No Escape

Alright, we’re now all caught up with stuff I forgot to post here! We return to the skies to fight off the Eruseans and… it goes poorly. I’m really proud of this episode just because it was a little more challenging to edit and I think I did a good job with it. Lemme know what you think! Like, subscribe, etc. Just as a note, we’re trying to make this whole content creation thing happen. It’s…

The more things change, the more they stay the same. The last seven years have been life-changing for me. Building this website, inviting contributors to write for it, inexplicably being able to create a community around it, none of this is what I expected to be doing in the last years of my 20s and the first of my 30s. I also didn’t expect this to last nearly as long as it did. There were…

According to the religion of Pop Punk, every kid dreams of leaving home, getting out of this shitty town, escaping the ennui and bad times and making their own path. Young and full of fire, you never intend to return home; sometimes you do anyway. For me I was always submerged in the bad times of home; leaving has only happened more recently. But I thought it was necessary. I made up a lot of…

I am not a person who automatically believes that ends justify the means in any given situation, especially when “the means” involve existential, environmental or social destruction. Basically, if something kills or immiserates people or contributes appreciably to the destruction of the environment, unless the result of using the means is “nobody will ever get cancer again forever” it would…

This project has been such a strange experience for me. I feel my relationships with these games and with the rest of the Final Fantasy franchise constantly shifting as I learn more, do more reading, finish more of the core games I’ve decided to take a look at. My reaction to the misogyny in Final Fantasy XV no longer feels like just some vague feeling of unease at the way certain characters were…

I wanna talk about Penguin Colony. Let’s talk about Penguin Colony. It’s the new game from Origame Digital (Umurangi Generation) and Fellow Traveller (1000xResist, etc.) and it’s a Lovecraftian tale reimagined, where you are a penguin waddling through the Antarctic wastes (your home) as you watch people who are not from Antarctica—nazis, namely—lose it and freeze to death (if they’re lucky) as…

I’ve been an anarchist since I was a sophomore in high school, so I am fairly well-acquainted with people not sharing my politics, broadly or specifically. But the thing that bothers me more than whether or not someone is ideologically aligned with me is whether or not motherfuckers can be bothered to care. I know I can’t make anyone give a shit about something but Jesus Christ, dude, it’s been…

Hey y’all. I’ve been feeling pretty down lately just with the state of the world and everything going on. I’ve also felt kind of dissatisfied with the work I’ve been doing and my contributions to discourse overall. The short version of it is really just trying to reckon with how my work (and criticism more broadly) gets subsumed by capitalism, how everything is just kind of sucked back up into…

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. —Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?“ Repetition and first time, but also repetition and…

I don’t like Mixtape (Beethoven and Dinosaur, 2026). I am going to be a hater in this review. If that’s not something you’re looking for, I have good news! Quite a few other critics adored this game. IGN’s Simon Cardy gave it a 10/10. Game Informer’s Charles Harte gave it a 9. Over at GamesRadar+, Rollin Bishop gave the game four stars, calling it a “nostalgic, vibes-based experience set to a…

As I mentioned in my Marathon review I am not actually a very big PVP person, despite earning a PVP-related title in Destiny 2 and having spent time in games like The Finals, Apex Legends and, of course, Fortnite. But when I was younger and I was a lot more locked into the so-called Valve ecosystem of games, I did play quite a bit of Team Fortress 2. Ever since seeing the Last Flag (Night Street…

My relationship to live service games has been almost exclusively defined by Bungie. Yes, I’ve played the other “classics” of the category, like Fortnite, PUBG, Apex Legends, The Finals and so on. But in those games I was a dilettante, a tourist, someone who popped in to see what all the fuss was about and, upon not getting it, left the scene immediately. I’m not a veteran of Overwatch or League…

This weekend, after a tumultuous handful of years in development including a very rocky alpha period, hefty allegations of stolen artwork, multiple delays and repeated layoffs, Runners will finally get to play Bungie’s first new title in almost a decade: Marathon. It’s a hybrid PVPVE extraction shooter where players will have to use more than just raw firepower to navigate the hostile world of…

For the first time in my games critic career I have to put a possible conflict of interest disclaimer here before the rest of the post: I received early access to the Steam Next Fest demo code for Zero Parades: For Dead Spies. I am also friends with a worker at ZA/UM. This friendship has likely unavoidably colored my thoughts about the studio and everything that has gone on around it since 2022…

I don’t know what it was about the height of the pandemic that caused everyone to suddenly get invested in the culinary arts, but it was around the time that we were all sheltering in place that I started watching cooking shows in earnest. Before the pandemic I dabbled, of course; the Bon Appetit channel was a favorite of mine until it turned out that Condé Nast was being predictably Condé Nast…

After somewhere in the area of 16 hours, I have beaten Animal Well (Shared Memory/Bigmode 2024. And by this I mean: I have beaten the first of four layers of Animal Well: the vanquishing of the Manticore and the restoration of peace to the world of the well. If I wanted to, I could now focus on completing any of the other three layers, including opening all the rooms and discovering all the eggs;…

There is something inherently anarchic about skateboarding. For all that the world has done to try to mold it into an organized sport for Olympic prestige and major sponsorship deals, it has largely remained unchanged at its core: pushing a board around places you’re not supposed to go. I was devastated when I figured out I didn’t have the drive for skating as a young kid. I couldn’t do an ollie…