Tag: games
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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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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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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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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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Silent Hill f: Review
Silent Hill f abandons the familiar American backdrop for the 1960s Japanese fictional town of Ebisugaoka. The corrugated iron rooftops and narrow, winding streets form the stage for otherworldly entities intent on tearing you limb from limb. It’s a thematically perfect setting for the Silent Hill premise – a place where post-war cultural changes clash…
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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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Doom: The Dark Ages: Review
Amongst the wreckage and labyrinthine halls of a burning medieval city, there is a small metal drop pod housing a powerful weapon: the power gauntlet. A weapon that id Software has designed to display the unbridled power of the Doomslayer. At the click of a button, you can turn demons to nothing but blood and…
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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…
Gaming Acuity 