Your Party in Wildermyth Are Kind of Assholes (and That's Great)
Video games are never quite going to feel like tabletop RPGs - as Rowan Kaiser points out in her review of Wildermyth for IGN, a computer is never going to...
The Absence of a Blank Slate in Divinity: Original Sin 2
I recently picked up Divinity: Original Sin 2 for the third time, having previously struggled to really 'mesh' with it. For one of the most critically...
Death, and Cultural Worldbuilding
Content Warning: Discussion of death and dead bodies. Many games accept death as a consequence for the main actions of gameplay, but fewer consider what...
The Narrative Power of Skill Ceilings in 'Disco Elysium'
There are three things you need to know about skills in Disco Elysium. The first is that each skill has its own personality - they speak to you, and squabble...
What Good Is An Alibi In 'Lucifer Within Us'
You might notice this isn’t a Substack post or a Medium post - apologies for the miscommunications, but you should be receiving uninterrupted newsletters...
Saturshot is Moving
You might have heard why many people are leaving Substack. If not, Jude Ellison Sadie Doyle explains, in their post In Queers We Trust. All Others Pay Cash....
How Narration Dictates Attention in 'Call of the Sea'
If you didn’t catch last week’s Saturshot, I raised the idea of also writing about things that interest me, but don’t reflect wholly positively on the game...
How Pendragon Procedurally Generates Tragedies
Procedurally generated stories don't usually feel “authored”. They don't need to - in the same way that improvisational theatre is a different type of...
Innovating Junk Cards in Signs of the Sojourner
Signs of the Sojourner was the first deckbuilding game that I ever played, and everything about it was incredibly novel. Having revisited with more...
UI as Storytelling in Yakuza Kiwami
Yakuza Kiwami, the first not-prequel game in the series, opens with a dramatic scene, and then goes into a flashback. In the time before the flashback, it...
Mass Effect 2: It's Like Stardew Valley, Actually
What I like about Mass Effect 2 isn’t a small detail, but its entire structure. Here goes: Mass Effect 2 feels satisfyingly tight as an experience because...
Companion Morality and Player Choice in Baldur's Gate 3
When playing RPGs for the first time, the temptation can be to play somebody blandly pleasant. Before you know your way around the world, it’s often the...
Wild Experimentation in Slay the Spire
(This is partially a companion piece to New Beginnings and Nowhere Prophet, but can be read alone.) I have been playing an awful lot of Slay the Spire...
"Letting You Get on With It" in Breath of the Wild
I don’t usually get along with games that people praise for “not holding your hand”. I understand the preference for exploratory, trial-and-error gameplay,...
Memento Mori, and the Aesthetics of Paradise Killer
I finished playing Paradise Killer last night, and haven’t had time to dig into what people have said about it yet. I hope everyone talks about its art...
Elsinore and the Time Travelling Outfits
Elsinore is a time looping adventure game set in the world of 'Hamlet'. It follows Ophelia as she tries to prevent the tragedy destined for her and everyone...
Kingdoms, Castles, and Video Game Cruelty
Broke: First-person shooters make you violent. Woke: Resource management games make you authoritarian. I’ll be fair, that isn’t really my thesis here (it’s a...
Reputation, Power, and Tyranny
Tyranny is one of Epic’s freebies next week, and I got to thinking about how it has some really interesting systems. One is that the way part of the way your...
Co-operation and Competition in 'A Way Out' [Spoilers]
A Way Out sees each player control either Vincent or Leo, as they orchestrate a prison break to pursue their shared goal of revenge. The two work together to...
'Pyre' as Building Block, and 'Pyre' Alone
A few people (including me) have said that you can see the building blocks of Hades in Supergiant'sprevious games. Bastion shares its clear the room combat...
New Beginnings and Nowhere Prophet
A lot of good game design is invisible. There’s so much you don’t see until something doesn’t work, and the resulting friction brings it to your attention....
Welcome to Saturshot
Welcome to Saturshot! You know when you’re playing a game, and something just clicks? And you’re like - that’s so incredibly neat. I’m going to think about...