Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura is a peculiar title. It was in some ways the last of a dying breed, occupying a similar historical niche to other isometric, choice-driven RPGs like Planescape:

Some games tell you what they are right in the title. Fire up a Street Fighter and you know you're down for a brawl. Others are a little cagier, but tell you what they're about with a subtitle or a tagline:

When The Red Strings Club, a cyberpunk video game, hit the market, there was a bit of hue and cry. A kerfuffle, if you will. The game featured a transgender character, and it turned out that in one scene

Welp, I got distracted from my queue again. But I did manage to play my distraction game to completion, so here's a review thereof! Endless Space 2 is the latest from Amplitude Studios, creators of a number

I've been lax in posting here the last few weeks! I haven't intentionally abandoned Steemit or my games review project--rather, I've been distracted by a game that doesn't neatly fit into my queue. The

In last post, I described what I appreciated about the design of Hand of Fate: its many-layered strategic metagame of probability manipulation. But even setting aside what I wrote about being annoyed by

Hand of Fate is a curious animal. It has elements of collectible card games, choice-based RPGs, Roguelikes, and 3D brawlers, but there's no single game one could point to and say "it's like that".

A friend recently encouraged me to revive an old RPG design project that's been sitting idle for a few years. Here's a subchapter I decided to add describing some important pieces of the game's ethos.

If you keep an eye out for the term "millennial" in news and blogs, you'll catch sight of two narratives. One paints the children of the 80s and 90s as contemptible freeloaders, refusing to work

As a transparency measure, and as helpful info for folks who may be looking for ways to up their Steemit game, here's a quick accounting of the tools I use on the 'chain! Busy.org Busy is an alternative

One of the subtle joys of engaging both analog and digital gaming is getting to see how concepts and mechanics flow back and forth between the two. Sometimes it's an obvious path, like Dungeons & Dragons

I'm currently playing Slay the Spire, but not quite ready to do an essay or review on it. So in the meantime, enjoy some more Doki Doki Literature Club, this time in fanfic form! It's a fluff triptych,

The reaction to my prior post about Doki Doki Literature Club tended to be "wow, that sounds terrible." And I felt pretty bad about that, because I do think DDLC is a game worth playing, and

I've been playing so many deconstructive video games lately that I'm starting to think of deconstruction as its own genre with its own conceits and tropes. (Like, it turns out that fucking with saved games

What makes a game's difficulty fair? A well implemented challenge drives engagement with a game and heightens trust in the game's creators, while difficulty that feels cheap or like the game is

The Wii felt like a turning point in console games history. Nintendo was no longer interested in a costly graphical arms race to win the hearts of the hardcore, but instead sought to attract the broadest

As any author will tell you, endings are hard. It's tempting to come up with some contrivance by which your work simply doesn't or cannot end! That is, of course, highly unsatisfying for your readers in

I have a Philosophy degree, though regrettably my focus wasn't on the philosophy of games. Still, it's a notable enough part of my thinking that I've over time tried to chip away at the difficult question

(Spoilers ahead for Twilight Princess, albeit mostly things you'd see in trailers...) Twilight Princess works on a slow burn. It's very much set up to be a sprawling adventure spanning dozens of hours.

The first hour or so of Twilight Princess is deadly boring. While it's charming to start a game with falconry and fishing instead of battle and exploration, it pales by comparison to the immediate action