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
On Connection in Cairn
Death Stranding is a 2019 adventure game from Kojima Productions. Starring Norman Reedus in the role of Sam Porter Bridges, Death Stranding is a game about navigating difficult terrain. Typically games have a reasonably frictionless interaction between the player-character and the ground – a hill in Call of Duty provides cover and interrupts sightlines, but…
Figurative Art in Hozy
Hozy is a 2026 game developed by Come On Studio and published by tinyBuild. It’s a cozy furniture arranging game: you pull stuff out of boxes and set up your house. It’s part of the broader genre of cozy games, so-called, where there are no timers or points or strict win/loss conditions. These games are…
Dark Souls: On Difficulty
Part of the point of the epic is that it’s so much work to get through. The Count of Monte Cristo takes place across twenty-three years and about 1200 pages, and those 1200 pages convey the idea of the years. At base, the epic is an example of how form interacts with content. A truncated…
Home-Making in Stardew Valley
Over the past couple months I’ve been playing Stardew Valley. The game had its ten year anniversary recently, and I saw a concert where they performed music from the game, and I got nostalgic and kinda curious to see what they’d put into the game since the last time I played. I have a pattern…
Design Tension in Date Everything
Date Everything is a 2025 dating simulator where a pair of magic glasses let you transform stuff in your house into people, who you can date. Your toilet turns into the rapper Jean Loo, the shower’s a country singer called Johnny Wash, the table’s called Abel and Shelley’s a shelf. It’s glorious. It’s light and…
Artifice in BioShock
“What can I do with this one, Aphrodite? She WON’T. STAY. STILL! I want to make them beautiful, but they always turn out wrong! That one… too fat! This one… too tall! This one… too symmetrical! And now- what’s this, goddess? An intruder! He’s ugly! Ugly ugly UGLY!” BioShock (2007) is at all times a self-consciously theatrical…
On Ignorance in Satisfactory
Over Christmas I’ve been playing my annual game of Satisfactory – we’re now heading into February and this thing is still ruining my life. I never – I’ve played over four hundred hours of this game, right, 435 hours, I’ve been playing all the way through Early Access, and I’ve never beaten the game. Partly…
Assassin’s Creed: The City at Rest
Like Halo, Assassin’s Creed is a wildly successful multimedia franchise launched in the 2000s and still producing new titles into the current day, with Assassin’s Creed Shadows (2025) serving as the fourteenth game in the main series. The original title, Assassin’s Creed (2007), traces its roots to the platformer by way of Prince of Persia:…
The Second Movement in Jedi Survivor
It took me a minute to get to grips with Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. The second game in the Star Wars Jedi series, I wrote a cheeky little piece on it to round out 2025 – just sort of having a dig at the customisation options for the main character. There’s a point where intentional…
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,…
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