Posts in Essay
Cloudbuilt - Review
Cloudbuilt - Review

Attempting to learn Cloudbuilt is like scaling the face of a cliff with your bare hands. It offers no assistance, no guidance, and relentlessly beats you down to where the game can begin to feel almost hostile. There’s so much going on within a given level moving so fast and incomprehensibly, that getting your bearings can seem an impossible task in a game designed for a higher class of player. But Cloudbuilt’s most apparent problem is also one that’s almost entirely frontloaded, and once I made it over that wall and could peer over the whole of the game, Cloudbuilt evolved into one of the most endlessly satisfying and expanding games I’ve played in a very long time.

Read More
EssayNathalieCloudbuilt, Coilworks, Reviews
Quick Thoughts On: Job Lozenge
Quick Thoughts On: Job Lozenge

ob Lozenge feels like a digital replication of this perpetual working grind. Crates drop in from the sky, which are then to be dropped into the abyss on the other side of your small village. There to ensure your cooperation and ability to perform your task is a bossy observer, showering you with praise when you finally finish your job but always with the assurance that there will be more crates the following day.

Read More
EssayNathalieFrom Smiling, itch-io, Job Lozenge, Quick Thoughts
Quick Thoughts On: Fragile Soft Machines
Quick Thoughts On: Fragile Soft Machines

Fragile Soft Machines asks a lot from the player. It asks that they buy into the plight of a butterfly crippled by its broken wing, to guide it through the dangerous garden it’s fallen in and attempt to make it a better place. It asks for the player to fill in much of the plot themselves, through text boxes and choices for which the outcome is often difficult to discern. And it asks that they accept their fate with little in the way of closure.

Read More
EssayNathalieFragile Soft Machines, itch-io, Madame Berry, Quick Thoughts
Duet - Review
Duet - Review

Duet is a dance. Two heavenly bodies entwined, moving in perfect unison to become one whole, inseparable and immaculate in their symmetry and differences. Duet is also a song. Somber, longing, broken and difficult. It’s a song pulled from outside the game, calling at my darker urges and insecurities. Duet isn’t a game about me, or maybe about anyone, but I was inarguably a part of it, and in its darkness and traces of beauty it found me and spoke to me in ways no other game ever has.

Read More
EssayNathalieDuet, Editor's Choice, Kumobius, Reviews
Quick Thoughts On: Mussel
Quick Thoughts On: Mussel

Mussel’s outrageous, self-destructive style is so in your face that I almost forgot I was even playing a game, which is fine as as a shooter Mussel is perfectly enjoyable if not especially deep. Every card has been played into the game’s digital rampage of flickering pixels, and in this case it’s a single trick well worth investigating, putting fellow would-be CRT replicants to shame with its unfiltered ode to image degradation.

Read More
EssayNathalieitch-io, Mussel, Quick Thoughts
An Ode to Pixel Art
An Ode to Pixel Art

Close your eyes and think of what the word “game” first brings to mind. For myself and I imagine a lot of people born before 1995, that image was something 8 or 16-bit. Maybe Mario, of MegaMan, or one of the early Final Fantasy games. In my eyes, pixel art is the defacto aesthetic of games. It’s where they began and an art style they created, yet beginning around the release of the Playstation, there’s been a trend in games to abandon the style in favor of attempting as high a level of realism as possible with a game’s graphics. Only in recent years has the style been revisited, mostly by indie developers, and yet the response I so often see toward it is not one of appreciation but accusations of developers being “lazy”, “incompetent”, or “unimaginative”.

Read More
EssayNathalieFeatures, Opinion, Pixel Art
Indie Impressions: Cadence (Kickstarter Demo)
Indie Impressions: Cadence (Kickstarter Demo)

Cadence is still a fair ways off, but already it's showing a ton of potential. Even if the editor doesn't pan out like I hope, the puzzles alone are such an ingenious mix of musical experimentation and systemic efficiency (I swear it's cooler than that sounds) that at the very least it will end up as one of the better puzzle games I've played in years, and certainly among the best sounding.

Read More
EssayNathalieCadence, Impressions, itch-io, Kickstarter, Made With Monster Love
Are long games hurting the medium?
Are long games hurting the medium?

I’m not exactly sure where the mindset originated (though if I had to guess I’d say with young people without a large income), but for a large segment of the gaming community a game’s length is often viewed as one of the deciding factors in whether they decide to purchase/play it. It seems absurd to me, as after all nobody says they only read books that are over 1000 pages or albums with more than 20 tracks, but for whatever reason games are uniquely singled out as being required to provide dozens and dozens of hours of content, or else be written off as a poor value or even somehow degrading games as a whole with their meager offering.

Read More
EssayNathalieFeatures, Opinion
Hotline Miami - Review
Hotline Miami - Review

As the music drove me forward and the hypnotic neon visuals swelled around the edges of a stage, I lost track of the number of people I had so brutally and ruthlessly murdered. The first kill was shocking, fast, and pointless. I felt sick and angry at the person who’d forced me into it. Then they gave me a pipe, and then a gun, and I kept killing. For as disturbing as the mutilated corpses and pools of blood around me were, the feedback I was being given was intoxicating, and the thrill of barely avoiding death only heightening the sensation.

Read More
EssayNathalieDennaton Games, Devolver, Hotline Miami, Reviews
Karateka - Review
Karateka - Review

The repetition is grating and the game’s refusal to acknowledge and react to it frustrating. It’s not a game without merit, it just doesn’t know what to do with itself. That it’s constructed around a groan worthy damsel-in-distress plot, which culminates in the woman you’re rescuing effectively becoming your own prisoner, is only more bothersome and shows a hesitancy for Karateka to move past its archaic beginning. I’m not exactly sure who this version of Karateka is for, but as someone without any amount of nostalgia for the first it clearly wasn’t me.

Read More
EssayNathalieKarateka, Reviews