Rime’s Helpful but Harmful Formulaic Depiction of Grief

SPOILER WARNING: I spoil the entirety of Rime in this article. In May of 2017 I lost my friend to a car accident. It was a very rough month and I haven’t been the same since. It opened my eyes to loss and made me seek answers about my views on the world and lifeContinue

Night in the Woods: Payphones and Rusted Thrones

I love the bus station at the beginning of Night in the Woods. It is one of the greatest beginnings of any game I have ever played. There is the beautiful mural showing the history of Possum Springs, the setting of the game, and a broken payphone on a wall next to the mural showingContinue

Downwell’s Palette Progression

Downwell is an amazing Roguelike shooter that I could spend countless hours praising, but instead I want to look specifically at its progression system, where you gain experience for going deeper into the well, and are rewarded by obtaining new play styles, and most importantly, more color palettes. These palettes range from the classic blackContinue

Celeste: The Complexity of Dashing

Casually, Celeste is a simple, yet difficult, platformer where you only have four movement options. You can walk, jump, grab, and dash. Together, these mechanics are used to their fullest extent to overcome the obstacles spread throughout each level. You grab onto blocks to activate their movement, allowing you to obtain momentum that will sendContinue

Meditation Games Diary: 2/9/19

Isaac Schankler made a pretty neat game for Meditations today. It consists of looking at a starry void and moving your mouse to change the look of the starry sky. Apparently moving the mouse also changes up the music, but the differences are too small to notice. Regardless, today’s game was visually pleasing, and aContinue

Meditation Games Diary: 2/8/19

Missing someone hurts, but it hurts more to think that you shouldn’t miss them. Andrew Yolland’s Meditations game is about him missing someone who passed away, and how he is not sure if he deserves to be missing them because he believes he could have been a better friend. Out of all Meditations games, thisContinue

Meditation Games Diary: 2/7/19

Today’s Meditations game, created by Torstein Vien and Dan Wakefield, is about burning books! Book burning has been a repeated event in history where objects deemed dangerous or sinful would be burned away due to powerful and evil individuals and groups believing that the objects would be dangerous to their ideology. Today’s game handles theContinue

Meditation Games Diary: 2/6/19

Laura Michet’s Meditations game had a wonderful description, but the gameplay completely lost me. I did not know the significance of my actions and did not understand the mechanics of the game. I don’t think this was intentional, and I may just be unable to comprehend games today, but my absence of knowledge was quiteContinue

Meditation Games Diary: 2/5/19

Federico Fasce made an amazing game for today’s Meditations experience. You play as a cute little fox and you walk through a snowy place outside of the city, and when you stop walking at various intervals, you watch as a cutscene plays, and then you continue to walk again. I played it multiple times becauseContinue

Meditation Games Diary: 2/4/19

Freya Campbell’s journey from a conservative county to Bristol is the subject of today’s Meditations game. This is important due to Campbell being a part of the LGBTQIA+ community, and the game focuses on how great acceptance is. A switch from a community that advocates for laws to harm you, to a community that acceptsContinue