Video games are in an exciting position. This brand new baby medium, still in its infancy, is also the biggest media industry on the planet, boasting well over $150 billion in revenue each year.
Here, we look at how games tell stories – from multi-million dollar triple-A titles down to solo indie shit.
Check out some of the quick-start topics below, or scroll down for the full video game feed.
Feature: Wolfenstein
Terror Billy vs the Nazis
By Genre
Strategy, shooter, or something in between
The Feed
Leave His Stupid Hair Alone
You know, I sort of hate character customisation? Not indiscriminately – it’s fine in an RPG where you’re making some random person who’s not meant to be anyone – but it really annoys me in the context of, like, here’s this one specific guy, and you can make him look however you want. This is…
Halo and the Hero’s Journey
Running from 1998 to 2001, the sixth generation of consoles marks a transitional point for the video game industry. Sega released their final console, the 1998 Dreamcast, and pivoted to making games, while their rival Nintendo started to focus on the casual market. They would launch the Wii in 2006, the Wii U in 2012,…
What The Swamp Knows in NORCO
We went to a small art gallery recently, and they had an ecology exhibit – fishing nets with bits of plastic and rubbish tied up in them, that sort of thing. I felt pretty indifferent about it. It’s not the idea that leaves me cold – I’ve been writing about ecology and art for years,…
Water in Still Wakes the Deep
Still Wakes the Deep is a 2024 Lovecraftian horror game from The Chinese Room, the storytelling masterminds behind Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. In concept it’s a fairly straight-laced cosmic horror. Cameron McLeary is an electrician working on an oil rig off the coast of Scotland. The underwater drill hits something, and…
Loss and Obedience in INDIKA
The interesting thing about D&D (or any other tabletop role-playing game) is how it operates on two distinct levels. On one level, D&D is a collaborative storytelling exercise. It’s a bunch of people round a table co-creating the events of a fictional universe. On another level it’s a series of luck-based dice games where the…
Mixed Feelings on Borderlands 4
I have mixed feelings about Borderlands 4. Apparently I’m not the only one – at time of writing (26 Sept 2025), the game has 63% positive reviews on Steam, giving it an overall rating of ‘Mixed’. Borderlands 4 released not quite four weeks ago, on September 12. In the early period after launch there have…
Built Space in Star Wars Outlaws
The thing about these recent Star Wars games is that they’re unified by a very specific visual aesthetic. They have all of their crossover characters, of course, all the people linking together the new extended universe – Saw Gerrera from Rogue One turns up in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, and the crime boss Qi’ra…
Fathers and Daughters in Deathloop
Back in the 2010s there was a rash of daughters in games. The generation of developers from the turn of the century were getting older, went the rationale, and having kids of their own, who emerged in games as key themes or motifs. Whatever the reason, there’s a bunch of daughters in mid-2010s video games:…
Public Face in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel
I don’t know if people particularly remember this, but Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel was a weird, slightly hateful game. Developed by 2K Australia in 2014, the game is set on the moon of Elpis between the events of Borderlands 1 and 2. It featured moon monsters, space lasers, low gravity, and all the characters were Australian.…
Play and Immersion in Welcome to Elk
There’s an Iain Banks novel, I think possibly The Bridge, with a line that goes something like “Her breasts were a pair of ( )s.” It’s some tortured postmodern thing about drawing attention to the fact that you’re reading a book, it’s very self-aware – you know, whatever. It’s sort of insufferable. Oh, it draws…
The Role of Mess in Dying Light 2
Dying Light 2 is the second game in Techland’s zombie parkour series. Released in 2022, it follows a formula set by the first Dying Light in 2015 and Dead Island in 2011: it’s a game about scavenging for resources and weapons in a weirdly cheery zombie apocalypse. Weapons degrade and break over time, combat involves…
Light and Dark in South of the Circle
South of the Circle is a 2022 narrative game from State of Play, the team behind Lumino City and Kami. It’s about the relationship between two academics, Peter and Clara, in 1960s Cambridge, and deals with themes of feminism and nuclear disarmament in the context of the Cold War. The game plays in two parts.…
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Death is a Whale 