From the side-scrolling small child running through the dark (INSIDE, Monochroma, Black the Fall) to first-person games about shifting blocks and pushing buttons (Portal, QUBE, The Talos Principle). I’ve also put the Hitman games here, and I do not feel bad about it.
NUTS: The Aesthetic of the Incomplete
Back in the dark days of 2017, I wrote about Dawn of War: Dark Crusade, a game where players take on the role of a faction from Warhammer 40,000 and battle for control of the planet Kronus. Dark Crusade is a strategy game played on two levels. Players move their armies around on a Risk-style…
The Pursuit of Knowledge in Doors: Paradox
For much of human history, doors are sites of ritual power. Even in the modern, secular day, they supplement their obvious practical function with a symbolic or cultural load: they mean things. We interact with a battery of social conventions and values that are wrapped around and written over the physical actions carried out on…
Maid of Sker: Space and Intention
Space in video games is purposive. It has purpose. It’s designed to be navigated and explored as part of the gameplay experience – for a lot of games, the sheer exercise of getting through a place is the bulk of the challenge. We’ve been talking recently about Resident Evil – those games are all about…
The Gothic in Resident Evil
I’m not a long-time Resident Evil fan. This and Silent Hill – I really feel very underqualified to talk about any of these games, especially in terms of the longer running reception. Really the extent of my exposure is that I watched a playthrough of Resident Evil 7 in 2017, and then I obviously heard…
The Unfinished Swan: On Sight
For a while now I’ve been thinking about the nature of vision in video games – not the biological act of looking, but the social and psychological construct by which you make sense of what you see. I have this feeling that I’m trying to process – sometimes, when I look at a video game,…
Dorfromantik: On City Builders
I feel like a lot of my opinions about games are built around the fact that I don’t like SimCity. I don’t enjoy the flat, affectless terrain; I don’t like being given a field and being told to go build something. I feel similarly about Cities: Skylines – all those sandbox creation games, really. I…
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Death is a Whale 