Ian here—
The sixth episode of the ongoing Shape Up! series is posted. This one addresses a structural innovation present in Oxenfree and NieR: Automata—two old favorites of mine I’ve mentioned before in videos and/or posts—as well as Doki Doki Literature Club! and Kitty Horrorshow’s ANATOMY, which I haven’t written about before but am excited to do so now.
Full script below the jump.
Continue readingIan here—
This is the second episode of my Shape Up! series of video essays about form, structure, and pacing in games. This time my primary focus is on Else Heart.Break(), which is one of the most ambitious games I’ve ever played, but also has what is probably the worst opening act of any game I’ve ever played. Bit of a meandering structure to this one, as I spend the first twelve minutes finding common ground with my dad’s frustrations playing games, and also dive into the varieties of irony games can use when conveying instructions to players—and the dangers of using it sloppily.
Full script below the jump.
Continue reading
It was important for me to immediately follow up my elegance sub-list with one on ambition. There’s a simple reason for this: these two are often incompatible.
The games on here are among the most rough-hewn of all the games I’m listing. In terms of visuals and audio, I would have to admit that two of them are outright ugly and grating. In terms of features, there are parts of these games that just don’t quite work. They don’t always succeed in doing what they set out to do.
But what they set out to do is something utterly fantastic, and their failures are, at the very least, interesting.
Ian here—
For those of you who aren’t in the know, “whoami” is a command that was first implemented in Unix-based systems, allowing the user to see what account, with which types of access, they are currently recognized by the machine as being logged in under.
This post offers two quick takes on two games. (They both happen to be from 2012, for whatever reason—something in the water?) While playing both of them, “who am I?” is a surprisingly rich one. Sometimes, they keep the player’s role vague, surprising them with the amount of agency they have, and the degree to which they seem to be inside or outside the game’s story. Other times, they are quite clear on who the player “is,” but leave plenty of room for interpretation as to what occupying this role means. Take care below: spoilers aplenty.
Intermittent Mechanism 