Wildfrost
After Slay the Spire released into Early Access in 2017 and was one of the best-designed games ever made, a wave of roguelike deckbuilders inevitably followed. Most of these were, I would say, pretty uninteresting — Slay the Spire excels…
Category Playing Games
Juice, Crunch, and Clarity
I recently saw this video explaining easy ways to make your game feel “juicy”. I don’t know if I’d heard this specific term used before, but it meant exactly what I would have assumed it to mean: Adding a bunch…
Control Freaking
One of the moments I enjoy most in a game is that just before a combat encounter happens. In these moments I plan my approach, my position, look at the lay of the land, look at how the enemy is…
Living Failures
The way games treat failure has shifted significantly over the years. The earliest commercial games were coin-operated, so in this case the loss of the coins used to play the game in the first place provided a self-evident punishment for…
The Corruption
I find most game stories extremely obnoxious. Beyond the irritations with craftsmanship and cliche, beyond being merely bored and annoyed, there are patterns I see over and over again in intros and cutscenes and store pages that are distastefully tedious…
Sheeple
I played through Cult of the Lamb a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been meaning to write about for a little while but got derailed by a general failure to write anything. Cult of the Lamb is a roguelite…
Rolled Flat
There’s a very special kind of annoyance when it becomes obvious that a work of art that you really like has actually impacted its medium for the worse. For instance, while I quite like the film Inception, for years afterwards…
Magic/Routine
I don’t like spell-casting much in games. If I get the option between playing as a character who uses physical weapons and one who uses magic I will almost always choose the former – which is a bit odd when…
Made to Order
Solving a problem is one of the most satisfying sensations in the world. Often this satisfaction is preceded by hours, days, months, or years of tedium and frustration as we struggle to understand the problem, collect the tools and skills…
Silent Hill: The Bad Place
“In my restless dreams, I see that town.” I miss Silent Hill. The games are still around, of course, and perhaps I ought to replay them – but you can’t really go back, and any replay is going to be…