wants a great game to end — but knowing that it will makes the experience all the more meaningful. A Short Hike (Adam Robinson-Yu) is one of my favourite games of recent years.…
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Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo – Review
Playing Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo on the Steam Deck feels like the closest approximation to playing on the Game Boy Advance as a child — albeit with a glossy sheen thanks to the Deck’s OLED display and superior fidelity. Despite its firm early 21st-century inspirations, it manages to feel modern, with a polished combat…
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Late to the Party: A Short Hike
The past month has been packed. A heavy workload, train journey after train journey travelling to the farthest reaches of the country, and to top it all off, a frightening abundance of family health crises to attend to. Nothing life threatening (thankfully), but significant enough that my precious time has been spread very thin. Keeping…
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Why Climbing in Video Games Feels So Shallow
Climbing is a feature in many modern video games. Even when it’s not central to the gameplay, it can have a big impact on how much I enjoy a game. Sometimes, it drags down an otherwise great experience with slow or clunky mechanics. Other times, it becomes a compelling core mechanic — something indie developers…
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Blue Prince: Imperfectly Perfect
What was the last video game that frustrated you? From Soft games tend to frustrate me, although this is by design and likely the reason why I love them so much. The difficulty feels tuned just enough that its frustrating to perish in combat, but victory is always just within grasp. It creates a powerful…
Gaming Acuity 