The promise of reaching everything in your sights has long been a cynical joke at the player’s expense in the Dark Souls franchise, one I sit with as Elden Ring earnestly fulfills it without punchline.
Read MoreIf the speedrun is an act of monastic devotion, proof of love for the game and power over the self, Asprey’s softlocks are not even so much as puzzles to be solved as koans to be contemplated, exercises in cosmic futility. Their construction is the art, the absolute knowledge required to construct such a lock the proof of devotion, examination of the cage a rumination on the nature of the virtual world.
Read MoreJoel Jordon (they/them) is the solo game developer of Time Bandit (2022), a real-time anti-capitalist work sim about how our subjective experience of time is shaped by our relationship to labor and historical forces. With Time Bandit’s first part releasing soon, Joel took some time to join me in talking through the game’s themes, how effective games can be as political instruments, and the hazy ethics of games-as-work.
Read MoreKarin Malady (any/all pronouns) is a writer, poet, and occultist interested in the relationship between art and audience. Recently, they’ve contributed writing to apocalyptic photography game, Dear Future (Dear Future Production Committee, 2021), and videogame flesh realm DEEP HEEL DOT COM. In this especially free wheeling episode, we talk about growing up on the internet, metafiction, being Tony Hawk, and provoking readers.
Read MoreI want to say thank you for listening/reading/being part of KRITIQAL. The community that has grown around the site, the contributors I’ve been able to commission, and the friend’s I’ve made along the way have been so hugely important to me not spiraling off into the void. It is perhaps the smallest bit of hope to cling to, but I cling to it either way.
Read MoreLike all of these little desert towns that pop up full of expensive Yoga studios and stuccoed Circle K’s (so the tourist knows they’re somewhere with real authentic history), the new money is all in videogames. What if you’ve got a stable base of poor players around to always make sure there’s an item in the game they can’t afford? Well you’ve got a digital ski-slope, where your only worry are the pesky locals showing up.
Read MoreForza Horizon 5 is a confidently built open-world game. You wouldn’t believe it based on the endlessly repopulating to-do list and amount of lizard-brain scratching notification icons constantly popping in the menus. These dopamine hits have long been a crutch to keep gamers from getting bored with uninspired combat loops or drab worlds. Once an incentive to keep playing the game and spend more money, they have now supplanted the gameplay entirely.
Read MoreThe horror of Dot Hack (and more immediately, my time with Final Fantasy XIV) is the realization that the online game, the company, and the state are working exactly as they are meant to when at their most frightening. If you can’t represent something about yourself through the offered tools you have to compromise through whatever means of communicating the software accepts. You hack the game’s logic on its terms while upholding the system that does not acknowledge you.
Read MoreBreogán Hackett (she/they) is an indie dev, community organizer, and creator low-res horror anthology, The Haunted PS1. She set aside some time from Halloween spooks to talk about how The Haunted PS1 got started, moving beyond the Playstation, and forcing players to get lost.
Read MoreXalavier Nelson Jr. (he/him) is a prolific videogame writer, producer, and internet poster, working on everything from An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs (Strange Scaffold, 2021) to Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator (Strange Scaffold, upcoming). He took some time away from creating every videogame to walk through how he moved from games criticism to creation, the challenge and necessity of figuring out what you enjoy creating, and the existential dark comedy of a drunk puppy.
Read MoreOne of the things that makes choosing a fighter important - more so than say, the outfit you deck out a character with in an FPS - is that they feel like more of an avatar, more representative of The Player. Everything from the focus on one-on-one competition, to how games like Street Fighter V proclaim YOU LOSE on the screen after a defeat, bring the player and their character closer together. It’s about identification, being drawn to a character for what they say about you as much as for the things they do in-game.
Read MoreHeather Flowers (they/she) is the non-existent creator of EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER, a post-apocalyptic visual-novel beat-em-up about gay disasters meat mechs fighting facists. They didn’t join me on this episode to recap MEATPUNK’s origins as a spontaneous collection of sounds, adapting the series into tabletop form, and rejecting apocalyptic cynicism. I cannot stress this enough: Heather Flowers does not exist and therefore could not have been on this episode.
Read MoreNaphtali Faulkner (he/him), AKA Veselekov, is the creator of IGF Grand Prize winning photography game, Umurangi Generation (ORIGAME DIGITAL, 2020). In this extra long episode, Naphtali elaborates on origins of Umurangi, confronting liberal apathy, and the hunger people have for explicitly leftist art. Many detours into Disco Elysium (ZA/UM, 2019) are made along the way.
Read MoreDragon Quest, at its heart, is about liberation. It’s about plunging down into the deepest pits of hell to sever the roots of injustice and hatred, about removing literal poison seeped into the land. Sugiyama’s music carries this myth, but now is burdened with the composer’s own baggage, adding a translucent film atop it, weighing it down, introducing new toxins. I can’t not take this to heart. It’s the only thing I truly believe in.
Read MoreJeremy Couillard (he/him) is an artist and professor, whose games JEF (2020) and Fuzz Dungeon (2021) explore the weird, uncomfortable, and inexplicable aspects of life through humor and alien surrealism. In this episode, Jeremy details how he started creating games out of a frustration with animation, the importance of loitering in digital spaces, and finding community in alt games.
Read MoreTaking away expected methods of interaction doesn’t isolate Madotsuki from these characters, it simply means she must create new ways of communicating. The lack of dialogue doesn’t stop her from sitting down to play the flute with O-Man or at the piano with Seccom Masada-sensei. It doesn’t stop her standing next to Maussan Bros to watch the lights in the sky. To say that Madotsuki can’t interact with Yume Nikki’s NPCs is to ignore the many uncoordinated, unspoken encounters created out of the game’s silence.
Read MoreRayzones (they/them) and Yaffle (she/they) make up indie studio lowpolis, creators of cute games with surreal insides. In this episode we explore the inspiration for lowpolis’ latest game, co-open (2021), discus the complex politics surrounding “wholesome games,” and appreciate the most fundamental videogame act: crawling through vents.
Read MoreMechs are not practical tools of war. It seems silly to point that out but there is a reason they look so much like people. They are extensions of our humanity. A humanity that longs to sing, dance, explore, know, love, and break beyond its own limits. The tragedy of mechs is that these colossal people are made to live as a site of conflict; that they are born to die rather than experience every glorious moment in-between.
Read MoreRyan Rose Aceae (he/they) is a visual novelist whose games explore the messy, sometimes monstrous dynamics of queer identity through surreal characters and earnest writing. In this episode he recounts his nontraditional route into making queer games, collaborating with Heather Flowers on GENDERWRECKED (2017), and the necessity of complex and challenging queer art.
Read MoreUmurangi Generation is the shitty future we occupy, the compromises and pain and small moments of joy all combusting at once. There are no good choices left, they’ve all been stolen from us. What do you do when the world’s on fire but you’re hungry and the landlord’s demanding rent? At what point does the dark comedy of capitalism finally break? Umurangi knows we’ve passed the point of no return but have to keep living like we still have time. It acknowledges our anger but refuses to give up on the people left behind.
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