Kentucky Route Zero: A Game, A Play, A Poem

Kentucky Route Zero, an unsettling point-and-click-plus-text-adventure starts with a wide shot, Edward Hopper style, of an old American gas station complete with a man-sitting-watching-world-go-by gatekeeper. It’s an unmistakably American scene, and a strangely constructed-feeling one. But we’ll come back to that… The good The game, being released episodically as five […]
I Have Played: Little Inferno

What exactly is Little Inferno? Is it a fourth-wall-breaking analysis of modern throwaway consumerism, set against the all too familiar backdrop of a tempestuous environmental mutation? Perhaps it’s an existential commentary, an experiment laboured with the task of projecting the developer’s qualms regarding a detached and insular society onto an […]
I Have Played: Brothers

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is a game that I had been vaguely aware of throughout 2013, but simply hadn’t given any thought to. I think there was something about the promotional artwork that put me off, I don’t know. I managed to ignore it right up until the […]
I Have Played: BioShock Infinite

Jake played BioShock Infinite and has now sat down to write most of the things that he could think to say about it. This isn’t a review. There will be spoilers in this article. The important thing to know about BioShock Infinite is that it is, first and foremost, a […]
Football Manager: What it Taught Me About Life

For all the pretensions I could contrive about gaming, I come back to a plain fact: games are regularly a form of fantasy-living for me. I write about games, think about games, and play a variety to both enjoy myself and fortify that writing and thinking. But when I think […]