Hi Friends!

The highlight of May for me was the day where I got a new Fridge. I was so stressed out beforehand that I had a dream where I punched a man because he stood in the way of it arriving.

Gamedev-News

JRPG Game is still in Publisher submission purgatory (I need to get back to bothering more of them), so I went and made a secret second JRPG game that I will not tell anyone about until it's done, just to pass the time. I also wanted to test if that framework I built actually is as easily transferable as I thought it would be and it turned out I was correct.

Blogpost-Shares

I mid-May I wrote about being tired of discussions around very specific videogame releases, where that exhaustion might come from and how to maybe find a way beyond the ever repeating same:

May 20th marked Virtue's Heaven's first Anniversary since it was released and I tried to write something like a post-mortem for it.

Interesting things I played:

I played some Outward and I like how much of that game is just wandering around. I also died once because I accidentally ate a berry that poisons me, instead of the one that restores stamina.

I then played Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky (first chapter). I bought that game back in 2022, played it for 20 minutes and got so confused by the magic system tutorial that I stopped until about 10 days ago.

I have since finished that game and bought the second chapter, because it turns out that all the people who said that this game is great were absolutely correct.

Interesting things I read:

Content warnings for Ableism in the linked post:

I honestly don't know much about the person who wrote this blog, or her books, but I wanted to share it, because the experience described, as well as some of the comments underneath illustrate how much our society struggles to understand that things that seem mundane to a lot of people, are actually incredibly hard for others.

It was also interesting to look over this today while putting this newsletter together, because I spent yesterday feeling horrible, for very similar reasons.

Some posts around that Mixtape game that I haven't played and am not interested in playing:

About discussions around games:

What are we doing? What's going on? | Autumn Wright

against posting as games criticism and discourse analysis

About Mixtape and Nostalgia:

Stumbled over this Interview with Artdink's Kazutoshi lida from 1996 and it was really interesting how much of the things we talk around videogames and their relationship to Art was already around 30 years ago:

I loved this description of the original Dragon Quest and how it's tied to the game's map:

I still want to play Dragon Quest 1 at some point, because there aren't that many JRPGs around where you play just one character and that game in particular alwas has a very strange, lonely quality to it.

Interesting piece about Stardew Valley, Cozy Games and their relationship to physical labor:

Imitations of Life

There’s a special kind of soap for hands that perform the kind of labour where dirt and grime and things soak into the skin. Fast Orange, as it's called, comes in an orange bottle, and smells accordingly of sweet and bitter citrus. And you would be right to question

About halfway through reading this essay about "Zero-Player" games I was suddenly jump scared by seeing my Evil Games blog being referenced as relevant reading on the subject. Am I accidentally doing Game Studies? I hope not.

Anyway the piece is good and I want there to be more attempts to shift the framing around games away from the purely product-oriented terminology that tends to get used:

On Zero-Player Games | De minimis non curat Lex

Field notes for travelers in the under-explored and under-theorized world of zero-player games.

This piece on Aftermath's very expected but still disappointing break of the BDS boycott is worth a read:

i’m not mad, i’m just disappointed – tell them i died

let’s talk about aftermath’s coverage of its forza horizon 6 coverage

See you in July!