Rachel Tanner (she/her) is a poet and prose author who writes the monthly column Extra Lives over at Video Dame. She joined me on this week’s Kritiqal Care to read a few of her poems and talk about how she got started writing video game poetry.
Read MoreMutazione imagines a beautiful and complex life founded on small, self-sustaining community and a respect for the natural world. It is charming and warm but also plain about the challenges of sustaining a community like this. It reckons with the contradictions of colonialist greed and asks if things couldn’t be rebuilt without hierarchies and violence.
Read MoreSomething new on this week’s Kritiqal Care, I’m joined by experimental software developer Nathalie Lawhead (they/them) to talk about the weird side of the internet. Nathalie specializes in small art tools with 90s sensibilities and lots and lots of potatoes, and recently released Electric Zine Maker for anyone looking to become an amateur publicist.
Read MoreIt was difficult to play Hyper Light Drifter and not feel a deep empathy for the drifter, also alone, also dying from an invisible disease. It’s an easy connection, but when the world is on fire all you can see are embers.
Read MoreThe Off Score Project feels similar to actively listening to vinyl by being a playable album, each track accompanied by a game that ties into the song’s lyrics and mood. A group project between musician YenTing Lo, artist Vanja Mrgan, and programmer Ferran Bertomeu Castells, Off Score is being released a track at a time with the first, Copy Machine, available now on itch.
Read MoreVery excited to have gotten the chance to this week to chat with Andrew (he/him), creator and curator of Indiepocalypse, a monthly zine featuring games, comics, and an assortment of other curiosities.
Read MoreThis week on Kritiqal Care, I was so excited to talk to the core dev team of ValiDate (upcoming), a dating sim about the weird complexities of dating as a twenty-something that features an all people of color cast, queer characters, different body types, and challenging personalities.
Read MoreYou could sketch Crossing Souls on a napkin, and it would probably be a smarter, more inclusive game. But I won’t ask you too.
Read MoreThis week’s episode is a little different, featuring Quinn K. (she/her, they/them) and Kyra (she/her) to discuss collaboration, the daily uncertainty of work during Covid, and old internet lore I somehow missed.
Read MoreOn episode 14 of Kritiqal Care I talk with artist and curator Eva Khoury (they/them) about their approach to different mediums and how they define themselves as an artist. Then we go way to deep on refrigerators.
Read MoreGames can often feel like some kind of sorcery, impossibly complex and created by people with inhuman ability. But they’re just people. Highly talented people, but still. Anodyne 2 is not sorcery, but it is a kind of magic, an ordinary magic that is all the more exceptional because of it.
Read MoreThis week I had the absolute joy of talking to the developer of one of my all time favorite games, Wandersong, Greg Lobanov (he/him). Greg is an indie game developer known best for the musical adventure game Wandersong, and is currently working on the upcoming dog-with-a-paintbrush game Chicory.
Read MoreEvan’s Remains is untidy, its themes barely cohesive. But if it were not so unusual, if it had simply doubled-down on puzzles and pretty screens, I do not think it would have left half the impression it did.
Read MoreAn update on our regularly scheduled programming. Links to support the protests and black creators.
Read MoreEpisode 12 of Kritiqal Care switches things up by having two guests! Kiki & Alicia (she/her) of the Youtube channel Transparency join me to discuss how they approach video production, the differences in their writing styles, and how The Last Jedi is objectively the best Star Wars.
Read MoreOn episode 11 of Kritiqal Care, I was delighted to get to talk to Jay Tholen (he/him) the developer of one of my all time favorite games, Dropsy. Jay is an indie game dev now based in Germany, who last year released the faux-internet moderation game Hypnospace Outlaw.
Read MoreSaving You From Yourself is not meant to be subtle. It is raw and messy, screaming for you to get it and do better. Backgrounds and character models form collages across the screen as scenes shift and the situation becomes direr as if each image barely has time to come together. There is no room for bad faith interpretations, the experience is too provocative, too direct.
Read MoreKate Olguin (any/all pronouns) joins me to discuss her upcoming project, Call of Karen, why games culture is so humorless, and the stigma around game design students.
Read MoreHad Signs of the Sojourner allowed the player to fail without having the door slammed in their face, it would be easier to forgive some of the flatness present in its card system or the brevity of its script. But by framing conversations as games to be won without anticipating how often they’d be lost, huge chunks of the game become sequences of frustrating nonsequiturs.
Read MoreOn the last of the single digit episodes of Kritiqal Care, designer and community activist Elaine Gómez (she/her) joins me to discuss E-Line Media’s upcoming BBC partnership Beyond Blue, which adapts the Blue Planet documentary series into an underwater adventure game.
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