Note: This article was originally published in Well Played 3.0 in 2011. I wrote about the book here at the time, but the old links are dead and these days you actually have to buy the book or go wading through academic PDF sites if you want to read it. So I am reposting it here. Obviously a lot of new horror games have shipped since I wrote this, but I think Siren is still one of the top contenders for this accolade. In 2003 I decided to become an expert on horror games. At the end of the previous year my wife and I had moved from icy Albany, New York, where I was employed as a game programmer ..read more

RETURNAL was touted as one of PlayStation 5’s premier AAA exclusive games, and it plays the part well. An incessantly beautiful game, RETURNAL’s vibe is a nightmare alien forest strewn with stone relics of an ancient society, INDIANA JONES raids AVATAR’s Pandora. A novel location in part because lush is a hard adjective for rendering engineers. There are no load times. The sound track, sometimes atonal and sometimes foreboding but always moody, is a single continuous stream of sound that ebbs and flows as you play. The hallmark of AAA is presentation, visual complexity, and polish, and RETURNA ..read more

DEATHLOOP is the latest in Arkane’s catalog of Thief-inspired systems-as-narrative games.  As a fan of this genre I deeply enjoyed DEATHLOOP, particularly the way it makes my style of play much lower-stress than in other immersive sims.  I am the type who wants to stealth perfectly and maintain a moral high ground, and DEATHLOOP gives me a novel way to relax a bit and enjoy the game.  But after many hours of play my feelings shifted, and now that I’ve finished the game I’m not sure exactly where I stand.  DEATHLOOP is masterfully crafted, a beautiful, witty, and tight game ..read more

Another year has come and gone and frankly, I can barely remember it.  This post wasn’t even written on time–2022 is just starting down the tarmac and I’m already nearly three months behind.  To what shall we attribute these time slips, these missing hours?  The pandemic?  Probably.  General stress?  Almost certainly.  But I’ve also found that, in the last two years, my time has been sliced up into chunks with very small windows of free time in between. Maybe that’s why I can’t remember many details about the last 24 months. I suppose this has something to do ..read more

As the grip of the global pandemic has tightened around the world, one of the very few upsides has been increased time for video games.  I managed to make it through more titles than usual this year, although a great many remain in the towering “to be played” pile.  As with previous years, today I’m taking a look back at games I played in 2020, not just titles released in the last twelve months.  As usual, I’ve omitted VR games from this list. Good Fun I am a big fan of titles I can consume from beginning to end in the space between my children going to sleep for the evening and ..read more

The principal trope of the zombie genre is that in an undead-infested apocalypse, it’s the other humans you need to worry about.  A zombie plague is a natural disaster, an epidemic, an indiscriminate force of nature that is driven by neither logic nor passion–it just is.  What the genre has to teach us is that in a desperate situation, the worst atrocities will be perpetrated not by the infected hoards, but by the surviving humans.  This is the central appeal of a zombie movie: it puts characters in a high-pressure situation to see how their humanity holds up. The craft demonst ..read more

The plastic plate affixed to the entrance to the changing room says “Automatic,” but I have to press it anyway.  The door glides open, a Star Trek gateway 245 years early, and quieter too.  After removing my shoes I pass through a cloth curtain hanging over a entry into the main changing area, where I strip down to my skin and leave my clothing in a wicker basket.  At the end of the room is a dark glass door, fogged by condensation, that emits a suction pop when I open it.  Beyond is the main bath area, several shallow pools separated by hard tile floor, each glowing q ..read more

I purchased a WiiU because I shipped a game for it and figured I should actually have one to play on.  My first two purchases were (naturally) ZombieU and Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water.  I’ve completed every Fatal Frame game to date (excepting FF4, which I got stuck in), and the series has always occupied a place in my heart as part of the trifecta that put survival horror on the map.  With Resident Evil you get bombast, zombies, and recursive map unlocking.  With Silent Hill you get introspection, symbolism, and hell.  You go to Fatal Frame for hig ..read more

Yoriko Douguchi is not interested in your crap. In 1967 yakuza filmmaker Seijun Suzuki was fired from his job at Nikkatsu Company for being too weird.  He made 40 films in 12 years for Nikkatsu, each allocated less than 40 days of production from start to finish.  Steadily his movies got stranger and stranger.  At one point in Tokyo Drifter (1966), the entire set inexplicably turns white.  In Branded to Kill (1967, his last film for Nikkatsu), the contract killer protagonist becomes roommates with his target, who is also trying to kill him.  Although N ..read more

Though it’s not a hard and fast rule, I almost never play games the moment that they come out.  I’m too busy, or I’m in the middle of something else, or (more often than I’d like to admit) I don’t even realize that a game I’m interested in has shipped.  I miss out on a little of the zeitgeist that surrounds the launch of important games, but generally I feel better equipped to analyze (and enjoy!) a title with a little distance. Here are some of the games I played in 2018.  Not all of them shipped in 2018, but I played them last year so they are 2018 titles to me.  I’ve omi ..read more