Category: Insight
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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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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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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…
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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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How a Game Changed My Views On Life
Outer Wilds took exactly 22-minutes to change my views on life. If you have not played Outer Wilds, DO NOT READ THIS. SPOILERS AHEAD I am not easily scared. I’ve never feared spiders, snakes, heights, or anything else really. But I have always been deeply terrified of death. I don’t know what happens when we…
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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…
Gaming Acuity 