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…
Tag Game Criticism
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…
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…
Inscryption – Curses, Sacrifices, and Roads Untraveled
I finished Inscryption a few days ago and feel I should write about it, but I don’t entirely know where to start. Well, let’s start at the outside and work in: Inscryption is, to begin with, a roguelike deck-builder –…
Bloodborne: Traversing the Threshold
...dreaming and waking, known and unknown, and the ever-shifting boundary between these. Even the player's weapon represents this idea of boundaries and thresholds, flicking between two states on command just as the player navigates the boundaries of dreams.
Everhood: False Endings, Truths, Choices, and Hope
This essay is almost entirely about spoilers for the game Everhood. If this is a game you intend to play, I would recommend doing so before reading this. It’s a pretty neat game, and I would cautiously recommend it, although…
Interesting Choice
“A game is a series of interesting choices” – Sid Meier The above quote is one of the first foundational ideas one encounters when studying game design. Sid Meier, most well known as the designer of the Civilization series of…
Better Mousetraps
I think if there’s one idea I’d seek to dismantle, it’s the idea that there’s a single correct way to do something. I believe that this approach creates problems for two reasons: First, similarity of approach tends to lead to…