By the time the game’s belabored development seemed to be wrapping up, the initial release of Tarotica Voo Doo had been pushed to drop during Comiket during the winter of 1997. Seen next to the newly released Playstation and Sega Saturn, the MSX was a relic. Still, solo developer Ikushi Togo soldiered on, ready to show his work to the 300,000 strong audience of the convention after years of working in isolation. Fate, however, had different plans, and with little fanfare a disk drive crash sentenced the project to an early grave, erasing the source code and any chance of the game ever being played. Tarotica Voo Doo was dead.
Read MoreI am doubtful of the military mecha genre’s capabilities to tell anything other than cynical stories of social defeat despite military victories, and Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon is a proponent of that doubt.
Read MoreOver its decades of development and numerous games, Oddworld’s characters and politics have shifted on an almost game-by-game basis leading to a series that is both tonally discordant and consistent in its inconsistencies. Oddworld wants to be popular, first and foremost, and it is unafraid to throw its ideology in the meat grinder in pursuit of bombast and wider appeal.
Read MoreWith its mix of flowery dialogue, elaborate metaphor, and obsessive passion, Legacy of Kain is continually referencing and subverting gothic conventions throughout its runtime. Amidst the complex story spanning multiple time periods, interrogations on the nature of power, and musings on immortal morality, another theme emerges from the game’s proximity to gothic and vampire literature: Kain is queer as hell.
Read MoreDespite its formal diversity, a tonal and stylistic consistency lends coherency to owch’s oeuvre, particularly a pattern of changes. The qualitative value of these changes is not usually clearly positive, and often scary, but always necessary to reach the ending. While individually owch’s games can seem inscrutable, when viewed together their shared interest in transformation, dramatic change, and uncertain outcomes suggests deeper readings.
Read MoreIt's relatively easy to create monsters that horrify and unnerve, more difficult to create ones that get under your skin and linger, and harder still to effectively use unreality and uncanniness to build worlds that work like nightmares. Rule of Rose and Silent Hill demonstrate the power of this mode of horror.
Read MoreWhen I was younger, I used to be extremely into Urban Dead, a text based MMO set during a localized zombie epidemic. Years later, the covid pandemic brought me back to the game’s undead infested streets. Fear makes you crave familiarity, and I wanted to return to a place from my childhood where the pandemic and quarantine were all just normal.
Read MoreSonic Unleashed is about transformation and monstrosity. In his Werehog form, Sonic is viewed as a monster, his new appearance terrifying the characters around him. His cutscene dialogue communicates frustration at the involuntary changes of his body and at not being recognized as himself. Through the Werehog, Sonic Unleashed asks: what does it feel like when your body looks and acts in ways you don’t recognize? What does it mean to be seen as something that you know you aren’t? What is a monster? And what does it mean to suddenly become one?
Read MoreIt would be unfair to expect What Comes After to be a playable therapy session, but as it addresses issues involving suicidal ideation and suggests a solution, it is worth discussing how media can meaningfully talk about mental health, analyze whether this attempt can be considered successful, and where its limitations lie.
Read MoreNight in the Woods’ anti-Capitalist politics were seen as revolutionary at the time of its release, but while the game had a lot to offer, praising it as a radical text feels like a stretch. In this essay we will look back at the five years since Night in the Woods’ release, examining how its political allegory has held up, the critical conversation surrounding the game, and what roads of analysis may still lay unexplored.
Read MoreThe promise of reaching everything in your sights has long been a cynical joke at the player’s expense in the Dark Souls franchise, one I sit with as Elden Ring earnestly fulfills it without punchline.
Read MoreIf the speedrun is an act of monastic devotion, proof of love for the game and power over the self, Asprey’s softlocks are not even so much as puzzles to be solved as koans to be contemplated, exercises in cosmic futility. Their construction is the art, the absolute knowledge required to construct such a lock the proof of devotion, examination of the cage a rumination on the nature of the virtual world.
Read MoreLike all of these little desert towns that pop up full of expensive Yoga studios and stuccoed Circle K’s (so the tourist knows they’re somewhere with real authentic history), the new money is all in videogames. What if you’ve got a stable base of poor players around to always make sure there’s an item in the game they can’t afford? Well you’ve got a digital ski-slope, where your only worry are the pesky locals showing up.
Read MoreForza Horizon 5 is a confidently built open-world game. You wouldn’t believe it based on the endlessly repopulating to-do list and amount of lizard-brain scratching notification icons constantly popping in the menus. These dopamine hits have long been a crutch to keep gamers from getting bored with uninspired combat loops or drab worlds. Once an incentive to keep playing the game and spend more money, they have now supplanted the gameplay entirely.
Read MoreThe horror of Dot Hack (and more immediately, my time with Final Fantasy XIV) is the realization that the online game, the company, and the state are working exactly as they are meant to when at their most frightening. If you can’t represent something about yourself through the offered tools you have to compromise through whatever means of communicating the software accepts. You hack the game’s logic on its terms while upholding the system that does not acknowledge you.
Read MoreOne of the things that makes choosing a fighter important - more so than say, the outfit you deck out a character with in an FPS - is that they feel like more of an avatar, more representative of The Player. Everything from the focus on one-on-one competition, to how games like Street Fighter V proclaim YOU LOSE on the screen after a defeat, bring the player and their character closer together. It’s about identification, being drawn to a character for what they say about you as much as for the things they do in-game.
Read MoreDragon Quest, at its heart, is about liberation. It’s about plunging down into the deepest pits of hell to sever the roots of injustice and hatred, about removing literal poison seeped into the land. Sugiyama’s music carries this myth, but now is burdened with the composer’s own baggage, adding a translucent film atop it, weighing it down, introducing new toxins. I can’t not take this to heart. It’s the only thing I truly believe in.
Read MoreTaking away expected methods of interaction doesn’t isolate Madotsuki from these characters, it simply means she must create new ways of communicating. The lack of dialogue doesn’t stop her from sitting down to play the flute with O-Man or at the piano with Seccom Masada-sensei. It doesn’t stop her standing next to Maussan Bros to watch the lights in the sky. To say that Madotsuki can’t interact with Yume Nikki’s NPCs is to ignore the many uncoordinated, unspoken encounters created out of the game’s silence.
Read MoreMechs are not practical tools of war. It seems silly to point that out but there is a reason they look so much like people. They are extensions of our humanity. A humanity that longs to sing, dance, explore, know, love, and break beyond its own limits. The tragedy of mechs is that these colossal people are made to live as a site of conflict; that they are born to die rather than experience every glorious moment in-between.
Read MoreUmurangi Generation is the shitty future we occupy, the compromises and pain and small moments of joy all combusting at once. There are no good choices left, they’ve all been stolen from us. What do you do when the world’s on fire but you’re hungry and the landlord’s demanding rent? At what point does the dark comedy of capitalism finally break? Umurangi knows we’ve passed the point of no return but have to keep living like we still have time. It acknowledges our anger but refuses to give up on the people left behind.
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