I played Dark Souls III during the COVID lockdowns. I’d figured that, since I’d had a lot of time on my hands suddenly and had to stay home, it was a good time to investigate the appeal of Soulsborne games that I’d heard so much about. They were really tough, I’d heard. They demanded a lot of patience, I’d heard, and it was because of that they delivered great satisfaction upon one’s victory over them. And I did end up becoming a Soulsborne fan as a consequence, though I told myself as the credits rolled that I would never buy Bloodborne. I then proceeded to buy and play Bloodborne (as well as its DLC) the next year, when the lockdowns didn’t let up. Of course, after that came Elden Ring, and Lies of P. I even tried CODE VEIN at one point. Dark times.

I really like Batman as a character. I think he embodies a lot of things about human beings that I like to see in various forms of fiction: our fears, our responses to those fears, a fairly serious tone, a certain exhaustion with existence, but also some humour, because a fully-grown man wearing a bat suit is inherently at least a little bit funny. Naturally, plenty of Batman games have been made, and have tried to play with different aspects of the character and setting.

I wrote recently about Fire Emblem: Awakening’s romance options. If you missed that, here it is, but basically it was about a fun romance system. However, it was a pretty lacking romance system really; it was fun in the context of what the game was doing with characters that worked with the narrative and mechanics in that game particularly. If you actually wanted romance in your romance system, if you want a little emotion and passion in your story and character work… it was rather lacklustre. It was difficult for me to imagine any of these characters caring about each other that much.

I’d played Sid Meier’s Civilization VI a long time ago, and I hadn’t liked it. In fairness, I hadn’t played it for very long. But because of that, it was hard to figure out why I hadn’t liked it. All I could conclude was that it was too different from a strategy game series that I really enjoy: the Total War series. I did, and still do know, why I like that series. But now, years later, I decided to try playing Humankind — basically exactly Civilization, but from a different developer — on a friend’s recommendation. It turns out that, in the end, it’s complicated. Maybe I’ll change my Facebook relationship status with it to reflect that. But I want to talk about Humankind now, because I actually finished a full campaign in it, and it went alright. 

In the online competitive-multiplayer gaming world, support players are underappreciated… or so the saying goes. I tend to be a support player myself, and this sentiment seems to be pervasive in the general Support-Player-Space. If you’ve played any of these games, you’ll know what I mean — especially if you are a Support player.

Persona 3 Reload is a remake of the original Persona 3, which came out in the 2000s. If you’re unfamiliar, the Persona series is a video game series based around, believe it or not, an odd mixture between Jungian psychological theory, tarot traditions, and a plethora of religious, historical, and cultural story references: from the Ramayana, to Les Miserables, to the Ars Goetia.

Here we are on Valentine’s Day! In a vague attempt to seem as on-theme as possible, what I want to talk about today is related to romance, yes. If this is the first time you’ve seen the term ‘waifu,’ congratulations. If you’ve seen the term before, you know what the connection with Valentine’s Day is. And if you’re familiar with Fire Emblem: Awakening, even better. But don’t even worry about any of that; we’ll worry about waifus for now.

A few years ago, I got into a game called Kingdom Come: Deliverance. I was interested in it because of its dedication to historical accuracy, and I wanted to see how that would affect gameplay. How would differentiating armour layers work? Would the emphasis on personal upkeep to keep oneself alive be too annoying? But also, how would the story pan out? What would it be like to play some random farmer-guy-turned-knight in medieval Bohemia?

Plenty of video games give the player two options, in terms of approaching situations. The first is stealth, and the second is to just go in guns-blazing, often literally. Depending on the type of game you’re playing, you’ll often be encouraged to choose one approach or the other. This is usually what tends to happen when a game tells you that you can “play the way you want to play.” Of course, more recently this has changed a bit — Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur’s Gate 3 are just two examples of games in recent memory that open things up more.

A while ago I wrote about management sims. They’re video games that are designed with one goal in mind: to have the player continually manage things, be they space colonies or theme parks or whole civilisations, while striving to make the process as efficient or grand as possible. These games basically end when you’ve completed what you set out to do. Once you’ve successfully enabled life on Mars, what other worlds are there to conquer?

The holiday season has led me to reflect on tradition, or rather, the seemingly random deployment of tradition despite, perhaps, the getting-tired of said tradition. One might conclude that one isn’t tired of said tradition after all, since it continues to be perpetuated. Needless to say, that led me to think about zombies.

Well, I like the Dead or Alive series of fighting games. I don’t know if it’s my favourite — Mortal Kombat or Injustice might take that spot in my mind palace — but Dead or Alive is up there. My first exposure to the series was in a YouTube video about it; it was about how the first game in the series was made. Lo and behold, the next time I was at the local game store, I found DoA2 for the PS2 right there, ripe for the picking. And I found it pretty fun.