The walls of The Oldest House are a veritable pressure cooker, a place of almost unbearable unknowns
Remedy has accomplished something so many before have failed to do: craft a world that feels consistently inconsistent, a place governed by a set of rules far, far beyond our mortal comprehension. Rules we can feel but never truly know.
That feeling — that sense you can nearly almost define…
Digital experiences can leave indelible marks on the story of the self
Video games propose a thousand ways to be. We live, we breathe, we dream the experiences they gift to us — either across an eight-hour campaign as the titular hero or through months as an alter ego in massively-multiplayer world.
Become what you want, when you want. Become a beefed-up…
Reflections on a time when play experiences were uninterrupted by ubiquitous, invasive connectivity
Video games used to be a meditative experience. It was just you and the box, with controller and cord as the connective tissue. Those thoughts — those pesky mental constructs — vanished to the experience in the moment.
It’s why there’s a soothing silence to consoles of yore. It’s you…
NieR: Automata’s opening hours are an eerie parallel to our post-virus world
Everything is changing. The advent of COVID-19 is transforming how we live now — and how we might live for years to come. The world we knew yesterday won’t be the world we know tomorrow.
In NieR:Automata, everything has already changed. The sun shines on a desolate land, a place…
The famous franchise had its share of growing pains
We used to be the parents. We were their guardian angels, the commander of our own private army of ensemble characters with wild hair and crazy costumes who burped giant boxes of text from their mouths as they talked about giant monsters and time-travelling wizards.
Why world-building and narrative supersede inconsistency in the message
In Mass Effect, the Reapers are absolute killing machines. Waaaaaaah, they cry, telling you just how killy they really are — and presumably that they’re going to be killy at you, too. …
Looking back at Kojima’s enigmatic second “Solid” entry
So, like, in Metal Gear Solid 2, there’s this guy who attached another guy’s arm to his very much arm-free elbow. The transplant apparently included a hidden extra: the spirit of a dead terrorist who’s the genetically identical twin of this guy’s sworn enemy. …
Do you think its possible to make suffering before death a happy thing? Or, at least, a less terrible thing?
The pursuit of power in our gaming lives
Be the better of your world and everything in it — that’s power. The child staying up past bedtime, the worker telling their boss to get lost: people enacting their will and breaking the rules, free from comeuppance and consequence. …
It preserved shooters of the past and could revitalise their future
Years later, one franchise remains trapped in time — a relic held in a stasis of circumstance and corporate reluctance. It seems forever stuck in the mud of its sixth-generation origins, defined almost as much by its unwillingness to move than it is by its ability to enthrall.
