Death Stranding: An Excellent Journey With A Cumbersome Conclusion
Novelty is difficult to find in AAA videogames. The prevalence of a few major game engines has led to a standard toolbox of mechanics which are combined like building blocks and then given marketing-friendly art direction in order to ensure ...
Remembering Rush: Why We Care That Neil Peart Has Passed
This is just a tribute Rush’s music is embedded so deeply into my personhood that I honestly can’t remember the first time I heard their songs. I inherited them from my father like a gene. The sounds from their catalog ...
Blasphemous Review | An Evocative Blend Of Gameplay & Religious Commentary
Videogames are more than code on a disk; subject matter is a major ingredient in providing interpretive possibilities for gameplay. Themes and motifs uniquely mingle with art styles and music and then combine with systems and mechanics to create novel ...
A Comprehensive Review Of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
FromSoftware occupies a unique position in their territory which reflects a consistently renewed legacy that has earned a footnote in the history of game design. The conventions discovered in the foundational Dark Souls series and their successful reorganization in Bloodborne ...
A Brief Review Of Octopath Traveler
Disclaimer: As of the publishing of this review, I’ve played Octopath Traveler for ~50 hours and have completed twenty of the thirty-two chapters it contains. The Japanese role-playing game constitutes a central building block in the evolution of videogame design: ...
The Staying Power Of Handheld Gaming
Echoing through the corners of the videogame obsessed social media landscape is a familiar proclamation: “I’ll be waiting until it comes to Switch,” or the bygone equivalent, “I’m still holding out for a Vita version.” These expressions exhibit a strong ...
Dark Souls And The Lifespan Of A Masterpiece
Our comprehension of a contemporary videogame’s impact is bound by the achievement of games which came before. This collective portfolio of past work is the center of our critical understanding, and every new release is judged against the previous in ...
Annihilation Demands To Be Experienced
My best friend and I share a hilariously terrifying feeling that spawned from the Disney documentary Oceans. Under the immense weight of miles of water above it was a shrimp whose entire life was darkness. Aimlessly eating across the ocean-floor, ...