My friend paid me a compliment the other day. We were talking about running because he’s thinking about shaking up his exercise routine, and he said to me (paraphrasing), “It makes sense that you’re a runner because you write for a living. You know how to push yourself.”
I’m pretty sure it was meant to be a compliment. I took it as one.
But it’s not 100% accurate.
Continue reading “Outrunning the Thousand”
Having proclaimed that 2025 was The Year of Games That Are Co-op and/or Action and/or Rogue-lite (scroll to the section on Risk of Rain 2 if you missed it), the time has come to look back and evaluate some of the games from 2025 that fall under that heading.
As a note: I determine whether something is an action game by asking “Do you have fine control over a character’s movement, and does that movement affect your chance of success?” If yes, it’s an action game.
As for what a rogue-lite is, that’s really a matter of vibes. Is the game run-based? Are you frequently given a choice of 2 or 4 but usually 3 things? Do you collect something that you can spend to become stronger on future runs? If yes, it’s probably a rogue-lite.
Continue reading “Thick as Thieves”
Early in Hollow Knight: Silksong, someone asks for your help building a bridge.
The bug asking for aid is called Flick, the resident fixer of Bone Bottom, a town in the depths of Pharloom. A capable craftsman, he doesn’t require practical help from you, instead asking for raw materials—shell shards, mined from the environment or gathered from fallen bugs along your path.
In the kingdom of Pharloom, there’s a custom of posting requests like Flick’s to wishwalls. The bugs of this land, many of whom are on a pilgrimage to the sacred Citadel atop the realm, leave their wishes on the board and hold onto faith that someone else will come along and make them come true.
Flick’s wish is called “A Lifesaving Bridge.” He means to build this bridge across a pit near the edge of town, one that many a pilgrim has tumbled into. You too have run afoul of this fissure, plummeting into it at the game’s outset.
(I’ll keep the details vague, but there are some spoilers for the game in this post.)
Continue reading “Wish upon a wall”
“Great art is both window and mirror… whether it’s your mask or theirs.”
– The Mask Keeper
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has me feeling conflicted.
Befitting its name, Sandfall Interactive’s debut title is a game of contrasts. There are many bright spots. There are also some not-so-bright spots. I want to quickly cover both sides, and I might touch on some mechanical specifics while doing so, but I’m not going in depth on the story other than to say…
Continue reading “Sur l’art impossible”
Summer Games Done Quick 2025 kicks off today. It’s a week-long charity marathon featuring speedruns and other video game showcases, the latest event in a biannual series that has been going for more than a decade. I want to talk briefly about why I make time to watch these events whenever they come up.
But first, I need to spoil all of Mobile Suit Gundam.
Continue reading “Gundam done quick”
I have beef with Spotify Wrapped.
Not because it is naked engagement bait (though it is), nor because it has inspired an obnoxious plague of pretenders (though it has). No, my beef is because Wrapped does not understand me. It purports to summarize what I have listened to in a given year, yet the colorful lists it generates do not tell the whole story. Wrapped assumes I use Spotify to listen to music, and that’s just not true.
I use Spotify to play music, regardless of if I’m actually listening.
Continue reading “Broken Silence”
After performing this ritual time and time again, I have come to understand the impracticality of cramming a year’s worth of blogging into a single blog post. It muddies the reflections, it delays the posting, it burdens the reader, and all of that pains me. A more sensible person would have realized this much sooner. Alas, you’re stuck with me.
Time to change it up. I didn’t write about every game this year. You’re still getting the full list—I can’t give up the convention of the title this far in—but only about half of the games on it have received the full treatment, such as it is. The rest are in a separate section, each with a brief comment.
Abridgment alone won’t make this a viable or worthwhile endeavor, so I have something more drastic in mind for the future. But I’ll get to that later.
Let’s talk about some games.
Continue reading “Every Game I Played in 2024”
I gave up trying to write about this sort of thing years ago, but there’s a few thoughts that I have to get out.
This election felt uniquely terrible despite how similar it ended up feeling to 2016. For everything that was similar or the same—underestimating Trump’s cult of personality, acting like there are Republicans who would vote for a Democrat, watching the Democrats rely on surrogates, celebrities, and vibes instead of a platform—the thing that felt especially soul-destroying is that I was committed to voting for a candidate who supported genocide.
Continue reading “The Trouble With Cowards”
I think this one was worth the wait.
Continue reading “Every Game I Played in 2023”
I have learned nothing.
“I will write the intro and conclusion tomorrow,” I said, on New Year’s Eve.
Imbecile. Buffoon. Fool.
It’s been established that these posts don’t need intros. I had already finished the body, which is what matters. And the conclusion, I might have done without prior to recent events. Instead, my fresh takes have sat withering, rotting in an open tab.
The good news is that I found something to say about every game on the list. The bad news is that the paragraphs are molded over and riddled with maggots.
Dig in.
Continue reading “Every Game I Played in 2022”
subjunctivitis 