DEATHLOOP is the latest in Arkane’s catalog of Thief-inspired systems-as-narrative games. As a fan of this genre I deeply enjoyed DEATHLOOP, particularly the way it makes my style of play much lower-stress than in other immersive sims. I am the type who wants to stealth perfectly and maintain a moral high ground, and DEATHLOOP gives […]
Another year has come and gone and frankly, I can barely remember it. This post wasn’t even written on time–2022 is just starting down the tarmac and I’m already nearly three months behind. To what shall we attribute these time slips, these missing hours? The pandemic? Probably. General stress? Almost certainly. But I’ve also found […]
I purchased a WiiU because I shipped a game for it and figured I should actually have one to play on. My first two purchases were (naturally) ZombieU and Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water. I’ve completed every Fatal Frame game to date (excepting FF4, which I got stuck in), and the series has always […]
Though it’s not a hard and fast rule, I almost never play games the moment that they come out. I’m too busy, or I’m in the middle of something else, or (more often than I’d like to admit) I don’t even realize that a game I’m interested in has shipped. I miss out on a […]
I gave an IGDA talk a few years ago about the horror genre’s roots in Adventure games. You can draw a line of influence, I argued, from Colossal Cave Adventure and King’s Quest all the way through modern titles like Slender and Amnesia: The Dark Descent. This line, which crosses through all of the survival horror classics, is best understood […]
“These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness.” — William Gibson, Johnny Mnemonic If you’re an indie developer, making a pixel art game is pretty attractive. First and foremost, it’s pretty cheap and easy to develop, at least in terms of art production. A one-man-band dev can put together […]
I played some good games in 2015. Here’s a couple of the best. Life is Strange Life is Strange is, hands down, my game of the year. The premise is easily explained (My So-Called Life + mysteries + time travel), but the feeling of playing this game is nearly impossible to put into words. I write a lot […]
There’s a lot to like about Outlast. It’s a non-combat stealth horror game made by a small team of veterans that sports super high production value but keeps things simple. The sound quality is fantastic and the graphics are nice and it manages to be pretty scary now and then. It’s got a great mechanic […]
Fatal Frame 4, which I keep coming back to every few months but never seem to complete, has a neat item pickup mechanic. Your character, a young woman trapped in a dilapidated hospital on a forbidden island full of moon ghosts, slowly extends her hand to reach for an item when you hit the A […]
Hey, I finished another horror game! Crazy, right? This time it is Curse: The Eye of Isis, a throughly mediocre game that nonetheless has some interesting ideas (that don’t work out, of course). This was one of the most pleasant bad games that I’ve played in a while because it’s not particularly buggy and I […]