Videogames - lesser daemon

15

Apr

Please Don't Call It A Metroidbrainia

I, like a lot of dorks with similar tastes, have been playing Blue Prince. It's a really well-designed mix of two types of games I love: Gone Home-style "walk around and find environmental clues" and deckbuilding. The cool conceit is that you're building a house, rather than a traditional deck of cards: every time you open a door, you're given a randomized pool of rooms to pick from, with the goal of finding the mysterious 46th room in a house you inherited from your uncle.

Blue Prince is fun, cool, and a clever mix of mechanics that I haven't

1 min read

25

Mar

Games That Know They're Games

Today was supposed to be my first day back in the office in a while, so naturally I'm sick. I think a frustrating thing, in times like this, is not really being able to isolate the variable that's making me feel lousy. I haven't been taking great care of myself, I've barely been home in the past month, and I certainly haven't been getting the best sleep. So is feeling bad today an actual illness or just the consequences of my own actions? Hard to say. I went into the office for a few hours and felt too feverish to

1 min read

24

Mar

Letter of Recommendation: Oshi-Gokko

Keeping today's post short and sweet. I went to the launch party for Oshi-Gokko at WonderVille last night, which was a whole lot of fun, and played in my first games tournament in ages. I got washed in the first round but I did lose to the eventual winner of the tournament so I'll call that a win. I am biased on this one, since my friend Mat was one of the lead devs on the game, but I think it's a really delightful two-player arcade cab and a great addition to the Arcade Commons collection.

The game's a sit-down

1 min read

22

Mar

What I'm Playing (March '25)

Visual novels are kind of a comfort genre for me. I think I get the same soothing effect from them that a lot of people get from games like Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing. So it should come as no surprise that I've been playing a lot of VN or VN-adjacent games recently. Here's some stuff I've enjoyed over the past few weeks:

Citizen Sleeper 2: Builds on the solid base of the first game and adds some fun mechanical crunch with missions and the dice-breaking mechanic. I always really enjoy Gareth Damian Martin's games - tumblr-coded Disco Elysium-likes (positive)

3 min read

25

Jan

What Comes After Post-Modernism?

I saw a talk at MAGfest today by Rym Decoster and Emily Compton which attempted to sketch a theory of current post-post-modern cultural output. It's very much a work in progress, but their concept of "metacontextualism" is the idea that after postmodern deconstruction and irony, we are starting to see a trend emerge towards building meaning through choice out of its ashes: being aware of the fractured contexts of a postmodern world, and that there's no single way of knowing or being, but choosing a forking path and going down it. They argue that art is how a society engages

2 min read