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 […]
Becoming What You Fear the Most: The Vicious Cycle Within League of Legends
To me League of Legends represents a paradox of conflicting emotions that lie at extreme ends of the gaming experience. On the one hand, it is an incredibly good video game. Some of my finest mouse-clicking memories have been created in it. It’s addictive, satisfying even when you’re losing and […]
Breaking the rules does not create new ones (or: UNDERTALE)
UNDERTALE. Well that’s everybody’s favourite game at the moment, isn’t it? (If you don’t want to read about the game’s ‘secret’s LEAVE NOW.) To be sure, UNDERTALE is a very good game – but I am struggling to see quite why so many people think it’s so good. Full disclosure: […]
Another World: The Art and Games of Eric Chahi
If, like me, you are a desiccated old fossil of a human, limping from one day of bone-creaking agony to another, you’ll no doubt remember both the Commodore C64 and the Commodore Amiga. These were ostensibly some of the first widely available “personal computers” for the average human being, and […]
A subjective response to the style of new games journalism
On Wednesday 26 March 2014, Jake and I went to a panel discussion about the new games journalism – the idea that games writing should be about the player’s experience, not the game’s mechanics. Here are some things it made me think about. The new games journalism, says Kieron Gillen’s […]