(This essay has been adapted from my YouTube video on the same subject. If you prefer an audiovisual component to this essay, click here!)

The only time Leon Kennedy hasn’t laughed in the face of danger is toward the end of Resident Evil 4.

It happens right after Ashley Graham, the president’s daughter, is kidnapped for the second time by the leader of the Spanish murder cult Osmund Saddler and his cronies infected with a mind-controlling parasite known Las Plagas. Leon sprints after her, dispatching infected ganados left and right. Until he makes his way into some abandoned ruins. Out of the shadows, a final adversary appears: his former brother-in-arms, Major Jack Krauser.

Krauser and Leon met on a covert ops mission in South America two years prior to the events of Resident Evil 4, tasked by the U.S. government to flush out another zombie pathogen similar to Raccoon City’s T-Virus. During the mission, the U.S. army refused to extract any survivors once the mission was complete, leaving Leon and Krauser the only remaining members of a massacred platoon. Krauser was also dishonorably discharged from the military thanks to an injury sustained during combat. Emasculated, Krauser transforms into the cartoonish villain we know today, someone whose search for ultimate power overcomes any sense of duty. Before their final showdown, Krauser ridicules Leon for being someone who would submit to authority instead of ally with the strong, being someone who would jump through all of these hoops just to save some girl instead of thinking selfishly. Leon and him go back and forth for a while, until Krauser says something that I think truly shakes Leon:

“You’re too soft to do what is necessary.”

What follows is the most intense boss battle of the game. Krauser demonstrates in a previous fight that he’s the only one who’s able to really beat Leon in hand-to-hand combat. Instead of lying in wait to try to slam Leon with a slower weapon like a gun or a giant hammer, Krauser gets up close and personal, slicing through the air with his tactical knife, while evading at the slightest sight of danger, secretly hoping to catch the player unawares with a tripwire or a bear trap hidden around a corner. Krauser fights Leon with the ferocity of a seasoned veteran. And Leon is outmatched.

But Leon somehow wins. Really, Leon only won the fight because Krauser submitted to the parasitic Las Plagas and forgot his soldier training in his second phase, relying on longer, slower attacks instead of something quicker. But Leon’s near defeat made me realize something: Leon has always been underqualified for his job. He’s always been “soft”.

A compelling underdog story is nothing new for video games. But truly engrossing ones use the tools of interactivity and genre that only games can replicate. Limitations to combat abilities, new game mechanics, and overall genre shifts can all create a sense of urgency to make the player assume an underdog role. Resident Evil might be the best example of it: every game Leon stars in, he is set up to fail in a unique way. Most of the time he’s alone, and most of the time he’s infected, injured, or horribly outnumbered. He’s permanently underqualified for his job.

And I think that’s exactly what makes us eat up every game he stars in. We fucking love Leon Kennedy. Every single list of Resident Evil protagonists, Capcom characters, even video game characters at large put Leon at the head of the table. Capcom loves Leon, too. He’s the face of four separate mainline games with more than a few spinoffs. But if I described him to you in a vacuum, he sounds pretty uninteresting on the face of it. He’s corny as hell, and of course, he’s a cop. I’m still deciding whether we will continue to use the AILK acronym: ACAB Includes Leon Kennedy.

But I think the very reason Leon Kennedy is at all interesting and everyone’s babygirl is the way that Capcom leverages his ineptitude to make each of his adventures feel new again. In every game he stars in, he is waylaid by something, mental or physical, and Capcom bends genre around Leon’s character to fit these circumstances. Leon’s games break containment far beyond their normal survival horror moniker to reflect the ultimate underdog. And if being an underdog is an art, Leon is fucking Picasso.

Leon’s gaps in his resume are immediately apparent in his first outing in Resident Evil 2. Here, Leon must nearly singlehandedly mow down a police station full of zombies when all he was doing was trying to be a good employee and show up for work early. What follows is a journey through a police station, a parking garage, back to the police station, the sewer, back to the police station, back to the garage, and then to a secret underground lab that the titan Umbrella corporation set up to use as a testing ground for their bioweapon that they unleashed on Racoon City. Simple stuff really.

It’s almost funny to ask how Leon is not shorthanded in his first adventure. First of all, he’s a relatively inexperienced cop, and he’s not working with much in the ammunition department. If you miss with the gun in the wide-ass gap in between Leon’s quivering crosshair, there’s a limited amount of ammo, crafting materials, and upgradable parts of his gear to work with. Also, Leon is matched up with terrifying enemies in the police station and beyond that first starts with normal zombies, but slowly progresses into lickers that crawl on the ceiling, zombified sewage monsters, and Mr X: a near-invulnerable superhuman hellbent on following Leon wherever he goes and creating nightmare fuel for players in the process.

Yet, Leon handles all of the forthcoming events with ease: the fight with one William Birkin once, twice, and one final time, as well as a final showdown with Mr X. I’m not sure which caused which thing here, but RE2 Remake is my favorite of the franchise partially because I can clear it in about six hours no problem. On multiple playthroughs of the game, these boss fights feel like minor pit stops where the majority of my energy is focused on navigating through the branching paths of each area. But I think the game’s brevity invites discussion on why RE2 is structured this way to begin with, and how the game has to rework its genre around a more naive but scrappy Leon Kennedy.

Resident Evil 2 is a puzzle game. Part of it is how absurd the intricate locks in the police station and other places are – like c’mon this is a sewer power system, why do I have to do a logic puzzle with chess pieces? But actual puzzles a puzzle game does not make alone. The combat encounters in Resident Evil 2 play out like puzzles, where every single shot from a gun, every knife attack, every desperate defense from a zombie around the corner means less resources in the future to stop Leon from getting bitten. Combat becomes a gamble on a first playthrough, but simplifies into a puzzle on multiple.

Take the Greenhouse in the ending laboratory section in the game. There’s combat, puzzle solving, backtracking, and crafting all lumped into one encounter as Leon tries to dissolve the plant life in the greenhouse to get a specific ID chip to progress to the next area. What follows is a balancing act for the player, forcing them to ask the question of when to kill certain zombies, if they should use all their resources on killing the lickers downstairs, what rooms to go to in which order, and doing all that while memorizing puzzle solutions. It’s also a section that doesn’t skimp out on jumpscares, as part of the masterwork of why these games are scary at all is the switchup from highly involved puzzle to a terrifying, grotesque enemy.

Capcom makes its game a precise puzzle because they know that the threat in Resident Evil 2 is seemingly too big for one man to handle, which makes Leon’s actions borderline miraculous. This feeling of prevailing against impossible odds makes sense in the context of Resident Evil 2’s development history. Series architect Shinji Mikami’s original idea for RE2 is only known to industry veterans as “Resident Evil 1.5” , a vision that ended any possible future of a franchise. Very few ideas from this first iteration made it into future entries. Ada Wong does not exist. Marvin Branagh is alive for longer. The two protagonists would not cross paths a single time. Capcom saw reactions to 1.5 and would scrap that project, while Mikami would retreat into a producing role. Leon’s voracious optimism is a direct consequence of this new direction: a blind hope that the series will persist this game. It shows up in the way he interacts with other characters, putting forth a blind trust in troubled characters like Ada Wong because he genuinely believes she will help him. It’s in Leon’s fictional biography, as he asked specifically to be transferred to the RPD because he was interested in solving the murders in the Arklay Mountains from Resident Evil 1.

The commitment to Leon as a character and a puzzle-like experience in Resident Evil 2 turns Resident Evil from a zombie game into an action franchise built on strong characters and well-oiled setpieces and gameplay bones. Leon’s underqualification puts him as the perfect person to be the face of this franchise, and directly untangle future puzzles.

This hands on approach is not the case for what is arguably Leon’s worst outing in the Capcom universe: Resident Evil 6.

What is arguably the weakest game in the Resident Evil saga also contains its largest-spanning plot. Resident Evil 6 is built as a co-op online survival horror/action game with four playable stories: Chris Redfield and Piers, Ada Wong, Sherry Birkin and a new character Jake, and finally Leon and another new character Helena. In this globetrotting story, U.S. national security advisor Derek Simmons plots to kill the president and simultaneously unleash another viral attack on a major city using cloning technology, this time in Shanghai, China. In 6, every campaign kind of limps to the finish line – even for Leon. Enough time has passed since Leon’s first and second outings into the wild that we assume he is equally in top physical condition and a driving force for the plot. But between how the game plays and what the story ends up becoming, he’s a passenger in his own story.

It feels like Leon pays the iron price of the growing scope and ambition of the Resident Evil franchise in 6. Since Capcom went globetrotting in Resident Evil 4 and it paid off, Resident Evil 5 took Chris Redfield to Africa, and the developer released more than a few spinoffs in other countries – including the Darkside Chronicles that features Krauser’s inciting incident. The scope just got too large in 6, and even though it shoves so many ideas into its story, a lot of them end up being half-baked.

For Leon, his story is a greatest hits-lite instead of focusing on any one new idea. He escapes from a university filled with zombies instead of a police station, he solves puzzles in an old cathedral instead of a Spanish castle. Even worse, Leon has no sense of urgency to bring him forward into the conflict, instead relying on Helena Harper, another secret service agent whose sister got turned into a zombie by Simmons.

But the other part of Leon’s backseatedness in RE6 is his tendency to submit to whatever authority is in his closest proximity, and it’s on full display for us here. RE6’s opening scene for Leon is the murder of his close confidant President Adam Benford. After witnessing him turn into a zombie, Leon and Helena are then blamed for his death by Derek Simmons, kickstarting the rest of the events in Leon’s campaign. Interestingly enough, the President was just about to reveal to the world that the United States government covered up the Raccoon City incident and subsequent nuclear blast. Leon is left pinned as Simmons holds his apparent guilt over him like a Sword of Damocles, but is also genuinely surprised that the United States government would do something so violent to cover up a regrettable past action…ahem…which has never happened before. Maybe it might be the time for Leon to reckon with the role the U.S. government played in all the zombie shit? No? He just wants to save his and Helena’s lives.

As much as Leon is hot and at peak physical shape and hot in Resident Evil 6, he cannot drive any plot point home to save his life. Which is a shame because some of the craziest shit in the entire Resident Evil Franchise happens in 6. Another city-wide blast that infects a good portion of Shanghai, Leon and Helena jump across flaming cars, Leon suplexes and gives the people’s elbow to zombies. It’s full of violence and spectacle and blood, so much blood and goo. But these stunts are utterly sauceless without any focus to the story beats. Eventually, Leon and Helena kill Simmons, but since Leon is so passive and Simmons is so uncompelling, there isn’t really a point to it.

This leaves Resident Evil 6 as a kind of arcade shooter on rails. Even though this is an iteration of Leon that’s supposed to feel new, it feels like a painting instead of a moving picture. Leon feels like he’s moving on a pre-planned track because the threat in RE6 is both too big to deal with by himself and he doesn’t have the wherewithal to challenge any of it. Resident Evil 6 reinvents Leon to be a passenger to his story. Even though he is arguably at the peak of his powers. For a time.

This peak withers away eventually, leaving characters and stories to crawl towards an ending of some kind. Like most franchises, they crawl towards their roots. So does Leon.

Resident Evil Requiem is both the greatest hits album that I wanted from Resident Evil 6, but also its swan song. An aging Leon Kennedy becomes an unlikely partner of Grace Ashcroft, an FBI agent investigating a series of murders of Raccoon City survivors. It turns out they were kidnapped and killed by Victor Gideon, a scientist working with the Umbrella Corporation during the original Raccoon City incident. Gideon is deeply interested in a latent version of the T-Virus that shows up in survivors of the blast, affecting even Leon and others like Sherry Birkin. The virus shows up like a mold, withering away Leon’s body into black, patchy husks where his skin used to be. It’s bleak.

The second half of the game is even bleaker, where Gideon transports Grace from his home care center full of zombies to a demolished Raccoon City. Barely anything that resembles the city in Resident Evil 2 is here anymore, and most of this section leaves Leon hunting down any remaining zombies that were pushed under hundreds of feet of rubble.

I’m not the first person to say that this game is a clear sign that the franchise is trying to excise its past. An excellent piece by Harper Jay MacIntyre in Kotaku highlights that Capcom’s modern Resident Evil is almost plagued by the Raccoon City incident.

But while Capcom and Resident Evil can’t let go of Raccoon City, Capcom and Resident Evil fans also can’t seem to let go of Leon.

So Requiem showcases a Leon Kennedy at what seems like the end of his life, while also being at his most brutal. Instead of a knife, Leon now wields an axe that can split zombie heads in two and parry enemy attacks just as easily. Leon now has a takedown move where he can crush an enemy’s head with his leg. Resident Evil fans have been wanting a more brutal Leon. But like the infection taking control of his body, Leon seems hollow on the inside while he’s kicking ass.

There’s a long section of gameplay in Raccoon City before you reach the final section of Requiem where it’s just Leon trying to open a large gate to reach Gideon. To open the gate, Leon must navigate a series of dilapidated buildings, subway tunnels, and what amounts to sand pits. They are all full of zombies, and Leon has free reign to mow them down at will. You might be thinking: “Wow, it’s all the best parts of Resident Evil 4 put back into a game and there’s no story interruption – neat!” Yet I felt differently about this section. It is undeniably cool to be fucking around in a literal sandbox with an unlimited arsenal. But there’s nobody else here, just Leon and the corpse of a city that used to be his. Leon is still at the top of his game in terms of combat skills, but every once in a while he coughs up something fierce that makes you think, “Oh no, is this one going to be it?” All the while the environment around you is washed out with greys and beiges as it fades from memory.

Raccoon City and Leon are equally clinging to their last breaths as they ponder the fallen. Since RE2 and the Raccoon City incident, Leon’s mind has been marred by trauma in watching so many innocent people around him die: Marvin Branagh, Kendo, Krauser, President Benford, and many more that he never met face to face. Not only is the infection that is destroying Leon’s body representative of his years of service, but also its mental effect on him. Requiem even shakes Leon’s previously-held beliefs about his trauma, as Gideon uncovers the reasons behind the Racoon City blast, which apparently no one in the U.S. high defense command ordered directly. It still hits him just as hard, as now he has no one to blame.

What follows the battle sequence in the ruins of the city is the greatest hits album that we “wanted”: a motorcycle chase across the broken city, a fight with the Super Tyrant from RE2, and an encounter with a hero that only the deepest lore-seekers will understand. And even with all of these characters thrown at Leon before his final encounter with Gideon, they still ring hollow in the grand scheme of the corpse of Raccoon City.

MacIntyre writes on these two sections with the following macabre tone, ““The mid-game drops Leon back into Raccoon City where, like a white blood cell, he sweeps through the streets to blow away the lingering hordes of zombies and freaks that lie beneath the dust. What follows can feel like a desperate “best hits” collection of fights—long decayed shamblers, a massive plant beast in the style of the first game’s Plant 42, a grey-faced Tyrant like Resident Evil 2’s iconic pursuer—where Leon systematically uproots the weeds tangling the series’ garden.”

To capture Leon’s experiences here, Resident Evil Requiem, at least the Leon parts, become an over-the-shoulder apocalyptic dad simulator, similar to the Last of Us. Leon should be dead about a million times over, yet somehow the game continues to revive his corpse to keep this franchise chugging along. He feels like an artifact of a bygone world, like Joel did. But the connecting thread through Requiem is the gradual recovery from trauma, from both Grace and Leon. Both try to live on again after tragedy, and cast off the incidents that defined their personalities: Leon with nearly everything that’s happened to him, and Grace with the death of her mother. Leon is unqualified for his task in Requiem because he is too physically beaten down by his trauma and the virus alike. But he feels new because he seemingly is dealing with it directly for the first time. He feels new because the world around him is just as dead as he is on the inside.

Which brings us back to Resident Evil 4. Jack – how could you possibly say that Leon is underqualified for his job in Resident Evil 4? He’s beating the lack of experience allegations, he’s beating the story too big allegations, he’s literally fighting back against Las Plagas every second after big boy Mendez injects it into his body. What can you possibly say now?

Let me start with how I think Capcom warps genre to make Resident Evil 4 unique. RE4 is undeniably an industry-changing game, setting the groundwork for so many third person shooters from then on. But I think RE4 is a management sim. Hold on, what the fuck? I thought you were gonna say a fighting game but a management sim? Let me cook for a second and get the fuck off the screen man. Every moment you’re crafting bullets, trying to determine which gun to use at the right time, what enemies are immediate threats and can be dealt with at close quarters, and what enemies you must snipe at range with the Stingray. That’s management. Each encounter requires a delicate amount of resource appropriation– more of which is required in the original which I did not play. That’s management too. Resident Evil 4 requires the player to be as dextrous and as offensive and defensive as ever, all while doing arguably the most annoying task in any videogame: inventory management.

So how is he failing? Well what is the one thing that you need in a management sim more than anything else? Decision-making. Mental acuity. The drive to make the best decision at all times even if it means letting someone die. That’s something that Leon fails at. And that’s the exact thing that Krauser calls him out on – being burdened by this responsibility when he could just let it go instead. At every turn Leon is taken advantage of by others, beaten by Mendez, Ramon, and Sadler – he’s tricked by Luis and Ada – and he’s led astray by Ashley, who he loses two separate times. But nothing stings for him as much as Krauser’s eventual betrayal and fight. Leon just can’t be him.

But that was never going to be Leon. Leon is the golden boy of Resident Evil.

The purpose of the management sim is not to completely disregard human life to serve your goals. You know what also is inherently there in a management sim game? Managing people! Managing lives! Keeping people going in the fight despite all odds pushing you in the other direction. A good portion of the gameplay in Resident Evil 4 relies on Leon managing what other friendly NPCs are doing at any given moment: where Ashley is in relation to the closet zombie that’s threatening to kidnap her, how Luis is helping with a home invasion of ganados.

I’ve been talking this whole time as if Leon is somehow reinvented for each game he stars in. But that’s not the magic of Resident Evil – the magic of Resident Evil is that Leon remains the same. Krauser asks Leon to essentially give up the bedrock of his personality. Leon represents the best in videogame protagonists because he exemplifies the two most unearthly qualities in people, period – being the ultimate protector, and the undying belief that we will get to an ending that works out for us. Despite each game in the Leon quadrilogy focusing on the different ways to bring Leon down a peg, Leon’s still the same smiling, quippy hero that will find a way to beat the odds, regardless of game genre, regardless of the task ahead of him. He feels new because Capcom finds new ways to show us how cool he is. He’s underqualified for his job to show us that we can still persevere in spite of it.

While doing research for this video, I stumbled across a Resident Evil animated series called Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness, starring a Leon Kennedy post-RE4. I don’t think it’s very good, but I think it might be the best example for why Leon’s ineptitude makes him human, and relatable.

Infinite Darkness is the final permutation of a Leon Kennedy story: a spy thriller. Following an attack on the White House, Leon is paired with two special agents, Shen May and Jason, as they take on a mission to infiltrate China for their alleged use of zombie super soldiers on American soil. What the mission actually becomes is an operation to expose the current U.S. Defense Secretary for using those same zombified soldiers in a vaguely Middle-East war in the fictional country of Penamstan. Jason is one of those soldiers, and wants to show the world the terror of what the U.S. has been up to behind closed doors. It still shows Leon as having a blind deference to U.S. military authority, and he’s still a hottie. But there’s one conversation that he has with Jason on a submarine that enlightened how much I rethought his character.

Jason is explaining to Leon how the world has changed in global politics and war gaming, when he talks to him about his time in Spain: “It was your job to protect those people. But agents like us, we don’t get to think that way any more. It’s a new world.” Leon quickly responds with: “You cannot save a country if you don’t give a damn about the people in it”

Resident Evil inherently treats its characters and subject matter as bags of meat – expendable pawns in a larger game between the good guys and Umbrella. But Leon refuses to accept this fact. Leon embodies exactly how he feels about the people he saves time and time again, flawed but worth saving. Every game reveals a different part of how he is imperfect, with all its genre implications in a puzzle game, a management sim, an arcade shooter, and a third person apocalyptic action game. You cannot play a character right if you don’t give a damn about the people you save. Leon feels new every single time because…well, because he’s the same person in every game he stars in. He’s Resident Evil’s golden boy.

You can’t run in Mixtape.

Why I’m fixating on a movement mechanic that’s of no consequence to 2026’s most polarizing release to date is beyond me. But I found some issue with the fact that you can’t run.

It might be because the experience of Mixtape is one of complete curation. And I found a lot of artifice in this curative process.

I’m definitely not the first to write a thinkpiece about Mixtape, the new narrative-driven walking simulator title from developer Beethoven and Dinosaur. Mixtape centers on teenagers Stacy, Van, and Cassie as they embark on their final day out in their hometown in Northern California before they all go their separate ways after high school. To fully take in their last few days together, they take a walk down memory lane through their highs and lows of high school delinquency. Stacy Rockford, the protagonist, controls the group’s narrative: her ultimate career aspiration is to be a music supervisor, the ultimate soundtrack and vibe curator. And it’s through this carefully curated soundtrack that we experience Mixtape’s story.

Everything about Mixtape is curated as much as Stacy curates the soundtrack to her life. Some things are quite literal, as the levels themselves are physically intertwined with songs from an elder millennial’s CD collection. Joy Division, the Smashing Pumpkins, and Portishead are lenses through which Stacey remembers each of the pivotal moments of her life. But the other curated aspects of Mixtape are more abstract: each level operates on a linear track with little room for player expression outside of each experience, we see each character only in a selected moment in their lives, and each scene moves on from one another with alarming speed.

Which brings me back to not being able to run. I’m sure that developer Beethoven and Dinosaur wanted to force players to sink their teeth into every aspect of the characters’ journey and really take in the John Hughes-ness of their hometown instead of rushing through each set piece. But it got me asking the question to myself – what is the point of a game that curates a vibe if that vibe never clicks?

The vibe of Mixtape obviously speaks to some people. Although I rarely pay attention to this kind of news, Mixtape has one of the strangest critical receptions I’ve seen in my lifetime. On one hand there’s people calling it the greatest game they’ve ever played, while on the other it has people up in arms about what makes a game a game and why Mixtape is not one.

I think Mixtape is fine. Just fine! If I had to give it a score, and I’m not usually one to numerically rank how a game makes me feel, it’s probably around a 6.5 and a 7 for me. The game includes enough cultural touchstones that are relevant to someone from any generation, as well as the unique feeling of leaving the place you call home for the first time. But almost too many of the scenes were truly meant for someone who was in high school in the late 90s, not for me who graduated well into the late 2010s. Which is fine!

What it does not mean is that the game is an absolute objective masterpiece. I don’t subscribe to the fact that you can rate art objectively from any standpoint, but I don’t understand why people would rate it so high even if they grew up in the 90s. There are a multitude of story beats in Mixtape that are completely airless, and I think so many of the initial reactions to the game would not hold up under even the slightest bit of scrutiny. The character Cassie has a subplot in the middle of the story where she’s about to be grounded for life and forced into a gap year by her parents all because of Stacey and Van’s bad influences on her. Yet that only gets resolved by Stacey reciting some song lyrics at Cassie’s father and him reciting some back at her. I find that subplot incredibly asinine.

But at the same time there’s no reason why this game should be as panned as it is by would-be Twitter critics. It pisses me the fuck off when people try to dunk on this game because it only has a jump button instead of guns, the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, and a fleet of microtransactions sucking your wallet dry. Games are an artistic medium, and even while some of the story beats in Mixtape fall flat on their face, that does not mean the game is not a game. One of my favorite moments during Mixtape was just throwing rocks across a pond while taking in the sounds of Monochrome by Lush. The interactivity still matters! And it works in tandem with the less interactive parts like cutscenes and walking around! In short, I’m not interested in debating the merits of walking simulators while I’m listening to this soundtrack.

Unfortunately, Mixtape is the latest in a line of games being thrust into the middle of a made-up culture war where everyone loses. As the folks over at Aftermath say: “By getting punched well above its weight, Mixtape shows that this can happen to any game—and, indeed, that engagement-hungry platforms and content creators demand it. Next week or the week after, there will almost certainly be another One Of These.”

Even though I do not want to relitigate the concept of walking simulators today, I am still annoyed about the lack of interactivity and level of curation within Mixtape. It’s stifling to me.

Trying to do something that a game won’t let you do is somewhat of a revelatory experience. It breaks the illusory wall that separates a player from the bones that support the game and the developers intentions for how the player experiences that digital world. Someone else is controlling my experience. Someone else is curating an experience for me, but I’m trying to make that experience go off its track.

Mixtape curates this experience while trying to make the player understand just how much that experience meant to its characters. Stacy Rockford theoretically is someone who lives in the moment, but is so obsessed with giving that moment a backing track that it feels like we experience an abridged version of her life. She wants us to feel the same exact way that she does, even if it’s to our detriment. And sometimes those pieces never align in the exact correct spot.

When games fail to bring you into the mind of the protagonist, you can see the holes in its infrastructure. A failed joke setup here, a flat character moment there. If an emotional beat really hits – it hits – but if it doesn’t, it fails spectacularly. But this is inevitable when you make a game where curation is the backbone of the experience. Curation in itself is an act of cultural skimming, trying to pick apart the best pieces of art to fit within a specific feeling, moment, or another piece of art. It’s an act that’s inherently artificial, and you can see the artificiality peeking out of every corner of Mixtape despite its walls being painted with a heavy coat of nostalgia.

Critic and media scholar Cameron Kunzelman calls Mixtape’s use of nostalgia like it is – a method to link experiences together through a waning link of intellectual property:

“It sees all of recent history as a thing to sample from in the same way that you would create a vision board on Pinterest or the way you would populate a fictional crowd for LeBron. There are a series of accessible, clear cultural touchstones that can be brought together in a novel formation that will produce a feeling, and if you squint you cannot see the intellectual property seams between them.”

The problem is that this web of IP, this nostalgia is suffocating me as a player-character. The problem is I could still see the gaps and seams in Stacy Rockford’s life.

I think there’s a time and a place for curators. I think the very reason why this fake divide in between gamers is a lack of curators. The expanse between “ball and gun” and “journo slop” exists because games are the last great artistic frontier whose biggest fans are realizing that there are simply too many games to play in one’s lifetime. Videogames are expanding faster than we can keep up with, new genres are being invented out of thin air, and the volume of releases is outstripping our attention spans.

What has come out of this explosion in the art form is endless amounts of grift. Pocketwatching studios to hope that a new game from them fails. Trying to review bomb one of the most popular deckbuilder sequels ever made just because they hired a woman consultant. When people get frustrated as AAA studios around them fail them time and time again due to developer layoffs and broken videogames, they turn that rage into grift, which begets more grift, which begets more grift.

I just need people to know that when you make a game entirely centered around art curation mixed with the Breakfast Club, it might not be everybody’s vibe. And that’s just fine.

Slay the Spire 2

This month, as well as March, has been a sort of out-of-body experience. My astral projection is looking at me, having fallen into a Slay the Spire-shaped hole. And Slay the Spire’s sequel might be the greatest deckbuilder I’ve ever played.

Slay the Spire 2 is an improvement on the original in every single way. The animations are much flashier, the improved card designs look amazing, and the new characters are jam-packed with intricacies and newfound strategies to take down the enemies across the game’s three acts. I was most used to playing the character called The Silent from my experiences with the first game, but new characters like The Necrobinder and The Regent offered some new playstyles that intrigued me. Slay the Spire 2 is also one of the few titles that I’ve purchased while it is still in early access, and it’s interesting to see a game whose overall balance is being shaped around my play experience as I play it. I have also heard nothing but great things about STS2’s multiplayer as well.

Most of all, I’m learning a lot about how I like to play deckbuilders and what I can do to improve. I’ve been consuming a lot of NorthernLion Slay the Spire 2 content, and there’s one lesson that he keeps reiterating that’s actually made me a better player: it doesn’t matter how synergistic your deck is, it matters how fast you kill enemies. I took it to heart because Slay the Spire 2 has so many synergies between cards that make you feel like you’re creating the greatest build of all time. But building around synergies risks a run crashing and burning if you have one bad draw.

I’ve put about 40 hours into the game so far with only a few ascension wins, so I’d imagine I’ll put at least 40 more in it before the year wraps up.

Moss Moss

Moss Moss was a cute title I saw in the Itch.io storefront, starring a cute sentient moss ball that’s trying to cover the rest of the known world with his moss. This is also the first title that I’ve played on the PICO-8, which feels like a blast from the past in terms of recreating a retro game aesthetic. I’m trying not to delve too far into the mechanics of a 50-minute-long game, but developer Noel Cody’s Itch bio “small games that hide secrets,” will tell you all you need to know about how fun this game’s levels are to traverse and hunt for hidden gems.

People of Note

I’m slowly starting to remind myself that I actually do not hate turn-based/JRPGs, I’m just unfamiliar with them. I decided to test the waters again with People of Note – a take on what Persona would look like if every character, story beat, and overall world would look like if everything was themed around music.

In People of Note, you play as Cadence, a pop singer who’s trying to win her city’s version of American Idol. Cadence is disillusioned with the contest and the state of pop music at large, as she faces impossible odds against what she thinks is the industry plant boyband that runs the city. What follows is Cadence branching out beyond her city’s music scene, teaming up with rock stars and DJs alike to find a new sound that will tug at the city of Chordia’s heartstrings.

Turn-based RPGs don’t click with me often because I often write off the moment-to-moment gameplay as just clicking one button for about twelve minutes and then moving on to the next encounter. That’s not the case in People of Note. As Cadence teams up with other musical artists, there’s a surprising amount of variety between turns as characters can attack, use special moves, and apply buffs and debuffs alike. Each turn also allows for certain attacks to be magnified depending on what genre the backing tracks happen to be. For example Cadence can do more damage on a pop track, while her rocking partner Fret can apply a defense buff to both of them on the same turn, and vice versa for a rock song.

Outside of the moment-to-moment gameplay, People of Note also is just a very quirky and happy time. There’s tons of cute references to musical genres, artists, and overall habits of musicians. Fret, one of the side characters, gets his backstory after his classic rock band split up because his bandmate wanted to pursue Math Rock. The K-Pop club is flooded with paparazzi. Cadence can find hidden creatures called “Weird Owls” backed by an accordion soundtrack that are almost one-to-one recreations of Weird Al parodies. I mean c’mon man.

I haven’t finished People of Note just yet, but I’m planning on knocking the rest of it out this month.

Horse Magnifier

I like Horse Magnifier. You magnify horses and they make funny shapes. The game is free. You should play Horse Magnifier.

Planet of Lana II

Planet of Lana II: Children of the Leaf was one of my most anticipated indies of the year after it was revealed in 2025. I wrote a ton about this in my review of the game over on GameCritics.com, but I wanted to add a few things here to complete the picture of what I was trying to paint with this review.

Everything about Planet of Lana II explodes compared to the original: the art style, the puzzles, the plot – not all to the narrative’s benefit. But it is undeniably a bigger swing, a larger expansion of the ideas in the original. So much of my playtime in Children of the Leaf made me think of the Empire Strikes Back. Between an evocative woodwind soundtrack and the beautifully intricate environments that surround Lana and his cat companion Mui, it’s hard not to draw that comparison.

If you want to hear more thoughts from me about Planet of Lana II, my full review on GameCritics is linked here.

Samson

There’s not a ton to write about for Samson – I purchased this game at the beginning of April coming away impressed with the trailer. What I thought I was going to get was a more slimmed-down, gritty brawler set in what seems like a backwater industrial town. The combat looked brutal and chunky, which is exactly what I like in games like this.

What I got was an absolutely broken mess. Samson was littered with bugs on initial release, forcing developer Liquid Swords to release a bug fix roadmap less than 24 hours after the game’s launch. Eventually I will return to it once the game works.

Vampire Crawlers

To thematically bookend this post with another roguelike deckbuilder, I checked out Vampire Crawlers, the deckbuilding spinoff of Vampire Survivors from developer poncle.

So much of the discourse around Vampire Survivors has branded it as a “podcast game”, a game that you can easily play while consuming content on a second screen. Survivors put players in the shoes of an intrepid hero that had autofire weapons circling around them, and the only decision-making required was choosing between three new weapons once you gained enough EXP. The game’s simplicity is not always a detriment, I strongly believe that games of all genres deserve entry points that are approachable and have a defined time limit (about 30 minutes in the case of Vampire Survivors), even if it inherently comes with a slew of dopamine and a lack real decision-making.

With Vampire Crawlers, poncle took the characters and lore of Vampire Survivors into something far more intellectually demanding. You can play Vampire Crawlers like Survivors. You can click on cards that are the same weapons and items from the first game in any random order to kill enemies fast. But you will lose faster if you play that way. To win, Crawlers is asking for much more than it did in Survivors, it’s asking for your attention. Each turn is a delicate balance of dealing damage, increasing your stats, and blocking incoming damage. But the game also doesn’t give up what makes Survivors such a compelling title in the first place – the frenetic energy behind it. Even though each turn feels like more of a delicate balance between all the competing goals, there’s still a feeling of entropy whenever you manage to pull off a hitless encounter. That sense of forward progress is still there, but I feel like I have more agency in it now.

Safe to say, Vampire Crawlers is a big hit for me. I’ve gotten about half the achievements so far, and I will be playing it through to the end.

And that’s it for April! I hope everyone had a great month and has an even better May.

There’s one moment about halfway through playing Pokopia that nearly brought me to tears.

Pokemon is not typically a franchise that would generate this kind of a response for me. It’s not a game that requires introspection: I focus on catching Pokémon, battling trainers, and earning gym badges – all while letting the “vibe” of Pokémon happen to me.

But Pokopia is a different beast. Combining Minecraft, Animal Crossing, and Pokémon would be doing the game a disservice. In Pokopia, there’s no battles, no gym leaders, nothing except a tattered world waiting for the player to bring it back to life. As the player character Ditto, I reconstructed buildings, rebuilt habitats to give shelter to lost Pokémon, and gained new abilities to reconnect Pokémon to each other. Taking such an active role in a game’s world instead of being a passenger through its branching paths by nature encourages more introspection. Little by little, I restored life to what seemed to be a nameless region, and I thought about what this region could be.

One of the starting areas in Pokopia is called “Bleak Beach.” When I got there, the entire beach was covered in a dark overcast of clouds, regardless of the time of day. Here, I had to restore power to various light sources, to help “wake up” the rest of the area’s pocket monster residents. It’s a perfectly normal beach, except for a large cruise ship in the distance.

Burdened with curiosity, I built a long bridge over to the ship. It didn’t take long for me to find out the ship’s true name: the S.S. Anne.

I was back in the S.S. Anne. I was back in Vermillion City. I was back in the world of Pokémon Red and Blue, but a version lost to time and memory.

I’m sure major game and movie franchises were aware of their “franchise-ness” before the mid 2020s, but lately it feels it’s only become a subject of ridicule to make more content. Few franchises take appropriate next steps and realize their output is getting stale. Wonder Man is one of the first examples of a normal show that just happens to be in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Yet what fewer and fewer franchises do is actively kill their existing worlds to remind consumers that they will not last forever.

The first time I noticed this came was from Jacob Geller’s video essay “Dark Souls 3 is Thinking of Ending Things.” Here, Geller proposes that Dark Souls 3 is actively trying to kill its past by presenting elements from Dark Souls 1 and 2 in dark, twisted ways. He argues the third entry is the last gasp of a dying world, forced by its players to keep it alive by stoking the game’s embers. Like most things, Hidetaka Miyazaki was ahead of the curve, as many other games would follow in its footsteps – including another one from this year.

2026’s Resident Evil Requiem is the ninth main entry in the Resident Evil Franchise, and it too is trying to kill its past. The game follows dual protagonists, one being an FBI agent Grace Ashcroft starring alongside the franchise’s golden boy, Leon S. Kennedy. Here, Grace and Leon investigate a final, buried threat in a long-dead Racoon City. But instead of a completely new threat for Leon, it plays like a greatest hits album: a chase across the city, a clash with the Super-Tyrant, and encounters with characters that only the lore-seekers of the franchise will know and love.

Requiem feels like a simultaneous celebration and swan song of the franchise. Leon and Grace face off against what seems like the last dregs of the Raccoon City incident, a leftover, zombified researcher named Victor Gideon. The second half of the game takes place in a Raccoon City where half of it is wiped off the map by a nuclear blast. It’s also revealed that Leon is dying from a long-dormant version of the G-virus, turning him into a husk. Requiem shows a franchise lynchpin stripped bare of its typical supporting cast.

But maybe that was the right call. So much of Capcom’s release portfolio in the past five years has been built upon the Raccoon City saga with its remake of Resident Evil 2, 3, and 4, all echoes of the original Raccoon City incident. Even the banger survival horror titles 7 and 8 can’t let go of their roots back to the original three games. Writer Harper Jay MacIntyre harps on this and more in her Kotaku piece, “Resident Evil Requiem Confronts The Franchise’s Burdensome Past To Save Its Future.” MacIntyre argues that by taking players into the heart of the desolated, destroyed Raccoon City, the franchise might finally be free of these chains for good and allowed to reach unforeseen places.

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Pokopia is far less brutal than Dark Souls or Resident Evil by nature of the source material. Yet the reasons for the disintegration, or destruction of the past is far more bleak.

The Kanto region in Pokopia is littered with debris. Thanks to widespread natural disasters, buildings are destroyed or covered in sand, there’s few recognizable landmarks, and everything is in disarray. These disasters left Earth uninhabitable for humans. To save the Pokémon, the professors from each region banded together and put all the Pokémon in a PC, while all of humanity left Earth behind in a spacecraft.

What’s left is a warped mirror image of Kanto. No matter how many Pokémon you find in the wild, no matter how many buildings you restore, it will not be the same place that you played through in Pokémon Red and Blue. No more gym leaders, no more quirky NPCs with questionable dialogue, no more speedrunning skips. Here, Pokopia isn’t as focused on killing the past more than it is exploring what happens when its player base forgets about its world. Against all odds, life goes on.

Since Red and Blue’s release in 1996, there’ve been ten generations of Pokémon games, countless spinoffs, and numerous formats for players to engage with beyond casual play. Every new entry encourages players to abandon the old. Developer Game Freak abandoned these previous franchise entries as well. They delist older titles on unavailable consoles like the 3DS, forcing players to digitally emulate them. But if players do that, Nintendo's legal team has a field day, punishing genuine fans of the franchise. The Pokémon Company and Game Freak force its previous entries to be forgotten with the sole exception of nostalgia bait remakes. Pokémon as a franchise isn’t as focused on killing the past as much as it teases players with an idealized, modernized version of it.

It might seem ironic then that Pokopia even got made in the first place. Why would Game Freak want to create a game focused on a dying Kanto region? I believe it’s thanks to Omega Force, one of the few times Game Freak has handed the reins off to another developer. Thankfully they took a big enough swing to make a Pokémon game that I somehow see myself in.

We are the Pokémon in Pokopia. All around me I can see echoes of the past: Pewter City covered in ash, the Fighting Dojo in Saffron thrown into the sky. Through the various modes of play and emulation, we continue to populate abandoned digital worlds. They forget, but we remember it all. Life goes on. Some digital worlds can’t ever truly be killed.

Sitting on the S.S. Anne in Bleak Beach reminded me of how much time has passed since I first played Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen, and how those worlds can change with time. What normally in Red and Blue is a ship full of trainers, a rival battle, and a weird massage with the ship’s captain to get a crucial item has now turned into something better. A place for Pokémon to hang out, a place for me to live, and a place for all of us to coexist. A place to remember whatever we can remember of the past.

1. Press New Game. Welcome to your journey of the hardest game ever made!

2. Pick your starting class, customize your character, and choose your starting relic. But don’t choose a magic user. Otherwise your time playing this game doesn’t hold any weight.

3. Begin your journey in the Undead Asylum. Work your way through the moseying undead. Light your first bonfire. Get hit by the boulder on the way to the second floor after going to said bonfire and lose half your health.

4. Fight the Asylum Demon. Die.

5. Respawn at the bonfire. Make your way through the asylum once more and accidentally roll off the side of the building just before you fight Asylum Demon again.

6. Repeat steps 4-6 about three more times. Don’t look anything up.

7. Finally beat the Demon after using up all your Estus Flasks. Travel to the end of the asylum and get picked up like the baby bird hatchling you are.

8. Get dropped in Firelink Shrine. Sit tight for a bit before choosing where to go next, either towards some zombies or some larger-looking skeletons.

9. Opt for the skeletons, and be quickly shown the error of your ways. Don’t. Look. Anything. Up.

10. Bang your head against the wall against the skeletons while farming souls along the way to upgrade your character. Make it to the Catacombs. Dodge enemies flying at you from each direction and throw out every expletive you can possibly recall from the recesses of your mind to try to beat them. Realize nothing works. But hey, you’re playing the “hardest videogame.” Maybe you’ll get it next time.

11. Finally relent and ask why it’s so difficult to get through the Catacombs on Reddit. Know that you’re not looking for anything game-breaking, just which is the best way to approach the next section of the game. Be unsurprised that you’re told that you went the wrong way. Realize it’s 12:30pm and you have work tomorrow, and you just wasted three hours of your life by playing a videogame out of order.

12. Respawn at Firelink Shrine. Sit for a bit while you ponder your life decisions up to this point. For the first time, notice there’s another NPC there at the shrine with you. He is called the Crestfallen Warrior, whom you go up to speak to. You think he offers a reprieve, maybe some definite answers as to where to go next, but it’s just more despair:

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“Well, what do we have here? You must be a new arrival. Let me guess. Fate of the Undead, right? Well, you’re not the first. But there’s no salvation here. You’d have done better to rot in the Undead Asylum… But, too late now…”

Forget the rest of what he says as your gaze drifts away from the shrine. Notice the sun’s rays streaming in from above, the foliage blanketing the area like a natural umbrella. There’s no one here. But there could also be no one here yet. A dark hub world without a clear purpose.

Be transported back to 2007. It’s Christmas morning, and your parents have gotten your family a Wii with a copy of Super Mario Galaxy alongside it. You have never been happier. You recall booting up the game, going through the incredible opening level where Bowser lifts Peach’s castle out of the ground and Mario is knocked into space, drifting forever.

Recall the Comet Observatory, the game’s hub world. At the start, the observatory is dark, desolate, with nothing but a verdant terrarium representing the only available levels to Mario. The only music backing Mario’s jumps is a lighter-than-air melody on flute and vibraphone. But as more and more levels and observatories within the larger structure are unlocked, the observatory lights up more and more, and additional melodies are added on top of the original. Soon, the entire Comet Observatory is blasting a powerful overture, only partially reminiscent of your humble beginnings.

Feel a similar quiet, eerie silence when you sit at Firelink. Recall that you have not had as fun playing videogames since picking up Super Mario Galaxy.

Interrogate yourself on how to replicate that experience.

Remember that even with all of your original excitement with getting this game, you were even more excited to play it with your siblings. Recall that so much of what you love about videogames is the community-building, talking to people about what you love, what makes you feel things. Mario Galaxy was an incredible experience that has staying power to this day because you had this built-in community to rely upon and share emotional experiences with. Introspect on why that sense of community is gone from your life.

Understand that the “git gud” mentality around Soulsborne games has been warped. Recognize that these games reward individual struggle and triumph, but can easily be co-opted into a narrative of deliberate exclusion to anyone who dares to ask a question about the most basic concepts. Moreover, know that everyone who buys this narrative completely disregards entire mechanics of the games that exist to build community. Summoning, bloodstains, messages: these games are about working with each other to overcome combat, build upon lore, and make dick jokes.

Realize as you’re sitting in Firelink that this purpose got away from you. You got too focused on beating the game the “right way”, instead of just beating it to have fun. Realize that maybe the best part of playing these kinds of games are these moments for reflection among the chaos. Be filled with a new sense of determination, but without hesitancy to rely upon your brethren who have taken this journey before.

13. Talk to the Crestfallen Warrior again, realize you missed entire lines of dialogue telling you where to go. Realize you need to go left and reach the Undead Burg to ring the Church Bells.

14. Travel up to Undead Burg, make your way across the tops of the buildings. Kill the Taurus Demon surprisingly easily with a well-timed plunging attack. Get annihilated by the dragon’s fire afterwards because you forgot to look both ways.

15. Avoid Bed of Chaos for as long as you can.

In a statement to Sony Interactive Entertainment staff on Thursday last week, CEO Herman Hulst announced that PlayStation and Sony would be shutting down BluePoint Games.

BluePoint seemed like a lynchpin of the PlayStation ecosystem even before Sony acquired the studio. Known for remakes of classic PlayStation titles like Shadow of the Colossus and Demon’s Souls, BluePoint helped introduce new players to classic games while cashing in on the nostalgia that so many older players had for these somewhat antiquated games. For me, BluePoint existed as a vehicle of game preservation, especially for a digital-forward industry that’s just as likely to leave a game lost to time instead of preserving it digitally.

So, what happened? Sony acquired BluePoint in 2021, and internal reports indicate that BluePoint immediately started work on a “God of War live-service game.”

A God of War live-service game. You have actually got to be kidding me. Typing that just now made me throw up in my mouth a bit.

There is no realm in any world that I could imagine that would make me believe that a project like that would work. Because of course it didn’t. Sony canceled the project in 2025, and now there’s nothing left of a studio that produced some of the best remakes in the past decade.

We can point to any number of the studio acquisitions and closures in the past five years and state that specific event was the marker of decline for the videogame industry: Arkane Austin, Monolith Productions, EA’s private acquisition from the Saudi Public Investment Fund. But BluePoint’s closure affected me more severely than I thought.

I think BluePoint’s closure is a true turning point. Not even nostalgia is a moneymaker anymore. There’s only one path forward according to the investor-driven world we live in now: live-service.

Remakes Aren’t Cutting it Anymore

The video game remaster, remake, reforged or whatever the next Final Fantasy 7 part is going to be, is a new staple of the games industry. If we think about Sony and the extremely limited catalogue of the PlayStation 5, remakes made up about one fifth of all PS5 exclusives because there were only about five games, and Demon’s Souls was the launch title.

Momentum hasn’t slowed down industry-wide. The 2020s have had a slew of remakes of high-profile games being the only items released in months: Metal Gear Solid III Delta, Dragon Quest 7 Remake, Silent Hill 2 Remake, and more. Some companies even use remakes as a load-bearing pillar of their games portfolio. Capcom has made this an essential part of their output every year through the Resident Evil remakes.

Yet the reasons for pursuing remakes to begin with are a double-edged sword. Some versions of games reimagined for the 2020s are, without a doubt, the best way to play that game point blank period. The Demon’s Souls Remake is one of those examples for me. First off, I can’t play the other version on my current consoles. But even if I could, every time I see the extremely janky gameplay of the original version, I cannot understand why I would put myself through that torture when I can just play a remake that’s made for modern game consoles. But other remakes seem like soulless cash grabs in comparison. In the case of Metal Gear Solid III Delta – the remastered edition of III is a perfectly playable experience. Furthermore, the remake is a version of a game licensed by Konami that original creator Hideo Kojima has basically no say over.

Nostalgia, much like optimism, has always been exploited in the games industry. While I do enjoy when old favorites get upgraded graphics, I understand that it’s just a low-effort way to boost profits. Sometimes I’m willing to take the bait. But taking advantage of nostalgia is a pervasive trend across media, not just games, and it makes playing these titles sting just a little bit.

BluePoint was a studio solely focused on remaking classic titles to appeal to modern audiences. The Shadow of the Colossus Remake got me hooked onto Fumito Ueda’s art style and games, since I never had a PlayStation system growing up. I had a similar experience with Demon’s Souls.

So then why, in Sony’s infinite wisdom, did they close down a studio that would have obviously been a financial boon for them? Because there’s always a bigger fish, and that fish is live-service games.

The Live-Service Obsession

There was a revelation about five years ago that gaming companies took to heart – games can and will function as micro-economies if the conditions are correct.

It started with games like CounterStrike, focusing on cosmetic skins for guns and knives done by opening cases. Since then the market has exploded, where rare cases and weapon skins can sell for thousands of dollars or more. Now that focus on microtransactions has bled into other games as well – the main culprits today being Fortnite and Roblox. Fortnite generates $5 to $6 billion annually for Epic, and Roblox’s market cap is well over $40 billion. But executives at Valve, Epic, and Roblox have even more proof points, as the insanely large player bases of Roblox, Fortnite, and CS back up the revenue numbers.

Since executives know that pursuing live-service games are such cash-cows, it’s no wonder that every major AAA provider wants to make them now. But there’s another key to the above games’ success that industry giants have little of: time.

CSGO wasn’t some sort of overnight sensation. It took years to build up a player base from nothing into the millions it has today. Roblox is the same way. Fortnite might even seem like an outlier, given its massive spike in popularity following the Battle Royale update in 2018. But Epic’s flagship title could have easily fizzled out without constant work to maintain its player base, regularly update content, and manage play expectations. It takes years of work to make a live-service game popular, and even more time and money to make it last.

Sony and Microsoft don’t seem to have it in them to make that commitment. They want results fast and cheap, but the games must reflect the inverse in quality: methodical and expensive-looking. We see ten times the stories about a live-service game failing over one succeeding. Highguard, the most recent example, is a title that industry executives and high-profile figures in the industry had such a hard-on for that Geoff Keighley unveiled its launch trailer as THE CLOSING TRAILER at the Game Awards. Yet just last week, developer Wildight Entertainment detailed mass layoffs at the studio.

It seems like everything that led to BluePoint’s demise was set in stone the moment Sony asked for a live-service title out of a studio whose bread and butter was remakes. I’m very sad that this studio got shut down unjustly. I’m sad for every studio, frankly, that has to deal with the whims of investors instead of the quality of games you make. In Hulst’s email to Sony staff, he followed the studio’s closure announcement by praising BluePoint for the high quality games it produced. If we’ve learned anything over the past five years in the games industry, it doesn’t matter the quality of games that you make, or whether they’re financial successes or failures, these studios are just collateral damage.

For me, BluePoint’s closure is a macabre turning point for the industry. Because if you can’t win on nostalgia bait, what can you win on?

It’s a game where every aspect of its construction exists to confuse me: its story, characters, visual style, and gameplay. Alan Wake’s first journey involves the author retreating to a sleepy seaside Washington town to break through some writer’s block. Instead he is terrorized by a ghostly entity called the Dark Presence, who causes him to develop amnesia about a secret draft of a book he wrote named Departure. The game is a garbled mess of darkness, weird PS3 era gameplay quirks, and every minor character calling Alan some name of a long-dead prolific writer. No thank you I would not like to wield the wonkiest gun mechanic ever put into a videogame while enemies are calling me Hemingway from behind four different layers of lighting that makes seeing anything impossible. The first game has almost reached camp status, and I rarely think that games can be campy – I don’t think we’ve gotten to that point as an artistic medium yet.

Alan Wake 1 is a necessary evil to set up its sequel. For every Dune Part II, Top Gun: Maverick, and Mad Max: Fury Road, there needs to be expository first films to set up a climactic story arc that a sequel of these calibers can deliver. For Alan Wake, its sequel took everything that I hated about the first game and turned it into a strength. Its darkness fits the new survival horror gameplay much better. Alan talking his ass off in the original fit into the narrative much cleaner in the sequel. The annoying side characters of Barry and Alan’s wife, Alice, are replaced with more intelligent and quippier characters in Saga Anderson and Alex Casey.

But what surprised me the most was what Alan Wake 2 didn’t deliver on: its ending. Alan Wake 1’s ending was one of the few things I actually appreciated about its story – it took a self-obsessed auteur and made him have a moment of sacrifice and mental clarity. He throws himself into the lake that the game’s main antagonist, the Dark Presence, came from. He saves the rest of the town of Bright Falls, Washington, he saves his friends, he saves his wife.

Wake’s follow-up journey ends on a similar note. The Dark Presence terrorizes Bright Falls once again, so Alan must write again to save the world. While he is stuck in the Dark Place beneath the lake in Bright Falls, he loops in a co-writer, FBI agent Saga Anderson, and together they work to write a duology and stop the Dark Presence once again. The story ends with Alan trapping the Dark Presence inside himself, and Saga kills him with a mystical bullet. But it’s not over when Alan kicks the bucket.

At the end of Alan Wake 1, Alan’s final line of dialogue is “It’s not a lake, it’s an ocean.” He’s describing the endless nature of the Dark Presence and the trillions of artistic words fed into its gaping maw. Alan ends his sequel in a similar way: “it’s not a loop, it’s a spiral.” Alan knows that the Dark Presence is too strong to banish it forever, so in a metatextual stroke of mastery, he calls out the player to keep playing the game over and over again, knowing that instead of being stuck in a loop forever, there will be an end to everyone’s suffering at the end of a spiral.

The final version of that spiral is Alan Wake 2: The Final Draft, a New Game + expansion to the base game that delivers an ending that I dislike. Not because it gives an unsatisfying ending, but because it tries to satiate gamers with an overly satisfying one.

Ingrained in every single Remedy title (Max Payne, Quantum Break, Alan Wake, Control) is a sense of melancholy. The design and art direction choices certainly play a part in this suffocating environment. But at each game’s center is a known fact: nothing can come without sacrifice. Everyone must give up something in each story that is integral to the rest of the plot. Life is oppressive in the Remedy universe. Max Payne thrusts the player into a story riddled with drug addiction and dead family members, Control ends with Jesse Faden giving up her freedom as a normal person to sit in the seat of paranatural bureaucracy that may drive her clinically insane like her predecessors.

So then why, at the end of Alan Wake’s spiral, does he get to live out a happy ending?

In the final act of the Final Draft, all seemingly goes as normal. Alan and Saga rewrite an ending to the book that Alan’s evil alter-ego is trying to bring about the end of the world with. The Dark Presence enters Alan’s Writer’s Room in the body of Saga’s partner, Alex Casey, and quickly shifts into Alan’s body. Saga shoots Alan with the “Bullet of Light,” a new plot device meant to put the Dark Presence back where it belongs and kill Alan alongside it. But then after being shot point blank with the bullet, Alan just gets up and leaves?

Is Alan deserving of this ending?

When it comes down to it, I think Alan Wake 2 is an interrogation of what it means to be obsessive about one’s creations to the point of ruin. Before the events of the first game, Alan was a bestselling writer with his Alex Casey crime novel series. He was someone who genuinely considered himself to be a great writer, but he still wanted something more. It’s why he went to Bright Falls in the first place – he thought he had writer’s block so bad that he needed to see a doctor to medically fix it. It makes it feel like a miracle that he’s written anything, especially a draft of a novel written by a ghostly entity masquerading as himself. Knowing where Alan’s story went was why I was willing to put up with so much of the game’s flaws in the first place.

But in the sequel, Alan isn’t just trying to create something, he’s trying to create something perfect. He’s been trying to escape the Dark Place, where he’s been trapped in for over a decade, and he thinks the only way to leave is by creating the perfect story.

What’s worse is that Alan actively brings down people to his level to try to envelop them into his literary nightmare. Alan Wake 2 features dual protagonists, where his counterpart Saga Anderson is an upstanding citizen whose life has been turned upside down by Alan Wake’s story. She is an FBI agent with a loving husband and daughter. But that all changes when her story threads get into Wake’s hands – she becomes part of the Bright Falls community, she has a long-lost great uncle and grandfather, she’s divorced, her daughter drowns to death. It’s not just Saga’s life that’s been turned upside down, Alan’s fictional Alex Casey becomes fully realized as Saga’s partner, tortured by a fictional representation of him. A group of townsfolk in Bright Falls band together to form a cult to fight back against the creatures from the Dark Place, partially because of Alan. The icing on the cake happens in Alan’s third chapter, where we find out that his wife, Alice, allegedly took her own life in response to the creations coming out from the Dark Place.

Alan’s persistence in creating draft after draft after draft plunges Bright Falls and the people he cares about into more suffering and darkness. But he’s always willing to take that gamble because these people, at least to him in the short term, will always just be characters in his story. He’s operating from a place of supreme insecurity, where he thinks that everybody is just pawns in his game, so he’s allowed to take the time to create the perfect narrative. So, again, why does he get a happy ending? Where is the justice?

Bad things happen to good people. Good things happen to bad people. People aren’t good or bad, they’re complex beings that contain multitudes – but they’re also easily characterized by their worst or best actions.

Playing Alan Wake 2 reminded me of these truths. Almost as easily as terrible things like Jesse Faden being stuck in the Federal Bureau of Control and Max Payne watching Mona Sax bleed out in his arms, equally good things can happen to characters in the Remedy universe. Alan can find something at the end of the spiral. Did I wish that someone paid the iron price? Yeah, absolutely.

But Alan Wake 2’s core theme that ties everything together is uncomfortability. The uncomfortability that someone else is writing your life story, in the case of Alan. The uncomfortability that every positive aspect of your life can easily be turned into a weakness, in the case of Saga. At the end of the day, having a story that felt like it should reach a dark ending and find light instead makes me feel uncomfortable. Maybe that’s just the Remedy “magic.”

I did not like Alan Wake 1, but I suffered through it to get to its sequel. Now that Alan Wake’s arc finally culminates in the Final Draft, it delivered an ending that I thought missed the mark. But maybe the end goal wasn’t designed to give the characters what they deserved. Maybe it was to leave you suffering instead.

January feels like it has been the longest month in recent memory. Between being an American citizen that’s been paying way too much attention to the horrible national news and the recent cold snap in New York City, January has been moving at a snail’s pace for me. But to make up for the slog of the past month, I played some games to pass the time. Outside of two AAA titles that I played for an upcoming YouTube video, I focused on playing indie games this month. Nearly all of them were bangers in their own way.

I’ve wanted to start this grab bag series for a long time, and the start of 2026 seemed like the best opportunity to do so. So for my first piece of 2026, I’m going to tell you about a few of the indie games I’ve played this month, if they were a fun time, and where you can find them.

MIO: Memories in Orbit

For me, the best formula for an engaging Metroidvania isn’t a title entirely focused on great environmental storytelling, good writing, or even beautiful world design. They just need to have a little guy that the player can control. That’s it, just a small guy in a big world. The criteria applies to so many Metroidvanias that I adore: Hollow Knight, Crypt Custodian, Hollow Knight: Silksong, and Tunic.

MIO: Memories in Orbit hits that criteria right on the nose. In MIO, you play as the titular small robot, MIO, that’s woken up in a dying robotic world. Through his journey, the player needs to slowly wake up the rest of the colossal ship that the game takes place in – an ark holding the remnants of a robotic civilization. I’ve only had about five hours to play with the game, but those five hours are extremely well spent.

By far the most excellent part of MIO is the floatiness of the protagonist, only exaggerated by the environment he’s in. The ark that the game takes place in is massive, and developer Douxe Dixiemes allows MIO to explore the farthest reaches of the ark thanks to great movement: ice slides, grapple points, and overall floaty jumping mechanics help create this sense of weightlessness. MIO strikes the balance between combat and exploration so eloquently by also implementing this floaty movement into how combat encounters are structured. And all these encounters are backed by a borderline angelic soundtrack from composer Nicolas Gueguen. It’s an excellent title that I can’t wait to complete this month. You can get it on Steam now.

KACIPBARA

Kacipbara is a very short horror game about a guy feeding his chickens, and then you get into a fight with a capybara. I won’t say anything else about the game to not spoil any more surprises, but it’s equal parts hilarious and terrifying. Kacipbara was also made in an extremely short amount of time (I believe in less than 48 hours?), and it made me interested in BADCATGAMES’ upcoming horror game EMPTY PLATE. You can play it for free right now on Itch.io.

Hide and Luig

Following up that Itch.io game with another banger from the indie games site I’ve been checking out recently: Hide and Luig. This is a puzzle game from developer Dialobic where you just have to find this funny little bald guy named Luig. It’s a point-and-click puzzler where solutions to finding Luig are hidden beneath giving certain characters certain items, finding hidden items tucked behind corners, and solving smaller puzzles within puzzles like combination locks and spatial reasoning situations.

I love puzzle games, especially ones that have this sort of weird charm behind them. Hide and Luig, and the rest of Dialobic’s games, are hand-drawn and have a semi-cartoony feel to them. Dialobic also has a pretty extensive catalogue built up on Itch, so I’ll be sure to check more of their games out soon.

Loddlenaut

Loddlenaut is Power Wash Simulator but you’re cleaning up the ocean — what’s not to like!

In the game you play as a scuba diver fresh out of training from everyone’s favorite megacorporation, but instead of a bonus, I got sent to clean up their mess they made on an ocean planet. This game came out a while ago, but I enjoyed the hell out of it. It’s a more bite-sized version of Power Wash, and it’s so much more emotionally gratifying.

It’s so gratifying because not only are you cleaning up the ocean (hell yeah) you also get to befriend little axolotl creatures to repopulate the ocean planet (even more hell yeah). Every ounce of pollution that I cleaned up felt like I was not only doing the Loddles a favor, but also that I was removing the stain that this corporation left on this beautiful ocean planet. This was one of the few games that I actually finished this month, and it took me about four and a half hours even though it felt like no time at all. You can play Loddlenaut on Steam and Nintendo Switch right now.

Big Hops

I absolutely adore 3D platformers, but I am equally disappointed that Nintendo has had a pseudo-monopoly on quality 3D platformers for the past five years. Big Hops, a 3D platformer where you play as a frog named Hop sucked into another dimension, hopefully bucks that trend.

Hop’s journey isn’t entirely unique to the genre. You’ve got your standard open-world platforming mechanics: vine swinging, chaining together jumps. You’ve got your massive open world with colorful cel-shaded environments. You’ve also got your standard plot from something out of Mario Sunshine – a malevolent but somehow also friendly creature plucks you out of your world and thrusts you into the next one just like that. But it feels wholly new, thanks to some great movement mechanics.

What sticks out about Big Hops is speed. It seems like the developers completely forgot to put a cap on Hop’s momentum in each level – as chaining together jumps and dashes can fling Hop across the map in seconds. These acrobatics gave me a feeling of genuine wonder and made me feel like I could break entire levels with how fast I could hop.

Ultimately, the game is a mechanical delight, but I’m still waiting on the story and overall objectives to tie it all together. While the platforming is sound and the open worlds look great, many of these environments feel empty in the grand scheme of things. I’m looking forward to finishing it and being proven wrong. You can play Big Hops on Itch and Steam now.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

I know, I know, this barely counts as an indie game. But I finally finished Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 after a long break, and my god what an absolute masterwork of a game this is.

It took me a while to get the feel of the combat down. Every fight in this game requires an amount of patience and pacing and planning that you’re not ready for. It’s equal parts Dark Souls-level of parrying and timing with Final Fantasy-level slogs of in-game battle time. But just before the end of Act 1, I had a eureka moment that made me rethink every single turn-based RPG that I had played up to that point. Final Fantasy 7 remake, Persona 5, and more were unlocked in my brain. During each combat encounter, where I thought I was just grasping at straws trying to figure out what does the most damage, it became an interesting puzzle to solve, slotting in characters and figuring out synergies. Once I had that moment of clarity, it changed the game for me completely.

Not only did Clair Obscur rework how I thought about turn-based RPGs, but To put it mildly, the game made me rethink everything I knew about art, its place as a way to process grief, and how grief can rip a person, family, and society apart.

Perfect Tides

I wanted to even out this list with Perfect Tides, a point-and-click narrative game released in 2022. Its sequel, Perfect Tides: Station to Station released a few weeks ago, and I wanted to catch myself up on the first game before I played the sequel, and I am oh so glad I did.

Perfect Tides is a time capsule of the turn of the millennium. You play as Mara Whitefish, a high-school-aged girl growing up on a seasonal island town. Mara spends her time equally between hating her family and writing fiction on AIM forums. She gets into relationships, she tries drugs, she deals with friends slipping in and out of her life. But she also deals with more complex emotions: love, belonging, and grief. I can’t even say that I totally immersed myself in this game on a more spiritual level because I grew up in the era right after dial-up internet – but these emotions transcend eras, and I felt Mara’s struggles and triumphs through her escapades in Perfect Tides.

I don’t want to say too much more without spoiling the rest of the game, but it was a worthwhile experience and I cannot wait to get to Station to Station in the rest of February.

And that’s it for January! I hope you all had a bearable month and good luck for the rest of February. I may do another one of these if there is interest. Thanks for reading!

Hi everyone,

It’s been a while. I haven’t written a new post in about a month and some change, and that’s for a reason. The reason: life! Life happened. A lot of life happened and got in the way of me writing each week and talking about games. My real 9-5 job got tough, I released a video for my Youtube channel, a right-wing chud reacted to my video on his stream and I got my first hate response video as a result, I went home, lots of stuff!

2025 has been a hell of a year. I started writing more seriously on Substack, which has been a blessing more than I could possibly expect. I really started to get serious on Youtube, released my first video that broke 100,000 views, and broke 1,500 subscribers. I feel like 2025 is when I started to get into a groove to talk about the things I love more seriously. Hopefully, 2026 is the year that I start to really thrive in that groove.

I’ve also been watching from the sidelines while the gaming community on Substack has been engaging in this wonderful “12 Days of Game-mas” tradition of promoting others’ posts. I wanted to do my part, so I decided to post all of these in one long supercut to show my appreciation for the amazing writing that the gaming community on Substack has built over the past year.

Lastly, before I go into my extended thank you note, a thank you note from me: I wanted to express my gratitude to each and every single one of you that decided to read a piece from me this year. It’s been a fun ride so far, and I can’t wait to see what 2026 brings. But without further ado, here is my 12 days of Game-mas.

Day 1: A Game That I’ve Played This Year

For the first day of 12 Days of Game-Mas, I’m sharing a piece from about Death’s Door, “Death’s Door is Wonderful.” I played the entirety of Death’s Door during a 4-hour train ride, and it was one of the most fun games I played this year. I appreciate Cat’s take on this game, as I had similar gripes with the lack of map and ability to heal during major fights, but also agreed with how much the visual style bleeds into every aspect of gameplay. It’s a killer title and Cat is a great writer, be sure to check out more things from her in the future.

Day 2: Something About a Retro Game

During my working hours/writing hours, I frequently listen to the Donkey Kong Country soundtrack, and I had never owned a retro console like an SNES. Reading ’, “The Golden Years of Rare,” made me nostalgic for a time that I never really got to experience firsthand, which I think is a sign of a quality piece of writing. It was especially interesting to learn about Rare’s genesis and their first few games on the NES. Peter is a mainstay in the gamingstack space, and it’s a quality piece you should check out.

Day 3: A Review of a Game

Dispatch was one of my favorite games of the year, and JM Mendez from ’s review of Dispatch highlights exactly what makes AdHoc’s Studio’s launch title so memorable. I love their description of how well the characters work, how much thought was given into the actor performances from across the media spectrum (A-list actors and internet celebrities alike), and how well they bounce off of each other. 1UP also highlights another one of my high points of Dispatch, which is how good the soundtrack is. I am still listening to it to this day. 1Up Vault publishes lots of great pieces, including reviews and also reactions to new tech developments in the gaming space. Be sure to check them out!

Day 4: Something that Made Me Laugh

’ 2025 Game Awards picks made me have more than one hearty chuckle. Bubsy 3D is criminally underrated, but I was personally pulling for Pepsi Man to make a big awards splash this year.

Day 5: A Piece that Made Me Play or Reconsider A Game

I have played every Assassin’s Creed game since the first one came out in 2007, and I spent an inordinate amount of time playing Assassin’s Creed Shadows this year, the long-awaited feudal Japan entry in the series. I did not like it, but ’s piece “Another 46 hours with Assassin’s Creed Shadows,” which I was sort of playing wrong,” on how to bend the game’s systems to make a more enjoyable experience made me reconsider how to play Shadows. Granted, I don’t think a game should make you go hunting for how to play it the best, but reading Stephen’s account definitely made me reconsider my less-than-perfect experience.

Day 6: Something Not Necessarily About Gaming

In my first year on Substack, I’ve been getting into reading some more experimental humor pieces, and “Is Mike Wazowski Jewish or Polish?” from somehow takes the cake for the funniest piece of writing that I have read on Substack. It’s so absurdly stupid, but for some reason it makes me cackle every time I read it because the topic is handled with a comical amount of sincerity. Love the line that is “Monstropolis is Monster Pittsburgh.”

Day 7: About Being a Gamer

This one absolutely had to be ’s “Ten Games I’m positive people are Lying about finishing.” Not finishing games is a serial bad habit of mine, and this post all but confirmed my belief that some people are genuinely lying about finishing certain games. You didn’t beat The Witness without looking up solutions, what are you, insane? In all honesty, Homie Big Picture Mode always chooses topics that I never would think of writing about, and just does it. Please check them out.

Day 8: A Piece About A Game I’ve Never Heard Of

For this day of Game-mas, I wanted to highlight ’ piece on TOEM: A Photo Adventure. I’ve always enjoyed games that have comprehensive tools that really can stand on their own outside of the systems that a game provides. With the buzz around a similar mechanic in Viewfinder, I’m excited to check out TOEM. Really appreciate Tyler’s write-up on this and it definitely made me excited to check it out.

Day 9: Something About Game Development

Donkey Kong: Bananza is my game of the year, and by far its most interesting mechanic is how well the world can be destroyed and the game is still playable. and Game Makers Toolkit is the go-to source on here and Youtube for anything game-development related, and learning about how destructability works in practice when creating a game from the ground up in his piece “How Games Do Destruction,” is incredibly interesting. I loved his piece on this and encourage anyone who is remotely interested in learning more about game development to go check him out.

Day 10: A Piece About the Act of Play

Ironically, the piece that I wanted to choose from this is about the act of watching someone else play a game, and the beauty of that. ’s piece on “To the games I won’t ever play…” is a beautiful account of choosing games that you know you won’t ever be interested in playing yourself, and being ok with that. Before I could really afford to have gaming as a hobby, I watched lets plays like there was no tomorrow. Now, that hobby has more changed into watching speedruns from channels like Summoning Salt, but that love is still there. I know when it’s time to take a back seat, and Katya’s piece made me remember that.

Day 11: A Miscellaneous Piece I Enjoyed

and is a pillar of the games community on Substack, and getting to contribute to his Halloween special, “Gaming’s Greatest Villains,” was a treat. Outside of my contribution of Khotun Khan from Ghost of Tsushima, I enjoyed getting to read other writers’ interpretations of what they believed are the greatest villains in the medium. Harrison is writing some of the most interesting and timely pieces on the platform, and is actively engaging members of gamingstack on a weekly and even daily basis in his own writing.

Day 12: Something I Wrote

My favorite piece that I wrote this year was my long diatribe of why I believe the New York Times needs a full-time gaming reporter that goes beyond traditional reviews. The idea came from a minor problem that I had with a short-form video the New York Times posted, and it turned into a

longer piece that touched on all my issues with the state of games media. Thanks everyone for tuning into this piece!

And that’s all! Thanks everyone so much for contributing to such a great posting and overall discussion environment about videogames this year. Happy holidays, and I hope everyone has a wonderful rest of 2025!

(SPOILERS FOR THE LAST OF US PART II TO FOLLOW)

I think most of us were in a bad state during the early years of Covid. The world was crumbling around us, lots of people were sick and/or dying, and generally it felt like everything was falling apart but you couldn’t truly experience it since you couldn’t leave your domicile. Everything was abstracted through several levels of screens. Political upheavals, social trends, and life were whooshing past without room for reflection. For me, it could have been a lot worse than it was.

For me though, I was grappling with an existential fear of death. I don’t think I fully understood how much I was scared of death until I was alone in my house after coming home from my sophomore year of college. It was early Covid, the time where you rarely went outside. No friends, just my family and nothing else. My days were fairly enjoyable – I got to talk to my parents and siblings a lot, play board games, and generally coast through my class load.

My nights were different.

As the sun set and family members in my house went to bed, I was awake – not by choice. Maybe it was the death and gloom of the year, maybe it was everyone’s lives were thrown into chaos, but I was simply fixated on the idea that nothing came after death. I’d have nightly panic attacks about the subject, not being able to focus on anything but that eternal blackness, and all my mistakes that would ultimately lead to a life not fulfilled before that blackness.

I don’t know why this was a fixation of mine. I don’t particularly find myself as an unhappy person. However, I do think that I’m a person that’s often comfortable with mediocrity and can settle into patterns just because it feels easy to. I was definitely settling into a pattern before I left college, and I felt like I was settling into a pattern afterwards.

In these voids, I felt directionless. It became all about asking questions that I know I could never answer right now: What would my life become? Would I ever find something I was truly passionate about to do with my life? Or would that journey into eternal blackness leave behind a life not fulfilled?

The Last of Us Part 2 came out on June 19th, 2020, about three months after my permanent staycation. Early-on in my gaming career, this was the game I was the most excited to play for a LONG time. The E3 trailer blew my mind, and knowing that the game involved playing as Ellie and having the most insane level design and lighting and atmosphere was just too good to pass up.

I thought it was amazing when it first came out. In the Last of Us Part II, the protagonist, Ellie, is on a journey of revenge for the murder of her father figure, Joel, from Part I. She traverses through Seattle with her love interest, Dina, after it’s been torn apart by a zombie apocalypse and ruled by a ruthless militia. The game’s second half focuses on Joel’s killer, Abby, who lives in Seattle and navigates her way through a civil war and Ellie’s revenge plot simultaneously.

My opinion on Part II has changed since release, but not by much. It’s in the running for Naughty Dog’s best game.

Perhaps the most advertised part of The Last of Us Part II, or maybe the most talked about in video essays and Twitter threads, was the realism of the game’s non-player characters. Mainly that whenever the protagonist, Ellie, would shoot them in the leg with a pistol or bludgeon them with a 2x4, they would cry out in pain and others near them would cry out their names too.

Developer Naughty Dog did this to make the NPCs feel more human, and attempted to put some real weight behind the violent acts the player/Ellie was committing every second of that game. But for most players, it felt shallow. I agreed.

It’s not a revelatory concept to make players think through their violent acts, and The Last of Us Part II isn’t even a game that follows through on that kind of reflection past the first five seconds of agony. Enemies will scream their comrades names, but nothing much comes of it afterwards as they’re likely the next target. Ellie barely reckons with any kind of bloodshed herself. While it’s a buzzword that’s used less than sparingly, The Last of Us Part II’s ludonarrative dissonance is palpable.

Yet at the same time, a shallow reminder that everything in this game is mortal is still a reminder. It’s very easy to forget the toll of violence in a modern action game. Games like Call of Duty and Uncharted circumvent Newton’s Third Law of Motion by rarely giving the players any kind of reaction to the actions of violence they take via pressing the right trigger. It’s so rare in a game that any acknowledgment is granted whatsoever. And at a time where so few AAA games gave that to me, The Last of Us did.

Just as much as The Last of Us is a series about death, it’s also a series about grief. It’s not hard to understand why a story set in a universe about the zombie apocalypse is about grief. Everyone that the main characters know either dies or will die someday. Their world should be dead. The specter of the undead is all around Joel and Ellie, and it’s up to them to reconcile with it.

Part 1 intensely focuses on the survivorship of grief: how does Ellie reckon with the fact that she might be the last person who can save humanity? How does Joel find a new daughter in Ellie? How can their relationship heal past the unforgivable act that Joel completes at the end of the game?

Ellie’s story in Part 2 is far more warped, which tackles the other side of grief – the death itself and dealing with grief in the immediacy of death. How does a society that’s learned to survive deal with the immediacy of murder? Does a path of vengeance lead to anything productive? Does it lead to healing, does it lead to peace – does it even lead to a burden lifted off one’s shoulders?

It seems like none of these questions are ever answered in either game. The problem with a story arc about the cycle of violence is that it can never end in the medium of an action video game – the game never gives the player proper time to reflect before they continue to perpetuate that cycle themselves. Without any time to think between shooting galleries, those questions never get answered.

But what struck me the most about the Last of Us Part 2 was not the long sections about this violence. Not Ellie’s story in Seattle nor Abby’s account either – but the smaller, more personal moments between characters that reminded me what there is to live for. Where Ellie, Joel, Abby, and Lev inch closer to answering those questions, but never quite getting there.

I value my sleep. I sleep less now, but before I became a working adult I used to sleep at least 8 hours a night, even if I was preoccupied with one of my many time-wasting hobbies.

I would try to sleep as much as I could during the pandemic especially. I tried to get away from those nightly voids of sadness and fears of death. It wasn’t productive, it didn’t do anything for me. So sleep was the answer.

When I played the Last of Us Part 2, I did not sleep when I finished the game.

I played that game every day, multiple hours a day when it came out. I was flying through the various days, knocking out Seattle Day 1 and 2 in a single play session, and many more afterwards. I started late when I got to the first Abby vs. Ellie fight in the theater in Seattle. I vowed then and there, I would finish the game that night.

It was a struggle, but every minute of playtime got me closer to the eventual final conflict in California. Ellie frees Abby and Lev, and then instigates Abby into one last duel by threatening Lev’s life. I see a faint glimmer of light out of the corner of my eye. Abby bites off Ellie’s finger. The light is growing brighter now. Ellie is drowning Abby, seeing the memories of Joel the night before Abby murdered him. The light is so bright now that I can barely focus on the game. And somehow…

Somehow Ellie spares Abby’s life, Joel’s killer. She reflects on a lifetime of hurt, companionship, and forgiveness with the man who was more or less a father figure to her. Whatever mixed process that brought Ellie to that moment of forgiveness for Joel’s killer, it was those moments of happiness that gave her the ability to let go. Death was not the end. Joel’s memory lived on.

Despite how violent the Last of Us Part 2 really is, what stuck with me was those moments of forgiveness, of emotional levity. Even in the midst of one of the most gruesome and oppressive environments, people can still be human. Moreover, we can remember what legacy those people left behind when they are dead. The very act of remembering is the first step that so many don’t even take themselves. Whether it’s an external cry out in pain, a happy internal memory, The Last of Us 2 remembers. Death is not the end for those who miss us. I took that to heart.

The Last of Us Part 2 is not a perfect game. But it’s a game that came at the exact right time in my life. The eternal void is still there, at the back of my mind – but I wasn’t afraid of it anymore. Death is not the end, and there are so many things, so many people, so many small moments to live for. Who cares what happens after the big sleep?

It’s 6am now. The sun is up. Time to go to sleep.

I would call myself a casual fan of the Pokémon franchise, but I’m rapidly losing interest. Two different factors can explain this loss of interest:

1) I am slowly exiting the age bracket that it is trying to pander to. While Pokémon is slowly expanding its reach as a brand for all ages through its card game, competitive scene, and overall merchandising, I don’t have as strong an attachment to it anymore as I did when I was 10, playing the Diamond and Pearl games on my DS. I still love playing through some old ROMs and even some great ROM hacks, but the main games aren’t for me anymore.

2) It’s becoming extremely evident that the games are no longer worth my time because the developer GameFreak refuses to make finished games that work with the contemporary era, and not something that came out on the PS2. Jesus Christ – Scarlet and Violet were so bad that I almost refused to pick up another Pokémon game again – and I made good on that promise when I did not purchase Pokémon: Legends Z-A, which came out last week.

That said, I still have a soft spot for Pokémon. It was a formative game for me growing up in the early 2010s, my first RPG. It was also an incredibly social video game, where you could trade Pokémon with your friends and see what version exclusives different people could get between games. You also cannot tell the story of video games as a medium without considering Pokémon’s impact: it’s a constant on every Nintendo console, from the Game Boy to the Switch 2. It’s the most profitable media franchise in the world.

Which is why it rubbed me the wrong way when the New York Times came out with this short-form video title “Why Won’t Pokémon Evolve?”

The video, headlined by Times culture reporter Zachary Small, attempts to explain Pokémon’s inner workings as a brand, and why the games have changed very little amid an industry in constant turmoil and upheaval. As much as I’m about to bash it in the next few paragraphs, I have to give credit that the video is well-made and Small is knowledgeable about how Pokémon has changed and what makes up its brand.

Small’s thesis here is that Pokémon doesn’t want to change because it “has a good thing going,” describing the relationship between the four different companies that keep the media empire afloat: Game Freak, the game developer; CREATURE, the card manufacturer; Nintendo, the IP licensor; and the Pokémon Company, the IP owner. All four of these groups work together to pump out games, cards, and new designs for each pocket monster. I largely agree with this – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

But what cheapens this video, I think, is the next idea Small brings up: that Pokémon fans want to see changes to the formula (which is true), and that such changes might disrupt the balance of power between the big four companies. What Small is suggesting here is a massive overhaul of the existing system of creatures. I don’t believe that is the case whatsoever.

Suppose you poll the average Pokémon game fan right now about what they do not like about the main series of games. You’ll most likely get one of three answers: lifeless animation, cut corners on art style and overworld design, and a lack of voice acting for 3D characters. Others who aren’t even fans of the series might point to the rigidity of the battle system – a nearly blind adherence to turn-based combat with little room for error. Because that’s what Pokémon is, and what it has been for the past 30 years.

Changes to the formulas listed above doesn’t necessarily mean a total upheaval of the corporate synergy that makes up the Pokémon brand. We don’t need an entirely new line of cards and Pikachu merch just because the games are updating to modern trends. I think maybe what Small is hinting at, is that maybe – just maybe – handing off the design of the new games to a new studio other than Game Freak may be in everyone’s best interest. That does upset the balance of power among the four corporate entities.

Yet those subtle changes, that intimate knowledge of the franchise and the problems gamers have with it, seem to be missing from Small’s coverage.

Small is more than capable of giving the topic the due diligence it deserves. He’s written amazing pieces about the industry, like how the big players in AAA games are fighting a losing financial battle with realistic graphics, and why all the characters in Majora’s Mask are unique in their own way. But it’s more of a problem with the outlet, and the New York Times and other newspapers’ lack of attention to the ever-growing video game industry. While it’s a trend across the journalism world for legacy media to turn to staff layoffs first in the face of financial turmoil, games journalism is always the first to get the boot. Despite billion-dollar acquisitions of top papers like the Washington Post, Launcher, their games vertical, was one of the first areas they axed. Other full-time games positions are also being cut left and right at tier-one newspapers nationwide. Even gaming-focused publications, like Polygon and Kotaku, are being gutted in the name of saving some money and relying on a poorly paid staff of freelance writers.

What is left are underpaid and overworked freelancers, and reporters like Small who focus on “culture” rather than their areas of expertise. I am all for reporters who like reporting on video games to branch out a bit, but one look at Small’s coverage page shows a pretty wide net of topics, from art and architecture to museums to archaeology. But the reality is that gaming is not going away anytime soon as a force to be reckoned with in the cultural zeitgeist.

Between the Saudi government investing billions of dollars in esports and literally buying one of the biggest AAA studios in Electronic Arts, to America reckoning with millions of children being terminally online – gaming culture is here to stay. Yet that’s not reflected in the news organizations we have around right now. When major news organizations and the United States government were busy trying to decipher the Charlie Kirk assassin’s messages that he carved into his bullets, people familiar with games knew that at least one of the messages was related to the popular team shooter Helldivers 2 (”Hey fascist! Catch! Up arrow symbol, right arrow symbol, and three down arrow symbols.”) If only someone, anyone at any major news organization could tell us what that means, like it was their job to cover that particular area of human interest and behavior…

I don’t think “Why Won’t Pokémon Evolve” is a particularly bad piece of content. It’s actually quite well done, but it reminds me of a lack of attention paid to games media. The New York Times and every other major news organization often treat games like a clown show – all eyes are on it when it’s making waves in pop culture, but quickly pretending like it’s not there when it’s not producing something like Grand Theft Auto 6. But video games are a multi-billion-dollar industry, producing some of the most important and entertaining stories and creative products I’ve ever experienced.

All we can do is hope that legacy media and new media still see it that way.

If you ask the average gamer what they think about “Foddyian Games,” I’m sure about half of them will say “what’s that?” The other half will probably say “oh, you mean the one with the guy in the pot? Yeah, that game is really hard.”

It doesn’t seem like a strong first impression people get from games either partially inspired or entirely developed by the developer known as Bennett Foddy. A trailblazer in the medium, Foddy is known for games like Getting Over It and QWOP, titles that are built upon sticking to rigid mechanics that teeter on the edge of absurdity and rage. These kinds of games are easy to describe as too hard or and too obscure. But think about it for a second: using mouse controls to get a guy who’s stuck in a pot up a mountain, use four letter keys to make a guy run, climb the “corporate ladder” while having roller skates strapped to your hands and feet – how could these not be difficult? How could they enter the mainstream outside of certain pockets of streamers and Youtube niches?

These titles have been Foddy’s bread and butter for the better part of the last decade.

This lack of accessibility and approachability from the casual gamer changed in 2025 with Baby Steps, co-developed by Foddy, Gabe Cuzzillo, and Maxi Boch (who all teamed up to develop 2019’s APE OUT). The game, with the benefit of a massive release and a featured trailer at Summer Games Fest, is also the easiest and most accessible game out of all of the games I’ve played from Foddy and company. It’s also the most unsettling.

It’s a difficult game, no doubt. Partially inspired by QWOP, the player must lift each leg individually using triggers and press forward on a control stick to make the character move forward. If the player does not do this synchronously with lifting each leg, the main character, Nate, will fall flat on his face. The journey then becomes focused on taking those “baby steps” to move Nate up a mountain to escape a world he was suddenly transported to, he thinks.

It’s a funny journey, no doubt. It’s more than a few times that Nate will fall flat on his face, his ass, or some weird version of a split where we can see his voluptuous cheeks (why did they make his ass so fat?). It’s hilarious that the fastest way to get from point A to point B is sometimes just falling over. But it’s through every fault of his own.

Baby Steps, like other Foddyian games, defies genre limitations. It’s a platformer, it’s a puzzle game, it’s a story-rich experience – it’s maybe an exercise in masochism. Foddyian games even spit in the face of what it’s about story-wise. It’s a game about meditation. It’s a game about persistence. It’s a game about exploring the ways that wacky mechanics can be much more than just surface-level fluff. But one such classification that I don’t hear a lot is horror. I find Baby Steps horrifying – horrifying to take steps up a mountain where if I make one false move, one wrong foothold, I could lose my progress instantly. It’s horrifying that so much of this game is just silent save for the odd squeaking of horns and what seem like dog toys, or just silent except for the sounds that Nate makes with each step.

All Foddyian games have this level of horror within them – but also just a bunch of games in general. One false move and you feel like everything you’ve worked for has simply gone up in smoke. A mistimed dodge, a jump too far, a whiff of an attack. Foddyian games make you feel powerless to the forces that be. You’re not some kind of warrior that made a mistake, or even a normal person navigating an unknown world – you’re a jester for even trying to learn the mechanics set out before you.

But in Baby Steps, it’s mainly horrifying that you’re alone.

Baby Steps explores the life of Nate, who starts out in the game as what you’d expect a 35-year old full-time Discord moderator to look like. He’s watching One Piece in the dark, alone, on his couch, in what seems to be in his parents’ basement. All of a sudden, poof, Nate ends up in a cave with the walking abilities of a toddler.

Throughout the entirety of the game, Nate also refuses help from every single person he meets. He refuses help and shoes from the weird hat-wearing human Jim, he refuses companionship from the other climbers just because he is unable to talk to them in a normal way, he cannot socially interact with anyone else. All he wants to do in the game is go take a piss, and he cannot even do that without the confines of a bathroom with four walls. In his social ineptitude, he’s cast out any hope of finding his way out of this mess, and completely isolated himself.

Nate’s isolation from everyone else in Baby Steps shows up in the gameplay quite literally. There’s no deep introspective scenes, no gameplay mechanics that make him interrogate his isolation. It’s just him, alone, walking. Across deserts, mountains, poison swamps, snowbanks, more mountains, more fields, caves, more deserts….

There are two specific scenes for why I think Baby Steps is a horror title. The first comes in the last quarter of the journey, when Nate is walking across a frozen tundra to reach the top of the mountain that he’s been chasing for almost no reason (multiple characters tell him that there’s nothing there). It’s a long expanse of snow, and Nate has a lot of it ahead of him. Here, the camera slowly pushes out to reveal just how much space Nate has left, and how much of it is empty. All of these baby steps have gotten him so far, but what is the point of any of it if nobody else is around him. Sure, he’s gotten here without help, but what does that teach him? Nothing! I mean for fuck’s sake, the man is literally in a onesie.

I think this is the strongest point that I have for Baby Steps being a horror game. A horror game about the expanse of loneliness with gameplay mechanics that emasculate you and the main character is a trial that surely no one wants to go through. There’s also so much of this game that I did not see as there are multiple paths to take throughout the map to get up – and multiple endings as well. But for me, it was scary. Travelling alone on the inside of a sand castle when I could fall at any moment was scary. Well, equally parts are funny and scary, when certain parts are abstracted from Nate’s emotional situation. Careening down the side of a river of what seemed like either breast milk or semen was scary. Drowning in the river trying to get to a new shortcut was funny and scary simultaneously. Watching all of your progress crumble before you is its own kind of jumpscare.

But there’s another piece to this puzzle. Nate’s parents are forgetting about him. Every checkpoint cuts between a still image of Nate’s bedroom/basement slowly getting packed up and turned into a home gym.

The second scene that I wanted to specifically detail ties the whole sequence together. Nate is climbing up through a fallen train car in the snowy area, when all of a sudden, he begins to hear the phone ring. It’s his dad, asking him if he’s coming to Thanksgiving. Nate tells him plainly that he’s climbing up the side of a train, and his dad says in a typical dad tone “Oh, well that’s nice. How’s it going?” He never gets a straight answer, and the conversation ends awkwardly.

Baby Steps is a horror game where the main character is nothing more than a meat sack on stick legs while your parents begin to forget him. Nate’s been forgotten about – not because his parents don’t care about him, but because they had gotten what they always hoped for – an independent son. But knowing the truth makes it hurt more. It’s a weird kind of self-inflicted horror that I can only put into so many words without you playing the game for yourself.

Nate doesn’t even get a necessarily “happy” ending. He never returns home. He just learns to accept help – despite the scary journey it took to get there. How much does he learn about himself on the journey up the mountain? You never really know. He won’t talk to anybody about it.

I ended up really enjoying Baby Steps, and it made me appreciate Foddyian games a bit more than I thought I would. It’s definitely Foddy’s biggest game, and doesn’t sacrifice the core wackiness, hilarity, and overall frustrating mechanics in spite of it. If you can possibly call one of these games “AAA”, this is it.

4 out of 5 stars.

It’s very easy to characterize certain types of videogames, or ways of playing them, as an exercise in sadism. Kaizo Ironmon in Pokemon. Hundred-hour playthroughs of multiple Destiny expansions. Even Foddyian games like Getting Over It and A Difficult Game About Climbing make you feel like you’re going insane while you’re playing them. But Soulslikes are the crown jewel of games as a masochistic exercise. At least for me.

If Soulslikes are the sane man falling into the vat of acid to become the Joker, Hollow Knight: Silksong dances along that vat’s precipice with the grace of a ballerina, never letting up the equally-balanced aria of desperation and fluidity in the player’s actions. It’s one of the best platformers, Metroidvanias, and GAMES that I have played in the last decade, and it is an absolute triumph of a sequel for the indie powerhouse that is Team Cherry.

Silksong, a follow-up to 2017’s Hollow Knight, follows the side character Hornet in a new realm of Pharloom, a haunted kingdom filled with chambers of lost souls, all upholding a massive holy site in the Citadel, where countless bugs make their way to seek salvation. Hornet, a captive in this new kingdom, sets out on a journey to the top of the Citadel to see what she was captured for, and investigate the fate of this haunted kingdom. It’s beautiful, it’s eerie, it’s frustrating, and it’s genuinely mind-blowing at some points. It’s more Hollow Knight, but it’s also so much more than just more Hollow Knight – Hornet’s journey through Pharloom is so unique and beautiful, and I haven’t even gotten to explore the rest of the map or get the true ending. I just know it’s going to be amazing.

The single-most discussed topic in relation to Silksong is the game’s difficulty, and whether the game’s platforming and combat are fairly balanced. By far the most common criticism in this vein is “the combat and platforming in Silksong doesn’t ease people into it like in the opening hours of Hollow Knight, they pick back up exactly where Hollow Knight ends.” But I don’t believe this to be a fair assessment, and it completely detracts from what makes Silksong amazing.

Silksong’s difficulty and enhanced platforming compared to Hollow Knight don’t stem from Team Cherry’s desire to punish the player, but are simply part of a through-line weaved (going to do an internal groan anytime I mention something silk-related) throughout the entire game.

It’s easiest to start with what makes the protagonist, Hornet, different from Hollow Knight: she’s inherently “better” at combat than the Knight. Hornet is nimble, fast, and floaty. Where the Knight can deal flashy powerful bursts of energy from each side and screams of rage using his soul energy, Hornet is far more surgical in the way she moves. She can jump higher, run faster, and maneuver her way around enemies much easier. Mechanics like a double jump plus a cloak that enables Hornet to hover above enemies and catch gusts of wind make moment-to-moment gameplay that much faster. She can even heal in mid-air, an incredibly useful tool at your disposal. Basically, if you took Hornet and plopped her in Hallownest and asked her to do the same quests as the Knight, she’d pass with flying colors and probably speedrun that whole region in an hour.

Thus, to properly contain Hornet, Pharloom needs to be that much more oppressive. Enemies are more likely to chase after her, flying enemies are more aggressive, mobs of enemies including ones that throw projectiles at our needle-wielding protagonist are more likely to gang up on Hornet. These enemies and groups aren’t much of a problem once the player learns the proper movement to evade and pick them off (mostly).

What really starts to trip people up, including myself in my first few hours of playtime, is the initial platforming sections. These portions of Silksong are where gamers started to make the comparison to the end portions of Hollow Knight, thanks to long sections where Hornet must “pogo” off of platforms using her needle that requires timed, precise button presses to make progress. The first section where pogos are heavily featured also happens to couple with a new mob of difficult enemies in the Hunter’s March, which is an ant’s nest filled with aggressive, red-tinted bugs ready to take out Hornet at a moment’s notice.

Hunter’s March is the first true skill check of Silksong. But it’s not a death sentence. Because of how nimble and fast Hornet can move on a moment-to-moment basis, these harder sections are needed to put Hornet’s platforming skills to the true test. Every room in these regions can’t just be a combat encounter or something critical to the story, so having these more difficult-to-master platforming sections to break up any monotony is necessary for the game’s pacing. Movement is what makes Hornet such a satisfyingly fun protagonist to play as, and challenging the player with these more involved platforming sections are what makes exploring Pharloom so great.

But platforming in Silksong is far more than just exploiting an existing mechanic to its limits. Sure, the game takes the incremental approach of starting out with basic “pogoing,” and then chaining that into jumps, flutters, and large leaps across the level. But soon it becomes a delicate balancing act of knowing which moves to pick to get from one point to the other – less of a planned out route and more of an improvisational jazz lick. There were so many times that I would find a route to the end of a platforming section with a new combination of moves that I didn’t think should have worked together, but they did anyway. Silksong, more than anything else, is about trying things out and seeing what works. It allows the player to explore Pharloom more than they could ever hope to imagine.

Each world is worth exploring to its fullest extent. The environments in Pharloom are so beautifully crafted with great visuals, interconnected enemy designs, and secrets aplenty. Some personal favorites of mine included the Bellhart, Greymoor, the Sands of Karak, and the Choral Chambers (goddamn Christopher Larkin please inject that soundtrack for Choral Chambers directly into my veins). Singular enemy designs, singular platforming mechanics, singular boss fights. But the best part about these worlds, personally, is how much they force the player to do multiple run-throughs to get the full experience. Coming into an area like Sinner’s Road for the first time, it’s incredibly terrifying. The roaches are an unpredictable enemy type that lunges after Hornet when you think she’s safe. But after going through there a few times to explore it initially, then go back with the double jump, and then go back to get to Bilewater, it felt like speedrunning that section. Silksong is amazing in empowering the player by raising the heat during combat encounters and platforming sections alike, so much so that it made the initial final boss an extreme cake walk.

But with this praise comes a few caveats. Some of the enemies in this game are just plain bullshit. Absolute bullshit. Specifically the ones that fly – there’s little Hornet can do to dodge them as they spray her with projectiles or lock onto her from across the screen and fly at her at a million miles an hour. Most of what they’re meant to do is add an element of entropy to each time Hornet traverses through an area, but sometimes it’s an actual mine field and Hornet is wearing magnetic shoes.

The worst example of these is the area known as Bilewater. Jesus Christ I hate this place. It’s the devil’s cocktail of difficult, vertical platforming, flying enemies, and an extremely long runback without a checkpoint in Pharloom’s benches. This is the only knock I will give Silksong – there are sections like Bilewater that just seem incredibly anti-player and anti-fun. It’s punishing to the point of moral defeat (yes, including the faux bench in Sinner’s Road). It’s frustrating enough for me to take long breaks to get my mental back in check.

But I don’t think that deserves to tarnish the reputation of the game. Some things about a game are designed to be evil, be a part that’s so insurmountable that they allow a community to form to bond over just how much bullshit is in this one section. Blighttown and Tomb of the Giants in Dark Souls, the Lilypad level in Super Mario Sunshine – there are portions of games that are meant to make you hate your life.

What Silksong doesn’t do is make it impossible to progress. There are portions that are great to farm rosary beads, Silksong’s currency, to get any item within Hornet’s grasp at any of the shops. There are items, health bar fragments, silk spools, to be found everywhere. Silksong even introduces a new (but poorly maintained/restored) tool system, arming Hornet with sub-weapons that she can toss out to distract or deal extra damage to enemies. Anytime I got stuck for more than 20 minutes, I knew there was something else I could do to get further or give me an extra edge in combat.

Yet there’s something about Hornet’s combat intricacies and the boss fights in Silksong that make it so easy to just go in and bang my head against the wall and just “get good”. Every time I would lose to a boss I would think “Well, that’s fair, I should have done X instead of Y there,” and go right back to another attempt. The main one for me was The Last Judge, the boss blocking the entrance to the Citadel where I spent at least 45 minutes trying to outmaneuver him.

All of this said, I’m not trying to make this video review something forcing players to “get good” or die trying. If you don’t like games that are more difficult by nature, that makes perfect sense. We have a limited amount of time on this earth, and an even more limited amount of leisure time. If you don’t want to play a game that makes you bang your heads against the wall, I understand. If you want to get to experience this world and install some mods to make the game easier, I understand even more. I often don’t get to hear these sides of gaming. Writers like opened my eyes to the world of modding and how it helps as a huge accessibility bump to those not as masochistic as me.

But what I don’t understand is people asking Team Cherry to completely overhaul the balancing in the game. Besides the fact that they already did a balance patch a week after launch, I don’t think you should completely rework a game that obviously went through copious amounts of testing, tweaking and work that took seven years of development heaven. If you want to mod the game, be my guest. But let Team Cherry tell the story they want to tell, difficult as it may be, for their end product that they finish with. I think games are at their best when they push me to the brink, and while that may not be for everyone, I don’t think it should be at the detriment of the creative vision that Team Cherry had for Silksong.

Because that’s the final through line of Silksong that they’re weaving. It’s the story. The hard platforming, long sections without runbacks, boss fights, they’re all in service of telling the story of Hornet. Hornet comes to Pharloom without any idea where she is, but finds the land blanketed in a layer of silk, something she is all too familiar with. As a weaver herself, every single enemy in the game is in search of taking Hornet’s ability from her, having her be the bug that can either bring this land to its desired salvation, or keep it under a forceful yoke like the silk weavers of old.

In the end of Silksong, you become that apex predator. Something so powerful that it can lead Pharloom to greatness or despair alike. The road to get there is long, arduous, and full of death, but it’s an experience that you do not want to miss.

Hollow Knight: Silksong had the weight of the world on its shoulders in the form of the most lofty expectations an indie game has had in decades. It shatters those effortlessly. Silksong is a shining diamond in the rough of the games industry turning its back on the consumer base that makes it strong. It’s an absolute marvel.

4.75/5.

But I gave it a shot this week, seeing it on a random Tuesday. The movie moved me a lot more than I thought it would, but for reasons I didn’t expect.

The Long Walk has a simple premise: in a future, economically-troubled post-war America, every state sends a young man to participate in “The Long Walk,” a trial where every contestant must walk until he cannot walk anymore. One by one, contestants begin to “drop out” until there is only one left standing. That contestant is awarded a cash prize and one wish for anything their heart desires. The movie is simple, but the simplicity of the Long Walk’s plot allows for a lot of depth for its characters, those which actors Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson do an excellent job of portraying in the two protagonists.

But the one thing about the movie that I just can’t shake, which is how the story deals with death. This long walk is put on by the U.S. Army, with an armed battalion following the young men on their walk. When contestants “drop out,” or slow down for too long, they’re immediately shot, and the walkers keep walking. It’s brutal, it’s gory – but it’s brief.

Even more than the death itself is how the men seem to talk about it. Instead of “dying” or “getting shot by the army,” it’s “getting your ticket.” To even mention the death, give it its due reflection, is slowing you down. You must keep walking. We see what happens when it starts to dwell on the walkers’ minds for too long. One such walker, Gary Barkovitch, gets into a fight with another walker and by dodging one of his blows, inadvertently causes his death. That memory haunts him throughout the film, until he can’t take it anymore and stabs himself in the neck with a spoon in the final twenty minutes of the Walk.

Death is a powerful thing. It’s something to be feared, without a doubt, but it provides a finality to most things. A life begins, a life ends. That finality can be scary for some, for others it’s a thing to rally around.

For the characters in “The Long Walk,” obscuring this finality of death is a shield from trauma. The main characters, Ray Garrety and Peter McVries, become unlikely friends not just because of their forced kinship in the Walk, but because both keep each other’s emotions in check when the Walk gets rough. For the hundreds of miles the journey takes them, about one in every twenty is filled with the sounds of gunfire after a fallen comrade is shot. Ray and Peter soldier on, not because they want to, but because they have to. Paying too close attention to the gunfire may make them believe that their fate of certain death is in fact certain.

But it oddly becomes scarier when that finality of death is stretched out, obfuscated, or otherwise muddied in the eyes of the death-dealer. People getting “disappeared” or otherwise whisked away where the publicly-mandated death is no longer in the public eye is frightening. It’s a black box where anything could happen. An air of silence fills the world of The Long Walk with this obfuscation of death and organized violence. The armed soldiers following the boys have no names, their leader only goes by the moniker of “The Major,” clad in aviators and a soldier’s cap. Contestants are also alone in the Walk, where nobody can watch until the final two are at their wits end. Faceless, nameless soldiers patrolling the streets where people cannot watch the suffering in front of them until it’s too late.

The Long Walk’s air of murkiness and censorship reminds me of the not-so-distant future – or present.

Lots of people seem to be “getting their ticket,” more metaphorically, in today’s political world.

As I’m writing this, the news that Jimmy Kimmel’s Late Night show is being suspended indefinitely from ABC is fresh in my mind, due to comments in relation to the death of Charlie Kirk. The comments involved Kimmel discussing how the MAGA crowd is extremely quick to pin Charlie Kirk’s assassin as anything but MAGA, correctly identifying that right-wing extremists are far greater in number than any other politically affiliated group in the United States. What followed can be described as nothing other than deliberate censorship by the Trump administration, forcing ABC to bend the knee as they borderline forced Kimmel off the air.

I personally don’t find Kimmel that funny. Out of all the late-night hosts, he’s one of my least favorite. But I am not one to celebrate the sidelining of his show. Kimmel’s monologue, linked here, doesn’t even outwardly say any words of celebration for Charlie Kirk’s killing. Jimmy shouldn’t be beholden to some invisible hand, some outrageous double standard for free speech that always applies to the left and never applies to the right. Public officials on the right can turn a blind eye to millions dying in foreign wars, supporting thousands being decimated in a genocide, cheering for friends and neighbors being deported by the modern-day Gestapo in ICE – but as soon as you actively do not mourn one of their own that advocated for racist and exclusionary policies – deplatforming and cancelling will follow.

But it’s not just the act of punishing dissenters – it’s the way they’re being punished. Deplatforming, taking away all of the airtime that these influential people have, is so morally defeating more than anything else. No public show of force, no video manifestos haranguing the evils that be, just silence.

I was reminded of The Long Walk while reacting to the Kimmel news, not just because it was another event that piled onto the existential dread of being alive in America right now, but because of The Long Walk’s more overt depictions of censorship.

Ray Garrety, one of the protagonists, has a specific plan for his wish if he wins the Long Walk: kill The Major. Wish for the man’s rifle, and shoot him dead with it. It’s a long-plotted revenge for what happened to Garrety’s father, who died at the hands of the Major for the crimes of sharing “banned materials,” books from the old world before the national crisis that caused this apparent military dictatorship. Ray’s father died in the name of sharing the lessons and themes from banned books to his kid and his wife.

It might be an overstatement to say we’ve fallen too far in that direction – the direction of banned materials, seeking out critical information as a crime – but as a country, we’re certainly heading that way. Trump has already talked about how any media that is critical of him is “no longer free speech.” School boards are regularly banning books that are critical of previous American institutions like slavery and Jim Crow laws.

With the way our lives are heading, between governmental actions and the clamping down of late-stage capitalism, the future of the Long Walk doesn’t seem so far away.

Death is inevitable. But subjugation to horrible people in power doesn’t have to be.

The most impactful scene for me in The Long Walk was about three-quarters into the film. There are ten walkers left, forty long dead and many miles behind them. One walker begins to blurt out “fuck The Major, fuck The Long Walk.” Everyone else, including Ray and Peter, try to calm him down and prevent him from going off the rails.

Everyone feels this weight of censored language, everyone is afraid of the consequences of what might happen to them if they speak out. But as the walkers keep walking, they realize something – they’re dead anyways.

What follows is a chorus of “Fuck the Major!” “Fuck the Long Walk!” And the soldiers can’t do anything about it. Sure, they can kill the boys, but that ruins the exercise of public humiliation. It’s only under the threat of death itself, the promise that all of the Walkers may not live to see tomorrow, that the young men can deliver any resistance to the powers that be.

I hope we never have to get to that point. I hope we can speak up a lot sooner.

This was a bit of a different post, but I hope you enjoyed it nonetheless. My review for Hollow Knight: Silksong will be out next week.

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I’ll try to answer the first part — I’ve written about video games in various different places over the past couple of years since graduating college. I’ve written about why I think climbing games are on the rise, why the original Half Life made me rethink my opinion on first-person-shooters, and why a game about Mini-Golf made me feel introspective about the future of the world and climate change.

All of this is to say that I’m ready to take the next step and make this thing a real side passion of mine. Well, it’s the main passion, but in terms of monetary value it’s on the side for now.

What can you expect from me? You should expect nothing. Want for nothing, and your life will be much happier. Desire is the root of all evil.

Stop being coy, what are you going to write about? That’s a better question, and I have plans for that:

1. There will be at the very least, two written pieces on the DoubleJump Substack every month. Written pieces on Double Jump are exclusive to here. I have a few ideas in mind, but here is a running list:

   1. A written review on a new release or an old classic

   2. A more newsy story in the games industry

   3. A critical analysis of a theme in the games industry (how most games in 2025 are soulslikes, for example)

   4. Indie Grab Bag: where I will pick 5-10 games on Steam or Itch.io and do quick little blurbs on what I like about the game, and where it is in development

   5. Anything you might be interested in hearing from me on! My life isn’t completely confined to videogames, so maybe I’ll talk about movies, shows, life, who knows.

2. In addition to the pieces of writing, I will be releasing at least one video review each month on the Double Jump Substack and the Double Jump Youtube channel

   1. These will be ~10 minute long videos that allow for more visual elements about a game to shine. Snappy editing and fun colors to follow.

   2. The first video review is already up on the Double Jump slate of channels, a Mafia: The Old Country review.

   3. Videos will release 2 days early on the Substack before going live on the Youtube channel.

I say this all with a massive grain, if not hunk, of salt. I am human, and as much as I want to stick to this schedule, I know that trying to do so above all else might just wear me down. That said, I will do my best to try to stick to this routine as much as I possibly can. Just don’t be surprised if I miss an upload or something of that nature.

To answer the second question: why should I care? I think you should care because I care. Videogames, as much as I can fully articulate within the confines of such few words, are and forever will be the future of entertainment. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry that has showed its staying power over multiple decades. But it’s so much more than monetary value — video games are the most innovative form of storytelling that we have right now. I want to do my best to try to analyze, share personal perspectives, and communicate even an ounce of that potential to you all.

That’s probably enough of the logistical talk for today. Time to get to some interesting stuff: bikes.

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Wheel World Makes Me Nostalgic for a Time that is Happening Right Now

When I was living in Washington, D.C., my bike was stolen from my own backyard.

Granted, I could have done more to stop it. I was living with my girlfriend and two other roommates at the time, and I was coming back from an overseas vacation when I got the call.

“Jack, hey, is your bike supposed to be in the back?” my friend called me up. “Yeah”, I said. “Well, it’s no longer there.”

I should not have been surprised. My two other roommates’ bikes were locked to our porch steps, and mine was not. Our backyard was also only secured by a flimsy lock that could be jostled open from the outside, making it quite an easy get. After a week or so of scurrying up North Capitol Avenue’s thrift shops and hunting it down on Facebook marketplace, I gave up. So much for that dream of valiantly scouring the city and taking it back. Probably could have used an AirTag.

But after a three-year-long hiatus of waiting around for the right model and being afraid of a potential new purchase getting whisked away from wherever I would keep it safe, I finally purchased a new bike about a month ago from a lovely man on the Upper West Side. It’s shorter, it’s not as fast, but it’s mine. It’s name is Chuck.

Biking along the paths and streets of New York City made me realize how much I missed it. I could zip up and down the entire length of Manhattan both for exercise and just for fun. I can zoom across paths that I could only cover fractions of on foot, and feel alive while doing it. I firmly believe that the bicycle is the closest thing humans have to autonomous flight besides stepping foot in an airplane. And it’s all free (with the purchase of a bicycle)!

It’s that same feeling that Messhof’s Wheel World tries to translate to a player experience.

You don’t need much to sell me on Wheel World. It’s an open-world cycling game for god sakes. More specifically, it’s a game about a bike rider, Kat, that wakes up in a field next to a sentient bicycle named Skully. Skully, depicted as a floating skull, is missing all his legendary parts to perform the “Great Shift”, where the bicycle gods of this world launch the moon back into orbit after it comes too close to the Earth. But Skully needs a seasoned rider, and Kat is anything but. It’s up to the player to win back Skully’s legendary parts and perform the Great Shift, all the while becoming a legendary bike rider in their own right.

It’s a cute story that you don’t really need to know all the lore for. What Wheel World is all about celebrating the bicycle. Nearly every element across the open world is about racing, collecting new parts, and having fun. The stations where larger parts of the map are revealed are shaped like a bicycle bell. Giant chain-like sculptures line each vista of the open world of Tramonto. Each portion of each region has parts littered around it to swap in and out with Kat’s bike, and each region has a pack of racers ready to challenge Skully and Kat at a moment’s notice. Trick jumps, hairpin turns, downhills that feel like downhills.

It’s not the most technical game. It’s not even the most difficult game about biking that I’ve ever played. But if there was a word I could use to best describe Wheel World, it would be accessible. The racing itself isn’t super difficult, and the customization options are nearly endless. Want to build a bike that can go a million miles an hour? Go do that and max out the aerodynamic stat? Want a bike that can do sick tricks and ride on gravel? All the power to you.

Accessibility should be the main focus of a game about biking, and Wheel World reminded me of how deep this hobby can actually be. Trick bikers, long distance riders, speed track, gravel, you name it — Wheel World has it. There is a little something for everyone.

But outside of the accessibility of the bike and its parts is the physical environment I would bike in. Wheel World’s starting areas are a joy to bike through, sporting bike paths, shared car and bike lanes, and beautifully maintained roads for both. It truly felt like a biker’s paradise. And the game reminds you just how good you have it before transporting you to the next area, the game’s “underworld.” Here, cars are aplenty, the skybox is black with smog, and there’s pieces of trash and used car parts littered along the roads, making it that much more difficult to bike through.

It reminds me that accessibility for bicycles only goes as far as the infrastructure created around them. New York is a fairly bike-friendly city, and I am incredibly lucky that we have such well-maintained paths on the outskirts of Manhattan. But it’s not like this everywhere. Manhattan apparently isn’t even the best borough in New York to bike in. And with public officials from the federal to local level being resistant to safe biking as a viable means of commuting, our infrastructure will deteriorate as a result.

I really enjoyed Wheel World. It was a fun five hours full of whooshing past NPCs, collecting bike parts, and taking the world of Tramonto by pedal.

But most of all, it made me want to get on my bike again.

The first time that I ever truly waited for something to happen to me was when I was eleven years old.

Growing up in a household semi-ruled by a psychology professor stepfather meant one thing more than anything else: if you are going to play video games, they were not going to be violent. No Xbox, no Playstation — you’re going to play the Wii and you’re going to like it. For the most part, I did. Playing almost exclusively Nintendo games for the better part of 8-9 years of life up to that point shaped the way I play games today. 3D platformers, puzzle games, and Mario Kart became my bread and butter — partially because they were the only game in town, but also because I genuinely enjoyed playing them. To this day, if a game isn’t fun first, I probably won’t play it for long.

But there was always a part of me that wanted to see what was on the other side of the veil. I had a few glimpses through my dad, who had a PlayStation 3 that I’d get to see twice a year. I’d play the original Modern Warfare, Assassin’s Creed 3, and Lost Planet (deep cut) — but every time I pressed start, I believed I was committing a cardinal sin. I was engaging forbidden love affair with something not in the Nintendo family. Jitters crackled through my body listening to that startup theme, playing games absent of cartoony characters Mario and Zelda for hours on end. I was an adult, in my mind. I could handle myself, I could play games that were violent and not turn out fucked up in the end. Amid all the gamers who turned violent, I would be different. I would be just fine.

But at home, my life was on lockdown, especially after coming back from my dad’s . I pulled out every stop in the back of my mind to try to convince them I could get a Playstation or an Xbox. Double my chores every week, do my homework without help, exercise more. I recall I even offered to babysit my younger siblings on every free weekend for the rest of time.

They did not budge on this. Once I turned 17, they said, I’d be able to get M-rated games and a Playstation for my birthday. When I turned 17, that’s when I’d be free.

So the waiting began.

I didn’t beat Hollow Knight until 2022. It was in my vast gaming backlog of games that I should play instead of the next big release out there or me playing another run of Hades for the 125,000th time in a row.

But when I say the game floored me, it floored me. Team Cherry blacked out here. The handcrafted, hand-drawn world of Hallownest was such a wonder to explore. Each area has so much life — or lack thereof — and painted a one-of-a-kind picture of the world’s ecosystem. A city drowned in rainwater in the City of Tears. The Queens Gardens, a multi-tiered tower of verdant creatures and plants alike. I could write a whole essay about why I think Kingdom’s Edge is one of the most beautifully haunting areas in a video game that I have ever played.

Yet what hit me more than all of the wonder I experienced while playing Hollow Knight was just how much “game” there is to play. Thirty unique bosses. Nineteen unique areas. Every corner in every screen has an enemy to kill, a collectible to pick up, an entire section that I didn’t attempt called the “Path of Pain.” To get 112%, the full completion level of Hollow Knight, you must collect every collectible, defeat every enemy, fight the final boss twice which is *spoiler alert* the Sun. And the game is $15. It’s a game that laughs in the face of $60 price tags and has more fun in it than about 90% of games that came out that year.

So when the first announcement for Silksong, the Hollow Knight sequel, came out seven years ago, people were rightly excited. It features a side character, Hornet, in a completely new world. I hadn’t even played the game and I was excited. I was just glad such a quality video game was getting a sequel.

And then the waiting began. Until now.

If someone is holding back something from you, you’d like to think it’s for bad reasons. They hate you, they don’t want what’s best for you, or the worst: they’re wrong about the entire thing. Maybe candy actually is good to eat for breakfast, and they’ve just been fed lies by Big Vegetable and Big Protein their entire life. It’s easier to imagine any of these things instead of what ultimately is true for most people — that they’re right, and that they care about you.

It was easy for me to take that naïveté and put that towards the general practices of the games industry. Too often we’ve seen major stories in outlets like Kotaku and Polygon and from star reporters like Stephen Totilo and Alyssa Mercante that a game’s development cycle was cursed. Inter-department disagreements, harassment accusations, mass layoffs, and creative differences are usually the difference between what makes a game come out on schedule vs. not. “Development hell” is a term thrown around so much that it’s basically lost its meaning. Only recently we’ve seen studios try to take steps to reduce crunch and have healthier work-life balances, before they eventually get closed by Microsoft for making a successful game.

Which is why it is so baffling to me that according to Jason Schreier at Bloomberg, Team Cherry took so long to make Silksong because they were just “having so much fun” developing it. The game, releasing next week, is the first of its kind to be stuck in a kind of “development heaven.” (I can’t pretend I came up with that, s/o to YUNGNICKYOUNG on X). The relatively small team there just had such a great time crafting each level and making sure they could deliver on the success of the first game. But good things take time, apparently.

It’s one of those situations that you have to assume something went wrong, and it surprisingly didn’t. It’s one of those situations that makes feel optimistic about the future of the games industry amid a sea of sad stories about studio closures and game cancellations. It’s one of those situations that just makes you happy.

I waited for a long time until I could buy a Playstation. Six years to be exact, when I turned 17. The exact age that I was legally allowed to play M-rated video games.

When the day came on my seventeenth birthday, I woke up, drove to GameStop, and purchased a Playstation 4 with Assassin’s Creed Syndicate and Far Cry Primal on physical disc. I came home, played those games for a couple of hours after setting up all the initial settings, and then I got up and left and felt… just ok?

Did I think this was going to be a bigger improvement in my own main hobby? Yes. Did it actually do so? I’m not entirely sure. I don’t think I was as happy with this purchase than I had built it up to be in my own mind — but what other nebulous image of your childhood fantasy is ever what it turns out to be?

I wanted to resent my parents a lot for keeping these games from me. Maybe I would have been happier to get all of these games when my brain was still actualizing what mass violence looked like. But I was mostly jealous. While my peers around me kept getting the latest Call of Duty, Gears of War, and upgrading to newer consoles, I was stuck with a Wii U. Again, I appreciated this in hindsight, but at the time I thought the worst of my parents.

But I realized the waiting helped me more than it hurt me. Both being ready to play these games with fresh eyes and also not being blind to the over-the-top, often senseless violence. I’m not the type of person to play every Call of Duty every year just because I was married to that franchise since I turned 12. I’d like to think I’m a bit more of an appreciative consumer of it all. Sure, I’ll still play the occasional first-person shooter, but I’ll at least think about it a bit before I unload a clip into someone in-game.

There’s a particular scene in the 2024 film, The Life of Chuck, that I think shows the outcome of waiting for things you think will never happen. The film, based on a Stephen King novella of the same name, where the main character of the film, Chuck Krantz, sees exactly how he will die in a room in his attic. Previously, his grandfather, who experienced the same fate earlier in his life, says “It’s the waiting that kills you.” Chuck sees his older self on a hospital bed, life force draining from his eyes. He could be 20, 30, 40, even older. He doesn’t know. All that’s left to do now is to wait.

It’s not a perfect film, but it captures this “waiting” so interestingly. When you’re waiting to see what will happen on the other side of a decision, you have all the time in the world to think about why people made it to begin with. Whether those people had their best intentions at heart. But why is the “waiting” the worst part?

I think, in the case of death, it’s because there’s no clear rhyme or reason. Death doesn’t have any rationale for coming in the night. It’s a thief that steals indiscriminately, and it will show up — it’s just a matter of when. It’s particularly frustrating since with most decisions with long wait times, all you can do is think — why? Why did my parents preclude me from violent video games when I turned out fine? Why did Silksong take seven years to develop? Why do people leave us?

We don’t choose to think about the “wait time” before people die, we choose to celebrate the life they’re living, and live with them. It’s just life.

All of this writing is really to answer the question: is the waiting worth it? Am I marginally a better person now because I put off violent videogames before I turned 17? Am I a better person because I waited for Silksong? Is Team Cherry better off because they took so long to develop Silksong?

All signs point to yes. “Good things come to those who wait” is a saying for a reason, as great things take time. But I wouldn’t go as far as to say that the waiting itself isn’t affecting me. I am just a different person now than when I started this waiting. I was a freshman in college when Silksong was announced, I am three years into my post-graduate life now that it’s coming out. I was eleven and impatient, six years later I am seventeen and less so.

I just hope I’m able to wait long enough for the next big thing to have an impact on me, and that future me will still appreciate it. And I’m excited to play Silksong next week.

The very first moments of the game set the tone. The roars of the drill’s engine flawlessly transitioning into the game’s breakcore theme song is just about as energizing a start as you can get, all while flashing a visual of a spinning drill ramming through a skull. 

Pepper Grinder focuses on this furious forward progress. You play as Pepper, a human who washes up on the beach with little to no idea what happened to you. All of a sudden, you’re approached by a very Undertale-looking antagonist with a posse of…narwhals? They then steal your treasure. You start to go after them, and then our villain gets to do a classic bridge cut from underneath the protagonist plot trope—leaving Pepper with nothing but a drill to dig herself out. 

It’s with this drill that you begin to exact your revenge. You can drill underneath the ground with your “Grinder” to move around each level, all while killing enemies and demolishing anything in your path. 

The movement of Pepper Grinder with this drill is surprisingly intricate despite the flashy and aggressive implications of the drill at your disposal. You can move between dirt patches by simply drilling in between them, drilling outside of them to jump, or even getting a boost by pushing your jump button at the right time when exiting a dirt patch. The great thing about Pepper Grinder’s movement is that a lot of thought went into the intricacies of every movement action you can make. The standard jump is not the same as the boost – and you have to play every level knowing that you can overshoot your mark if you’re not paying attention to which one is which. Once you master the movement of the drill in the dirt and outside of it, it’s incredibly satisfying to maneuver your way around the various platforming challenges and enemies of Pepper Grinder.

It’s here where the choice of enemies becomes clear – because why else would you pick a narwhal to beat the crap out of? These zombie-faced narwhal, “Narling” grunts can use their horns to drill in the same dirt patches you use, while trying to out-maneuver you and poke you in the behind. None of the enemies are tough to beat with your giant drill, but the challenge of Pepper Grinder is based on where enemies are placed throughout each level. Sometimes, you might have Narlings placed in the dirt patches, requiring the player to be careful when using their drill. Other enemies might be floating, ready to shoot you out of the sky with guns while you’re zooming between chunks of earth. The game stays engaging throughout because of these varied enemy layouts, with powered-up and armored versions of regular enemies as you get into the later levels to keep combat up to your skill level. 

Yet, while the movement and the enemies are shining elements of Pepper Grinder that make each level feel cohesive and a blast to play, its piece de resistance is the level design. 

The closest thing I can compare Pepper Grinder to, which is by far the highest compliment I can pay it, is Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. Nearly every single level is oozing with character and life, and buzzing through each of these landscapes is always a unique experience. I can’t count the number of times I was playing a level in this game and audibly said, “Wow.” 

I want to write a few short descriptions of levels that gave me that reaction. The snowmobile level where you’re riding among a caravan of Narlings in a massive car-chase, all leading to a difficult boss fight with your early foe from the very first level. The beach level where you can tunnel under every single sand dune with tons of hidden secrets. Crystal Falls was a personal favorite of mine. Set in a crystalline cavern, you must drill into falling chunks of crystals to maneuver your way around.

The various locales of Pepper Grinder are built upon a strong foundation of the game’s art style and sound design. Pepper Grinder is all about the small wielding something so powerful that it shouldn’t make sense, so the sounds of the game should reflect this. The drill is so overpoweringly loud, with the intermittent squeaks of Narlings as they die, all backed by an understated lo-fi backing track. Likewise, all enemies are so small in the grand scope of the level layouts. Gigantic caverns and tall mountains surround you but all you have to deal with is the two-feet tall grunts in front of you. 

What makes Pepper Grinder’s levels shine is not just that the movement/combat is satisfying, but that each level is so cohesive in every aspect of its design. The most obvious example are the backgrounds, which are often dynamically shifting as you make progress through each level. My favorite was one beach level, where a volcano erupts halfway through the course, spouting lava obstacles you had to dodge as they fell from the top of the screen. Those lava blobs could cool and act as more dirt patches for Pepper to drill through with Grinder. The background seamlessly interacts with the gameplay. Other shining moments were the giant in one of the snow levels, and the dark, grimy, ever-shifting city towards the end of the game. While 90% of this game consists of banger level after banger level, the only knock I will give Pepper Grinder is that there are some less inspired stages. A few felt like they were just thrown in because they fit the overall world theme, but I don’t expect every level to be 100% amazing. Even the boss fights were surprisingly cohesive -- the gigantic rhino beetle in the first world, the magma worm in the second, and even the final boss, Emperor Naro, was a fun time. 

Inherent in this seamless experience is a great understanding of level pacing. Pepper Grinder has levels of varying speed – and even multiple sections within the same level that are differently paced. The developers know when to slow down Pepper and have her make tactical, more careful decisions in combat and movement. Likewise, they also know when to funnel you through the level at a million miles per hour. The drill attachments are the best gameplay mechanic that helps keep this pacing on track. Slower levels often present you with more jumping outside of the dirt, and a different drill attachment like the gun (yes, you get to attach your drill to a minigun) allows you to approach the game more methodically. More fast-paced levels will have external gadgets, like cannons that shoot you across the level or hooks where you can swing around to higher patches of dirt. My favorite gadget was in the last world, which I won’t spoil now, but when you get there, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Pepper Grinder knows what it’s doing. Developer Ahr Ech is really onto something, as it incorporates so many different aspects of platforming from so many different titles, and yet it all works in one seamless project. It’s the best platformer I’ve played so far this year, and I don’t see a world where it’s not in my top 10 games of 2024. 

Score: 8.5/10

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That subheader is 100% joking, of course, but Balatro has one of the most addictive, satisfying, and challenging gameplay loops I’ve seen in any game, regardless of genre.

The literal meaning of Balatro is one of a court jester or clown. It’s an apt game, as I often feel like the court jester himself the more and more times I throw myself at this game for hours on end. 

The game revolves around a typical poker game with many interesting twists. You try to rack up as much money as possible with a given hand, ranging anywhere from a lowly high card up to straights, flushes, and full houses, all while trying to beat the money total of the big casino man. The game can take you from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows within minutes in each of your runs. And that’s because of the incredible deckbuilding mechanics.  

As the difficulty in each round ramps up and you have to raise more and more money, the game introduces modifiers that will increase your money in the form of Jokers. One will increase your multiplier (a modifier that your total chip number gets multiplied by at the end of a hand) for every even card you possess. Another will increase the number of chips you get for face cards, adding even more money to your total. Another will increase your multiplier for a predetermined played hand that is set at the beginning of the round (all hail the Idol Joker!). 

You can also upgrade the amount of money each hand gives you at the end of each round, meaning you can set a winning strategy from the jump with a couple of common hands, like a two-pair or a flush, and just play those hands every single round. But putting all your cards in one basket – both metaphorically and literally – might backfire on you.

Obviously, none of these strategies would ever work in a real casino, but it’s the idea of bending the cards — and by extension, the house — to your will that makes this game so enticing to play. Balatro understands what makes card games fun, and builds upon these base concepts in creative ways through Jokers and other modifiers, allowing for a ton of player freedom. I’ve seen a lot of videos on social media of players racking up trillion dollar combos off of one hand. It makes you think: “Huh, I can absolutely do that.”

After learning the initial mechanics, the game helps feed into the desire to play bigger and bigger hands to win more and more money through its understated art direction and sound design. If you play a flush of hearts and have a few Jokers that help multiply that total to over $4000, you feel it in the movement of the cards and hear the big ka-ching of the money that trumps the house. The red seal cards that activate twice the amount of chips and bonuses you get spell out a forceful “AGAIN” as you rack up more points. All the while, you’re praying for your glass cards – cards that have a 1 ⁄ 4 chance to disappear from your deck entirely when played – not to shatter into a million pieces. All of this is to say when you play a massive hand, that wins you the round, you know.

And while the game is egging you on, Balatro toes the line between making you feel like you’re cheating the house with all of your crazy combinations of cards, and the house is cheating you with unfair penalties. 

Because while the game is built around you building up your deck by adding cards and purchasing items that multiply your decks even further, the house is working against you. Did you happen to just purchase a Joker that buffs all of your club cards? Oops, it looks like the next boss of this round debuffs all your clubs. Sorry! You may even go several rounds without a Joker card that will actually help you. Balatro’s gameplay rewards you for locking into a playstyle that will give you returns no matter what luck you might have, but it will also force you to think on your feet by suddenly blocking those strategies from working. The real way to win the game is by creating strategies that work in spite of the obstacles that the game throws your way. And when you win that way, there’s no better feeling. If there’s one thing that the one-man development team, LocalThunk, gets right, it’s making you feel smarter than the otherworldly forces controlling the twisted game of poker before you. 

Despite its intricate gameplay strategies, you can get as technical or as “playing by feel” as you want with Balatro. When I showed this game to my friends for the first time, our winning run took about two hours to play out as we had intense discussions about which Jokers made the most sense and which cards would get us the most money. But simultaneously, you can just play on autopilot and see what combinations work for you as you progress through the rounds and finish a run in ~40 minutes. While the game rewards you for playing smart, Balatro is also based on exploring the world of the card game every new round and seeing what new cards might give you good fortune. New combinations of jokers, hands, and upgrades might give you a completely different option to progress through each of the game’s rounds. It’s even better that the game incentivizes you to explore the cards, as the game’s varying decks with different modifiers (more hands per round, more money per round, etc.) unlock as you discover and add new cards to your collection. It works the same way with Jokers, of which those new ones might give you a new multiplier combination that will prepare you to face the game's final rounds. 

Balatro gives you this feeling of every run being blessed with a new opportunity, that maybe if I buy more cards of a certain suit and order my Jokers and invest in certain hands, maybe that will be the extra oomph that will get me past the next hurdle. But even if it isn’t, that new run button will call you, egging you on like the clown you are. 

I haven’t been this into a game since I picked up Hades for the first time on my very first Twitch stream (shameless plug for https://www.twitch.tv/jackalopeyt). You should 100% play Balatro right now unless you want to look like a clown yourself.

8.5/10

I wouldn’t have discovered some of my favorite games of all time without knowing their predecessors. Hollow Knight was an easy sell for me because of the Metroidvania of it all and it being compared to the atmosphere of Dark Souls. Hades was one of the first roguelikes I actually enjoyed because it was reviewed as a refreshing take on the genre. 

But comparison is often the death of ingenuity. Not every game is Dark Souls, Zelda, or Metroid; sometimes something completely new comes around that will redefine the medium. Constantly comparing one game to another industry mainstay inherently disregards some of the new games’ magic. It also puts new games -- often ones that will make or break a new studio’s success -- on a massive pedestal with lofty expectations that they will have to live up to. 

Wild Hearts is a great example. Gamers seemed to love EA’s take on the Monster Hunter genre – reviewing it well into a favorable Metacritic rating. But there’s the caveat. Notice how I could not describe Wild Hearts without first acknowledging the game that came before it. The first review I read on this game on Metacritic mentioned Monster Hunter one sentence in. 

It’s sometimes a necessary evil to do this. Gamers need a jumping off point to understand where a game is coming from and what it intends to show them in order to meet the game on its own terms. The problem arises when games media at large decides to take genre comparison and throw it into overdrive.

Games media has a lot of issues right now, but one of the paramount ones is constant comparison with live service games. There’s a clear reason why this exists -- live service games are a sure-fire way to generate gaming content. For games like Overwatch, Valorant, and League of Legends that constantly get new updates, every new map or new character or bug fix is a new piece of content that can get written on websites like GameRant or other aggregators. But what if those same sites want to generate the same amount of content for single-player games?

This is where the content machine becomes tricky -- oftentimes leading to dangerous pieces of content getting published. Take this article from Gamingbolt.com. The headline “Starfield Could be in Trouble, as Player Numbers Plummet” is more than just misleading -- it’s borderline journalistic malpractice. Right off the bat, Starfield is a single player game with no option for multiplayer or online play of any kind, so there’s no reason for player numbers to remain high once everyone has finished the game since it was released in September. The author does bring up other titles that have higher concurrent player counts like Skyrim, Elden Ring, and Stardew Valley. But there’s just a lack of nuance in the reporting: Skyrim has a thriving modding community that Starfield doesn’t quite have yet, Elden Ring has online player v player gameplay, and Stardew Valley has both of those things combined. 

Granted, the author, Ravi Sinha, doesn't outright call Starfield a failure, citing that the game has the record for most Game Pass subscriptions in a single day. But the article in itself is a nothing burger, simply speculating that Starfield, an incredibly successful game by itself, might be “in trouble.” Concurrent player numbers aren’t the important thing for a new, single-player, offline Bethesda IP like Starfield, it’s game sales and Game Pass subscriptions. The constant comparison with live-service games is often what is wrong with games media altogether. 

This plays into a larger issue of game genre generalization. If it’s from a big time AAA developer and is a modern release that isn’t FromSoftware, Sony, or Nintendo, it simply must be live service! But if the game is smaller in length, budget, and graphical capability, it’s an indie game.

That’s what’s happening right now to a game called Dave the Diver at the Game Awards. The game, published by Mintrocket (a subsidiary of Korean studio Nexon which is worth trillions of dollars), is up for Best Indie game.

It’s not an indie game. By all definitions of the word, the game is not from a new studio and is not small-budget. But because games media sees “Oh this is pixel art and costs less than $30,” it’s being viewed as an indie game, giving a spot at the Game Awards that otherwise would have gone to a game like Pizza Tower.

I could preach from my soapbox and try to come up with a reason why this problem exists with games media outlets for hours on end, but all I know is that this needs to change and not. Coverage of these games needs to be genuine, and actually well-researched by those who claim to know everything about the industry. 

To bring this all back to a head, a final mention of Wild Hearts. It’s been just under a year since Wild Hearts was released, and EA has all but abandoned the game. Whether it’s due to low concurrent player numbers or just overall bad rollout by EA, it’s not for me to say. All I know is that the Monster Hunter clone flopped more than I think it should have.

Bottom line, I’m picking Cocoon for Best Indie Game this year.