Videogames

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)

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3 min read
100days Videogames
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

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2 min read
100days Videogames theory
23
Jan

Letters of Recommendation: Signalis, Mushroom Coffee

Since I've spent most of today waiting for a delayed train or on said train, I decided to write about two of the things that got me through it.

1) Signalis

This 2022 game by Berlin studio Rose Engine has been sitting in my Steam library for a few months now, and I finally picked it up this week. I play a lot of artsy indie games, but I don't think I often see overlap between those and the survival horror genre. This threads the needle beautifully - hallucinatory dream sequences, beautiful pixel art, and compelling poetry, punctuated with some

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3 min read
100days recommendations Videogames coffee