The best games writing from around the web.

The Weekly is your round-up of all the best in games writing and related spaces. Reviews, news, features, and more await you each week as the curators of Good Games Writing scour the Internet for the best of the best. Some themes are for older audiences.

Summer is here. Wherever you are, we hope you’re happy and healthy, making the most of time in the sun and, hopefully, your own holiday at some point. For us, as a team of educators, this is a time to recharge after a difficult school year, but also time to refine our practice after reflecting on our successes and failures. That philosophy–of grinding, of ruminating, and improving–applies to games writing as well.

Reviews & Criticism:

Two games have mostly captured our attention in terms of recent criticism: Cruelty Squad and Chicory.

Describing Cruelty Squad, PC Gamer‘s James Davenport calls it a “psychedelic assassination nightmare”. The descriptive examples–the first paragraph a prime example–are helpful for establishing what the game is and what it aspires to be, and the review itself manages to discuss the mechanics without making it feel tedious. This is a review that works on every level.

Descriptive examples are the name of the game with coverage of Cruelty Squad, as evidenced by this Kotaku Australia clip:

There’s a double jump you install by cutting holes into yourself. There’s a corporate chip that basically breaks the stock market. There’s a grappling hook that’s better described as your lower intestine repurposed as a rope. You can install an implant that shrinks you to the size of a pea; you can buy goggles that transform the entire game in a black and red filter. And if you feel like it, you can also just buy a house for a million dollars.

Our favourite read on the game thus far comes from the DEEP HELL Skeleton who focuses on the slick but nauseating, textured but bright aesthetics found in Cruelty Squad, comparing it to the slick but nauseating American cultural fixtures of fast food and service stations.

It’s both the differences and the similarities to Cruelty Squad that Chicory: A Colorful Tale share that make it an interesting release gobbling up our collective attention together. Chicory leans into both its colourful world and strong writing to create something altogether different but the fact it came out a few days before Cruelty Squad isn’t lost on us. For a time, it was the only game we saw splashed across our social feeds; now, its palette is interspersed with the nightmare fuel of Cruelty Squad.

Uppercut’s review lays out the hero’s journey nature of the game and masterfully avoids giving away too much more. It’s a straightforward enough review that embraces magazine/newspaper style simplicity – for our team, it was the review that put the game on the radar in the first place. For those that need more nudging, more explanation, then a different review is in order:

Chicory is more than just an interactive coloring book experience; it’s also a surprisingly poignant story and a disarmingly candid depiction of mental health, along with the ebb and flow of its symptoms.

Over at Can I Play That?, their accessibility review reveals a host of features that are helpful to players who may be overlooked, including the introduction of a “wet sounds” toggle (to remove squishy, paint sounds) and eyestrain features (changing the “warmth” of the screen), praising its wealth of options and comparing its accessibility to the landmark work of The Last of Us Part II.

(While this is a reviews section, we’d be remiss not to mention Eric Van Allen’s short piece on its hint system–a feature that’s also referenced in the above review–and how it helps landmark progress while building out the story. Cute.)

Then there’s Natalie Flores’ review which focuses on the narrative theme of the game along with its various subversions and surprises. It’s a Game of the Year contender, according to Flores, that manages to challenge its players like any good piece of art. And, like any great work, it’s tough to put that into words. Flores does just fine.

More reviews:

Other recent reviews and criticism we’ve read are varied in the games they cover and the tone they take.

First up are a pair of tabletop reviews. There’s Brandy Berthelson with a review of a Taco Bell card game that’s less about the novelty and more about its functional playstyle. We’re not sure we’d have the strength to avoid filling an article with terrible taco jokes. Then, there’s this Monopoly Deal review with a headline that proclaims it’s the “only Monopoly worth playing”. Matt Jarvis explains that this condensed version of the game packs in all the parts people remember while removing the tedious bits. If you can’t get yourself one of those Animal Crossing themed sets this one will have to do.

Monti Velez grounds a piece on Mini Motorways on the exhausting nature of life in a pandemic – both as it progresses and as we try to move on from it. The Apple Arcade release, for its part, has a soothing feel to it, and that allowed Velez to be sucked into the game for moments, recalibrating in the face of life’s daily challenges.

Tackling Chivalry II, RPS‘ review blends an accessible (to newcomers of the genre) approach with irreverent humour (appropriate for the game), with this paragraph telling us all we need to know about both the game and the review:

Throwing weapons in general is an instant spike of dopamine, so much so that I will regularly throw all my weapons, at which point I have to rummage about on the floor for a new sword, a sight that must be funny to the enemy I have missed three times, now menacingly approaching. Of course, if you fail to find a sharp bit of steel, there are other options. Maps are filled with throwable detritus. Rocks, tools, barrels, planks. You can stick your hand in a well and find a fish to lob. You can pick dung off the floor and chuck that. An enemy knight once doinked me with a roast chicken. I cannot fault his valour.

That’s not #content you’ll get anywhere else, folks.

At his personal blog, Cole Henry writes about Maneater (Shark Week is soon, innit?) and how everything it does it frames as a joke or otherwise laughs it off. In that respect, it’s a wonderful companion piece to the DEEP HELL piece featured above and the two should be read together. Shot meet chaser.

Rounding out this section is a poem review of Metroid II which is just aces. The mission oriented nature of bounty hunter Samus Aran is given the spotlight here with wonderful effect.

Competitive:

A trio of pieces in the competitive space have inspired much discussion by our team in recent meetings.

First, is the phenomenal piece on the future of competitive Tetris after the death of its most prominent player and cheerleader, Jonas Neubauer. It’s as much an obituary as it is a rallying cry for the community — a potential roadmap for the dream of getting the series into the Olympics.

Next is this scathing commentary on on the ‘Save Titanfall’ campaign which, quizzically enough, has often involved harassing Apex Legends developers and fans alike. As the author opines, the “only thing this example of extreme gamer entitlement will accomplish is getting a bunch of devs to work overtime on a holiday weekend“.

Closing out the competitive bit is a slightly older piece explaining the shenanigans speedrunners use to beat Paper Mario in a hurry. The “cartridge swapping” method was on full display at this week’s Games Done Quick so it’s a great time to revisit the piece.

And now, your guide:

We’re turning the spotlight on guides on the regular moving forward and the first we want to feature is this series of Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart guides from Jordan Oloman at TechRadar. The site doesn’t neatly put them all together for you but the pieces do neatly lay out where all the major collectibles in the game are found.

Read them:

• Armor sets
• Spybots
• Gold Bolts

Tech:

Mashable‘s tech coverage is reliably among the best but this science/tech piece on drones that search out screams (for noble reasons!) is fascinating enough we had to share it separately. We’re not fans of an email interview but the author gets plenty out of the research and responses provided.

At RPS, this list of the, erm, questionable art choices on graphics card packaging was both informative and eyebrow raising. Robot animals, cyborgs, and military inspired women abound.

Reporting:

At Fanbyte, Josh Broadwell interviews The Geofront, a group leading fan translations on JRPGs, highlighting the challenges and opportunities they’ve faced over the years.

On Vice, Steve Kupferman spotlights Best Electronics, “a mail-order business that has been selling Atari goods continuously for almost four decades”. Bradley Koda, the owner, has perhaps the definitive collection of unused, original Atari parts sourced directly from their warehouses. The businessman is meticulous in his work completing orders by hand but can be described as ornery. He has numerous rules–written and unwritten–such as order limits (no more than three items) and PayPal minimums. As the only game in town he writes the rules; those wanting to buy parts from Koda are ill-advised to break those rules.

If you’re a fan of Double Fine, then Blake Hester’s history of the company for Game Informer is a must-read longread, and its relationship to Microsoft is clearly highlighted throughout:

Psychonauts was in development for around five years. In that time, Double Fine learned how to operate as a team and make the game it wanted to make. But it came with some high costs. There was, of course, the crunch. “It was terrible,” Crook says. But also, Microsoft was going through its own internal changes. In January 2004, Fries left the company. Around the same time, Microsoft was beginning its transition to the Xbox 360 in preparation for its November 2005 release. This halted funding for original Xbox games planned to launch after 2004. Expensive and behind schedule, new management within Microsoft opted to cancel Psychonauts – even though, by this point, Double Fine felt it was finally making real progress.

Tension between China and Taiwan featured heavily in Red Candle Games’ work Devotion being incredibly difficult to find for the past two years. It’s available for purchase now–from the developers website–serving as impetus for Shannon Liao to interweave the story of the game’s self-publishing with review-like elements.

Can you lend a hand?

One of the premier Pokémon oriented sites on the Internet–particularly for fans of the TCG–is PokeBeach. The site has recently been hacked and in the process lost years and years of material. The owner is looking for help with data recovery. Are you someone who could help? Reach out to them.

A final shoutout:

Our last feature for today is to credit Kotaku for dedicating seemingly the entirety of their July 4th coverage to indie games through an event they called Indie Penance.

If you’re looking for a new indie–particularly with the glut of summer sales–their pieces from July 4 include 44 games you might want to take a peek at. Find the pieces below:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4

Jobs:

The best games writing from around the web.

The Weekly is your round-up of all the best in games writing and related spaces. Reviews, news, features, and more await you each week as the curators of Good Games Writing scour the Internet for the best of the best. Some themes are for older audiences.

We’d like to begin by acknowledging the more than 500 bodies of children discovered across former residential school sites in Canada over the past few weeks. That number is expected to grow in the coming weeks. As a team of educators, the systemic racism that led to the creation of these schools, and the genocide of these peoples, is a black mark against our very profession. The very fabric of our system is built on such racism that is interwoven into many practices today. We stand with the Indigenous communities seeking truth, accountability, and action.

Our Not E3 special is a longstanding tradition in which we feature smaller voices and typically non-gaming publications in the midst of the chaos that is *E3*. It’s far too easy to have our feeds devolve into a long list of trailers and reactions; while fun, it’s not for everyone. Here are a few completely E3 free pieces for your enjoyment.

Non-gaming publications

We start our collection with pieces from non-gaming sites that (sort of) fit the bill.

First is SB Nation‘s look at the rise and fall of trading card scalpers. Their demographic is sports enthusiasts but Pokémon cards have seen a meteoric rise in value in recent months. If you’re not the sports type you might be unaware that the bubble seemingly started with basketball and football cards before Game Freak’s iconic creatures became paper gold for speculators.

The fever spread from basketball into everything else. First football, then baseball, and finally Pokemon. “Pokemon makes me too nervous man,” Tyrone says to a friend who suggests they start buying it up, “we don’t know shit about those. I mean, can we break it? I don’t know. I know Luka and Ja, not Squirtle and shit. I’ll stick to what I know.”

Over on the CBC are a pair of features that reminds us the heart of games is play, and we’re remiss to forget that a game of tag counts as games writing. First is this competent consumer guide that masterfully recommends everything from a glowing hula hoop to sidewalk chalk, Spikeball to magnetic chess sets.

While that bit of service writing is well done, we appreciate Sebastian Yūe’s list of games to play in the park, which has no commercial implications whatsoever. Go run. Play pen and paper games. The simplicity and joy of park play is captured throughout the piece.

The Guardian ran this fantastic piece on gaming parents (and grandparents!) last month and it reminded us of the halcyon days of families descending on parks to play Pokémon Go: the cross-generational appeal of gaming was so clearly on display for the world. Lucy Campbell points out it isn’t just mobile experiences attracting older games–everything from Animal Crossing to Call of Duty: Warzone is played–a reminder that the 18-34 year-old demographic isn’t the end-all-be-all of game design.

Grief

This pair of pieces connects loosely with grief: the loss of a family member and the loss of home feature here.

Oisin Kuhnke details their experience with Loop Hero, a game they describe as “a game about the end of the universe”, and how that bleakness brings comfort in dealing with their own loop centred around the death of a loved one.

At the New York Videogame Critic Circle, Makeda Byfield connects the experience of grounding oneself through Wii Sports after several moves to the excitement of playing Miitopia as they enter adulthood. From there it’s a somewhat typical review format, but a promising start from this writer, nonetheless.

Craft

This final section focuses on the craft of making games in various forms.

Let’s start with another somewhat conventional review: Rowen Cameron tackles Lacuna, a “pixel art sci-fi noir adventure [with] a futuristic universe of technological advancement, uneasy planetary alliances and colossal social divides.” The review itself is punchy and filled with solid one-liners. We’ve highlighted Cameron a couple of times before and we’re happy to see her continue to improve her writing craft.

Arcade Idea reliably posts interesting retro content: This week’s entry is 1984’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This is a longread, no doubt, that’s filled with nuggets both for those looking to reminisce about the game and those who didn’t realize there was a video game adaptation at all.

Dent is only the primary player character, because the game changes which character’s perspective we control and see things through frequently, always accompanied also with flashback. Well, time travel technically: you need to collect items and possibly do tasks once-not-done in the past to change the present to give the flashback segments mechanical puzzle reasons to be there.

This moment sets up two thundering paragraphs about the character swapping that ultimately crescendos into a description of the game’s narrative structure and related decisions. This is essential reading.

In a much shorter piece, Matt Gregoire writes that Destiny is crossing a threshold with its violence, in which once squishy targets now have a narrative, a story, a life. Suddenly those bullet sponges feel far more consequential. The penultimate paragraph of this piece has some of our favourite writing so far this year, too, so check it out. Here’s but a taste…

It almost goes beyond physical violence at this point and into the realm of cruel spiritual violence; we robbed them of the Traveler’s gifts once unintentionally, and now we’re knowingly ripping away what scraps are left by force.

Chris Penwell, meanwhile, interviews a narrative designer on Returnal, discussing the importance of the role, describing them as “more of an editor and interpreter between the writer and the game designer“. The challenges of designing the narrative around the already established gameplay systems make for interesting interview fodder, too.

Finally, we end with a wonderful D&D guide on how to accurately–and respectfully–portray some Chinese dishes in your campaigns. Mouthwatering.

Because hot pot is such a social meal, it’s the perfect backdrop for any number of roleplay-heavy hooks and scenes. A scheming noble invites the party to her manor for hot pot, but one of the ingredients is poisoned. A band of thieves rolls into a hot pot tavern, demanding the best meats for themselves and no one else. Two warring clans sit down to discuss a tenuous peace treaty over a shared pot of roiling broth. The possibilities are endless. 

The best games writing from around the web.

The Weekly is your round-up of all the best in games writing and related spaces. Reviews, news, features, and more await you each week as the curators of Good Games Writing scour the Internet for the best of the best. Some themes are for older audiences.

We certainly don’t like being gone for the length of time we were. As COVID-19 rages out of control in Alberta, compounded by a government keen to sit on its hands, our individual workloads as educators became monumental as we juggled ping-ponging back-and-forth between online learning and in person.

In that spirit, our updates will still look different for the next while, while we juggle the demands of our profession and try to catch up on all things games writing. These entries won’t be our usual massive lists, either, and you’ll perhaps see them more often than weekly while we engage with and read the numerous pieces we’ve bookmarked of late. You can expect a handful of pieces from the last week or so paired with a somewhat different collection of pieces from the past 45 days. We anticipate “catching up” in June!

CURRENT EVENTS

We’ll start things off with the most recent works to come to our attention before working backwards.

As Apple and Epic duke it out in court, there’s few publications we trust to give us the skinny, and high up on the list is The Washington Post. Their live updates are engaging and informative; too often, such updates can feel trite. Each of these feels like its own capsule capturing a very specific moment in time. If you’re interested in these proceedings this will be one place to watch.

At Upcomer, Aron Garst is tracking the news around Overwatch‘s Chinese teams boycotting of Park “Saebyeolbe” Jong-ryeol of the Seoul Dynasty after he made remarks angering the Chinese intelligentsia and their censors. Much of the coverage encompasses translated versions of the teams’ various statements. This is one issue not likely to go away anytime soon.

Chase Carter analyzes criticism around MTG‘s new character–and something of a mascot of the Strixhaven set–Killian Lu. While fans were initially enthusiastic about the character, new card reveals indicate the character falls into just about every Asian stereotype there is, rather than chart new territory.

“It’s the Panda Expressification of Asian Culture,” [says Michelle Rapp], comparing the attempt to the American chain of fast food restaurants known for its vaguely Asian-inspired recipes.

The current hotness in games is obviously New Pokémon Snap. Extra-thicc Bidoof capture hearts and minds while our social feeds fill with goofy, adorable, and frightening scenes. If you’re jumping into the game, the guides at TheGamer are essential, with everything from large thematic guides to nitty gritty ones focusing on individual quests. There are spoilers–namely for certain special and legendary Pokemon–so beware of that. Otherwise, these guides are top notch: Accept no substitutes.

We also appreciated Jessica Howard pointing out that in New Pokémon Snap it feels like the series is allowing at least one character to grow up alongside those that play the games. Ash may forever be 10ish but seeing a once-prominent character enter adulthood successfully hits hard.

MORE PHOTOGRAPHY

We like themes ’round here.

Kenneth Shepard explains how New Pokémon Snap doesn’t care about composition in the way we might expect. Its scoring doesn’t care about your feelings (sorry); rather, Professor Mirror wants centered shots showing the ‘mon doing something specific. If you’re a photography geek, or just have an eye for what looks good, this piece will put your head (and heart) at ease.

At Red Bull eSports, Jason Fanelli interviews eSports photographer Stephanie Lindgren about all things photography in general and in the games space specifically. While the interview is ostensibly about promoting a contest, we appreciate that it pulls back the curtain somewhat on a relatively new career path.

Over on Gamasutra, Jack Yarwood interviews the designers of recent indie games that feature a photography element, and the discussions on what works and what doesn’t in various games is downright fascinating.

Christian Donlan argues that “the best thing a game can give you is a camera” and the reason for that, is, well, that it makes it all feel more real:

This is the heart of it for me. An imaginary camera makes an imaginary reality more real, in surprising ways. They make me think: oh, I am here, and I want a picture of that. So ‘here’ and ‘that’ become real in a way that is separate from the game mechanics, from the idea of graphics and whether there’s too much bloom or if the grass looks convincing. They make me look beyond whether things are convincing, and so I am merely convinced by them.

If you’re feeling a bit nostalgic, Willem Hilhorst created a brief history of photo modes in games, and while it isn’t exhaustive, it is a trip down memory lane.

Alternatively, a throwback to February, where Rachel Watts informs us of the best photography oriented games on PC…possibly useful for those missing out on all that Bidoof action.

Finally, Lewis Gordon (and co.) make the claim that photography games may well have more in common with so-called ‘walking sims’ than most any other genre, while embracing the fact gaming is a medium of images in so many ways:

here are moments playing Nuts which resonate with what the art critic John Berger wrote in 1972: “In no other form of society in history has there been such a concentration of images, such a density of visual messages.” Since then, their proliferation has only intensified, and the three in-game cameras of Nuts, each recording the squirrels’ journey in real time, emphasizes just what an eruption of images video games actually are. What’s lovely about the game is the way it asks you to print out photos of its bushy-tailed subjects. By the end of your time in the forest, you’ll have amassed a small trove of freeze frames pinned to the corkboard in your virtual camper van.

That’s a wrap!

If you’ve seen writing on Assassin’s Creed (broadly), Loop Hero, or Stardew Valley we’d love to hear about it. Give us a message on Twitter @GoodWritingVG or use the SUBMIT button to your right.