Thoughts About Games

Backtracking: Resident Evil 4 (2005)

2026-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

</div>

Backtracking is a blogging project that I’m embarking on in 2024 in which I will play one game from each year since I was born. My goal is to engage with games I’ve never played and divert some of my attention away from new releases and towards older titles. I hope to cross off some major backlog items, learn more about the influences and intertexts that informed the games I grew up with, and practice my analytical skills. I’m using US release dates as the relevant year for my selections.

Why I Chose It</h2>
As I get further into this project, I’m reaching an inflection point: The mid-to-late aughts precedes the indie explosion of the 2010s, but it was a time that I was actively seeking out and playing all sorts of games. The list of options for 2005 had relatively few that really felt like glaring backlog gaps for me. To put it more simply: I don’t have many titles from this time that I missed and still think about returning to. Admittedly, that’s probably a gap in my curiosity—there were a colossal amount of games on the PS2 alone in these years.
Either way, I think it’s fair to say that Resident Evil 4 is one of the more significant mainstream releases of 2005. Before playing it this past month, I hadn’t put much time into any Resident Evil titles. This makes it additionally interesting to start here: Resident Evil 4 exists at an inflection point in the series itself. It’s a huge shift from the fixed-camera horror of previous titles towards more finely controlled movement and action-oriented gameplay. For good or for ill, that means that I was approaching it as it is, without any prior or subsequent titles to compare it to.
And of course, like several of my previous selections, Resident Evil 4 has recently been lavishly remade from the ground up. I find myself wondering: why did this need a remake, and for whom is the remake designed? Is it enough to just go play a mid-aughts classic, or must it be modernized somehow before it can be approached by new players? Honestly, I think it holds up just fine.

</img> </div> 
What I Thought</h2>
I remember trying out RE4 at a friend’s house not too long after it came out. I got stuck on an early sequence with a chainsaw-wielding villager, the first set piece fight against a more durable and dangerous enemy, not to mention a good number of regular enemies in the mix. I think I got past it, but I lost steam soon after and felt little desire to play it later on my own. It was an early experiment in playing horror games, and I hadn’t developed any taste for it.
When I started it this month, I had a strange sense of trepidation about dealing with that chainsaw bastard again. Somehow, though, I stumbled into an entirely different approach in which I did not enter the house that triggers the cutscene. After hunkering down in a shed in the corner and defeating enough villagers, the church bell rang and they all left. I simply never triggered the fight.
This was the first sign that Resident Evil 4 was a little more than I was giving it credit for, and was living up to its survival horror roots despite the fresh coat of action game paint. Even with a very linear structure and boss fights with clearly-intended solutions, most encounters have a multitude of tricks for conquering them while conserving resources. Usually this is as simple as using environmental hazards or finding defensible choke points. But even the possibility of alternate approaches, even if they were rarely as substantial as waiting for the bell and skipping a scripted sequence, drove me to explore more curiously and experiment more willingly.

</img> </div> 
Departing from fixed cameras, Leon controls with a tight, claustrophobic over-the-shoulder camera. He can stop moving and aim his gun by holding down a button and swiveling the right stick. This makes combat much more dynamic than predecessors, and makes a smart compromise to maintain the tension between fleeing danger and stopping to aim and shoot at it. The parasite-infested villagers (they’re not technically zombies) can be shot in the leg to slow their advance, in the arms to drop weapons, or in the head to briefly stun them. A couple of those states can be followed up with melee finisher attacks or swipes with Leon’s knife. Leon feels a lot more capable and deft with violence than a typical survival horror protagonist, but the availability of these melee moves makes them a crucial tactic for conserving resources while dispatching hordes of enemies. And, of course, the famous inventory grid constraint ties it all together nicely by forcing a balance between ammo, grenades, healing items, and the weapons themselves.
The writing and voice acting are also crucial parts of synthesizing Resident Evil 4’s corny action-horror tone. The writing wears thin in places, especially the random acts of casual misogyny from both Leon and Luis and the frequent kidnapping and endangerment of Ashley. In fact, the game seems so anxious about including too much “escort mission” play (which isn’t even that bad) that Ashley repeatedly gets captured and rescued throughout the game. But in many other places, the camp really shines: Leon’s stupid tough-guy affect and one liners, Ada Wong’s comically exaggerated femme fatale shtick, the various villains’ gloating and bravado. The story unravels into a scheming cult leader’s plot for world domination, which is enabled by awakening a monstrous prehistoric parasite and driven by an absurd plan to kidnap and mind-control the daughter of the president of the USA and then, presumably, use her to infiltrate the entire government apparatus. It’s so fucking stupid (complimentary).

</img> </div> 
The campy writing is bolstered by sequences that are deliberately alternating between action-movie bombast and survival horror tension. Resident Evil 4 is full of set pieces that it doesn’t feel the need to entirely justify: a stumbling chase through a maze of shipping containers dangling inexplicably above an abyss, a sprint through a compound while a friendly helicopter blows stuff up along your path, even a reference to the gruesome laser grid scene in the first Resident Evil movie; the list goes on. At one point, you’ll encounter the Regenerators, terrifying infected corpses that refuse to die. Some hours earlier, you might have realized that Leon can suplex standard enemies after stunning them. The game has both things and does an admirable job of cohering them.
I think part of my fondness for the campy tone comes from an unexpected familiarity with it. This is the only Resident Evil game I’ve touched, but its development studio is the same division at Capcom that made the Devil May Cry games of the same console generation. Despite very different approaches to combat and controls, there are level design sensibilities, bits of incomprehensible gothic and industrial scenery, and painfully corny voice lines I recognize as stylistic touches from that team, enough to make me feel oddly at home.

</img> </div> 
Reflections</h2>
Now that my Backtracking project is firmly in the height of the PS2 era, I’m finally playing titles that were contemporary with ones that I played as a teenager. In 2005 I wasn’t just playing hand-me-downs from my dad and my choices weren’t as heavily corralled by console access as they were in the previous generation. I was mostly making my own choices about which games to rent and buy for my PS2. At this point I was finally beginning to explore JRPGs. My action game diet was expanding beyond cartoony platformers like Ratchet and Clank to include edgier, more “grown up” (huge quotes there) games like Capcom’s own Devil May Cry. It was a time where I was not just exploring games haphazardly, but actively honing and broadening my taste.
Maybe that’s why I have such a nostalgic fondness for the unabashed quirks of games from the mid-aughts. The goofy action set pieces of Resident Evil 4 have far less polish and visual fidelity than the ones you find in later generations, but they operate with a level of sheer audacity that more than compensates. Even the little details charm me: the magically omni-present merchant has about a dozen voice lines, and you can bet your ass he’s going to use one of them every single time you press a button in the shop menu.
There’s a sense of unbothered corniness to the over-the-top spectacles in Capcom’s big-budget PS2 titles that feels like it’s become more subdued in comparatively-bigger-budget modern equivalents, which put more stock in moments of somber storytelling and high visual fidelity. I don’t think this is unique to Resident Evil (and I would need to play further to find out if newer titles retain the camp), but I have a strong impression of an impending loss of playfulness going into the PS3/Xbox 360 era. I’ll have to see what I find as the project continues.

Play Report - Moonsailors

2026-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
A little over a week ago, I sat outside at a patio table and played Moonsailors, by Annamyriah de Jong</a>, with four of the friends I made through an online course about world building and game design. Moonsailors is a game about lone starfarers exploring an abandoned system and finding traces of one another. We started our game at dusk, and as night fell, we were left relying on a battery-powered camping lantern in the middle of the table.
This post is unusual. It’s a narrativized play report that tells a version of the stories we told at the table that evening. It’s entirely from memory and it’s edited down, so it misses some things and misremembers others. There are details I added or backfilled to help tie things together. I couldn't recall all the character names, so I left them out and gave the characters simple titles. I hope you find it interesting.

It’s lonely out in the stars, especially in the abandoned inner reaches of the system. Dwindling at its center is the system’s own sun, dying a death that’s too slow to perceive and too massive to ignore. Most of what remains of civilization in the Inner System are abandoned industrial sites and residential stations. There are folks living out here, but they’re far apart from one another.

1. The rogue surveyor scavenges parts from the wreckage of the Aurelion, sure that he can find something to fix his broken antenna. As he sifts through the drifting space debris, he thinks of a distant home where the weather gets colder with each passing year. Here in the warmer Inner System there are a scarce few places that are viable for rehabitation.
Normally, he would contact his superiors to get his ship repaired. They were stingy with requisition requests, but anyone could tell you that the ship needs a functioning antenna to perform normal operations. But they were no longer his superiors, and this ship was no longer theirs, as far as he was concerned. Eventually, they’d catch up to him and there would be consequences. But if he could find what he was looking for before then…
As he fits the Aurelion’s functioning antenna onto his own finicky ship, he gently wraps his old broken one in a spare adhesive strip. He nestles it into an old flower pot that floats amid the ships forgotten things. A reminder that we lived here once, and we could perhaps live here again.
2. Across the system, the Courier sits at Rozie’s Diner and picks at her waffles disappointedly. Her latest cargo sits in the hold of her ship, which is parked in clear view outside the window, just to be safe. Secretive cargo like this always makes her nervous, and she has a long way yet to go with it. She doesn’t much care for smuggling jobs, but good pay and veiled threats help grease the wheels when they cross her desk.
But even for a smuggling job, this one feels different. The air of secrecy is less fearful, more reverent. The clues about the cargo’s true purpose are less evident, even when she allows herself to search for them instead of pushing the thoughts out of her mind. The strange, cold canisters sit there, bundled tightly, and she feels almost as if she can still see them through her hauler’s hull as she gazes out the diner window.
3. The exiled priest looks up and shifts his sore knees slightly, emerging from somber reverie after a long and persistent prayer. He brushes frost out of his beard and shakily stands up, feeling the cold of Tyrian’s icy surface deep in his bones. Strange that a place like this could exist so close to the sun—supposedly still inhabited, no less—when it was already so frigid. Much like the Outer System, it’s been getting colder here on Tyrian.
The overcast skies have no answer for him today, so he sighs and returns to his ship to warm up. Endurance in harsh conditions, and even pain, are important to his faith. But self-destructiveness is not so holy.
His ship beeps cheerily at his return and he pauses to gaze again at its plush, high-tech interior. As if in final insult to his devotion, the religious community that cast him out sent him on his way in cloying luxury. He wondered, not for the first time, if this miserable ship was enough of an affront to plainness and piety that it was the thing holding him apart from his god.
4. The elder surveyor runs routine analysis as she orbits Carnelian, a planet-like ball of scrap that has developed an ecosystem of its own. Its still open for business; occasional passing vessels discharge bundles of refuse in low orbit before jetting away into the dark. Each year, she passes through and runs some tests on the odd species of lizard that inhabits the junkyard, its origins unclear.
Her fleet of spiderbots scuttle around the surface collecting samples as she watches their feeds from orbit. Someday, they might shut down this junk heap, stop raining new debris down on the heads of these creatures. But for now, nothing changes. No major population decline, no signs of greater intelligence that could shift priorities.
She sighs as one of the spiderbots gets caught in the settling refuse. It’s too dangerous to retrieve it manually, so she calls the others back, updates the task item in her work queue, and prepares to move on.
5. People find all sorts of things to fill the weeks of oppressive void, but more often than not it includes voices. Perhaps that’s why most of them listen to radio and podcasts; it feels just a little bit like community.
The oracle now waits patiently as fuel sloshes through a series of tubes that they’ve attached between the I.A.R. Pitch, a derelict station in tight orbit around the sun, and their own ship. They skip back and forth through a podcast episode to make sure they’ve followed all the right steps for the fuel siphoning technique that they’ve learned. It’s funny that something like “divination podcasts” could catch on as much as they had, even in a dying system, but it’s no surprise that they’d quickly devolve into various other tips, commentary, and personality content.
Still, fuel siphoning advice is the sort of thing that comes in handy regardless of where you hear it. There are few people out here in the Inner System and hardly anyone to enforce the laws prohibiting it; making use of these drifting ruins feels more meaningful than following the rules of a ghost town.

6. The rogue surveyor wanders the tunnels of Mining Base Celadon, a mined-out asteroid that basks in the warmth of a swift, close orbit. The rock is sturdy, at least in the places it hasn’t been damaged too thoroughly. There would be plenty of danger that came with building here, but plenty of potential space too. Maybe they could enclose enough of it to establish an artificial atmosphere…
He’s interrupted from his thoughts by the sounds of rocks shifting somewhere down the tunnel. He wonders how much time he has before they catch up with him. He wonders how much time his friends and family back home have before their world becomes uninhabitable. He wonders where they’ll go. How much longer can they wait to rebuild in the Inner System?
7. The courier exchanges a package with a recipient who has made their base on the derelict City Ship Sage. The brief interaction warms them, and they leave a family memento with their contact as a gift. It’s been a long time since she thought about her family as the people and experiences she grew up with, not the abstract symbols of them that she had brought with her to to the stars. She must have had some lingering emotion that drove her to hold on to these trinkets, but the impromptu gift was more an expression of magnanimity than a desire to be rid of the thing.
This dropoff was only a side gig, though, and the ominous cargo that she’s been carrying still waits in the hold, impatient for its destination. The courier has been having strange, grim dreams lately. A frigid place, spines and spires of jagged ice, empty, terrifying. She can’t help but think the cargo is calling to her somehow. She’s never broken a promise to leave clandestine cargo sealed, and she’s well aware of the dangers it could pose. Still, it’s harder than ever to resist…
8. The exiled priest drifts amid the stars, unsure of where to go next. The megachurch station where he made his life and career is far away now, and he thinks of the last time he glimpsed true divinity. It came, he recalled, in the unlikeliest of places. Some strange canisters of cargo that called to him once and even still haunted his dreams, inviting him to believe in a future not yet promised. With the sun dwindling and his congregation becoming nervous, he told them of his revelation.
The clergy understood this to be heresy, a deviation from their own notions of divinity. Though many of them fervently sought signs from their god—pursuing purity by way of fasting, long hours in prayer, and living in harsh simplicity—it was hard for them to believe that one of their fellows had achieved such contact. Ironically, they found his story to be lacking in grandeur, mundane and modern in a way that strained credulity. They gathered, deliberated. He was sent away with no chance to appeal.
He can’t explain why, but he knows in his heart that he’ll never encounter something like that again. Unable to go back, he drifts amid the stars, unsure of where to go next.
9. The elder surveyor frowns and clears the notifications from her terminal. Another memo about the rogue surveyor with the stolen ship, who is still at large, and the actions that employees are meant to take should they encounter him. Being suddenly asked to work as a bounty hunter troubled her. Touching down on the shattered planet Viridian, she chooses without quite knowing why to stroll along with her surveying robots in the planet’s mild atmosphere.
The thin sunlight warms her face, though the air here is crisp and cold. Breathing it in, she immediately feels a sense of relief that only dirt underfoot can give. Navigating around the cracks on the surface of Viridian, she listens to the latest voice message from her son. Fresh out of the university, he’s taken to the stars just like her, working as a courier. Can’t say she didn’t warn him about the long weeks in space. Lately, her pride in her work has given way to a nagging sense of doubt. She hopes, at least, that he’ll send her messages more often now.
She stumbles slightly, swearing under her breath as one of her earbuds slips loose from her ear and tumbles into a crevasse. Again, too dangerous to retrieve. She hopes, inexplicably, that someone else will find it.
10. The oracle touches down on Tyrian in search of its elusive inhabitants. Hours spent trudging around the frozen wastes yield no signs of life. Resigned, the oracle returns to their ship, and begins broadcasting on their radio.
The oracle believes in community; they believe enough to dedicate their years to visiting its most distant tendrils, providing guidance through divination. In the barely-populated Inner System the sun’s slow death looms even greater. They know that people out here are looking for direction and comfort, and that their gift can only truly be given face to face.
You could call the loose network of oracular podcasts and radio shows a “community” too, but this oracle doesn’t see it that way. They make their broadcasts without fussing over listenership or marketing; they don’t even know if anyone’s listening. For them, broadcasting into the darkness is an act of outreach and unselfish kindness. The listeners they address feel more imaginary than real, but they love them all the same. Out alone in the black, they speak for those who might hear; and when they meet clients to perform their divination duties, the first thing they do is listen.

The Unanswerable Question of Cairn

2026-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
This piece contains moderate spoilers for Cairn throughout, but there is a clear warning before discussions of the ending.
Cairn is the third major release from French game studio The Game Bakers, a team known for past titles like Furi and Haven. Though the genres vary, their signature style could best be described as expressive action and movement enfolded in focused, personal storytelling. Cairn, in turn, tells the story of Aava, a world-renowned mountain climber taking on her hardest climb yet and seeking a summit that none before her have reached. From its outset, Cairn seems to be putting forth a question: why do we climb mountains?
Initially, the appeal of Cairn for me was its clever balance of verisimilitude with legible game design. It uses a mechanical approach to climbing that relies on some degree of fidelity towards the realities of rock climbing, but it layers on fantastical technologies that smooth out the experience. Aava uses auto-drilling pitons and a science fiction wall-climbing robot (her “climbot”) that collects them for you, manages your rope, and holds some of your gear. Despite some of the marketing claims, Cairn doesn’t really feel like a simulation of rock climbing, but it is works admirably to represent the significance of differing holds, weight distribution, and movement on the wall. It’s a fairly successful gamification of what makes climbing fun to me: puzzling out the wall by plotting a route, executing, and adjusting to surprises and setbacks.
My climbing experience has been entirely at indoor gyms, but I enjoy it for the combination of physical and mental exercise. Climbing in Cairn can’t replicate the stakes and or the physical exertion of climbing in reality, but it does a compelling job capturing the problem-solving challenge. There will be setbacks, there will gruelingly difficult stretches, and there will be a wave of relief when you crest that next ridge. Climbing is naturally the thing you’ll spend most of the game doing, so it also becomes a pacing mechanism for the accompanying survival mechanics and narrative.
Kami, the fictionalized insurmountable peak where the game takes place, is full of little stories. The earliest sections have park notice boards with tips and warnings for climbers and hikers, as well as some derelict cable car infrastructure. Farther up we begin to find carved-out caves that were once inhabited by a mountain-dwelling folk, now nothing more than empty refuges for passing climbers. There are notes written in a native language (that Aava can seemingly read somehow) that gesture at the culture of these folk, the significance of various locations on the mountain, and the vague forces of modernity that drove them to abandon their homes and join the world below. And eventually, as you keep climbing, there are bodies. Climbers whose lives were claimed by their relentless pursuit of the summit, whose bones and backpacks are now subsumed into the jagged texture of the mountain’s face.
But despite all this effort to make the mountain seem enormous and full of history, the climb itself is a fantasy. It neatly sidesteps the ethics and logistics of mountain climbing; Aava casually drills pitons into the rock wherever she likes (a destructive approach that’s typically avoided by modern climbers), and the science fiction contrivances let her effortlessly cover her tracks and open the path ahead of her. Bear boxes contain fresh supplies, stocked by who-knows-who. Aava can pick up litter on the mountain and have her climbot compost it into extra chalk to improve her grip. The paintings and notes left behind by the absent mountain-dwelling community are there to bring an air of spiritual significance to the mountain, to highlight the hubris of past mountaineers, and to convey hard-won route knowledge to the player; they never feel like a people whose own story matters, and they’re all gone by the time Aava is there picking through their dwellings and sacred sites.
So it turns out, then, that Cairn is actually about the mythic notion of climbing a mountain more than the reality. There is no expedition. No climbing partners. No sherpas, no native inhabitants, no crowding. The other people Aava meets on her journey are singular individuals with pursuits of their own, presenting various foils for her to bounce off of. Marco, the younger climber who looks up to Aava and gets to know her when their paths occasionally cross, is mostly pushed aside to forge his own route. Nobody exists in community, no one must make any effort to be a steward or a caretaker. Everyone on the mountain is a lone agent of ambition, hubris, or level-headedness. Only the notes on corpses seem to talk about other people.

</img> </div> 
In carving away these realities, Cairn sort of becomes its own abstraction. Its difficulty as a video game becomes the metaphorical thing that must be overcome. Why, it asks, do we (desire to) climb (metaphorical) mountains? Just like Aava’s laser focus, Cairn pointedly erodes the context of the world around its protagonist in order to build a heightened and distilled man-versus-nature struggle. The world below is infinitely far away, remembered only when it frustratingly intrudes upon Aava’s singular pursuit. The way Aava sees it, it’s only her and the mountain, and the game itself mostly makes that true.
It’s very reasonable to be frustrated by everything that Cairn pushes to the side, and these convenient omissions deserve to be interrogated (go read Jay Castello’s thoughtfully critical piece at Unwinnable</a>). But as I saw the facade of “realistic” mountaineering falter and fall away, I found something compelling about the starkness of the questions it asks, and especially how it frames them through its characters. Aava’s moments of frustration and loss, both in her own setbacks and in the faraway trials of daily life that she’s missing out on, are still resonant. Her all-consuming desire to push past her limits, in spite of what it does to her and what she seems to be avoiding, is recognizable and empathetic—even though it’s also nakedly destructive and unhealthy. Aava struggles to find meaning in other people and in the world outside herself. It’s tragic and infuriating, and it’s inextricable from the question of why she’s doing all this.
Late in the game, Aava is met with resistance from Marco and another character on the mountain who have assessed the danger ahead and decided that continuing the climb is not worth the risk. She sleeps on it and soon afterwards she reconvenes with Marco as he begins his own descent. At this point, the game presents a choice: end your climb here and go back down with him, or return to the mountain and seek the summit against all odds. It’s the first direct narrative choice, breaking the fourth wall to offer players an early-out. There are numerous moments leading up to it that suggest that Aava is too deep in her own head, that she needs to reassess her priorities, make the healthy choice, and come home to her loved ones.
But the Aava we’ve met and played as this whole time isn’t that person. Her frustrations and pain have not drawn her closer to anyone, but intensified her emotional self-isolation. She’s withdrawn into an uncompromising individualism, a complete refusal to accept either failure or help. She isn’t ready to come this far only to turn back. Despite the risk, despite the costs, she wants to reach the end. The game puts forth a challenge directly to the player that aligns with the question Aava herself faces: are you really going to give up here? After coming all this way?
To me, this question is drawing on the competitive and completionist mindset in the modern internet landscape of video games. It’s a veiled jab at the 100% completion chasers, the achievement hunters, the challenge runners, and even the casual players who just want to see credits roll before they put the thing down. Cairn knows you want to see the end, you want to see everything that’s in the game, and that you’ve probably been socially conditioned to stubbornly pursue it. Like Aava, you don’t want the easy way out; you want the full experience. So, if you’re like me, you choose to press on.
⚠️ Warning: Full ending spoilers ahead, as well as some mentions of pet death. ⚠️

</img> </div> 
Beyond this point, the climb becomes more challenging. Resources dwindle more rapidly and the mountain asserts its the true brutality. This final stretch presents some of the most difficult sections so far, and soon things become fuzzier and more surreal. At one point, Aava loses consciousness and wakes up in her tent, unsure whether she dragged herself to it in a haze or was pulled in by her robot companion. She begins to hallucinate and her vision swims, and the climb becomes more treacherous yet. Eventually, some of the survival mechanics drop away just to let the player proceed to the ending of Aava’s story, but it feels like there’s always a little more mountain left than you thought.
And then, after a final focused stretch, Aava staggers up to the pinnacle, collapses to her knees in the snow, and screams into the whipping wind, a guttural shout that both proclaims her triumph and laments its steep price. Her partner waits at home, having recently said goodbye to their beloved cat who fell suddenly ill, a trauma that Aava wasn’t there for. By this point, the climbot that Aava has relied upon for years has unambiguously become a proxy for her lost pet. As you near the summit, it sputters and gives out. By the end, it’s either plunged into the snow hundreds of feet below, or clutched cold and lifeless in Aava’s arms, depending on whether the player chose to cut it away when it went dark or pull it along with her.
As she sits there at the top, all her energy spent, a prompt appears on the screen: “Be part of a whole”. We press and hold the button for a moment. Then Aava looks up, sees the stars above her, reaches out…and grabs one. She places one foot on another star. Then, controlling her again, we climb. Aava pulls herself from star to star, into the sky, reaching higher, further, each one etching out a constellation as she touches it, now launching herself with each pull, faster and faster, until she becomes a streak of light, a shooting star. She becomes part of the mountain, part of the sky, part of the universe. This is her death; alone at the top with broken equipment and the whole world endlessly far below her, she finally gives herself up to something bigger than her.
To “be part of a whole” is the most specific interpretation set forth so far for the enigmatic feeling that Aava has been chasing. This is how Cairn expresses the culmination of her desire to achieve something no one else ever has and transcend her own limits, to defeat the unnamed demons inside her. It seems at first like Cairn is offering an answer to its central question, but it immediately feels incomplete and insufficient. As Aava’s star streaks away, the ending title card appears and we see the little constellation of stars etched between the letters animate into place, taking on a new meaning.

</img> </div> 
I’m fascinated by this final imagery of constellations. The stars in the sky are lightyears apart, proximate only in the context of our earthly perspective. There are no lines connecting them together. Constellations are made by people. Constellations are connections between individual stars that people create, that people imbue with significance. To me, a constellation represents the ties between human beings. It represents looking up at the stars and imagining that surely they can’t each be so singular and lonesome, surely they must connect to each other and be part of a whole together. Constellations represent the greater whole that Aava refused, the network bonds between individual people and pets in her life that she could have returned to if she chose.
At the end of the day, I like the contradictory metaphor. Climbing into the stars while the music swells, I certainly felt something momentous, but it was hard to actually identify it. Aava either stubbornly rejected all the things that make her human, that connected her to other people and to the world…or she recklessly pursued the only thing in the universe that matters at all. We can’t really know which one is the truth for her. The answers don’t satisfy. The question lingers.

Mothership, OSR, and One Shots

2026-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
At the beginning of the month, I got my long-running tabletop group together for an incredibly overdue in-person session. Knowing I’d have more time than a usual session and wanting to explore more kinds of games, I read up on Mothership, printed out materials, and set up the box full of goodies that come with the game books. I bounced around skimming various modules, but figured I’d get the most straightforward new-GM experience running the first scenario in the pack-in module Another Bug Hunt. Our session went for about five hours, and we concluded it with (some small spoilers) the mission completed—files retrieved and hostiles dispatched—, one player character dead, and most of the others infected with the strange affliction that’s central to the whole mess. We ended on a stinger that suggested that the transmission that called back the dropship to evacuate the party had infected the pilots, and possibly others aboard the ship in orbit.
This was my first time running Mothership and my first time running anything in the OSR space, though I have played a few OSR games before. I wasn’t sure how to tune my expectations for how Mothership would function in this context and with this group of players. It should go without saying that even if I happen to have an academic understanding of OSR principles and playstyles (which is also disputable), I could stand to learn a lot from more experience.
But before I can explain how I felt about the session overall, I should give you a bit of backstory.
My Cool And Edgy (Gaming) Backstory</h3>
I first dabbled with TTRPGs in college, where I played short campaigns of D&D 4e or 5e here or there. After I graduated, I played a couple more short campaigns as well as a Call of Cthulhu campaign with coworkers that went on for about a year and a half. I listened to D&D comedy podcast The Adventure Zone, but was otherwise relatively incurious about getting more involved in the hobby.
Then, somewhere around late 2018, I started listening to Friends at the Table. For the first time I can recall, I was inspired to actually run a tabletop game. Dungeon World—and the way that the cast played it—got my attention with its storytelling focus. Having played almost entirely trad games thus far, I was completely new to the ideas and intentions of this play culture.
So in early 2019, I got a group of old college friends together for a weekly online game and pitched Dungeon World (this same group sat around my table for Mothership earlier this month). We had a positive experience with Dungeon World, despite occasional pitfalls of my brand new GM-ing. We wrapped our story after about half a year, then prepared to start something new.
That “something new” became D&D 5e; two players were new to the hobby and were curious about the Most Popular TTRPG; a couple of others were comfortable with D&D 5e already, and one of them was interested in taking on the Dungeon Master role. To this day, and with hundreds of hours spent playing 5e, I have still never actually run it.
For nearly 7 years, we’ve jumped around between games, sticking to “seasons” or “chapters” of our campaigns that lasted somewhere between 6 months and 2 years, and playing shorter games in between. Our Dungeon Master friend runs the the trad (or adjacent) games: Call of Cthulhu, Star Wars: Edge of the Empire, Cyberpunk RED, and of course 5e. Meanwhile, my GM-ing has explored story games: an on-and-off Blades in the Dark game, short campaigns of Spire: The City Must Fall and the Avatar: The Last Airbender TTRPG, a bunch of two- or three-shots of various games including Monster of the Week, Wanderhome, Action Movie World, Eat the Reich. We’ve also played GMless classics like Fiasco, The Quiet Year, and some Ben Robbins games. And in the past couple years, they’ve all been gracious playtesters of my own work.
I’ve played even more widely with other folks, but this core group of college pals has been my regular RPG crew for almost 7 years now. They’re arguably the players whom I know the best. I can count on them to be curious and open to all sorts of games. And I’d been itching to try Mothership.
Why Mothership? Why OSR?</h3>
One of my goals at the end of last year was to see what this whole OSR thing was all about. There are a few more specific objectives I brought into focus while reading, prepping, and running Mothership:

Understanding the hype—both for Mothership and for OSR more broadly, I want to know what everyone’s so excited about and I want to see if I can see the same things in these cool games that so many others do.</li>
Broadening my Horizons—a lot of discourse seems to position OSR as an alternate or oppositional play philosophy from story games, which does feel true to me. That said, I also know plenty of folks who love both and get a lot out of all sorts of games. And of course, the particularly active OSR blogosphere is certain to have insights for me regardless of the space I design in, so more familiarity will help me learn from it more effectively.</li>
Seeing how systems shape play—Mothership itself has a lot of advice about how players should approach challenges and what they should expect, all in the interest of encouraging the kinds of play that are especially compelling within its framework. I wanted to see how its own design went about accomplishing that push towards certain play styles.</li> </ul>
So How Did It Go?</h3>
As with most games I play with my friends, it was fun! We had triumphs, moments of despair, clever schemes, amusing dice luck. My overall impression of Mothership and Another Bug Hunt, though, was that they didn’t really give me what I needed as a GM (or Warden, in Mothership’s parlance) to tell an exciting horror story within the confines of a one shot. I found myself slipping into other habits while trying to keep things tense, dramatic, and fun.
Another Bug Hunt is broken up into four scenarios, each building on the previous one; it’s designed to be explored as one big multi-session sandbox, with some portions and even some whole scenarios skippable depending on what the players choose to focus on. Each scenario is, however, intended to provide a satisfying session if the players find their way into its key locations and objectives. Each scenario also offers a bit of guidance for running it as standalone one-shot adventure, but the suggested adaptations are sparse and probably insufficient. We’ll get to that; beware of spoilers ahead if you intend to see to this module as a player in the future.
Another Bug Hunt’s first scenario is a little spare; there’s one significant threat to contend with and the rest of the scenario involves rooting around a derelict base full of bodies, bits of intel, and a couple of jump-scare-style surprises. It’s generally very static, relying upon players finding and engaging with specific things before a whole lot happens. The one-shot guidance reconfigures the overall mission, but doesn’t do much to cordon off the subset of the the wider module it exists within. Throughout the mission, players were finding dog tags with names that did not mean anything to them and never would. The strange signal that risks infecting them is meant to be a concern across the whole four-scenario story, and it needs some additional adjusting to be a compelling threat in the context of the abridged one-shot format.
In general, there’s not really a lot that’s likely to happen to the players until they disturb the insectoid monster that remains at the base or interact with something that sends a radio signal (and this is pretty broadly interpretable; it’s hard to know exactly what’s meant to count here).
A friend of mine told me that they ran it by compressing some of the ideas and characters from later in the module into the first scenario, bringing more dynamic and distinctive NPCs into play earlier on so that players had more to engage with as they explored, and so that the connections to the broader story would be more paid-off without seeing the rest of the module. That approach sounds smart, and I could imagine having done something similar if the one-shot advice had prompted me to do so.
That comes back to the other part of where I felt that things fell short: my own GM-ing habits. I don’t think I made failure as scary as it could have been early on. My players were in a D&D 5e mindset where a failed roll often just means nothing happens, and I don’t think I put enough effort into pushing back against that expectation and meting out substantive consequences in response to failures. Without encountering that friction early on, they never did develop the trepidation around rolling dice that Mothership wants to instill, and it resulted in some shocking outcomes later on.
In general, I found myself sliding towards other habits that the game advises against. I resisted the urge to rebalance the monster slightly on the fly, but I still brought it out into the halls before the players actually found it themselves it per the setup of the mission, hoping to escalate the drama a bit. These are things that Mothership wants me not to do, but playing the game in the context of a one-shot strains that sense of purity; it’s no big deal if a regular weeknight session is a bit of a sleepy one, but it feels different when 2 and a half hours of a one-shot have been dedicated to getting through doors and picking through wreckage in search of clues. I understand why the game advises against the impulses I had, but I also felt that the module was failing to produce intrigue in a way that I didn’t anticipate ahead of time. In that regard, spicing up the scenario ahead of time would have been more in line with the play philosophy of sticking to the world that’s prepped.
What Do I See In OSR?</h3>
I can’t speak much to the history of OSR, having not done a scholarly dive into it, but I think I can articulate one idea of where it’s coming from broadly, and that spins out of recent incarnations of mainstream D&D 5e culture.
One of the dominant 5e cultures of the past decade or so feels very beholden to system; for years there was endless debate on D&D Beyond and Reddit about whether certain interpretations of the rules were valid, Jeremy Crawford’s twitter replies were regarded as basically-official addenda, and in most cases consensus seemed to form and solidify. And even if this culture of close reading can be inconsistent, I don’t think it’s necessarily bad. Many folks come to 5e to embark on grand adventures with characters who will grow and develop over the long haul. They want believable danger and adventure, but they’re not actually looking to get their character killed. They want this from a game that explicitly does not give players any narrative control over when their characters die, but does give them a lot of warning signs and escape hatches. (Most people will tell you that unless a character is colossally outmatched or a DM is especially hellbent on killing a player character, the players have a lot of tools at their disposal to evade death or even undo it.) The adherence to rules and to rules consensus feels like an outgrowth of a culture of fairness and predictability that supports player intent. It’s a part of the push and pull of feeling the possibility of death without feeling unequipped to confront and overcome it.
When you stick close to the rules, though, 5e doesn’t have a lot of levers for flexibility, especially in combat. You’re either in range or you’re not, things hit or they don’t, you have one Action and one Bonus Action, you’re either downed or you have 1+ hp and you’re fine. You can maybe use cover rules, mounted combat rules, and other edge cases to find opportunities or optimize around your abilities, but in general you play within the standard rules and you don’t expect to be able to solve problems outside of them when you’re in combat. The character you’ve built is the beginning and end of the tools you have available, by and large. To reinforce this, the system provides DMs with very few discretionary modifiers to dole out (mostly just Heroic Inspiration). Advantage or Disadvantage could be awarded for doing something clever, but they’re also explicitly awarded for landing certain spells or using certain abilities, so using them too freely outside of those mechanics risks cheapening carefully-chosen builds. Obviously, not everyone runs 5e this way, but the presumed table culture I’ve found in the half dozen 5e groups I’ve played with has had that general sense of systemic rigidity and mutual faithfulness to it.
So we have a mainstream 5e space where game rules are the core contract between player and DM, and space is given to players to make sure their little guys stay alive. OSR play philosophies take a different tack. OSR is probably not the monolith that it’s often discussed as, but my general impression from play, blogs, and more-engaged friends is that it revolves around a playstyle that goes unrewarded in the aforementioned 5e culture: a clever, tenacious gamer who’s attentive to their surroundings, using their resources cleverly, and always looking for smart or unexpected solutions beyond the basic mechanics of the game. These are folks for whom a character sheet is not a limited set of mechanical capabilities to deploy, but an endless trove of ideas that can do just about anything if cleverly exploited. It’s a player who wants to outsmart the challenges in front of them and be rewarded for overcoming the limitations that stats and dice place upon them. Games designed for these players downplay balance or fairness, because the core contract between players and GMs is that the GM will simulate the world reasonably and fairly in response to players’ actions, and thoughtful decision making can always provide a chance of survival.
This OSR player archetype I’m describing is less attached to long-lived characters and more attached to out-of-character decision making. They may still incorporate character and narrative play along the way, but Mothership generally seems to expect players to operate as players first. They should play smart and let the mechanics tell them when they fall short rather than making suboptimal choices that are truthful to their characters.
So the OSR mentality caters to players who want to get away with shenanigans, who want to craft harebrained schemes to overcome odds that are stacked against them. I can imagine that this type of player could be regarded as obnoxious at tables with different goals, but I truly appreciate how much Mothership and the OSR play philosophy love these players. They’re not being served by 5e culture’s default rigidity or by the story game oeuvre’s deemphasis of lethality and player ingenuity in favor of storytelling and worldbuilding.
OSR play lets them focus on overcoming challenges that happen to be about characters, and leaves space to dabble in roleplaying as a secondary goal. Players don’t trust the Warden to give them ample chances to survive, but they do trust the Warden to simulate the world honestly and reward them for thinking outside the box when their solution makes sense. Mothership has a whole section in it’s Warden’s Operation Manual (equivalent of a GM guide) about making rulings at the table and how to make fair, consistent, and fun rulings that generally comes down to this kind of good-faith simulation.
And more than that, Mothership’s suggestions about how to write modules (which are delightfully thorough and focused) involve describing a space in strict terms; as the Warden, you know exactly what’s where and you won’t move anything around when players miss something important or interesting. The world as written is the world; the Warden’s role is to reflect it truthfully and fill in any gaps.
A Game, Not a Story</h3>
My aforementioned failure to make dice rolls scary, combined with a table that’s accustomed being rewarded for acting in character rather than being clever out of character, meant that I felt wrong-footed for much of the session. A game like Mothership gave them low stats and barely-described equipment, and left them to find answers that they aren’t necessarily accustomed to negotiating for.
Mothership’s framing and dice math produce a demand for players to creatively approach and solve problems, and a background assumption that things like character personality and motivations will arise as an added layer of creativity rather than a primary one. I got a sense of gradual acclimation to what the system was expecting of them, but it came slowly. When they couldn’t come up with some clever approach to a problem and opted to roll straight up, consequences tended to feel arbitrarily harsh and punishing to players who were making interesting or fun character choices.
Mothership’s Warden Operations Manual makes the claim that “Story only happens in retrospect. Most of what the players remember as the ‘story’ of the game will be intense moments and encounters that went sideways.” Mothership doesn’t seem to think that the stories are told at the table, but paradoxically does have a lot of opinions about what makes good horror storytelling. This is maybe my greatest departure from the philosophy behind Mothership: I think you can weave a fiction at the table that players will find memorable and impactful independent of the threat of character death, and that Mothership is choosing not to attempt to do so. This is a perfectly reasonable choice, but it’s not acknowledged as a choice. I vividly remember story beats that my friends devised in games like Fiasco or Fall of Magic and I have incredible fondness for the curveballs my players threw at me when I ran Apocalypse Keys. I love when games help tell stories by intentionally building up dramatic narrative elements. In the case that it is a goal, as it often is for me, there are plenty of ways to pursue stories that happen in real time and are experienced as such.
A Parting Note</h3>
There is, of course, a great likelihood that I’ve deeply misunderstood the design philosophies of Mothership, the OSR scene more broadly, or the kinds of playstyles that they appeal to. Frankly, I’m just some asshole who ran Mothership one time and then wrote 3k words pontificating about it; you really don’t have to fucking listen to me. I don’t really have the affinity for simplified, classic RPG mechanics that OSR does, even though I certainly do understand the appeal of the lively module-writing culture that springs up around it. As I said way back at the beginning, I played many dozens of hours of various RPGs before Friends at the Table and Dungeon World compelled me to run games myself. Regardless of how my taste and skills have evolved, my attraction to the hobby began with games as a mechanism for collaboratively building narratives with curiosity and intention.
But I’m also trying very hard not to approach this subject as a story games crusader. I’ve been reading a lot about OSR and adjacent play cultures, I’ve played games here and there that operate within it, and I do think I have a grasp on what Mothership intends and the kinds of play it (openly states that it) wants to reward. What I’ve come to doubt, at least without playing it more in a longer campaign, is that the game is able to really produce the playstyle it wants to reward…or if it relies on players to bring that to the table already within their hearts (which is, of course, also entirely valid).
My heart, for that matter, remains open. I hope to get more opportunities to engage with OSR games as a player and experiment with the kinds of player behavior that it rewards. I hope to run more OSR games, ideally in campaign format to get a clearer picture. As it stands, though, I think I have a stronger understand of what draws me to story games and what feels absent to me from the OSR philosophies. My search for insight continues.

Unbeatable - Beautiful Distractions

2026-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
Last month I finished Unbeatable, a slick anime rhythm adventure game about playing music, changing the world, and beating up a whole lot of cops. Unbeatable is made by D-CELL games, a project nearly a decade in the making with a slowly growing team of animators, musicians, and voice performers. The journey this game took me through certainly had its high and low points, but it got me thinking a lot about what rhythm games fundamentally do and what can ultimately be accomplished by using them as a format for telling a story.
Rhythm games are, at their core, about hitting notes on a note chart. They're about skill, precision, attentiveness, reflex, and feeling the groove. When it comes down to it, the game itself could look like anything, right? Because the point of the visuals is to see the note coming so that you can hit it precisely on time. Right? That's why so many of them have options to disable visual noise and focus on the notes…
…Right?

</img> </div> 
I think that’s probably wrong, actually. Rhythm games are, inexplicably but undoubtedly, about spectacle. As much as they revolve around the notes you have to hit, they build their identities around visual style elements. The throngs of cheering PS2 character models behind Guitar Hero’s note chart, the fractal abominations looming over Thumper’s pulsing industrial racetrack, and the rapping kung fu onion man trading bars with Parappa are crucial to what those games are. It's easy to imagine that it's all about the pure essence of the note chart, about the custom controllers and carefully considered mechanical interactions that intertwine with the musical style. But ever since I became obsessed with Dance Dance Revolution as a 7th grader, I’ve known that seeing what the game wants you to do isn't nearly enough. You'll never get into the groove unless you can hear and feel the beat.
So rhythm games are instead about seeing just enough visual information to time and choose your button presses and spending every other iota of your attention on hearing and feeling the music, including visualizations that supplement that act of feeling. Doesn't it make perfect sense, then, that visual style is such a memorable and important part of so many rhythm games? Doesn't it make perfect sense how we end up with the Mii-looking Trombone Champ goofballs, the Sayonara Wild Hearts masked motorcyclists?
Rhythm games are at their core about beautiful distractions. You can already hear the music. You could listen to the music with no visuals at all, if you wanted to. And it only takes so much visual information to tell you what button to press next. Everything else, every other detail, is about building a kickass music video to accompany your kickass performance, to make you feel the music even harder, and maybe even to tie it all together into the story that the music is trying to tell.
I suspect that Unbeatable's developers agree with my interpretation, because the game is perhaps more committed to visual spectacle than any other rhythm game I've played. Many of the rhythm sequences in its story mode are essentially bespoke music videos that accompany the track and help deliver the scenes of the story, often the most dramatic or action-packed ones. They’re amped-up fight scenes and melancholy dream sequences. They’re chaotic chases and triumphant live performances and nail-biting escapes.
The music in Unbeatable is a love letter to alt rock, garage bands, anime, and anything would make you dance or sing or cry cathartically when it plays on your iPod through your wired earbuds. Its tracks are often woven with playful electronic flourishes but the vocal and guitar performances feel a little scrappier and more grounded. It's blatantly inspired by late 90s anime, FLCL looming largest among the bunch, but its subtler influences are broader, and some tracks have the energy of modern "bedroom musicians" that feels simultaneously experimental and nostalgic.
Unbeatable is also a game that's diegetically about music, if that wasn’t obvious. It takes place in a world where (to quote the game’s own marketing) “music is illegal… and you do crimes.” Specifically, Unbeatable is about how playing music makes you feel things, and how feeling things makes us all too passionate and willful to be quiet citizens and obedient laborers, and how ultimately we need to feel things to be human.

</img> </div> 
When Unbeatable isn’t supplying players with rhythm game challenges, its storytelling operates within a lightweight adventure game format, in which heroine Beat runs around sunset-drenched towns and city blocks, solving problems and and talking to people. The game goes out of its way to do a thing that a lot of narrative games don’t do: frequently, it makes multiple characters’ voiced dialogue deliberately overlap and interrupt each other. We’ve all seen RPG dialogue sequences with silly pauses between supposed interruptions and the lines they supposedly cut off; it’s a signature identifier of video game dialogue rhythm. Unbeatable puts in the effort to engineer it's way out of this common shortcoming because the rhythm and spectacle of its conversations hold weight within the experience in the same way its musical action sequences do. It relies on dialogue rhythm for comedy and drama, to complement and heighten the voice performances and the writing that buoys them. If a pure, abstract note chart can’t speak for itself, neither can a pure, written script speak for Unbeatable. Performance is too important to leave behind.
Oddly enough, as a more typical kind of rhythm game, Unbeatable doesn't really hold my attention. The ways in which it escalates difficulty have a lot more to do with visual processing than auditory, which is interesting at first but unsatisfying when I amped up difficulty and tried to push my skills further in the the arcade mode. That said, the “hard” difficulty that I selected for the story (the suggested default), was challenging in a fruitful way: it kept the tension high during those dramatic story sequences and even pushed me hard enough to run into close calls and brutal game overs.
The story of Unbeatable is frequently funny and often heartfelt, though it perhaps spends too much energy on high-concept sci-fi ideas that don't cohere into strong metaphors. The ending is awkwardly paced but has a lot of charm and strongly felt sincerity. The combination of big conceptual ideas and several dreamlike sections at the end left me struggling to parse how much was unclear on purpose and how much was unclear by accident. It ultimately comes together into a very vibes-based finale, dripping with more intimate melancholy and grief and hope.

</img> </div> 
These close examinations of ennui and grief, of being stuck in a rut as you pursue art and constantly get in your head about your motivations, it honestly... it hits. It’s sometimes clumsy, and it’s a little long in the tooth, and sometimes it’s sentimental in a way that doesn’t work for me at all. But even when it's trying too hard, it tries too hard in a way that's difficult to be mad at. The emotions behind its writing, the vocal performances, they're all soaked in enough genuine feeling that the meaning comes through even when storytelling falters. Finishing this game made me want to play music. There are tons of video games that have incredible music that means a lot to me, but they don't make me want to play music.
Unbeatable makes me want to play music. It's approach to telling stories about music, using everything in its animation and art and writing arsenals to do so, is a big part of making me feel that way. I have a lot of minor complaints about its overall construction but at the end of the day, all it's trying to do is leave you with a feeling. And it fuckin' does it.

TTRPGs and Being Online

2026-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
Sometime in early 20-teens, I was home from college while a family friend was visiting. He pulled out a sample printing of a card-driven party game he’d designed. As we played, I asked him some questions about his design goals relative to other (very popular) games that were similar, but I quickly got the impression that he had no familiarity with most of them. The game he made was…fine. It was fine. It was built on relatively little context or experience within the space he was wading into, and it frankly felt bland and unfocused compared to other contemporary work. My impression was that he was drawing from his stereotypical straight white man confidence in the novelty of his own ideas. And also, that he was making a game primarily as a fun business endeavor that happened to leverage those ideas. He was designing a product for a market, not creating a work of art within a lively and evolving artistic scene. And knowing neither the scene nor the market, it made for an underwhelming and inelegant work.

In the last year and a half, I’ve put a lot of time into exploring analog game design, including writing on this blog about my experiences with tabletop RPGs. I’ve kept my blogging scoped to a niche that I’m most comfortable and experienced with (“story games”, or whichever insufficient term you prefer). Beyond my writing, though, I’ve tried to explore games outside my familiarity, to play widely and curiously and voraciously.
During these efforts, I’ve intermittently delved into Magic: The Gathering, I’ve played social deduction games, I’ve spent time with older RPGs (a.k.a. ”trad games”, another insufficient term), I’ve dipped a toe into board games, I’ve read and written lyric games, and I’ve explored blogs and actual play shows and game design podcasts. I’ve attended conventions and meetups, followed conversations on discord and bluesky, joined playtests, and so forth. In the back of my mind, I think I must have intended to become a sort of “expert”, a person with sufficient knowledge to confidently participate in both TTRPG criticism and design.
So far, by any metric that I earnestly believe, I have failed at becoming this kind of person. I’m writing this post partly to convince myself otherwise, but mostly to attempt to reframe the goal itself and resist burnout.

Games are an enormous space that demands an impossible amount of time, attention, and energy to know them both widely and well. This is in some ways a very good thing; it means there are games out there for every sort of person imaginable. In my efforts to avoid carelessly butting into spaces that are filled with history and preexisting artistic interplay, I’ve prioritized an adventurousness that drives me into new spaces without acknowledging how it’s chilled my sense of critical conviction.
Participation is core to what defines games as a medium. While it’s obviously possible to write games “for yourself” and cast them out into the world untested, it’s not how I personally want to operate. For me, art is communication: I want the things I make to speak to someone and to connect with them, even if it’s only one person. I want to hone and improve them to be stronger and more insightful messages for those willing to receive them. To do so, I need to playtest them. To make art in this space, I rely on contributing to and getting things back from relevant social spaces. And even as I work on managing my own habits better, there will always be an ongoing emotional tug-of-war that comes from existing with social anxiety in TTRPG community spaces. Overcoming social hurdles like soliciting playtesters or attending conventions can be gratifying, but exhausting. Unraveling that exhaustion is becoming an increasingly important part of my ability to stay inspired.
So while I do feel a need to be present in these spaces in order to access the joy and mutual uplift of community, I find that my vigilance against privilege-borne confidence pulls me in the opposite direction. Lurking in servers as a wallflower and trying to keep up can be hard enough, and chiming in is often additionally unnerving. Siloing my opinions into this blog is one way to make my thoughts public, but still obscured behind the effort of clicking through links, reading long posts. As of yet, though, it hasn’t been the way I make strong connections with my peers; it isn’t conversation.
As an example, game designer Aaron Lim recently mentioned an eternally-ongoing debate</a> around whether game systems “matter” (whether they meaningfully change the play experience at a given table). His comments acknowledged that it’s an ever-evolving conversation, but also that it’s constantly being joined by new voices who have varying levels of context on what has and hasn’t been said. Even in this light, and even seeing various other folks weigh in, it was weird to share even a couple of stray thoughts about my own design experience. I’ve been sitting with this discomfort since, trying to figure out if these spaces just feel hostile to my loose and reactive thoughts, or if I don’t quite have the emotional constitution to be online in this way at all.

Ultimately, I want my art to be in conversation with other work that excites me, and I want to share my thoughts and experiences about that work. I don’t necessarily need to participate in capital-d Discourse to do that, but engaging with games multivariously is core to how I enjoy the hobby and how I improve my art. Not only that, but my opinions ought to shine through into what I make; otherwise my work is going to come across as diluted and underbaked regardless of its breadth of influences. I don’t know if I need to measure my critical voice by whether or not I'm willing to dig my heels in and produce A Take On The Internet, but it’s important to me for that kind of conviction to be present in my work if not in my online presence.
Honestly, I can’t figure out how to end this. It’s helpful to talk through doubts and to acknowledge that my vague pursuit of “TTRPG worldliness” is probably unhelpful to me as a person and as an artist and critic. Maybe the resolution here is to follow my intrinsic curiosity more earnestly. At the end of the day, I probably prefer self-doubt over unearned confidence. But writing and revising these thoughts every couple of weeks at least feels like putting in the work and putting something out there, and that’s worth doing.

Delusion of Choice - Player Choice in Dread Delusion

2026-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
Over the holidays, I typically try to start a bunch of games from my backlog. With my time inevitably broken up around relaxing with family, I rarely get very far into any of them. Games with a large scope, whether that’s with design or with narrative, usually fall by the wayside before they can make strong impressions. So when I booted up Dread Delusion</a> on my steam deck, I wasn’t expecting to be drawn in quickly enough to stick with it while I visited family.
Well, I was wrong. It became a minor obsession for a couple of weeks. I became enamored of its weird fantasy-horror setting and its grim history, I was repeatedly charmed by its great deal of sharp characters and thoughtful writing. But beyond that, it made me think a lot about choices in video games and the way players interact with them.
Dread Delusion is an indie take on an Elder Scrolls-style first-person CRPG. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic open world split across sparse, floating islands in the wake of a great cataclysm called the World Rend that brought the surface below to ruin. You begin the story as (tell me if you’ve heard this one) a prisoner, captured and jailed by inquisition agents rooting out unlicensed magic use and deity worship. You’re quickly ushered from your cell and forced to join the inquisitors’ ranks as they throw bodies at the fortress of renowned pirate Vela Callose, who has evaded their pursuit thus far. Bring her to justice, you are told, and you’ll earn your freedom.
From the start, the Apostatic Union and the inquisitors they employ can hardly be regarded as actual allies. As you’re go from prisoner to indentured inquisitor, you’ll follow the pirate’s trail and recruit her old crewmates to help you track her down. Along the way, you’ll see more of the inquisitors and the world that their God Wars have brought about. To the Union’s initial credit, you’ll find that communities across the isles have been liberated from pagan deities that demanded brutal sacrifices in exchange for prosperous farmlands and fortunate weather. But you’ll also find that in the absence of these hungry gods, the promised prosperity has vanished as well; crops struggle, Union-regulated trade squeezes folks dry, and many wonder if they’ve been freed from a tyrannical divinity only to be subjugated by imperialist bureaucracy.

</img> </div> 
Throughout the game, you’ll meet struggling folk and seek to find solutions to their problems that don’t leave them in even worse situations. Across each of the three regions in the world, you’ll find evidence of the historical clashes between the god-worshipping Wikkans (yes, that’s really what they’re called) and the Apostatic Union—”apostatic” as in “apostates”, because they’ve systematically rejected their gods. You’ll meet the Endless, zombie folk who have unlocked eternal life but have suffered immensely under its weight, and the denizens of the Clockwork Kingdom, who erected an inscrutable machine god to rule over them in place of the old ones (take a guess at how that’s going). All over these isles, folks are having a pretty bad time, and many of them wonder whether the new order should be dismantled, if the old ones should be restored, or if an entirely new vision is the only way forward. Each kingdom entangles you in a major decision that will affect its peoples’ future for decades to come. And as the central plot returns to Vela and her own world-changing ambitions, all things culminate in a final choice, with the fate of everything in the balance.
Despite the dour state of the world and its focal regions, Dread Delusion is more often interested in existentialism, tragedy, and hope than it is in true despair. Beneath its fleshy, low-poly surface is a profound sense of place and people. The folks whose stories you’ll help shape are always present to argue their case, lend their life experience, and give each choice weight. And no matter how wrong every answer feels, no matter how poorly an outcome might go, the writing is never smug about this in the way that something like The Outer Worlds wallows in the frustrating imperfection of binary choices. Dread Delusion is content to present you with a problem and let you solve it as best you can, within the limits of what you understand and can accomplish; sometimes that isn’t as much as you might hope.
Steam has a user-applied tag called “Choices Matter” that represents a particular ideology of player expectations. To suggest that “choices matter” means that decisions made by players must be rewarded by meaningful changes to the story and systems of the game. Steam’s users have have not applied this tag to Dread Delusion (nor The Elder Scrolls titles that it draws heavily from), but they have applied it to works in a similar vein like Avowed and Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon, which I find fascinating. The writing in Dread Delusion seems determined to bear the weight of choice, insisting that you have the power to change the world’s fate with your decisions…but the visuals and systems of the game have limited tools to surface these changes in the world. Few choices have immediate material outcomes in the world (though many change how various factions regard the player). However, Dread Delusion’s procedurally-built ending incorporates each key quest line’s resolution, resulting in a closing narration that’s very clearly shaped by player decisions.
On some level, Dread Delusion seems conflicted about whether or not its choices matter. Unlike other games in this style, it leaves space for players to avoid choices entirely. Most of these decisions don’t truly have to be made, by and large; completing the primary quest of the game does not depend upon resolving the major plot lines of each region. No, you can wander around until you find and recruit the mysterious strangers key to your central mission and leave each kingdom to contend with its fate however it might. Sometimes, that feels like it’s the thing you ought to do. But the threads of fate pull, even gently, and there’s always the promise of a “glimmer of Delusion”, the game’s advancement currency, at the end of these major decisions.

</img> </div> 
The only other way to acquire glimmers of Delusion is the collectibles scattered throughout the isles. Notably, killing monsters or amassing resources does not provide Delusions. Thus, players are encouraged primarily to explore the world and resolve the stories within it. There’s no way to reverse decisions by loading saves; the game asks you to decide what your character believes and express it through choices that are presented to them, committing to the outcomes and making the story of the isles feel like something they molded. It feels often like it leans into the popular tendency of players to voraciously move quests from the “Active” to “Completed” columns of the journal. Quests unfinished would feel like books left half-read, movies half-watched. A story should have an ending, even if the world around it has to live with the enduring consequences.
An often-referenced video game design concept is the illusion of choice, in which players’ actions seem meaningful but are in fact relatively inconsequential. When we’re talking about player experience, it’s often more important that players feel that their actions are impactful than it is for them to actually be impactful. Because regardless of outcomes, choices are a mechanism for players to express themselves. Making choices helps us mold our imagination of the characters we play, inviting roleplaying and allowing the player to participate in what their character’s values and personality might be.
In that way, the final choice surprised me. After endless debate about which path I should pursue, argued by impassioned NPCs with various motives and values, it came down to making the call. The dialogue gave me plenty of space to breathe, to think. I could back out and ask more questions, even when I’d already asked all of them. And when I selected the option I’d been planning on for the past several hours of the game, I hit one final confirmation dialogue. One final bit of resistance that asked if I was sure, if I really thought I could make that choice. A tiny last-second accusation that maybe I had it all wrong.
And…I hesitated. I backed out, clicked the other option, waiting to see what it’s final urging was, if it would rebuff me in the same way. It tried, but I realized that my mind had been changed. I clicked through. Right there at the precipice I changed my mind, after everything before it had cemented my inclination towards the other path.
Having now seen both of the main plot endings, I see that my first inclination would have led to a “better” ending. The two core endings, when considered together, express a kind of hopefulness than I didn’t quite expect. But the final provocation to reconsider actually worked; it made me doubt and made me question what I really wanted and what I really thought would forge the brightest path forward. It’s not so important that my choice mattered; what made it impactful to me is that it felt like choosing mattered, like the act of making a decision was a considered part of the storytelling in the game’s final moment.
I don’t have a fully coherent theory of what the game means with its use of the word “delusion” as a currency for advancement (and, of course, in the title), but it feels like a very intentional subversion. To believe that the world can be made truly and radically better is, to some people, delusional. But as you collect more of these glimmers of Delusion you become more capable: stronger with your blade or spells, more convincing with your words. If striving to understand the world and change it is to pursue a delusion, then maybe what the game is saying is quite simple: that a delusional intention to reshape the world can be inverted to become conviction, determination, and genuine faith.

2025 in Review — Tabletop RPGs

2025-12-29T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
I’ve been writing about tabletop games for more than a year now, most frequently in the past six months. Meanwhile, I’ve been writing about the video games (sporadically) for 8 years. I’ve gotten comfortable with the scope and depth of my video game writing, balancing personal experience with analysis, exploring within and around my taste, and finding ways to challenge myself while keeping my footing.
But with tabletop games, I’m still wobbly. My critical angles and the games I manage to write about don’t keep up with the “scene” in a way I can with video games. The critical and the scholarly suffuse into each other in distinct ways with TTRPGs, and even very recent history looms large and casts long shadows. I don’t read enough games, let alone play them, and while I have a keen interest in recent and upcoming work, I simply can’t keep up.
There are a bunch of reasons why it would be difficult to give the “top 10” treatment to tabletop games I’ve played this year. Obviously, there are lots of folks out there reviewing and discussing the newest phenomena within the hobby, but plenty of folks (myself included) spend our time with a “trailing edge”, games from anywhere in the past five or so years that are still filtering into an attention economy that understandably stretches beyond a year-to-year cadence. Often, games I’m writing about are ones I’m only encountering because of prior coverage or actual plays.
So what I’ll do instead is reflect on how I engaged with the hobby in the last year. I want to talk about running and facilitating games, my experiences playing more widely, how few games I read this year, and what became of my first full year of designing and playtesting games. I’ll tie it off with some reflection on writing about games, and some broad goals for the coming year.
Running Games</h3>
In February I wrapped up a nearly year-long campaign of Apocalypse Keys (Rae Nedjadi, Evil Hat Productions) with a playgroup that’s developed a ton of chemistry as we’ve continued to play together. Running Apocalypse Keys was a great way to flex my growing affinity for horror, and saying goodbye to that campaign on a high note (and after pulling some extremely silly meta-narrative maneuvers) felt like the perfect balance of “hard to say goodbye” and “time to let it wrap up”.
Early in the year, I tried out some of the new Deep Cuts (John Harper, Evil Hat Productions) supplemental rules for Blades in the Dark, which was really challenging to wrap my head around. I started to find my footing as the scenario progressed, but got there a bit later than I wanted to. Still, I had a good time engaging with new play philosophies and learning them together with friends. Deep Cuts marks a pretty substantial leap from the original Blades in the Dark rules as written, but it follows logically from the kinds of play philosophy that makes the original run smoothly. Picking up Deep Cuts gave me a sense of just how differently any two GMs might run the very same game, but it also helped me develop opinions on what works for me and the tables I run games for. I’ve run a decent bit of Blades and don’t reach for it all that often anymore, but Deep Cuts gave me an enticing reason to come back.
Later in the spring, I ran Eat the Reich (Grant Howitt; Rowan, Rook and Decard*)* for the same group. What initially felt like an overly fiddly divergence into very dice-forward play wound up reminding me of something very important: people love to just roll a whole bunch of dice. When Eat the Reich was firing on all cylinders, it was doing a perfect job rewarding both characterful and clever play and delivering the swingy drama of big dice pools. What felt to me like over-reliance on a core set of interactions was in fact—to my players—good indulgent fun.
The last new GMing adventure I embarked on was beginning a campaign of Heart: The City Beneath (Grant Howitt & Christopher Taylor; Rowan, Rook and Decard) for my Apocalypse Keys group, one of three systems I pitched them on that they chose from. Heart started clumsy as we found our rhythms with its Stress and Fallout consequences and the resources necessary to soften them; players were initially appalled at the apparent “difficulty” of Heart, but learned quickly that consequences could be full of flavor, fun, and even surprising new story vectors. I’ve had a wonderful time watching them push their luck, lean into their strengths, and choose Beats that draw the story in wild directions. The party dynamics are bizarre and funny, the characters even stranger. And as we draw towards the conclusion of another campaign I’m having some of the most fun I’ve ever had with prepping and running RPGs.
And finally, I found a couple of opportunities to facilitate Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast (Jay Dragon & M Veselak, Possum Creek Games), a game that has ups and downs in my opinion but really shines when you manage to bring it to multiple tables, adorn your book with stickers, and start developing the characters. I’ve only played a couple of sessions, but I’m glad I got a binder full of characters started because I think I’ll keep breaking it out now and then.
Playing Games</h3>
My home group started a campaign in Cyberpunk RED (R. Talsorian Games), the first brush I’ve had with any version of the Cyberpunk system. Modern iterations of trad games tend to feel oddly bloated to me, a strange mix of old systems and setting details and heavily revised ones aiming to engage new players and surprise returning ones. I have criticisms, to be sure, but I also appreciate getting to play around in a setting that’s more alive and constrained than the sprawling D&D 5e adventures of our previous campaigns. Cyberpunk cares about the mundane side of its characters lives in a way that feels distinctive, even if it it spends a lot of its effort on making mundane life cartoonishly bleak rather than emotionally resonant.
I also spent a good deal of time playing games with a small group for an “actual play” project, which we’re playing and recording up front but will hopefully start releasing some time next year. It’s hard not to split my focus between my own play and thinking about the audience experience, but I always enjoy the clumsy process of building rapport with new groups. I’m looking forward to the challenge of building our play into an enjoyable listening experience and I’m excited about the world we’ve been building together.
I had an opportunity in May to mobilize some friends for a late-stage playtest of Pale Dot with designer Devin Nelson as they worked towards a final release. As silly as it is, I was really happy to see my name in the playtester credits for a printed book, and I'd love to bring Pale Dot to a table some time soon.
In the latter half of the year, I found new spaces and occasions to play more widely. I played convention games at PAX West and KublaCon Fall. I started attending a monthly story games meetup run by a local designer where I played a lot of backlog games like Desperation (Jason Morningstar, Bully Pulpit Games), Going for Broke (Avery Alder, Buried Without Ceremony), and more For the Queen (Alex Roberts, Darrington Press)—which I’ve greatly warmed up to since I first played it at Gen Con last year). I also had the pleasure of trying out Last Train to Bremen (Caro Asercion, Possum Creek Games), which uses Liar’s Dice as a central mechanic and showcases how the texture and tone of traditional games can be a pitch-perfect match for storytelling games. It’s something I definitely hope to explore in my own design.
At KublaCon Fall I also became enthralled with Blood on the Clocktower (The Pandemonium Institute), a social deduction game (not generally my taste) that uses a dedicated facilitator called a Storyteller to introduce all sorts of interesting possibilities to social deduction games that parallel what GMs bring to traditional RPG tables. I don’t know if my fascination with Clocktower will filter into my own design, but it’s left me a lot to think about with regard to why I dislike social deduction games, why I enjoy GMing, and my habits as a player. Folks in story games discourse often seek to soften expectations around GMing, to regard it as a different kind of play rather than a special role beholden to or dominant over the other players. This is, in general, a good thing: GMing is fun and should be taught in ways that make it inviting and approachable! But Clocktower is an unexpected reminder that a GM who is committed to serving and enriching player experiences can bring a lot to a game that would otherwise be impossibly complicated.
I also kept in touch with old coworkers and played a tiny bit of skirmish game Forbidden Psalm (WIRD DESIGNS) and classic adventure board game HeroQuest. I haven’t dug as deep into war games or into board games as I’d like to, but I made a start by trying a few at PAX and playing more with friends over the year. I even took a few faltering steps into Magic: the Gathering. I’m admittedly dissatisfied by how little I’ve broadened my horizons this past year, but it’s good to acknowledge the progress and reassert my curiosity for the wider world of analog games.
Reading Games</h3>
This was not a good year for reading games for me. I struggle to set aside time for reading games in the way I can when I’m prepping or playing them, but it is a huge part of engaging with the hobby. Read widely is incredibly enriching and restorative of my enthusiasm for the hobby. Getting to see what the bounty of talented folks out there are getting up to in their latest work is fulfilling in its own right.
One of the only long-form books I read this year (besides Heart, which I’ve been running) was Slugblaster (Mikey Hamm, Mythworks), perhaps one of the most fun TTRPG reads I can remember. With books of this scope, I’ll often read just enough to decide whether or not I want to run the game for a group, and then wait till I have a group lined up before I do a cover-to-cover read. But Slugblaster just kept my attention, made me laugh, and had me constantly grinning at its zany locations and factions and equipment. I adore its stylized writing and in-universe voice; it was a big inspiration for one of my own ongoing projects.
Beyond that, I read a few games here and there that I’ve bought or have been gifted in the past year or so that I found compelling. Bleak Spirit (Chris Longhurst) takes the idea of a “Dark Souls story game”, which is tantalizing to sickos like myself, and leans deeply into notions of enigmatic protagonists and speculation-as-play—aspects that surprised me at first but feel sharp and well-considered in retrospect. The Slow Knife by (Jack Harrison, Mousehole Press) sounds like an absolute blast to play, a conspiracy-building story game built on the spectacular premise of perfect, patient revenge. Border Riding (Jo Reid, Stout Stoat Press) is a thoughtful rumination on how borders change our perception of ourselves and others, an incisive evolution of ideas in story game classics like The Quiet Year. It comes with a companion essay that imparts some history and eloquently expands on its key themes. I’m not sure if I’ll get any of these to a table any time soon, but reading and thinking about them has already been time well spent. Reading widely keeps me inspired by the hobby, especially at times when I can’t get a play group together (and maybe don’t have the social energy anyway), and I need to do more of it next year.
Designing and Playtesting Games</h3>
This was my first year of (somewhat) full time game design, and it was a daunting prospect at the start of the year. I started the year with the goal of getting one of my first serious projects out into the world in January: Alone in the Loop, my hack of Alone Among the Stars (Takuma Okada) that tells the story of a lonely time traveler trying to prevent a grim future. It was with the enthusiastic help and encouragement of friends that I found the confidence and motivation to complete the layout, publish it on itch.io, and eventually even put a modest price tag on it.
But beyond the simple milestone of releasing something that felt finished, the work I’m proudest of this year is all the design and iteration and playtesting I’ve done. I have many more milestones to hit (more on that later), but I’m very proud of just how much design and community participation I’ve mustered this year. I’ve made a couple of friends in the scene, deepened my connections with others who I’d only met peripherally, worked with very talented folks, and ultimately found more solid footing within my own creative process.
I also reached out further and tried to participate in more TTRPG community spaces, becoming active for a while in a couple of discord servers before slowly burning out from the cocktail of social anxieties they seemed to draw out of me. I still try to lurk from time to time, but I’ve curbed my participation and attempts to “keep up” in order to protect my own mental state. The experience has, unfortunately, given me some pause when it comes to how I approach participation in the communities around this hobby. To be clear: nobody has done or said anything to me that targeted me or excluded me. But I’m learning that these spaces tend to stress me out unless I maintain a degree of remove. I hope to cautiously reengage in the new year, but it may be a mode of community participation that just doesn’t quite work for me, and I hope it’s not too much of a barrier to finding friends and collaborators in the future.
Regardless, it’s a year to be proud of. I did a ton of prototyping during my ill-considered dive into an October daily design challenge, I’ve playtested 6 different projects, some even with groups of strangers (which was incredibly daunting at first), and I’ve picked up a lot of instincts for layout and organization of my work as I went.
Writing About Games</h3>
Finally, the most ridiculous and circular part of this post: where I write about tabletop games by reflecting on my writing about tabletop games. Halfway through this year, I adopted a more aggressive and consistent blogging cadence with the goal of improving my writing and analysis through consistent practice. I’ve written a lot that I’m proud of and a lot that felt half baked, and I’ve fretted an unreasonable amount about the four total emails that get sent out to subscribers when I hit publish (if you’re one of them, hello! I appreciate you immensely!).
My favorite work is still my longer essays about planning for and running specific games. I’ve also greatly enjoyed writing design commentary pieces for my own work, but I don’t necessarily feel like they’re as insightful in their own right. I hope to get better at talking about design from a designer’s perspective, but I hope that comes with time, practice, and confidence.
Nonetheless, my conclusion is that the pace I’ve adopted is a bit too aggressive—especially with my propensity for high word counts. For next year, I’m aiming to post every two weeks, continuing to alternate between TTRPGs and video games. Hopefully that strikes a balance between consistent output and time collect my thoughts.
Farewell 2025</h3>
It’s been a busy year, but next year will be no less busy. I’m sticking with pretty broad goals for now, but I hope to:

Release Ridge City Riders, the project that I started in March. It’s the first time I’ve brought on an editor and an artist and they’ve already helped make it so much more than it initially was. I’m really excited about this one and it’s almost at the finish line!</li>
Playtest more and with a wider crowd, including soliciting playtesters in game design communities.</li>
Run something at a convention, either something of my own or just something I enjoy running.</li>
Run something in the OSR space (let’s be honest, this will probably be Mothership).</li>
Read more RPGs this year, including a few longer ones.</li> </ul>
And that’s the year! A lot to write about, but still so much to play and read and build in the coming year. To all of those in the hobby who I’ve gotten to know or work with or play with during this year: thank you for making me feel welcome, for sharing your art, and for engaging with mine! Here’s to another year of strengthening those bonds and sharing my love for this art form and community.

Best Video Games of 2025

2025-12-22T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
We’ve made it to the end of 2025, so it’s time to look back on this year’s video games. I’m always tempted to open these posts with platitudes: about the state of games as a professional creative field, the endemic layoffs, the looming existential threat of generative AI. But there’s better analysis out there already. What’s important to me right now is supporting art that I love and—most importantly of all—the people who make it.
In my mind, a good “Best Games of the Year” list accomplishes two things. First, it’s a thoughtful collection of strong personal impressions and critiques. Second, it’s a fun and rewarding skim for regular people who justifiably ain’t readin’ all that. So to that end, I’m keeping last year’s format I and putting it all in one big end-of-year video games post. Read on ahead, or just skip to the bottom to see if I made the right choices (don’t worry, I won’t tell).
Honorable Mentions</h2>
There are a few games that didn’t make the list but needed a bit of special attention for one reason or another, so here are some honorable mentions.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33</h3> I almost forced myself to fit this into the main list just because it was such a huge talking point in games this year, particularly “indie” games. And despite my complaints about its ending</a>, I really liked a lot of what it’s doing. The multifaceted combat system rewards both sharp reflexes and build-crafting cleverness, and the novelty of this two-pronged approach is really felt even if it wears thin here and there. The writing and performances have both gravitas and whimsy. Artistically and musically it’s… well, at times a tad overrated, but very strong nonetheless. Ultimately, though, everything on my main list commanded a bit more enthusiasm from me. Is Clair Obscur good? Hell yeah it is, but you probably didn’t need me to tell you that.
Isopod</h3>
I was really sad that Isopod missed my list. It’s a delightful little game with fun ideas and consistently endearing writing. Under it’s “cute bugs” veneer is a story about labor organizing, revolution, and anti-capitalism that never wavers in its ideological clarity despite its comedic maximalism. It’s frequently corny and goofy, but I think sometimes we should be allowed to have silly popcorn stories that are also radically leftist.
Lies of P: Overture DLC</h3> The fact that his is a DLC is not enough for me to disqualify it outright, but I don’t have a lot to say about this excellent expansion. It’s basically everything I hoped for from a Lies of P DLC and the things that I love about it are…pretty similar to what I loved about the original game, which I gushed about at the end of 2023</a>. The only thing I might add to my past praise is that Lies of P continues to be a game for parrying sickos (an affliction I suffer from). Nailing an elaborate parry sequence and following up with a devastating punish is just sublime; it makes learning and mastering fights feel truly gratifying. I played this DLC obsessively and if you liked the base game, you will too.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle</h3> I liked this game just fine and I thought it would make my list. But this is actually a dishonorable mention: I unfortunately forgot when I first wrote about Indiana Jones that developer MachineGames is owned by Microsoft, a company that is willingly and actively participating in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Microsoft’s video game products are priority targets for the BDS movement</a> and are further reiterated by activists within the industry via No Games For Genocide</a>.
I’ve added a note to my prior post about this game and I won’t say anything more about it here, but I will share why I bring this up. I strongly considered quietly excluding Indiana Jones from my list, but then I thought about the audience for this blog (which is very small) and the audience for my GOTY posts in particular (which is a tiny bit larger) and I realized that I wanted to put these thoughts in front of those readers. Some folks who see this post aren’t interested in boycotting games because of a publisher’s support of war crimes. We all have to decide where our own lines get drawn. But if you’re someone who bristles at the suggestion to boycott, someone who groans that I would spend three paragraphs preaching about it, I hope that you stop and think about why you feel that way. I hope you consider what you believe in and what you’re really okay with. If you’re skeptical about the effectiveness boycotts or particular boycott targets, I hope you consider whether you truly know better than the activists who are calling for them and whether your process critiques override your solidarity with their cause.
I hesitate to categorize myself as a “journalist” under No Games For Genocide’s boycott guidelines, but I also believe that my posts have a different scope than personal consumption habits. I want to acknowledge my oversight in writing about Indiana Jones earlier this month (I’m embarrassed that the Bethesda logo didn’t jog my memory) and make clear my intention to avoid buying and talking about Microsoft’s games in the future until we see them meaningfully change their practices. Frankly, I don’t think it’s that much to ask.
But I’ll belabor it no further. Now it’s time for me to tell you about the games I think you should support!

</img> </div> 
#10 — Ambrosia Sky: Act 1</h2>
Ambrosia Sky: Act 1 is a mashup of something like PowerWash Simulator with a layer of science fiction immersive sim. Its story unfolds across a number of individual cleanup missions across a large, remote fungus farming operation in the rings of Saturn. Protagonist Dalia, having left the colony in her youth to join up with a research-motivated disaster-cleanup organization called the Scarabs, now returns to her home and confronts the horrors of what happened here, along with her unresolved feelings about the place and the people who lived there. These details unravel slowly, contemplatively, while she methodically blasts away dangerous fungal overgrowth and kicks her way through quiet hallways in zero-g.
Ambrosia Sky feels somewhat incomplete, and to be fair, that appears to because it is. The development team promises future acts that will continue the story some time next year. I don’t know the whole story of why it’s broken up into acts, but there’s definitely a feeling of incompleteness: the skill tree’s upgrades can feel a little inconsequential and they fill up a little too easily, and though the game presents some challenge at the beginning, future levels fail to introduce enough new ideas to the fundamental fungus-removal part of the game. If I’m being honest, I wanted something that escalated its mechanical ideas a more substantially over the course of my 7-ish hour playthrough.
But at the end of the day, that doesn’t matter that much. Because the things that make Ambrosia Sky compelling are not the immersive sim interaction layers or chemical sprayer upgrades. What makes it interesting is its melancholic storytelling, sometimes through various data logs and Dalia’s mumbled realizations as she faces the wreckage of her past, and sometimes more indirectly through the contours of that wreckage, the places it must have once been. Even the exact plot beats aren’t as important as Ambrosia Sky's impeccable atmosphere. It’s in the way the game’s textures and shading dapple every surface with sandpaper rough, the way its color palette hangs in an odd space between muted and colorful, the soundtrack full of hushed whispers and strange beeps and big synth bass rumbles. And tying it all together is level design that’s deeply engaging to explore and clean your way through, intricate and confounding while also feeling intentional and lived-in and disconcertingly abandoned. And though the narrative is mostly delivered through asynchronous communications, there are a few sequences that use lovely comic panel overlays to drive home their emotional weight.
Ambrosia Sky is an eclectic mix of things, and some of them feel half-baked (albeit with room to grow in further installments). But it’s atmosphere is genuinely unparalleled and I’m really excited to see where it goes next.

</img> </div> 
#9 — Despelote</h2>
Many of the most lauded big budget video game narratives in the mainstream are, in all honestly, about as good as a mediocre book. Games have a lot of things going for them that enable them to be unique experiences, but they make for a pretty clumsy way to tell cinematic stories. The beloved blockbuster video game stories that succeed tend to do so in spite of the format rather than being indebted to it.
But in the indie space, it's easier to find something different. Despelote takes place in Quito, Ecuador during the early aughts leading up to Ecuador’s debut appearance in the World Cup. The story is told through the eyes of young Julián, a grade schooler who causes innocent trouble for his family as he kicks a soccer ball around town and watches the city around him fixate ever more intently on the World Cup and the Ecuador national team’s performance. Despelote is broken up across short vignettes and sandbox spaces in which Julián is sent off to go play (or asked to stay put) and return some time later. Throughout, it plays with your attention and time management, goading Julián towards mischief and ensuring that his promises to return on time will slip away in the simple excitement and distraction of childhood play.
Despelote’s physical spaces and passage of time are where it leans most into the unique strengths of video games. A simple series of short stories or scenes would not convey the aimlessness of wandering around the city, the losing track of time, the attempts to tune out cross-talk from your parents while you play your football video game. These approaches to capturing an adolescent perspective are full of warmth and nostalgia, but never so narrowly-focused that they prevent the player from empathizing with the characters around Julián (even if he himself seems more interested in playing games).
By the time it concludes, Despelote has unfolded into a more contemplative meta-reflection on its own making and the ways the it depicts a cultural moment as its designer remembers it, or might have remembered it had he been that age at that time. It’s sweet, imaginative, and relatable while also being deeply grounded in a precise sense place and time. It has all the personality of memoir but with the tactility of video game football physics. It’s short and charming, always engaging, and really special overall.

</img> </div> 
#8 — Consume Me</h2>
Consume Me honestly has a lot in common with Despelote in terms of structure, but a very different perspective and very different design intentions. It tells the story of Jenny, a direct self-insert of the game’s creator, as she finishes high school and pursues college and relationships. Throughout these years, Jenny finds herself challenged by the sheer magnitude of expectations placed upon her, compounding with personal struggles around body image and dieting.
It’s a fairly blunt depiction of these issues, and there are moments where it almost feels careless. It’s a game that would rather deliver its criticisms through mechanics and wry humor while clad in adorable picture-book aesthetics and jaunty chiptune tracks. Somehow, in the space between the delightful style and heavy themes, there’s an emerging clarity to what’s happening that comes through in the escalating mechanical ideas.
The game plays out across a number of chapters, each of which places a daunting pile of objectives on Jenny’s shoulders and demands that the player using every tool at their disposal to accomplish them before the appointed date. Warioware-style minigames are the vehicle for Jenny’s various tasks, with your performance substantially affecting how much progress she makes. Do some chores to earn bus fair to visit your boyfriend, read a book about dieting to make your meals more efficient (but also kill your mood), put on free makeup samples for a self-esteem pick-me-up, drink coffee, stay up too late. It’s time management and bad habits all the way down. Consume Me is cute and playful on the outside and harshly demanding under the hood, culminating in looming fail states at the end of each chapter that send you back in time to try again should you slip on any of your goals.
Consume Me’s minigames are its heart, and while they’re not all brilliant, the cleverest ones function as perfect, frantic metaphors for what it feels like to blitz through exhausting tasks while more chores, homework, and self-loathing piles up in your wake. The minigame for reading a book is the best interactive metaphor I’ve ever seen for trying to read while distracted. The game’s general veneer of colorful positivity is both genuinely delightful and also clearly saying something about the masks we put on and the compounding costs of acting like we’re fine when we’re not.
By the end, Consume Me evolves into something a little different, its epilogue taking on a meta-narrative angle and revisiting its core ideas with dramatically different inflections. In some ways, the ending could feel underwhelming, but its honesty and personality kept it in my good graces. Consume Me is both incredibly stressful and deeply engrossing. It’s mechanical structure alone makes it hard to put it down and that makes its narrative even more affecting.

</img> </div> 
#7 — Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo</h2>
It’s practically a given that something in the metroidvania lineage will make its way onto my list each year. The odds that I’ll play several and enjoy at least one of them (more on that later) are quite good. That said, I’ve become familiar enough with the genre and its popularity that I often seek some sort of novelty in the games I play within it. 
Looking at the timing from Dandara (2018) to Unsighted (2021), we’re actually one year overdue for another entry into the pantheon of “unique twists on Zelda and/or Metroid formulas from a Brazilian developer”. But the wait ended this year with Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo from São Paulo studio Pocket Trap.
Pipistrello follows Pippit, the young scion of a ruthless power company, as he embarks on a quest to rescue his horrible aunt who became imprisoned inside his yoyo after a gang of rival capitalists sapped her life force to charge up ultra-powerful batteries that will provide them with infinite energy for their own enterprises. It’s uhh…pretty silly right out of the gate, but its world is big and vibrant and full of all sorts of oddball characters that and subplots. Using a yoyo as a focal object provides a unique mechanical foundation that gets expanded and elaborated through upgrades, most of which come in the form of yoyo tricks that Pippit learns to unlock new kinds of traversal.
Moving around in the game is initially rather basic, but in addition to the library of yo-yo tricks Pippit also gets a brilliantly-tuned jump ability, which gives him a lot of maneuverability and doubles as a dodge during fights. You’ll find yourself jumping and reorienting in midair before using yoyo tricks to propel yourself across gaps and through elaborate puzzle rooms. The flexibility of the jump helps the game avoid being overly stiff and instead makes it feel generous. This little bit of extra wiggle room in Pippit’s movement opens up a whole host of challenging movement and puzzles that feel tricky but don’t involve serious frustration. It takes a while to fully appreciate the basic movement, but it’s a great example of how good foundational movement can make this kind of game stronger all the way through.

</img> </div> 
#6 — Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector</h2>
Early in the year, we saw the not-so-long-awaited sequel to the excellent Citizen Sleeper (regarded by some critics</a> as the best game of 2022). Starward Vector zooms out to tell a story in a distant sector of space, only barely outside the crossfire of the vast corporate war that rages just off screen in the first game as well. On the shores of the conflict, Starward Vector contends more directly with the flotsam that washes up and the insidious tendrils of influence that sneak in from both of the war’s major players.
But beyond those big picture ideas, Starward Vector is a lot like its predecessor. It focuses on individual people fighting to carve out a life and a future in a world that surrounds them with hostility, precarity, and scarcity. The character writing is what really sings, but Starward Vector also does a better job than its predecessor with sustaining the tension of its dice-driven mechanics, this time introducing various intertwining systems that complicate the core mechanic of rolling dice each cycle and slotting them into various tasks. I had more frequent brushes with disaster and encountered them further into the game than I expected, and this tension generally felt like it mirrored the narrative tension quite well.
The tyranny of random chance in a setting where everything is second-hand and falling apart is a strong metaphor, and the ways in which community helps to offset these difficulties comes through in the mechanics. In some ways I found that Starward Vector was a tiny bit too saccharine, too unwilling to bring its characters to harm or put them at odds. On the other hand, it’s also more nuanced with its exploration of the Sleepers themselves (enslaved workers in synthetic bodies powered by emulated versions of donated human minds). It handles some of its transhumanist ideas with a little more subtlety and intention, conjuring questions around machine sentience without really posing them directly or fixating on them too pointedly. And ultimately, it sets its sights on hoping for more than mere survival and respite; it dares the player to imagine genuinely better futures, even if it’s hard to know how you’ll reach them.
Citizen Sleeper 2 won my heart through sharply written subplots that make the game go, buoyed by a cast of characters who sometimes get along, sometimes butt heads, and always feel distinctive and worth getting to know. By the time it all wraps up, it really is hard to say goodbye.

</img> </div> 
#5 — And Roger</h2>
Some games are best left as minimally spoiled as possible, and that is unfortunately true of And Roger. It’s hard to know what to say about the game itself; it contends with incredibly heavy topics, using confusion and uncertainty as a crucial element of its storytelling. It begins with a girl in a bewildering and scary situation as she tries to understand where her father went and who the strange man in her house is. Even before you know how it shakes out, you can immediately see how much fire this game is playing with emotionally and thematically.
But to talk about this game, the easiest thing I can talk about is my response to it. When credits rolled, I sobbed. It made me think hard about how much I struggle to let myself cry, and the fact that I played it at home alone on a quiet afternoon is probably the reason I felt like I had the space to let it out. It’s a game that had me immediately wanting to call my family and tell them I love them. It uses simple and evocative mechanical metaphors to convey itself, reminiscent of how 2018’s Florence operates in large part through mechanical texture.
The topics that And Roger tangles with are tough ones and I don’t have the authority to say whether it handles them perfectly; my only expertise is my experience as a distant bystander to the themes it tackles, but I would be surprised if there weren’t a lot of folks who have similar experience through proximity. Either way, in my estimation, it brings profound empathy, care, and love to the way that it chooses to address these themes.
To keep talking around it would just be frustrating and unhelpful. I really believe this game works best with minimal foreknowledge. If you’re interested but you’re worried about not knowing where it might go, message me about it and I can tell you if it touches on something you might not be cool with. But otherwise, just play it. It does what it sets out to do with surprising grace and genuine pathos.

</img> </div> 
#4 — Blue Prince</h2>
Blue Prince is a game about exploring a bizarre and ever-changing mansion in search of its deepest, most cleverly hidden secrets. It’s driven by a roguelike loop in which each successive day resets the mysterious puzzle mansion and the rooms it contains. Every individual run hinges on a surprisingly compelling resource management layer that guides the player’s choices. Meanwhile, across multiple runs, players will unlock crucial upgrades that improve that resource economy, provide more control over the randomness of room selections, or give them easier access to powerful tools. 
Blue Prince contains the entire gamut of puzzle game challenges: simple and bounded puzzles with robust rules that escalate with successive attempts like increasing levels, clever observational puzzles that reveal hidden secrets, big picture meta-puzzles that only emerge across several runs, and ultimately a staggeringly deep well of elaborate history and lore belying the game’s most devious and complicated questions. It truly is puzzles all the way down. Every minute bit of storytelling, every odd environmental detail, every quirk of the mansion’s rooms and grounds, it all has some grander meaning just waiting to be discovered.
The deeper you go, the more this game becomes a yawning maze of conspiratorial metaplots and mysteries. On the gaming podcast Side Story, Austin Walker suggests that perhaps “the true ending of the game gives you a choice, and the choice is whether to continue being [Charlie Kelly from the Pepe Silvia meme] or to hit uninstall on Steam.” It’s the kind of game where, long after hitting credits and mucking about in its deeper mysteries, you’ll reach a breaking point and think to yourself “alright, I’m done struggling, I’m just going to look up spoilers for the rest of the game”, and then a few sentences into those spoilers you find yourself closing the tab and going back for just a couple more runs. I may never know the full extent of its secrets, but the hunt itself is too tantalizing to give up on.

</img> </div> 
#3 — Promise Mascot Agency</h2>
Promise Mascot Agency is extremely weird. That, if anything, is the core of its appeal. Borrowing most heavily from the Yakuza series, it combines a management game with open world exploration in a toy-like kei truck. It leans on crime story trappings for its core narrative thread, following mafioso Michi as he takes the fall for a deal gone south and goes into exile in a rural town that has bad blood with his yakuza family. Thanks to the writers’ wild imagination, the story weaves a grim tale of retribution and civic disenfranchisement with a hopeful and bizarre redemption story, filled to the brim with misfits and weirdos of all sorts.
In many ways, this game boils down to a “checklist game” full of collectibles and repeatable tasks, but its sharp writing, big heart, and strong sense of place make it far far more. Promise Mascot Agency’s characters might be zany but their interiority is taken seriously. It’s not squeamish about labor politics or class dynamics or sex work. Upgrading your truck improves your ability to clean up the town and traverse its hills and satellite islands while building up your mascot agency lets you employ more townsfolk and help promote the businesses of others. It’s all an exercise in putting in the work, rooting out corruption, and bringing a community together by taking their needs seriously.
Like any good open world game, a huge part of its character comes from traversing its world and finding interesting details, both the ones you were looking for and the ones you weren’t. Kaso-Machi is a sad, rundown backwater with a dirtbag mayor and a stagnating economy. It’s full of losers and cynics, hopeful go-getters who have been beaten down and resigned old-timers who have seen too much suffering to get their hopes up again. And most importantly, Promise Mascot Agency loves all of them: it loves their abandoned passions and their faltering hope, it loves Kaso-Machi’s pretty sunsets and its strange landmarks with their quiet magic. It’s a place that clearly has its history and traumas etched into it; the only way you can make something new is to pick up your broom, grab your sassy sidekick, and start bringing the place back to life.
Promise Mascot Agency is wonderful purely on the back of Kaso-Machi and its characters being so fun to discover and fall in love with. Its most heartwarming moments are deeply ridiculous and its most ridiculous moments are strangely heartwarming. I hope it gets more attention as people revisit the year’s releases.

</img> </div> 
#2 — Absolum</h2>
Absolum is a roguelike take on the beat ’em up genre set in an apocalyptic fantasy world with a vibrant comic-book art style. For me, it’s against type; I’ve played a few beat ‘em up games here and there, but I rarely reach for them and I’ve never been especially gripped by their combat. Absolum, it turns out, was the perfect entry point towards greater appreciation. It has the appealingly steep difficulty ramp of roguelikes that rewards skill and practice, but it also stays fresh as players progress further with more resources, abilities, and knowledge.
I think what makes Absolum really special is that it’s such a slick complete package. The story is told first through broad strokes as we learn about the cadre of rebellious sorcerers who hope to claim reclaim the land from a usurper. It leans on its focal characters’ pasts and the legacy of their decimated communities, gradually unraveling into a big picture story through the discoveries that players make when exploring new routes. The beefy soundtrack is packed with catchy tracks and has a few surprising swerves from talented guest composers. The art style is cartoonish and flashy with sharp line work and expressive animations that all read pretty clearly. The world is vibrant and its locations are varied and full of character, frequently yielding new details and secrets to those who look closer and search deeper. Combat is expressive enough to reward various playstyles, and while the build-crafting can feel limited sometimes, it’s augmented by item loadouts that can synergize well if chosen carefully. And to top it all off, it’s great fun to play with a friend in co-op.
Honestly, compared to the other games on this list, Absolum is kind of tough to pitch because it’s simply really good in a conventional way. It’s a smart mashup of core mechanical ideas wrapped in a gorgeous fantasy fable, it’s rarely too self-aware and rarely too self-serious, and it brings a lot of life to its world and characters across runs. Polish and panache have always been crucial to the appeal of the beat ‘em up genre, and Absolum translates those facets to a fantasy setting and roguelike format with unbelievable deftness, making it feel both classic and incredibly fresh at the same time.

</img> </div> 
#1 — Hollow Knight: Silksong</h2>
I’m sorry to be so predictable, but it couldn’t have been anything else. Hollow Knight (2017) was one of the early stops on my descent into metroidvania fever, and I played it pretty soon after my first forays into the Dark Souls universe as well. It sits at the intersection of my fondest genre affinities and it remains one of the best games of it’s kind, jam-packed with compelling secrets, clever world building flourishes, and memorable and challenging fights. It’s the only game I’ve ever revisited via a randomizer, just so I could explore its infested caverns once more. To follow up a monumental achievement like Hollow Knight would be no small task.
Enter Hollow Knight: Silksong, the breathlessly awaited DLC-turned-sequel that finally emerged from its silken cocoon earlier this year, arriving in the face of the highest expectations I’ve seen since No Man’s Sky. It seemed so unlikely that it could be as good as its predecessor. It seemed impossible that it could somehow top its predecessor.
But you know what? It god damn delivers. Silksong expands on nearly every idea that made Hollow Knight stand out, sometimes subtly and sometimes substantially. To enumerate its every bit of clever iteration would be indulgent and uninteresting, but it’s hard to overstate how perfect an evolution it is. Hornet’s movement is distinct from that of the Knight in ways that seem minor at first, but begin to hold more weight as you learn to traverse the world of Pharloom. The first movement ability that you pick up makes her feel more nimble and acrobatic, arriving just late enough that you’ve come to appreciate the basics before you get it, but immediately emphasizing her distinctive agility. The variety of tools and skills and crests (which change the shape and speed of her attacks) starts at a trickle and slowly grows into a steady flow of new options to experiment with. The two separate currencies that Hornet collects reward both cautious exploration and attentive experimentation with her collection of tools. Difficult challenges lurk around every corner, but nothing is so sturdy that it won’t fall to careful practice, a new loadout, or a future visit. Even dozens of hours into the game, it never runs out of surprises, challenges, and unexpected story beats.
Silksong was such a big deal that it spawned its very own difficulty discourse, a type of controversy that’s typically reserved for titles made by From Software. All manner of arguments were trotted out, some tired and some new, but there was a general feeling that if the difficulty of Silksong alienated you it was kind of big deal because the game was kind of a big deal. To be excluded by it felt bad in a way that would not be true of some niche masocore platformer or galaxy brain puzzler. It was a game of the moment, so feverishly celebrated by its core fanbase that it seemed like it needed to also be a game for everyone. When it couldn’t be, folks were (not unreasonably) upset; if anything, the bitterness of those who bounced off only served to deepen its mystique.
At the end of the day, Silksong is one of those special games that feels so laser targeted at my taste that I doubt whether I’m even remotely qualified to judge if it’s actually “good”. I’m pretty certain that it is—but even if it isn’t, it truly feels like it was made just for me. I don’t get that very often with video games, so it’s only fair to reciprocate and declare it the best game of 2025.

Uncommon Resolution Mechanics

2025-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
A crucial part of the soul of modern tabletop games is uncertainty. We use it as a way to surprise ourselves and each other at the table, to buck against predetermined stories and foregone conclusions by saying “maybe, just maybe, I could do something unpredictable and get away with it.” It’s what brings the format from traditional storytelling to improvised and collaborative storytelling. I’m by no means an expert or a scholar on this topic, but I’ve been thinking about it lately as I’ve tried to stretch my design ideas beyond well-established techniques.
Those classic techniques have staying power for a reason. Dice and cards are centuries-old tools of randomness and uncertainty and, therefore, excitement. Time-tested as they are, it’s no wonder that they’re cornerstones of tabletop gaming. Things like rolling skill checks or drawing cards to tell us how a proposed action resolves are great ways to stoke our imaginations, lead us to unexpected outcomes, or cause us to reconsider tricky problems.
In story games, we often get uncertainty from each other (sometimes in addition to the above). When it’s my turn in Fiasco</a> by Jason Morningstar, I can choose to establish the scene around my character while leaving the outcome (negative or positive) up to my fellow players to decide. Alternatively, I can keep control over the outcome but be thrust into whatever scene my companions establish for me. Either way, I encounter uncertainty on one end or the other, and further uncertainty arises during the scene itself through the simple act of improvisational scene play.
A great many tabletop games provide players with pools of distinct options to choose from—like a hand of cards, the hexes on a world map, or a table of prompts— in order to lean on players’ ability to mutually surprise one another with their choices (in addition to the art and writing contained in those options).
But we can go further afield than cards and dice. Designer Tyler Crumrine is especially adept at finding uncommon sources of uncertainty to build ideas upon. In The Details of Our Escape</a>, a hand of dominoes rather than cards provides a unique offshoot of a more familiar kind of uncertainty. Dominoes are tactile in a distinct way from that of cards, and they’re also relational to one another, placed in certain configurations based on their numbers. The dominoes form a shape, a path that traces the journey’s twists and turns, making them a thematically resonant choice in addition to an eccentric one.
In Beak, Feather, and Bone</a>, Crumrine uses simple playing cards provide a source of random prompts, but each turn is punctuated by the player selecting and coloring in a building on an illustrated map that accompanies each playthrough. That building is then described according to its significance to the faction within the city that the player controls. They might choose the building based on its shape or size or design or location, but it’ll always be uncertain to their fellow players and it will ultimately intersect with the stories that those players are telling about their own factions. The map functions almost like a table of prompts, in a way, but with visual and spacial meaning instead of words.
Another way to create uncertainty is to build pools of possible outcomes at the table and then either choose or randomly draw from them. In my game Dump Stat</a>, players provide a set of mad-lib style words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) for the GM to secretly choose from. Those words become the stats that the players are using as they take on challenges and try to figure out what exactly they’re good at. One of the inspirations for this design idea was Tyler Crumrine’s Scene Thieves</a>, in which players each contribute zany props to a big bag at the beginning and then draw one randomly during each scene. The prop introduces a surprising hinge point for the scene that must then be incorporated into the described scenes, but it’s also a perfect fit for the thematic setup (a troupe of actors who are also pulling off a heist behind the scenes): it grounds the story in physical objects and asks players to think about performance and theater craft while also encountering surprising and unpredictable twists, as one expects from a heist story. You could even build entire sentences of narration while drawing from a pool of words at the table, as I encountered last month</a> in Dreamland by Jason Bradley Thompson.
If randomness or choice in general are still too boring, tests of real-life skill can be used as a mechanism for generating uncertainty. Some of the most popular versions of this (to my knowledge) use tumbling block towers to simulate mounting tension and eventual catastrophe or release, as popularized by Epidiah Ravachol and Nathaniel Barmore’s horror game Dread</a> and used in Alex Robert’s much-lauded romance game Star Crossed</a>.
This is all exciting and wonderful, of course, and I’m not the only one who feels this way! In fact, Brian Flaherty of Many Sided Media discusses several of these games and more in a newsletter from earlier this year</a>. But what’s even more exciting is that the well surely goes deeper still. I have to imagine that there are all sorts of ways to derive uncertainty, randomness, and inspiration via unexpected materials and mechanics that we haven’t happened upon yet, or that exist in a far corner of itch.io</a> that I haven’t yet stumbled upon. And in designing around those unusual resolution tools, we can lean into their specificity and evoke feelings or thematic associations that are uniquely connected to those mechanical ideas.
This notion is something that I’ve begun to dabble with in recent projects. My #promptober game WORD WIZARDS (available in its original form here</a>, though I’m working on some revisions) relies on a test of skill I haven’t seen used before: spelling words correctly. The game is about spelling bee contestants defeating an accidentally-summoned eldritch monster by using their spelling prowess to create magical effects. With that premise, it’s hard to imagine a game that does not involve attempting to spell words. But since people have very different feelings about spelling, this mechanic risks alienating unconfident spellers. I try to mitigate this in the game's rules by building fun outcomes around success and failure, and giving players who failed some control over the resulting narrative, an outlet to turn their mistake into further creative antics. When it works, it means that a game about spelling things correctly can be just as fun and engaging for a player who’s terrible at spelling as it is for a player who wants to flex their spelling skills.
I haven't listed every uncommon resolution mechanic I'm aware of, but I'm sure there are many more that I don’t know about. If you have a favorite game that uses one, I want to know about it!

Guns, Whips, and Fists in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

2025-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
Update 12/22/25: When I initially wrote about this game, I had forgotten that developer MachineGames was under the publishing umbrella of Microsoft, a company that is currently a priority target of the BDS movement</a> due to its direct complicity in Israel's genocide in Gaza. I'm leaving this blog post up for posterity, but I'm encouraging readers to follow the guidelines outlined at No Games for Genocide</a> by activists within the video game industry. I've personally pledged my support to this effort and will make a point to avoid covering games published by Microsoft until it ends this complicity.

In my sprint to play a few more of 2025’s games—and lend some legitimacy to my impending top 10 list for the year—I’ve gone all the way back to last December, which I’ve decided to count as within my “2025 release” cutoff. That meant circling back (please clap) for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, a title I was interested in but never quite made time for over the past 12 months. I’ve not yet finished the game, but I’ve already got a lot of thoughts about the way it finds its niche as a stealth-focused adventure.
Crucial to effective stealth gameplay is enemies that are daunting and dangerous. Giving those enemies plenty of firepower is a classic, straightforward way to make them credible threats, which is why a good number of the various sorts of fascists who wander the regions of Great Circle are packing some sort of heat. That may not seem remarkable in a stealth action game, but it’s a big part of what you can and can’t get away with while you explore the levels. Rifles and revolvers are around, and Indy often has ready access to a revolver like the one he’s often seen with in the movies. It’s easy to miss this, though, and it very well may be the case that you interact with firearms for the first time only after you start knocking out the Italian fascists who carry them and picking them up.
When I first did this, I was already several hours into the game. And I when I aimed and fired it, I was a little surprised that I was even allowed to do so; thus far, the game had been perfectly content to provide me with shovels, wrenches, and the like so that I could quietly bonk my enemies over the head. There was even a boss fight that was entirely a hand-to-hand encounter.
But when I tested out this gun I’d picked up, I immediately remembered that developer MachineGames knows what they’re doing with this sort of thing. Perhaps a true FPS enthusiast could provide a more authoritative assessment, but in my opinion, that automatic rifle I picked up had all the heft and impact you’d expect from a well-made FPS weapon. The “gun feel” was, to be honest, pretty good. It didn’t feel awkward and ancillary the way that Corvo’s pistol in Dishonored does, where ranged weaponry feels very separate from (and secondary to) the core verbs like blinking around and performing sneak attacks.
No, in Great Circle, the guns seem like they’re meant to feel powerful, dangerous, and—well, like they would in a more typical shooter. They’re so effective at defeating Indy, in fact, that In most scenarios enemies won’t even draw them until he fires the first shot, instead preferring to attack with nightsticks or bare fists.
But that’s not the most interesting part about it. What’s interesting about the guns is that they’re really not that useful. Throughout the game, Indy must cautiously pick his way through fascist-occupied buildings and nazi camps at archeological digs. Success comes down to minimizing the scale of the conflicts you get into; cartoonish sneak attacks and frantic, muffled brawls are the only way to avoid alerting dozens of enemies to your infiltration. At the highest difficulty, the crack of a gunshot most often signals an impending game over and checkpoint reload.

Indy’s signature whip and the dukes he puts up when he enters melee combat are far and away his most stalwart tools, and the combat design around fistfights and melee is clearly an area of greater focus than that of gunfights. The guns, it would seem, are only as tightly designed as they are because of the carried-over talents (and perhaps even technology) of MachineGames in the wake of their Wolfenstein reboot series.
I’ve been finding a lot of enjoyment in the way that Great Circle adapts a campy movie series to its gameplay. Stealth takedowns are only possible if you pick up various items from around the level, most of which quickly break and must be replaced, which plays up Indy’s resourcefulness and puts a lot of silly everyday objects in his hands to be swung at his foes. Just like an action adventure movie, the game never sweats just how lethal these bonks on the head or pushes from a scaffold might be. It’s less about deciding whether you’ll kill or K.O. someone, and more about enjoying the comical slapstick and environmental hazards when you sneak up and trigger your sneak attack animation. When holding a gun, Indy can press a button to flip it around and grip it by the barrel, turning it instead into a breakable melee weapon that’s perfect for bloodlessly clobbering your unsuspecting foes; one more bit of player-driven tone setting that feels right at home for the character.
Mechanically, it all functions a lot like Dishonored, but tonally, it feels a lot more like modern Hitman, delighting in violence that’s both silly and justifiable. If Wolfenstein seems to say “isn’t it rad to mow down a bunch of nazis?”, Indiana Jones is saying “isn’t it hilarious to tap a nazi on the shoulder and then cracking a broom across his face when he turns around?”
My thoughts about the legacy of Indiana Jones as a character and franchise are a lot more scattered. I’ve never had any nostalgic fondness for it, so I can say with clear eyes that the genre of intrepid treasure hunters going on wild globe-trotting adventures brings with it a lot of troubling fixations and tropes. Even with Great Circle’s self-aware pulpiness, modernized interpretation of Indy, and genuine interest in history…the undertone of cultural tourism is impossible to shrug off, and probably inextricable from the core conceit of the character. Despite all that, to those for whom there is still fun to be found in pulpy adventure stories like this, Great Circle has managed to translate it well by making smart, restrained choices about how the hero navigates the trials in front of him.

Holiday Games

2025-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
Last year, I made a one-page holiday TTRPG to send out with Christmas cards to friends and family. It was a simple trick-taking game tucked into a silly pretense about taking over for Santa on Christmas Eve and delivering gifts in a fleet of time-manipulating sleighs. The premise is explained briefly, the core rules are condensed onto one spread, and it dedicates a back page to a play example; generally, I think it fits itself pretty well into a little gift-wrapped box of design constraints. It’s free and a quick read, so I encourage you to take a peek at it on itch</a> if you’re curious!
This year, I’ve decided I’m going to try to cement this into a tradition and make another one-page holiday game. It’s a delightful design challenge, a fun way to experiment with scale and format, and a nice way to vaguely explain to friends and family what this whole “game design“ thing is about.
So, what exactly are the design constraints that I’ve established for myself, and what’s the philosophy behind them? I’m so glad you asked! Here are the design guidelines for Holiday Games:

Sharing memories is a core theme — Sleighing Time was a little on the nose about this, but its central idea was to nudge players into sharing memories of loved ones, stories about their travels or adventures, or goals and accomplishments. It was built around the idea of catching up with friends and family during the holidays and looking back on the year. I hope to carry that theme forward in a novel way this year.</li>
Highly approachable — Holiday games are designed to be shared with friends and families ad hoc during the lazy in-between hours of visits and gatherings. That means that they need to have trivial play materials, flexible player counts, and a short runtime. Sleighing Time can be played with a deck of cards and writing implements, which imagined most folks having on hand. Items like block towers, specialized dice, or even 6-sided dice felt a little too specialized for average non-gamers to go dig up. Other widely available implements like coins or sticky notes would also be reasonable choices. In addition to materials, Holiday Games should play comfortably with 2 or more players, probably becoming less reasonable at about 6+. Sleighing Time felt viable even for just two players, like a couple enjoying a quiet evening together before traveling to visit family, but I can imagine it dragging with 5+, so I’m hoping to improve the scaling factor for this year’s game.</li>
Low floor for roleplaying — In Sleighing Time, players are asked to play as their real-life selves, but placed into a silly fantastical scenario. Since it revolves around sharing your real-life memories, it makes perfect sense to play as yourself. There’s no reason folks couldn’t assume a character and invent memories, but it was important to me that it not be an expectation. TTRPG gamers delight in Making Up Guys, but to me it was helpful to lean into the more casual reflex to simply play as yourself. Holiday Games that do involve playing as characters other than yourself ought to provide simple pre-gens or straightforward archetypes to make sure they’re easy to pick up.</li>
Influenced by board/party/traditional games — Sleighing Time includes a little track along which players race to the end, reminiscent of board games, and involves a lightly competitive layer in which players can overtake each other or exchange cards. These details are intended to make the game feel more familiar to folks who aren’t accustomed to storytelling games; a ludic goal like “win the race” gives a simple framework for decision-making if players aren’t drawn to the storytelling prompts. Crucially, Sleighing Time also includes rubber-banding mechanics to keep the race close and an equal-number-of-turns rule that allows multiple or even all players to win, together. The ability to gently compete—but with the potential to bring everyone into the winner’s circle—struck a nice balance in my mind between a competitive impulse that motivates play decisions and a set of equalizing measures that keep the stakes low and the game close.</li>
Simple, but not boring — Designing for non-gamers means relying on a narrower lexicon of rule vocabulary and zero assumed knowledge of RPG systems. Sleighing Time’s rules needed to fit in one spread so they’d be easy to read quickly and could be referenced during play. The progress track adorns the bottom of the same pages, so everything is in one spot. The front and back “covers” were reserved for the establishing fiction and a play example, both less likely to be actively referenced. The rules, while condensed, still have a light dusting of strategy and storytelling prompts to produce the intended social dynamics. They’re simple enough to follow by referencing the instructions, but not strategically inert and with storytelling prompts that ought to make players think for a moment. There are certainly some ambiguities and edge cases, but I feel like it works well for the space it uses.</li> </ul>
Looking back at Sleighing Time, I still feel like it lives up to these goals. For this year’s game, I have similar goals in mind, but I hope to make something a bit more ambitious. We’ll see how it turns out.
If you’re a game designer, I invite you to (informally) join me in making a holiday game! Share whatever you make, or reach out and let’s exchange cards. If I keep this up, I ought to put together an itch.io</a> game jam in the future.

Expedition 33 and Refusing to Let Go

2025-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

Why I’m still stewing about Expedition 33’s ending.
</div>
A warning up front: this post is chock-full of spoilers! Read ahead at your own discretion.
As we careen into GOTY season, it’s hard to avoid hearing and talking about a game that’s dominated the industry narrative since it’s release earlier this year. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was a critical darling and is regarded as a triumphant inflection point in the state of modern game development. Whether or not it serves as a reasonable standard for indie achievement remains to be seen (not dissimilar from the discussions that surrounded Baldur’s Gate III), but its presence in the zeitgeist is impossible to deny.
I finished the game about a month ago. I honestly struggled to situate my expectations amid the soaring praise, but in the end it was an intriguing and unique experience. However, I found the ending to be incredibly bleak and frustratingly paternalistic; enough so, in fact, that I still haven’t quite let it go, and now I want to talk about it.
A Recap</h3>
Before I get into it, let’s get the relevant pieces on the table. There are rampant spoilers ahead, so beware. The following is a very brief summary of the story of Expedition 33 following the end of Act II and approaching its final conclusion. It’s not exhaustive and there may be minor inaccuracies, but I’m pretty sure it’s mostly right.
Throughout the first two acts, the adventure gradually gives way to an unfolding mystery around the Dessendre family, to whom many of the focal characters belong. After defeated the Paintress, the heroes believe they’ve saved the world from an apocalyptic force that was rapturing its population year after year. They find, however, that their victory was hollow. The survivors are unmade in much the same way as before, and we learn that Renoir, the man who’s obstructed the heroes several times and has been revealed to be Verso’s own father, is the true destructive force behind it.
It turns out, then, that the surreal world in which we’ve spent the whole game thus far is in fact a world inside a painting, a vivid fantasy realm given life by the creative powers of a different version of Verso. We learn that there is a “real” world outside of this painting. In that world, Verso has died in a terrible fire that also grievously injured Maelle’s real-world counterpart Alicia, and their parents Aline and Renoir are embroiled in a protracted struggle inside this painting. As Aline wallows in her grief and wields her power to maintain Verso’s painted world, Renoir fights to destroy her creations and return her to her senses. Eventually, Alicia (disfigured by the fire that killed Verso) enters the painting and is reborn as Maelle due to Aline’s control over the painted world. Time appears to pass differently in the painted world relative to the outside one, so she lives an entire second childhood in the painted world, surrounded by its painted folk. They are as real to her as her family outside.
After Aline’s defeat, Maelle/Alicia comes to remember her past and her life with the Dessendre family. Meanwhile, the version of Verso that’s present within the painted world struggles with the knowledge that he is only a simulacrum, an approximation invented by Aline to dull her loss. Maelle resolves to defeat her father and send him back to the real world, hoping to linger in Verso’s painted world and restore it to a peaceful equilibrium. But we’ve also been told about one more complicating factor: a lingering fragment of the real Verso’s “soul” (a notion not discussed in any other context) remains trapped within the painting, seemingly preventing him from truly passing on.
Maelle’s Fate</h3>
All throughout Expedition 33, great care is taken to center Maelle within the story while rarely putting the player into her perspective. One of the only times that we control her on her own is a brief flashback before Act III as her real-world counterpart Alicia, in a sequence that only drives home her passivity and helplessness.
After Gustave’s death, we saw the “Act II: Verso” title card and jumped seamlessly to Verso’s perspective. We learned about the Dessendres as our charted their course to the Paintress’ doorstep, all the while controlling Verso and building his relationships, seeing through his perspective despite the many secrets he still kept. After defeating the Paintress and witnessing the aftermath, we see the title card for “Act III: Maelle”. We briefly wander Lumière in her shoes and witness her decision to liberate it from Renoir’s tyrannical unmaking, and her escape from the city with Verso and Esquie.

</img> </div> 
Then, we return to camp, reunite with our friends, and… find ourselves once again playing as Verso. Maelle is the last “real” person in this painting besides the primary antagonist, and her fate is clearly the heart of the story, but we never experience the world through her unless we’re wallowing in her trauma. Later, we can play an optional sequence where she defeats and mercy-kills the tortured, silent doppelgänger of her real-world self that has haunted her throughout the game. No matter how much the story is about Maelle, it is rarely told through her perspective.
Despite this, after the final confrontation with Renoir, Expedition 33 ends with a choice. Maelle insists on staying in the painting, but Verso believes that she must leave for her own sake. The game pulls back to a dialog menu and implores the player directly: choose which character you would like to inhabit in this disagreement.
This choice presents the us with some control over how the narrative will end, but any video game with multiple endings will always invite comparison. In the wider cultural discussion, they exist in tandem and in opposition. The whole of the story includes both of the diverged endings, not either ending alone.
While the notion of multiple endings is often portrayed as responding to player choice, in some cases it can feel much more didactic. A single binary choice invokes questions: did you, as a player, come to understand the story’s thematic intentions? Can you determine which decision leads to a “good” ending and which one leads to a “bad” ending? The game may or may not label them overtly (and indeed, many so-called “bad” endings aren’t meant to be punitive), but nonetheless, the approach tends to reward players who choose the thematically appropriate ending by leaving them with more closure, more gravitas, and sometimes even a sense of moral superiority. Sure, it’s entirely up to you which ending you want; but between the two options, one perspective will be proven right and the other will be proven wrong.
Two Endings, One Message</h3>
More words are exchanged in the fight between Verso and Maelle, but the proper endings happen in the cutscenes that follow, denoted by an “Epilogue” title card. Verso’s ending is a long and somber moment depicting the Dessendre family in the outside world, standing over Verso’s grave, cathartically grieving and seeming to rediscover a semblance of unity. It suggests a hopeful future in which they can move on from this trauma, together. Alicia lingers beside the grave after the others leave, clutching a plush Esquie, and watches sadly as apparitions of her painted friends wave goodbye and dissolve away.
Meanwhile, Maelle’s ending begins with a slow zoom into a grand theater in Lumière, where we see characters from the game resurrected and happily reunited. Maelle sits among them, watching them arrive. Her expression darkens as the music drops and the lights go out. When they come back up, everything is in grayscale and an aging Verso appears on stage approaching a piano. He hesitates, a pained expression on his face. The sinister turn is punctuated by a dissonant piano sting and a cut to Maelle’s face, which is mottled with melting paint like her mother’s was, seemingly indicating her declining health as she refuses to leave the painted world behind. As an image, it mirrors the disfigurement that seems to define her existence in the waking world, reminding us that she can’t truly escape what’s happened to her.
Both endings prove Maelle wrong. In Verso’s ending, she’s a grieving child brought back to a grim reality that she has no choice but to accept. In her own ending, she’s a grieving child playing pretend in a demented dollhouse. Whatever she wanted, whatever she hoped for, she was wrong and her father was right, as was the simulation of her brother. The painted world is portrayed as a childish fantasy, but the “real” world she returns to is an equally unserious one: as far as we’re ever shown, it’s a world that ends at the steps of her family’s manor, is inhabited by four people, and is characterized by an offscreen “war” between the capital-P Painters and the capital-W Writers. It’s a world in which she is silent and her future is determined by others. That’s the world in which she belongs, according to these endings, and the game offers no further evidence of its “realness”.
The other discomfiting factor is Maelle’s disability after the fire, which leaves her unable to speak. I do not intend to suggest that her life in the real world is made unlivable by her disability or that there’s no peace to be found in the wake of her trauma. There can and should be a life for her outside the painting, and her disability should not erase her as a person. But Verso’s ending makes absolutely no moves towards depicting this notion. The whole time, I was begging someone to please get her a prosthetic eye, or to even gesture at an attempt to let her communicate without use of her voice. I’m not an expert on the disability politics at play, so I’ll try not to put my foot in my mouth, but I think it’s evident regardless that Maelle’s agency in the matter is deeply minimized by the way that she’s portrayed across these two endings. Even if you’re able to see Renoir as a loving and desperate man trying to get his family back, it does not change the fact that he calls Maelle “a living ghost” when trying to convince her to return to a world in which she can’t speak. There is no escaping the fact that Verso’s ending takes this choice away from her.

</img> </div> 
What Are You Trying to Say?</h3>
For better or worse, a sharp thematic clarity emerges from this dual-endings style of conclusion. It presents a clear dichotomy between two worldviews and forces the player to align themselves with one or the other, and in doing so, says something about both the characters themselves and their understanding of the world they inhabit. They form the two sides of the coin that is the ending’s overall thesis. The two endings of Expedition 33 suggest different outcomes, but do not imagine different possibilities.
Throughout Expedition 33’s final act, questions are raised about grief, trauma, and legacy. The final choice hinges on the fuzzy lore of the paintings themselves, and the suggestion that the Verso we know is not, and can never be, the real Verso… but that he is also somehow connected to the lingering fragment of Verso’s “soul” that prevents him from passing on peacefully. Maelle insists that her father will destroy the painting against her wishes as soon as she leaves, and that seems to be borne out by Verso’s ending. If we believe that Verso’s soul is somehow trapped in the painting, then perhaps it’s a mercy. If we believe that anyone else in the painted world is a person in any meaningful way, well… that makes things more complicated.
In the endings as presented, the metaphor is much clearer than the metaphysical implications. For Maelle to linger in the painting is to refuse to let go of someone who’s gone, and for her to leave is to take the first step towards moving on and accepting both Verso’s death and her own disability. Maelle’s desire for anything else is portrayed as selfish and deluded. Meanwhile, the only way for Verso’s “soul” to move on seems to be the destruction of his life’s work (or at the very least, his childhood drawings), which is a confusing signal about the meaning of one’s art in the context of grief and legacy.
At the end of the day, Maelle is proven to be incapable of knowing herself. She must be rescued by a parent whose affection is barely perceptible through his self-righteous rage; that’s what leaves me feeling so negatively about this pair of endings. Throughout the story we see Maelle being brave, determined, and occasionally self-destructive. But at the end of the day, she is completely reduced to someone who must be saved from herself, unable to face the truth of her disempowerment unless coerced into doing so. Her father, who spends most of the story destroying every remnant of Verso’s work, is the one who ultimately knows better, the one who’s seen the truth of things through his own past trials and now shepherds his family into the light. Never mind that the world he returns to is one he seems to preside over. Never mind that the world he returns to restores his agency and diminishes hers. Maelle, it turns out, was never a person whose eyes we should try to see through; better to make choices for her instead.

These endings are, of course, designed to evoke a response, to overwhelm with sadness and catharsis. My frustration with it comes from my own interpretation, and others may see either ending more charitably or positively. Let me know what you think, or if anything I’ve said here resonates.

KublaCon Fall 2025 Recap

2025-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
Over the weekend, I attended a local convention called KublaCon Fall, an off-season supplement to KublaCon Prime (which runs in May). Silly name aside, it’s an approachable local convention that I hadn’t been to before past this weekend, and I played some new games. So without further ado, here are some (long-winded) impressions!
Our Brilliant Ruin</h3> The first game I played was Our Brilliant Ruin by Studio Hermitage</a>. It was an original adventure by the GM, who was running the game as a member of a demo and playtest organization that was works with the publisher. The provided characters were primarily pre-generated ones from the book itself.
The game is part of a constellation of media that form into a big IP blitz, including an ongoing audio drama and an upcoming video game. This kind of production-maxing admittedly puts me off, but since this event had open slots and seemed like a unique system, I gave it a shot.
Our Brilliant Ruin takes place in the final bastion of an apocalyptic world, where light from a distant star has brought a destructive force called Ruin that devours anything made of metal and metaphysically corrupts anyone it comes into contact with. It’s a socially-stratified setting with Gilded Age trappings and supernatural undercurrents. The book is very setting-forward, from what I could tell browsing through it, which is unsurprising given the multimedia project that it slots into.
The session felt a lot like trad games I’ve played in the past, even if the system seemed to stretch against it a bit. The amount of world-building in the book can’t really be absorbed by the scope of a convention one-shot, but I could certainly feel it etched into character sheets and capabilities. These sheets were both flavorful and economical, making it easy to understand my capabilities and archetype at a glance.
The dice system involves rolling d6s and looking for more 6s than 1s. I found it difficult to form an intuition about the dice math; as the dice pool grows, your chance of a positive outcome changes fairly subtly. Even though more dice technically improves the odds, each individual die you add is just as likely to screw you over as it is to grant or reinforce a success.
Our GM was as flexible as he could be within a prewritten-adventure style of play, but he did have to short circuit certain paths once or twice to keep us on track. The group also over-indexed on planning, with several players asking the same questions of the same NPCs and hoping to get new answers with new rolls, dragging out some of the opening scenes.
The system design seems to draw most from World of Darkness games’ narrative and mechanical blend (and indeed, one of its writers is Justin Achilli, a White Wolf veteran). A lot of the resulting dynamics hewed towards how a D&D adventure with an upstairs-downstairs twist might play out, though the scenario that the GM brought could have been a big contributor.
I found it hard to play a noblewoman character in the context of a “go to a poor rural village and hunt a monster that’s terrorizing them” adventure; the aristocrat character felt out of place doing dangerous, violent, hands-on work, even though the epicenter of the haunting was an noble family’s abandoned manor. I suspect that with the right massaging, this tension could be ameliorated or at least made more interesting, but as it was there was some friction that didn’t feel especially fun.
Overall, the game felt like it belonged deep in its own big sprawling setting in a way that couldn’t shine in a convention setting with players who had no prior experience. I don’t think it suited my sensibilities, but the PDF is free and it seems to be thoughtfully crafted, so it’s worth checking out if the pitch sounds intriguing.
Royal Blood 2e</h3> Royal Blood</a> is a game by Rowan, Rook, and Decard that funded a lush redesign and rerelease on Kickstarter late last year. It was the first I’d heard about it, but I’m familiar with a chunk of Rowan, Rook, and Decard’s output (as you may have seen in other posts on Eat the Reich, Heart: The City Beneath, etc.).
The game involves establishing characters and setting around the core concept of ambitious magic-users in a modern-day city who band together to dramatically dethrone a powerful magic wielder called the Arcane. The game is fueled heavily by tarot as both an aesthetic cornerstone and an oracle for storytelling.
A good chunk of our session was spent during setup; a nontrivial sequence of steps guides the group through building characters, detailing the world, and establishing the obstacles in front of the protagonists. This is certainly not a bad thing (setup is also play!), but I could feel it straining the time management of our four hour play session. Ultimately, we went a half hour past our allotted end time.
After setup, the remainder of the game involves several phases built around a simple token economy and a tarot card drawing mechanic, in which players can stake more resources to get more card options to choose from for their outcome. Different cards produce different results, so widening the pool of options feels quite meaningful, a lot like rolling with advantage.
The writing of the game is maximalist and indulgent, which is (along with the sheer density of drug references) very recognizably Grant Howitt’s style. It works well most of the time, but occasionally overstays its welcome and makes scanning and remembering details a struggle. For example, each character has “Facets” that they use to contend with challenges and must risk losing in order to progress; each one has an entire paragraph of flowery description, but lacks a single-sentence summary to remind you what it actually is or does.
The tarot artwork by Silvia De Stefanis is lovely; there’s no shortage of gorgeous tarot decks floating around in the Kickstarter ether, but these cards still hold their own and complement the game nicely. Since the Kickstarter hasn’t shipped, our convention GM got a deck printed on glossy card stock and they served us well during the game.
On that note, I also appreciated that the GM constrained our setting with a conceit of his own (high school goths overthrowing the queen bee of the school). It led to exaggerated characterization that suited to the game well and was easy to play into for a convention setting.
Overall, Royal Blood’s top-level procedure felt like a little bit too much, but the bones of the game and its resolution system were punchy and the tarot interpretation was a well-integrated element. Even with a GM guiding the story, these interpretive moments felt very collaborative. I also managed to convince my partner to join the game, which made it all the more fun. I could see myself revisiting Royal Blood to run it for friends at some point.
Blood on the Clocktower — Trouble Brewing and Bad Moon Rising</h3> I first heard about Blood on the Clocktower</a> at Big Bad Con, when I was making small talk with other volunteers in the break room. It’s a social deduction game, akin to Mafia or Secret Hitler, in which each player is given a hidden role and a team alignment and then tasked with eliminating fellow players until their team emerges victorious.
Designed by Steven Medway, Blood on the Clocktower feels like, as far as I can tell, the mother of all social deduction games. It’s built modularly on a foundation of simple rules and then thrown into elaborate strategic chaos via the introduction of dozens of unique character roles, each with a unique ability that lets them contribute to their team in a distinct way.
The structure of a Blood on the Clocktower game takes place across several days and nights. During the day, players converse and share suspicions and theories, then nominate players to execute and cast votes. During the night, players take turns triggering their hidden abilities while the rest of the group keeps their eyes closed. Layered on top of this basic format are “scripts”, curated sets of roles that produce certain strategic and social dynamics alongside a set of instructions to follow in order to run the game and proceed through each night.
This brings me to the most distinctive aspect of Blood on the Clocktower: there is one person who has no role at all in the game’s fiction. Instead, they function as the “Storyteller”, a neutral facilitator who carries out the procedural steps: they tell players when to open and close their eyes, call for nominations and count votes, manage individual player abilities during the night, and announce the results of those actions. All of this is performed in a prescribed order to ensure that everything fits into place neatly, often leaving space for mechanical edge cases but ensuring that they’re clever and intentional.
Beyond the precision and simplicity of the core rules, the Storyteller manages every piece of procedure and information visibility, making the whole experience feel smooth and curated. Using these tools, an effective Storyteller may also adjust balance and spotlight certain interactions. They can make choices about which roles from the pool are included in a given game. They can determine which players are affected by certain abilities and can make on-the-fly balancing decisions (all within the stated rules) that keep the drama high and ensure that victory is won cleverly or narrowly.
In both of the games I played, each with a different script (Trouble Brewing and Bad Moon Rising), each of which had more than 20 unique roles, I landed in the role of a Minion, a second-in-command to the lead antagonist Demon. In both games, I was soon pulled aside by the Demon (a more experienced player, luckily) and given advice on how precisely I should lie to other players about my role and its abilities. There was a palpable play culture among the cohort of seasoned players I interacted with: unstated habits and strategies, references to other scripts or past play experiences, and so forth. All of this was a bit alienating at first blush, but it was meaningfully tempered by the presence of a neutral Storyteller who could answer questions.
Playing an evil character in both games was exhausting, and not just because of the complexity. I think it’s fair to say that I have an aversion to social deduction games in general. I find tactical deceit to be stressful and viscerally unpleasant; whenever I draw an evil role, I feel my stomach knot up and my heart rate elevate. I can imagine the appeal: there’s obviously a thrill to getting away with ingenious deceptions, to pulling one over on your friends with poisoned logic or careful acting. It truly isn’t fun for me, but I can understand the sort of competitive impulse that it appeals to. I don’t mean to say I didn’t have fun; I just experienced an inordinate amount of stress along the way.
But I have a million more thoughts about the Storyteller role and the ways it intersects with GMing in traditional TTRPGs and wargames. This post is long enough as it is, but suffice it to say that the mere introduction of a neutral facilitator creates so many possibilities. They can answer rules questions mid-game without giving things away, they can apply “randomness” to abilities (e.g. one-out-of-two chosen targets gets this effect), and they allow role abilities that involve believing your role is something that it isn’t; all of which Blood on the Clocktower was doing in the mere two games of it I played*.* The inclusion of the Storyteller truly explodes the design space, and while the game itself is hard for me to stomach, I’m profoundly intrigued by the notion of filling the Storyteller role. In a sense, even with its truly overwhelming complexity, Blood on the Clocktower seems to be offering an alternative way to participate—even for forever-GM social deduction haters like me.
**</h3> The last proper scheduled game I played was a late Saturday night session of Dreamland</a> by Jason Bradley Thompson, run by the game’s very own writer, designer, and illustrator.
Dreamland draws heavily on the stylistic trappings (and also the literal words) of Lord Dunsany’s writing, among many other inspirations, and functions by using an intriguing wordplay system to augment a more traditional “skill check”-oriented foundation. Players portray characters who inhabit a dream world and have only a few specific memories of their waking lives. During the game, they endeavor to solve problems in the dream while periodically intersecting with their waking lives, either by waking up entirely or experiencing events that blur the boundaries between the dreaming and waking worlds.
Whenever players need to take difficult actions, they attempt to meet a target number and may roll skills or start from zero to do so. Either way, players can increase results by interacting with a unique wordplay engine that asks them to poetically describe actions and outcomes, either as in-character monologue or out-of-character narration, using a pool of provided word cards laid out in a grid. The resulting storytelling leaves room for flowery and dramatic descriptions, as well as a degree of overt dream logic (which occasionally came into play to help us circumvent tricky problems).
Intentionally or not, wide vocabularies and articulate improvisation are socially (if not mechanically) rewarded by Dreamland's word system. As is often the case, you can feel when mechanical incentives take precedence over roleplaying or writerly impulses. But throughout our session, Jason was admirably reassuring and encouraging about the varyingly eloquent dictations that got us out of trouble. Despite the awkward social challenge of building narration while also attempting to use keywords, I found it to be a genuinely endearing system to engage with: it often produced little swerves or flavorful details to the fiction that would not have emerged from dice alone, and it did so in a structured way that a GM could somewhat anticipate just by keeping an eye on the word pool. It also provided a lot of agency to players wanting to avoid direct failures in exchange for risking alternative consequences. I had relatively bad luck that evening, but I always felt like I had a good degree of control over what I risked and when. That kind of flexibility can be quite hard to produce.
Overall, I sometimes found the waking/dreaming lives concept to be a bit of a distraction from the core (dream world) fiction of the scenario, but I could see how it would function better over multiple sessions. Dreamland has an unusual system that surprised me in a lot of ways, and I’m looking forward to seeing it release fully. I couldn’t say if I’ll run it in the future, but I’m certainly not counting it out.
Playtesting Jajanken Duel</h3> Before I left for the day on Sunday, I got a chance to playtest a slightly revised version of the Shonen dueling game I wrote for day 5 of promptober</a>, with the help of a local friend who was at the convention. The playtest revealed a few points of logistical friction as well as some rules text that needed more clarity, but I was surprised to find a lot of intrigue and tension in the core structure of the game.
Jajanken Duel (as I’m temporarily calling it, Hunter x Hunter inspiration on its sleeve) is a rock-paper-scissors powered card game about anime characters fighting it out, using cool powers and trying to outsmart and one-up each other. But the story my friend and I told involved a setup that quickly led to both of us being reluctant to continue the fight, even though its stakes were still at play. By the end of the game, neither one of us was explicitly trying to win rounds, especially not with offense; we were instead trying to guide the story towards a cathartic ending for our characters, rolling with the punches along the way as the narrative squirmed in our grasp.
The game played from start to finish in about 45 minutes, which is great news for future playtesting. The fact that we were able to reach such dramatic intensity so quickly was an equally encouraging surprise, and the tension between narrative intent and the mental game of rock-paper-scissors became both disorienting and fruitful. It’ll need a lot of tempering to feel smooth, but the potency of the effect is proof to me that there’s something here to build off of.
I tend to feel extremely vulnerable when playtesting games with friends, especially when introducing folks to my work for the first time, but I always come away energized and touched by their kind, thoughtful feedback. It was a lovely note to end the convention on, and a reminder that in addition to scheduled events, conventions like this provide a space that erodes the burden of planning and leaves pockets of downtime to casually explore games with friends.
Conclusion</h3>
And that’s a wrap for KublaCon Fall. I even managed to not buy anything from its humble selection of merchandise vendors! Please clap!
In general, KublaCon had fewer scheduled events that captured my interest than Big Bad Con (which featured more story games) or Gen Con (which was simply gigantic). But the laid-back experience of a local convention helped me prioritize spending time with local friends and pacing myself with games and time spent at the con. I’m starting to find healthier rhythms with these kinds of events that leave me less drained; hopefully this means many more conventions in the future.

Backtracking: The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay (2004)

2025-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
Backtracking is a blogging project that I’m embarking on in 2024 in which I will play one game from each year since I was born. My goal is to engage with games I’ve never played and divert some of my attention away from new releases and towards older titles. I hope to cross off some major backlog items, learn more about the influences and intertexts that informed the games I grew up with, and practice my analytical skills. I’m using US release dates as the relevant year for my selections.
Why I Chose This Game</h2>
Well, I'll be honest: it wasn’t my first choice. Instead, it was a fallback I turned to after dragging my feet for too long. At one point I was choosing between Metal Gear Solid 3 or Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, but either of these would have been meant sampling from a big game series that I don’t have meaningful prior experience with. So instead I let convenience and familiarity win out and I joined our pal Richard B. Riddick for a good old-fashioned prison break.
The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay was developed by Swedish developer Starbreeze Studios and released shortly before the Chronicles of Riddick film, serving as a prequel to the series as a whole. It's fundamentally a first person shooter, but with gestures towards RPG and immersive sim design. One clear reason to choose Escape from Butcher Bay was that I knew it was relatively short, and even though I’ve thus far been glad to challenge myself to play slightly longer titles, I was too daunted by the other options I'd considered for 2004.
I vaguely recall Escape from Butcher Bay being in the canon of “dad games” alongside Tomb Raider and Max Payne, but I can’t remember actually seeing him play it. If memory serves, I once asked him about it and he said it was “pretty good”, or some such tempered (but sincere) praise. Moreover, my dad likes the Riddick movies and other sci-fi action films of their ilk. Personally, I have a similar fondness for Pitch Black (the first in the series) and a limited interest in the rest, but with Escape from Butcher Bay being a prequel, I figured it was worth my curiosity.

</img> </div>
Oh yeah. It sure is 2004.</div> 
What I Thought</h2>
Escape from Butcher Bay is a game full of glimmers. It’s got plenty of untapped potential wrapped into a compelling but ultimately clumsy package, undoubtedly rushed to completion by its proximity to the release of The Chronicles of Riddick (the film). Its level design is intricate, but only occasionally makes any use of its interconnected spaces. Its stealth design builds on a notion of using light and darkness to gain an advantage, but rarely builds interesting spaces around this concept. The edgy action sci-fi storytelling is limited both by its prequel status and its unwillingness to make any narrative maneuvers within that broader context, mostly just alluding to Riddick’s own Mandalorian-esque backstory.
These kinds of dualities are not uncommon for FPS titles of this era, many of which were reasonably- marketed commercial products of humbler scope. It’s fun to revisit a time when the difference in scale between tentpole action games and random PS2 oddballs was not so towering. Having been mostly curious about how and where it pointed its ambitions, the experience didn’t disappoint. But the gaps between those ambitions and their execution were undoubtedly felt.
I played through Escape from Butcher Bay on “Normal” difficulty, wary of the possibility of getting stuck partway through with no recourse (difficulty can’t be changed partway through, I don’t think). I found it to be very inconsistent with its challenge, while still being comically generous with its resources whenever there were heavy gunfight sequences. Ultimately, it’s probably best that I set the difficulty where I did.
To the game’s credit, it does pointedly take your guns away on several occasions as a way to reset the power curve. It feels as if the developers were aware that the gunplay was not all that thrilling or unique; rather than investing in depth with weapon systems, they lean into the narrative pacing of the triumphs and setbacks of Riddick’s escape attempts. The push and pull between gaining and losing your arsenal creates a much more pronounced effect than the Campbellian “belly of the whale” trope that video game stories like to lean on, in which a brief sequence of disempowerment precedes a return to full strength before the finale. Instead, Riddick spends nontrivial portions of the game with nothing but his bare hands, a shiv, or a tranquilizer gun, and those segments are generally made stronger by their limitations.

</img> </div>
The darkness is so stark that it's no wonder Starbreeze's next game would be titled 'The Darkness'.</div> 
The stealth systems make a clever pitch for using darkness, a space where Riddick’s alien superpowers let him see clearly when his opponents cannot, but enemy behaviors are often touchy or frustrating or simply leave no room for stealthy approaches. The “eyeshine” ability that Riddick can deploy is similar to the military shooter trope of night vision goggles, but it sticks to its world-building: it’s a heightened sensitivity to light, meaning that if you keep it on when you’re in a brightly-lit space, the entire screen blooms into white light. I enjoyed how conflicts would fall apart if I failed to use it deliberately, but I was constantly wishing I could make better use of it to be the terrifying hunter that Riddick is portrayed to be.
Butcher Bay as a setting is a grungy sci-fi take on a supermax prison, rendered with an attention to light and shadow that stands out among contemporaries. The labyrinthine nature of the facility makes the whole adventure enjoyably disorienting and keeps the place feeling enormous and incalculably complex. The final sequences shake things up, showing off drastically different parts of the facility and providing a more cinematic conclusion. The soundtrack, by Gustaf Grefberg, is both somewhat generic and strangely catchy, with a focal string melody in its action-oriented tracks that I can only describe as “swashbuckling”</a>. It’s an odd fit if you take it seriously, but it’s well-suited to the sheer camp of the storytelling.
The prison’s grimy halls are full of various weirdos, with key roles voiced by screen actors giving clumsy, hammy video game performances (complete with Vin Diesel’s gravelly monotone reprising Riddick). Given the era of the game’s release, I was a bit surprised by the racial diversity of characters, suggested by their character models and accents. But I’m hesitant to give it too much credit when the entire cast consists of a grab-bag of inmate archetypes and a couple of variations on the “sadistic prison warden” trope. The one and only woman is a disembodied female voice who explains Riddick’s alien superpowers to him; that’s the kind of writing we’re dealing with here. The most unexpected bit of nuance I found was the presence of Muslim prisoners—or an approximation thereof—who can be found praying in the prison yard on painted patches of concrete that vaguely resemble prayer rugs.

</img> </div>
I'm not sure what to make of the fact that the graffiti on the wall behind them says 'FUCKERS AREA', but there's a lot of similar graffiti elsewhere, too.</div> 
The highlight of the story, funnily enough, is the comical recurrence of William J. Johns (a.k.a. “Johns”), the put-upon mercenary who repeatedly attempting to collect a fair reward for capturing and recapturing Riddick, all the while enduring Riddick’s… well, ridicule. The homoerotic tension between these two is probably unintentional but undeniably present, and easily the most endearing thing about the entire story (a shame how it all goes down in Pitch Black).
All told, the game’s brief length makes it easier to swallow. It’s not an especially memorable game by 2025’s standards, but I can see why it had its defenders. Its clear why Butcher Bay’s ambitious systems, technological vision, and gleeful action movie violence mark its developers (specifically, key talent that spun off to launch MachineGames) as strong candidates to build the Wolfenstein reboot that released a decade later.
Reflections</h3>
My choice for 2003, Billy Hatcher, was a game that I had wanted to play at the time but missed out on because of console exclusivity. Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay is a different kind of missed title, one I might have played on release if I had been particularly keen to do so, but was outside my typical focus at that age.
Growing up, I was kind of a square. I wasn’t drawn to games and movies with mature content the way some other kids often were in ways that made them feel grown up or rebellious. I watched cartoons and played cartoony games well into middle and high school, and I rarely thought much of it. Ultimately, some of the most violent or objectionable games I played were casual hand-me-downs from my dad who had a fondness for that style of heightened action, and it was more incidental than motivated (I wasn’t just going to ignore entire video games that fell into my lap).

</img> </div>
Riddick rarely speaks outside of cutscenes, but once in a while he's overcome by the inescapable urge to monologue.</div> 
I realize there’s nothing wrong with liking what you like, but I do often wonder if my taste, or even social groups, would have changed if I’d pursued more “grown up” things sooner. In high school I fed my transgressive impulse with metal music while my other media interests remained tame. Escape from Butcher Bay is much more edgy and childish than it is truly “mature”, but it’s an interesting glimpse into a different direction that my childhood tastes could have gone if I had aligned more closely with my dad’s taste. I probably have a greater appreciation for it now, in all its cool guy stupidity. Maybe that comes with getting older and revisiting media that my parents enjoy.

TTRPG Promptober Retrospective

2025-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
As I wrote about a few weeks ago</a>, for all of October I was sucked into a daily design challenge that was helping me stretch my game design muscles and push me to experiment with mechanics, play materials, and thematic ideas that I haven’t previously touched.
Over the course of this challenge, I wrote:

2 micro-supplements for specific games: a Landmark for Heart: The City Beneath and a Faction for Blades in the Dark</li>
5 generic supplements, mostly tables or prompt lists</li>
4 incomplete games—these ones are missing whole sections of rules or have unfilled tables or prompt lists</li>
18 “complete” games—many of these are woefully imbalanced, some are missing key guidance or crucial prompting, but all of them ought to be playable as written</li>
1 lyric game, which is technically playable but not sensible to group with the ones above</li> </ul>
Phew…
That was probably too much. I shouldn’t have written that much. And by the end it was mostly stubbornness and sunk cost that was keeping me going. But it was also a lot of fun and an enormous amount of writing and design exercise. I’m probably going to need a bit of a break, but there’s a lot of ideas in here worth revisiting! I want to walk through a few I’m excited to come back to, just to get some commentary written down and summarize my intentions for further work.
So here’s a small selection of the games I wrote that I believe have the most potential and are highest on my list to revisit (in addition to the three I highlighted earlier this month). For each of these, I’ve briefly summarized the game itself so that nobody feels like they need to go read a whole other post all the way through before continuing.
WORD WIZARDS</h3> Full text here</a>
WORD WIZARDS is a loose, silly one-shot game built around using spelling bee questions as a resolution mechanic. The setup involves accidentally summoning a horrible monster, after which players attempt to fight it by answer spelling questions to determine how their actions play out. If they get answers right, they accomplish what they intended. If they get them wrong, they can rewrite reality to accomplish something helpful but different than they intended.
This was Day 2, and it’s the first complete game I wrote. It’s also the moment I realized I was in trouble. From this point on, the average length of my complete game posts increased gradually. It’s hard to say whether that’s because I got less efficient or my mechanical ideas got more complex, but I like the simplicity and efficiency of this early entry a lot.
The writing itself is passable but could certainly be improved, and the setup prompts aren’t as flavorful as I’d like. Additionally, the game is really lacking resources to help GMs find sufficiently fancy words to prompt their players with; I'd have to do some research to track down good links. Besides that, though, there’s not a whole lot I want to change. It just needs to be playtested!
Scattered to the Stars</h3>
Full text here</a>
An asynchronous, multiplayer journaling game that shares a notebook (with friends, or through a “little free library” like I see around my neighborhood). It’s about survivors from an alien planet that was destroyed in a supernova, who are now doomed to roam the galaxy apart from one another. The radiation of the supernova has given them a deep connection with the stars themselves, through which they can sense and communicate with each other even while lightyears apart.
The goal of the game was to build something out of the deep loneliness of being the last of one’s kind while still capturing a sense of awe and hope about the universe. There’s undeniable Outer Wilds influence, but also inspiration from Umurangi Generation and Superman stories. I think the core idea of the game is strong, but the prompts (specifically the Memories to fill in) are light on specificity and likely need to be more evocative before the whole thing can come together.
There’s also a tension here with using prompts to invent a fictional alien species. They ought to be distinctly non-human and non-earthling, but I also try to avoid the pitfall of collapsing them into a monoculture. There’s a lot of fine tuning to be done around accomplishing this goal elegantly, especially in a way that doesn’t feel like shallow box-checking.
Ihezohr</h3> Full text here</a>
Ihezohr is a storytelling game about a party of victorious heroes who climb a tower to find out what happened to a friend who they parted ways with along their path. It’s essentially a love letter to the friend in your TTRPG group who got too busy and had to drop out of the campaign (usually with some thin narrative pretense).
The game uses a tarot deck with the major arcana representing rooms in the tower. The rest of the cards are used by players to conjure memories of time spent with their old pal Ihezohr and to deal with challenges on the floors of the tower. There’s a bit of a metafictional element to it all, but I hope it comes across as both celebratory and somewhat restrained.
As written, there's a little bit too much weight to a single “play”, where a player who’s contributing to the scene must play a card, introduce fiction to the “present” moment of climbing the tower, and also reminisce about Ihezohr through a flashback. I don’t know if this is too much cognitive load, but either way I could imagine the structure getting stale if every maneuver includes a flashback.
There’s also an emerging mystery around Ihezor’s whereabouts and goals, assembled piece by piece as players pass around the role of portraying the tower. I don’t know if those pieces work well yet, but a playtest will help answer that.
Also, it's worth noting that the name “Ihezohr” came from fantasynamegenerators.com</a>. I thought it was kind of funny that it sounded like “eyesore”, even though that seems incredibly mean if you read into it even a little bit. It’s mostly just a generic fantasy-sounding name.
Among the Ruins</h3>
Full text here</a>
A world-building game about exploring a post-apocalyptic world and encountering ruins that tell the story of its past. It uses a die, a block tower, and a custom set of rules for stacking blocks that produces odd and expressive structures.
I had been wanting to make something using a block tower, as popularized by horror RPG Dread</a>. Well, now I have, but I didn’t use it in the conventional way. The block-building in this game uses a d6 and a set of rules about how to arrange the new block onto the structure, which begins from scratch instead of as a complete tower. I was a little surprised how compelling the building was once I started ironing it out; I have some confidence that this piece of the game will work (though I’d probably want more example structures listed in step 1 of the Encountering Structures section). I've also always had a strong affinity for what you might call "verdant post-apocalypses", which meant I had quite a bit of fun testing the building rules and imagining the ruins they evoked.
I’m much more uncertain about the “talk about” prompts, which suggest freeform conversation topics to use—be it in character or out—as the wanderers make their way towards the next ruin (for the players, this covers the time during which blocks are being placed). The idea is to provide a left-brain counterpart to the very right-brain task of arranging blocks, but I’m not convinced it’s actually helpful to try to talk over that step. This would probably be a key focus area for playtesting, in addition to honing the World Questions that drive the overall storytelling.
Honorable Mentions</h3>
Plenty of the entries were either much farther from being complete or just less compelling objects altogether, so here's some one-liner pitches and links for those who really have a lot of time to go read around:

No Honor</a> is a game for 3+ players about a heist gone wrong at the 11th hour, where impending betrayal leads to a standoff just moments before a clean escape.</li>
Final Dive</a> is a solo game about exploring an alien ocean and collecting parts to repair your submarine and ascend...all while avoiding a beast that lurks about the depths.</li>
No Empty Spaces</a> is a table of storytelling micro-games that can be used as part of a hex crawl to add some variety between mysteries, monsters, and loot.</li>
Destined Wielder</a> is a collection of 2-player mini-games built around a shared series of prompts exploring the relationship between a chosen hero and their sapient weapon.</li>
Something is Out There</a> is an incomplete solo game about monitoring trail cams while something terrifying stalks through the park, played by marking up a trail map.</li>
Dream Sequence</a> is a lightly competitive duet "interlude game" designed to explore a character's backstory and a GM's future prep by playing out a prophetic dream.</li>
Reap What You Sow</a> is an unfinished and unhinged solo journaling game about time management, writing poetry, and the illusory simplicity of farming.</li> </ul>
Farewell October</h2>
And that's it. There are maybe a couple others in the overall collection, which you can browse here</a>, that I’d love to explore more eventually. For now, I’m very glad to have done this! And I'm also glad that it’s finished.

Pacing and Progression in Roguelites

2025-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
In a “true” rougelike (that is, games whose design lineage points directly at Rogue and its ouvre of procedural dungeon crawlers), there is only the player and the run. The game itself is randomized, malleable, ever-shifting, but sturdily bound by a set of rules and interactions that the player comes to slowly understand. Their knowledge and intuition grow, while the game remains the same object, obstinate but not unconquerable.
Rogue and similar titles are turn-based; there is no skillful execution involved. Only decisions to be made and enough knowledge to overcome the whims of luck. I don’t tend to gravitate towards these titles because the weight of failure can feel so brutal, the tedium of repeat attempts so oppressive.
My preferences fall a bit more in line with those of today’s popular sensibilities, which trend towards providing players with some notion of irrevocable progress even when failures abound. Extra lives, checkpoints, and save functionality are all early expressions of this curve towards kept progress, but it's found another common expression through “meta-progression” in the modern wave of popular run-based games.
There’s a satisfaction to progression for its own sake. Leveling up, increasing stats, completing stages; these mechanisms generate a sense of accomplishment. They let players feel like some trials are behind them, and new ones are ahead. And for good reason! It can feel tedious and dull to repeat challenges you’ve already completed because you’re still trying to accomplish whatever lies beyond them.
Regardless, the old becomes new across a variety of vectors and today we find ourselves in a world where procedural generation collide with RPG-like meta-progression. This combination, distinct from the more directly comparative “roguelike”, is often dubbed a “roguelite”, a slightly-judgmental term that signifies a balance between procedurally-generated challenges and layers of meta-progression providing more resources or more options (or both) for subsequent attempts. This tends to mix nicely with an action game layer, where reflex and reaction complement knowledge and systemic mastery.
The roguelite structure is, in a pretty straightforward sense, meant to be the best of both worlds. It kicks your ass at first, then begins handing you tools to fight back on more even grounds, smoothly blending your growing prowess with a growing collection of concrete advantages. Each time you fail, you get consolation prizes that ultimately soften the sting of defeat. It’s a smart approach that lends itself well to games that are complex but not long, a scale of experience that’s approachable for small teams, though it demands careful testing and balancing.
But here’s the thing: everyone has different tolerances for (and interest in) each of these mutually-reinforcing factors. If a game leans too heavily on skill expectations, it alienates those that want their failures to mean something and bring them closer to success. If it leans too heavily on meta-progression, it alienates those who want their skill to feel meaningful. There can even be additional splits between different types of skill, most notably the difference between build-crafting knowledge and realtime execution in action roguelites.
This difference in tolerances brings me to the topic of two roguelite games I’ve been playing recently: Hades II</a>, the sequel to the greek-myth-inspired roguelite juggernaut Hades, and Absolum</a>, a roguelite beat-em-up in a fantasy world that released a month later.
In Hades II, after 31 hours, I’ve beaten the “final boss” of the game. What remains is to repeatedly do so while progressing a number of parallel side stories and advancing the main plot. Each of these runs will take somewhere near an hour to complete. While the game is about skillful execution, I’ve reached a point where it asks me to just complete more runs, with any additional sources of challenge coming from weapon choice and opt-in difficulty intensifiers.
In Absolum, after about 5 hours, I’ve not yet reached the last boss (or even come all that close). My longest runs are about 35 minutes and most of them are closer to 15 or 20. Despite presenting me with much less build variety (at least, so far), the core system has enough depth that I’ve been compelled by just learning the ropes and getting better at the core mechanics.
I don’t know if Absolum is ultimately going to rely on sending me back to the beginning as many times as Hades II will in order to see its story through (I did look around, but couldn’t find much without spoiling myself). I don’t know if my more successful runs will balloon in length like they have with Hades II, making the early parts feel more rote and tedious. And more generally, I’m not sure if I’m just prone to enjoy the earlier parts of these experience curves, when the starting areas still hold novelty and the quest for more skillful execution makes each engagement feel significant. Moreover, I ought not ignore the novelty of the combat system in Absolum; I'm inexperienced with beat-em-up games and might be more easily won over by it.
I’m also still unpacking my general ambivalence towards Hades II, a game that I was doomed to be disappointed in</a> because of my history with the studio’s previous work. In my experience, the intention to make failure rewarding (go talk to your friends, grow your relationships, and enhance your capabilities) has created an odd inversion of the core loop: now, it’s less about truly striving to overcome a challenge and more about walking a long road that will eventually lead to surmounting it. I should be clear that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and in fact it’s one of the reasons that Hades II is so approachable and appealing to so many players. But it may not be to my own taste, and the dichotomy between these two games is helping me understand that.
The line between justifiably critical and elitist can be blurry. I want to be more confidently negative, to proclaim that Hades II leans too much on the sheer escalation of its meta-progression rather than building a challenge that revolves around players becoming more skillful with how they handle it; but I also know that it’s part of what makes the game appealing to a wider audience who might avoid it otherwise (even with its difficulty-adjusting option). For now, it’s given me a lot to think about.

TTRPG Promptober Check-In

2025-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
This post is coming in a little hot, because I’ve regrettably gotten myself quite distracted. Due to a confluence of unrelated events, my three semi-regular weekly game groups were all on hold for the first half of October. To bridge the gap for myself, I dug into a daily writing challenge for the month of October. The challenge is described here (but requires a bsky account to view): https://bsky.app/profile/diwatamnl.bsky.social/post/3m243seqz4c2s</a>
I find that prompts, jams, and other kinds of time-boxed design challenges are incredibly helpful for my own creativity. I’m prone to endlessly jotting half-considered ideas, but at a certain point the desperation to get something done kicks in and it pushes me to commit to an idea earlier than I otherwise would, sometimes with positive results.
Before I go further, I feel compelled to mention: I’m fortunate to be in a position where my weekly obligations add up to much less than a standard 40-hour work week. Part of the reason I’ve tumbled into a rabbit hole for several of these daily prompts is because I have that time right now. I don't necessarily expect anyone to measure themself against my work, but it's definitely something I've done with other folks' work during busier periods of my life. To everyone, always: find your own creative rhythms any way you possibly can, and always give yourself time to rest when possible.
Highlights</h2>
Since the challenge is still ongoing, I’d like to just share a few that I especially enjoyed writing or felt particularly fond of the result.
Glade of Solitude</h3>
Full text here</a>
Glade of Solitude is a game about witches-in-training getting lost in a mystical forest and losing the ability to communicate directly with each other. By using their potion-crafting training, intuition, and trust in each other, they must survive until they can unravel the curse and get free from the Glade of Solitude.
With no time or occasion to playtest, I had no reason not to jump straight to a bunch of ambitious ideas. I used a little map of hexes to give players options for which parts of their curse they unravel, to allow strategizing around remaining resources, and for introducing a loose sequential narrative structure. The game discourages nearly all player communication during potion making (which functions like a heavily-modified prisoners dilemma, where players are trying to produce certain combinations without knowing each others' choices), and then it gradually reintroduces communication in limited ways.
Honestly, I think it probably has some wild balance issues and I haven’t the slightest idea how well the communication restrictions would work in play. Would it be nigh impossible to collaborate even as restrictions lift? Or would it become trivial far sooner than I hope? This is heavily reliant on in-person play, so it’s hard to say till I revisit it and properly test it.
Jajanken Duel</h3> Full text here</a>
Jajanken Duel is a game inspired by Shonen duels and the series of escalating taunts, reveals, and mind games that are often exchanged while the duel unfolds. It’s loosely inspired by my recent watch of Hunter x Hunter (hence the name and the rock-paper-scissors structure, for those familiar), and it attempts to capture the emotional and dramatic arcs of such heightened exchanges.
I had fun trying to laser focus on genre specificity while also keeping actual game content broad and flexible. The game uses 3/4 of a deck of cards to implement a modified version of rock-paper-scissors and the remaining 1/4 for special prompts that players draw from to rally when they lose a round. I was pleased with the economical use of cards, and I’m happy with how concise and straightforward it is in general.
The core of the game is the prompts that players answer when they win or lose a round, so there’s certainly room to expand on them, to make them both more plentiful and more precise. Also, since ties are resolved by the rank of the cards used, I haven’t fully worked out what kind of incentives it produces choosing which card to play. It may be technically optimal to always choose the highest-value card in your hand, and that could ultimately make it a bit boring; I’ll have to play it out a bit to get a sense for it.
Survivors</h3>
Full text here</a>
Survivors is a dark story about a group of sapient zombie-folk who are accosted by unturned survivors while trucking supplies to another community. In order to escape their predicament, they must rely on their few strengths and maintain their resolve for the communities that they hope to protect.
If Glade of Solitude was unwieldy (but fun!) because of its mechanical ambitions, Survivors was tricky because its thematic ambitions. I wanted to invert certain zombie genre trappings in order to unravel my discomfort with them, and I landed in a place that has a huge number of uncomfortable parallels. Most of them are parallels I've thought through and attempted to deliberately incorporate to produce fruitful discomfort, but they’re still topics that are tough to handle and I’m barely semi-confident in my treatment of them.
That said, ambitious attempts can be gratifying even if you’re unsure of their success. As with the others, the actual probabilities need to be mapped out in more detail before I’d have a sense of how closely it aligns with the tension I’m hoping for. Additionally, I was quite happy with how it uses a spread of stats to emphasize thematic ideas, but dissatisfied with the way that the unturned player character is the most literally vulnerable. This really does muddy some key thematic goals, but I do still think it’s mechanically compelling.
I’d also want to revisit the way that backstory is delivered and make it more prominent and more naturally integrated. As it is, it’s kind of shoehorned in to bring depth to characters and what they’re trying to protect. Regardless, writing something really heavy and uncomfortable (but intentional) was new territory that I’m glad to have explored at least a little bit.
Ongoing</h2> If you’re interested, you’re welcome to follow along on bluesky</a>! I’ve been deeply touched to hear from friends telling me they’ve read along, and though I must remind myself that I’m doing this exercise for the sake of my own growth, I must also never fail to be moved by my friends’ attention and encouragement.
When this is all over, I hope to work through what I made and pick out some to produce more fully, in whatever form they might take. Till then, let’s see if I can keep up the momentum!

Hades II - The Safety of Sequels

2025-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
A couple of weeks ago, Hades II exited early access and released in its 1.0 form. A huge number of people I know have been delving into its depths (and ascending its mountains). Most of them have put in more time than I have, since much of my gaming time has been devoured by the long (and still delightful) tail of Silksong. I can’t yet opine about endings, boon combinations, weapon aspects, or what have you. But I’ve played enough to get the feel for it, to see most of its regions and fight many of its bosses and mini-bosses at least once or twice.
What I can talk about is how Hades II fits into Supergiant Games' legacy and why it ultimately leaves me somewhat cold despite its many great qualities.
Hades II is Supergiant’s first sequel, and it seems to be a perfect example of what makes sequels so rewarding: smartly reusing assets and systems by expanding them into new directions with new twists. It’s the same foundation, but with a plethora of new ideas and variations built on top of it.
Hades, its predecessor, was a genuine indie darling. It reached beyond the core audience for roguelike action games and leveraged the studios affinity for charming, character-driven storytelling to broaden its appeal dramatically. Some folks I know felt welcomed into an otherwise brutal genre because of its distinct sensibilities.
Hades II is no less sharp, delivering its story as before through a web of relationships, fueled by writing and voice acting that’s grandiose and admirably unselfconscious. It’s a well-crafted work, honed by iterating on its formula. It’s making good use of its resources and its time in Early Access to feel bigger, more dynamic, and deeper than the previous title. But despite the many ways in which Hades II evolves its formula, it is ultimately more Hades. It feels like popcorn: a whole new spread of delightful character designs and spectacular music, lots of great twists on its core systems…but nothing so bold or unique as the studio’s earlier titles. To put it bluntly, it's remarkably safe.
One of Supergiant’s signature elements, crucial to everything they’ve made, is what I might call “gestural storytelling”. Their games constantly invoke stories and worlds offscreen, using (often diegetic) allusion to goings-on at a much greater scale than the focal character’s journey. In Bastion, it’s Rucks’ ruminations on the history that brought their world to collapse. In Transistor, it’s the noir-esque backstory profiles of the digital beings that become Red’s abilities. In Pyre, it’s an ongoing plot in the Commonwealth above, the unseen haven to which the Exiles might return if they can succeed in the Rites.
Both of the Hades titles have a version of this as well, gesturing at the histories, alignments, and animosities between the familiar pantheon of Greek deities, sprinkling in original twists here and there, and delighting players with their interpretations of classic characters. But neither of these titles really has a world outside its characters that feels mysterious or larger than what we know. The warring gods in Hades II are locked in infinite stalemate as the game waits for you to unravel the status quo. The affairs of mortals crop up occasionally but seem largely immaterial. There are happenings outside of Melinoë’s field of view, but the soul of the story belongs to her, to all the small moments of conflict, affection, and determination that she shares with the wider cast of the game. That’s a perfectly fine choice—and often an affecting one—but it does make me miss the grandiosity of what the older titles did with implication and allusion.
Meanwhile, the experience of playing the game certainly feels like an evolution of Hades, with creative weapons and interesting boon combos. But none of it feels nearly as fresh as Transistor’s almost-turn-based action combat and multi-faceted function slots, or Pyre’s bizarre ritual sports matches and asymmetrical kits. If I’m being particularly uncharitable, Hades II feels almost like filler. But I only feel this way because it's from a studio that I love for their sense of daring, for storytelling ambitions that always stretch far beyond the edges of the screen and gameplay ideas that surprise me.
For all my gripes, I’ll continue to play and generally enjoy Hades II. I can’t ignore the reality that for every (mild) hater like me, there are hundreds of players who would never be drawn into something as offbeat as Pyre. Hades II is almost certainly going to keep Supergiant’s doors open for many years to come. I can’t fault them for giving fans what they want, especially when their work is still full of so much indulgent fun in its writing, performances, and aesthetics. And I can imagine the kind of pressure and urgency that comes with making unique and unexpected art that also needs to sell well enough to sustain livelihoods. Moreover, I don’t doubt that the developers have enjoyed making this Hades II! But in my heart of hearts, I hope they get an itch to make something far stranger next.

Designer Commentary - Dump Stat

2025-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
Dump Stat is a playful parody of the tyranny of skill checks in the Dungeons and Dragons lineage of TTRPGs. It’s still pretty rough; I’ve only run a single playtest. But it’s also a silly two-pager, so I see no problem with talking through the decisions I made and the changes I’m considering. The PDF is available for free, so please grab a copy</a> and follow along!
The basic pitch of Dump Stat is that you’ll play out a scenario where the players don’t know what their stats actually are, only that their better at some than others. During the scenario, they’ll try to glean more about how the GM is interpreting their actions in order to better address their goals in the scenario and construct a guess at what their character’s “build” might be. At the end, players assign themselves a snappily-named Archetype (like a class or playbook) and then all is revealed. Let’s get into some of the details!
What’s the big idea behind this game?</h3>
Ultimately, Dump Stat is a game about the interpretive calculus of mechanics of skill checks and the ever-present temptation towards metagaming—which can often be good fun!
Players declare what their characters are attempting in the fiction, but only the GM can map those actions onto the mechanical procedure that follows. Meanwhile, the GM does their best to interpret those actions both creatively and consistently. During the scenario, both parties are hyperconscious of the imperfect process of translating fiction into mechanics.
Dump Stat then encourages players to prioritize the metagame goal over the in-fiction one, the opposite of typical play advice. One-shots are always a good opportunity to play recklessly and curiously; having a mystery to solve external to the fiction helps to intensify that impulse. There’s fun to be had in smashing the action figures together and seeing what happens.
Where does the title come from?</h3>
The term “dump stat” is the popular vernacular for a stat or skill that’s brought as low as possible in order to allocate resources (and thus competence) to some other skill that’s core to a character. Traditionally, your “dump stat” is the thing you’re bad at and don’t plan to use. But since you don’t know what it is you’re good at in this game, you’ll have to experiment to find out which is which. It’s also a familiar phrase that evokes a sense of metagaming intention, so I think it puts players in the right mindset.
The initial title was Mincing Words, which I felt was mediocre. While the GM will certainly use evasive language, the idiom of “mincing words” doesn’t really fit the zanier tone of the game. “Dump Stat” is still a poor descriptor of what the game is, but I do think it’s an improvement. I’m sure there’s still a name I like better out there somewhere.
Why NOUN, VERB, and ADJECTIVE?</h3>
Truthfully, the answer is that I have a pet peeve about games that use inconsistent parts of speech for their stats. It’s a very silly thing to be hung up on. So I made a game that does it loudly and on purpose.
Ultimately, though, it doesn’t much matter exactly what they are. The point is to have categories that are distinct, that won’t reveal anything on their own, but can be filled with pretty much any words that might function as stats or skills in other games. The game text could certainly be clearer about how these function, though. In my mind, I think of them as “slots” that have hidden contents, to be revealed at the end. Maybe I can work that metaphor into the text.
One other benefit of using parts of speech is that it calls to mind Mad Libs, which is a helpful grounding for the intentions of this game. The chosen words should be arbitrary, zany, and surprising when encountered in context.

Playtest note: A couple players asked if they could use proper nouns for the “noun” category (this was before the text specified “common nouns”). I ultimately said “no”, if only because it could make the GM’s role much trickier in a way that would not necessarily be more interesting or fun. </aside>
Why do the players contribute words to the pool? Why not have the GM choose?</h3>
I wanted to draw players in and get them invested. They’ll have a broad sense of what’s going on if they’ve glanced at the rules, so this is their chance to come up with the funniest or most intriguing word they can think of.
Choosing from a narrow pool of options makes the GM’s job more straightforward than if they had to choose any 3 words for themselves. Meanwhile, giving that same blank canvas to the players is less troublesome, since it doesn’t affect their own mental overhead so directly. Players can focus on picking something funny or strange, and the GM can focus on building a set of 3 that’s both interesting and manageable. I like the way this splits the responsibility.
Another limitation I’ve seen so far is that the number of players affects whose words get chosen. There’s a possibility that this game might be best played with a number of available stats derived from the number of players, so each player can know that one of their contributions will be selected. With a GM and 2 players, it would be only “noun” and “verb”, and with a GM and 4 players, you’d potentially add an “adverb”. But I worry that this both increases the GM’s cognitive load and muddies the water with a less-well-understood part of speech.

Playtest note: I slightly messed this up when playtesting! I chose two words from one person’s contributions, one from another, and left the remaining two players with none of their selections used. That left one player with a lot more insight than others. On top of that, a miscommunication resulted in him thinking that all three of his stats were his own words, and that I was tracking a unique set of three for each character. That would be an interesting variant, but it sounds like way too much to manage.
Regardless, it may be worth considering what GM advice I can give to help them keep everything organized better and avoid mistakes like the one I made. </aside>
Character creation is really thin; how will players find ways to make their characters distinct?</h3>
Naturally, a character built out of virtually nothing (players choose which part of speech to be good at, but they don’t know what the words are) might feel too empty to play. This is where Roles come in. The inclusion of Roles—and the way that the Scenarios tend to imply at least a couple of different roles—allows this change. If I expand on this, I might just outright include a list of suggested roles next to each scenario as a third column. That would help players ground quickly themselves, and it should also imply further variations of the scenario where different sets of roles chosen.
Regardless, the key idea with Roles is to give players a clear responsibility in the fiction. If they have a specialization, they‘ll know when their character should be stepping up to the plate in the story, and it helps suggest ways to share the spotlight. Since a Role is more like a job than an identity or skillset, it also gives the characters room to be bad at their assigned specialty without it seeming like they’re fundamentally a fuck-up. Since they’re guaranteed to be good at something, the trick is more about figuring out what that is and how to best use it.

Playtest note: The words I chose for our scenario were:

NOUN — Mustache</li>
VERB — Gamble</li>
ADJECTIVE — Arrogant</li> </ul>
For the scenario, I suggested “Convicts in a prison yard” planning to “Execute a daring escape.” Some players struggled to think of Roles, but I proposed that one of the prison guards might be a double agent working to spring the rest of the group; this ended up being a great use of a Role, because it differentiated that character from the others meaningfully and enabled new options for approaching the scenario. These are more indications that providing a prewritten list of roles might be helpful. </aside>
Isn’t this a lot for the GM to juggle?</h3>
Well, yes and no! The most unusual task you’ll have as the GM is to keep your chosen stats secret, because that’s the core meta-mystery of the game. Much of the GM advice on the second page is geared towards helping them focus on the important bits. Players will want to be able to try a variety of approaches, both to keep things interesting and to suss out what their stats mean. All the GM needs to do is remember the stats, keep things moving, and try to provide challenges that can be addressed from multiple angles.
It’s possible that this game would benefit from more procedure for running the scenarios, but I’d still want to keep it light. Since there are goals beyond just keeping the scenario on track, it’s important that the structure stays flexible.

Playtest note: My playtest was run online, which meant that it was trivial for me to put the words physically in front of me in a way that ran no risk of my players seeing them. I wonder if there are better ways to do this in person, short of having a GM screen or something similar on hand. </aside>
How come the game doesn’t end with the players guessing the stats?</h3>
Rather than have players directly guess what the stats are, I wanted to give them a way to encapsulate their theories in something that’s distinctively their interpretation. Assigning an Archetype lets them channel their guesses into something that might feel true for them even if it turns out that they were way off base.
Each player knows which words they contributed, but unless there’s exactly 3 or fewer players, there’s no guarantee that any of their words was chosen. Though players are encouraged to theorize, I wanted to blunt the possible bad feeling of not having any of your words chosen.
An alternate approach would be to insist that this game be played with no more than 3 players (plus one GM), but that feels needlessly restrictive. Assigning an Archetype still feels clumsy, but it gives the player some final authority over who their character was.

Playtest note: My players were a little baffled by the notion of an Archetype, which tells me that it’s either poorly explained, or not especially compelling. Either way, this needs to be honed better to accomplish its intended goal. </aside>

Well, that was a little longer than I thought. I hope you found this interesting!

An Ill-Advised Dip in the Poison Swamp

2025-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
With Hollow Knight: Silksong continuing to dominate the indie game attention economy, I’ve come to the terrible conclusion that I have a couple of cents to contribute to ongoing conversations around video game difficulty. So, into the poison swamp of discourse I go.
More than six years ago, I wrote a post about why I thought that Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice would be a better video game if it had provided more flexibility around difficulty. Back then I was on WordPress and had built-in commenting capabilities, and it’s my first (and maybe only) blog post that inspired a long and somewhat snarky disagreement by an anonymous commenter. They were so impassioned that their comment was longer than the blog post, and to this day I have no idea if it was someone I know or a total stranger.
My blog isn’t hosted there anymore, and I didn’t choose to migrate that particular post, but in the interest of transparency (and in letting this anon have their say as long as I get mine), I’ve dug up the archive</a>. To summarize: at the time I felt that there would have been good reason for Sekiro (a game I adored) to provide some options to players who might want to tune their experience towards easier progress. I made a few simple claims to this effect, followed by several refutations of the boring, common arguments I’d seen people level in defense of its immovable difficulty. My whole post has a bit more backseat game design than I might deploy today, and I probably don’t think of difficulty as much in terms of inclusiveness nowadays. I won’t summarize the commenter’s spirited rebuttal, but I won’t discourage anyone from taking a peek at it either.
Video game difficulty is a strange topic; it’s incredibly personal, but also highly animating. Even outside of all the gatekeeping, we like to talk about it because it’s so key to what games uniquely do and make us feel. Difficulty is understood to be experienced subjectively, but frequently framed around more objective details like i-frames or hit boxes. The experience of difficulty certainly arises from identifiable design decisions, but when it’s situated within style, taste, and lineage, it tends to be couched in reductive genre catch-alls. When we talk about difficulty, we rarely articulate the specific cultural moments or trends that it’s responding to or operating within outside of calling it a “soulslike”.
Something that’s readily apparent to anyone who plays games more than a few years old is that the standards and expectations around difficulty have changed dramatically and frequently over the decades. My recent trek through a selection of 90s and 2000s titles via my ongoing (I promise) Backtracking project has been a stark reminder that developers have used difficulty in obnoxious, careless, or uninteresting ways for time immemorial. I smoothed over my experience of A Link to the Past and EarthBound by using emulator save states. But those were always still intentional decisions, as they are now. They were no more defensible then, nor are they defensible retroactively. But they are meaningful facets of the experience of playing those games, parts of their texture and the experiences they produce, both now and in our memories.
When we say that a modern game is unreasonably difficult within its own genre space, the standard that we’re applying is one of the moment, one informed by our collective play experiences and tastes, and it's likely less objective or stable than we imagine it to be. There are design choices we put up with now that we didn’t a decade ago. There are others that we once tolerated, but no longer will. There are some that, when brought back from the past, meet much more intense dislike than they ever had before. Even the most good-faith discussions about difficulty can feel circular, disconnected, and hard to build into real analysis.

</img> </div>
What I ought to do when the difficulty discourse starts again</div> 
Basically, it leaves me wondering: why is this topic both so discussed, and yet eternally unsatisfying and inconclusive? What can our observations about Silksong’s difficulty tell us about our collective expectations and how they’ve been shaped? Why does this discourse always come back with a vengeance? I don't have answers, but I can try to point out what, to me, is instructive about Silksong’s difficulty and how it's deployed. I know others have made similar points, but these are things that ring especially true for me.
My first observation is that challenges tend revolve around finding and maintaining rhythms. I admit that this is the “Sekiro is a rhythm game” take, to a degree. The growing stratification between parrying sickos (this is me) and parrying haters (truly, I completely get it) has games leaning more heavily on learning and matching complex enemy patterns, where a mistake can often mean losing the beat and suffering several more mistakes in quick succession. This often feels really bad, and it’s distinct from taking one or two hits and getting back on track. The flip side is that this style of enemy design seems to produce an especially keen feeling of skillful execution when you do manage to maintain the rhythm; at least, it does for me. Games that allow players to lean heavily on parrying tend to prioritize this learning and matching game, turning the challenge into a dance, an improvised performance. Skillful performance feels great to do! When playing games like Nine Sols or Lies of P, which let me give into my inner parrying sicko, I would work my way from being utterly obliterated by a new boss to toppling them almost entirely unscathed; that creates in a very particular feeling of mastery.
If Silksong is more difficult than Hollow Knight, it could be because the landscape has been shaped by games that more often ask for this kind of mastery from players. The heightened lethality and more substantial health pools of its boss fights are, to me, reminiscent of the parrying-sicko mentality I’ve seen celebrated elsewhere in the space, even without a particular focus on parries. Or, maybe I’m just more attentive to it than I would have been before. Just as the moment has changed, so have I.
My other observation is that modern action game difficulty is deeply concerned with how it asks players to spend their time. Even Silksong’s most punitive design choices are cautious. They’re built to be annoying or discouraging but not especially time-consuming. In particular, the “runbacks” (platforming routes between boss fights and the checkpoints they send you back to on failure) in Silksong that I’ve seen so far are much more optimizable than some of the ones in Hollow Knight (Mantis Lords being a notably tedious one). The runback functions as a disruption of the rhythm of the boss fight, bringing players back into the world of intentional platforming. That disruption can be a meditative break from the fight during which the player can refocus, or maybe just an annoyance that persuades you to try something else or take a break. It might be objectively worse for some folks, but it’s clearly a deliberate change to the experience of the fight, an escalating of the stakes of a single attempt.
Once you’ve got Hornet’s first movement upgrade, getting around the world is pretty fast, especially compared to Hollow Knight. Speed and scale are being deployed to make the world feel bigger, but not necessarily more tedious to traverse. Silksong understands very clearly how much it’s asking us to repeatedly tread routes, and still, it does so with real precision.
Silksong is also layered with subtle indicators to players that there are other things they might work on besides the challenge directly in front of them. It introduces quests that send you to scour places you’ve already been, its paths branch frequently, and it provides numerous avenues for improvement and build-crafting.
It isn’t necessarily true that these things will stop you from beating your head against a stubborn challenge (I’ll admit I’m personally guilty of this), but it’s clear that it wants you to acknowledge them. In fact, many of these alternate incentives feel onerous or tedious to some players in their own right. But whether or not they liberate us from our struggles is only one way to read their intent. Maybe they aren’t just there to remind us of other possible approaches, maybe they’re intended to make the world feel bigger and more mysterious, or maybe they want to encourage players to revisit places where they could have missed secrets. Even if they do all these things, maybe they’re still being drowned out by the drive to return to your corpse and recover your resources… or by a cultural moment that’s been telling us for over a decade now to “git gud” and persevere in the face of frustration or drudgery, an impulse that might linger no matter how soundly we reject it.

On Introducing TTRPGs

2025-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
Nearly a year ago, a friend of mine who lives a couple states away pinged me on discord asking about how to start a D&D campaign with a group of people who had no experience running or playing the game. Being the person that I am, the first question I asked was “is it D&D you want to play? or an intro to TTRPGs more generally?”
Plenty of folks have it in their head that they want to play D&D specifically. It’s the thing that’s in the culture! You can throw a rock in a suburb and probably hit a white guy who knows a thing or two about D&D and wants to run a campaign for you. But this particular person and his particular friends weren’t coming from a laser-focused fandom interest or some other big cultural inroad that I’m aware of; they were simply interested in the hobby in general and seeing what all the fuss was about. I saw it as a chance to pitch some other options that might get up and running faster than D&D, or more easily provide different kinds of tone and setting. He was receptive, and asked for recommendations.
A few weeks later, he bought a copy of Monster of the Week at his local game store, got a group together, and found a willing Game Master (“Keeper”, in Monster of the Week’s parlance). They got together and made their characters, then set the game down with plans to dig in properly in the next session.
They never actually got to pick up those characters. Life interceded and the volunteer GM became distracted by other things. My friend who had reached out to me just shrugged, figuring it would have been better to try something they could play in a single evening. For whatever reason, I felt a bit guilty; should I have directed them elsewhere? Should I have run something for them myself over discord?

The hobby is pretty small outside of D&D’s wide umbrella. I always feel a (probably unreasonable) sense of responsibility when I introduce people to RPGs, even just by recommendation. So when my friend came into town this past week, I was delighted when he still wanted to try playing something with me while we could play in person. But I was also determined to get it right, to find something that would make up for the false start he had with his home group.
I put out a few options, including Monster of the Week (I had some pre-generated stuff on hand for a oneshot). But there were only three of us total, and the other player he brought along was similarly new to the hobby. I felt that the occasion called for something that could distribute our attention better than a game with a GM. In the end, they deferred to me to choose. That was where the real fiasco began.
Which is to say: I picked Fiasco, by Jason Morningstar. Fiasco is kind of antithetical to the way that traditional RPGs are popularly played in media that draws folks into D&D (like Critical Role, Dimension 20, etc.). It’s not a game about heroic blorbos at the center of a grandiose plot; it’s a game about normal people who probably kind of suck and are about to have a pretty bad time. It leaves space for so much irreverence and absurdity, and its structure is too simple to get caught up in. I hoped it would be perfect. Amusingly, we ended up playing the Dragon Slayers play set by Logan Bonner, a send-up of fantasy tropes that asks “what happens to the heroes after they slay the dragon?”

I've not written all that much about Fiasco, but it’s very near and dear to my heart. It's a one-shot storytelling game that invites players to create losers, assholes, and in-over-their-head failures, self-interested people just trying to get a slice of what they think they deserve. It leaves room for brushes with heroism, reconciliation, moments of connection or triumph… but in the end, it’s all going to fall apart. It's a game that's not about heroes, anti-heroes, or even villains; just regular dipshits getting into trouble they're not equipped to handle.
Crucially, Fiasco is built around freeform scene play, providing just enough intrigue during its setup phase (and excellent play sets that add specificity) for the players to build upon. When it’s your turn, you choose between establishing a scene or resolving one. If you establish it, the rest of the table chooses whether it ends positively or negatively for your character. If you resolve it, you let them set the scene, but you get to choose the outcome for yourself. The only other details to think about are your characters, the fiction, and the cards on the table. It leaves players with plenty of mental bandwidth to focus on who they’re portraying (and getting them into more trouble). At times it feels too simple to work, and yet it consistently does.
It’s fun to introduce people to roleplaying games via something like Fiasco, because it tends to get responses like “oh, I didn’t know these games could be like this.” It’s certainly not for everyone, and the sheer darkness of its endings can blindside folks (something I’ve been careless about in the past). But I love how simple and approachable it can be, despite revolving around the daunting notion of freeform collaborative scene play. And who doesn’t love to make up a guy ~~to be mad at</del> and portray their downfall?~~
I knew I had chosen well when my fellow players and I quickly established a love triangle, an arranged marriage, an enchantment spell, and a bounty hunt. Our chaotic trio consisted of a wealthy aristocrat-adventurer hoping to escape the burden of familial responsibility, another wealthy aristocrat-adventurer desperately trying to sow sympathy and affection, and a bounty hunter whose memory and motives were scrambled by the aforementioned enchantment spell. It was classic, goofy Fiasco fun.
Overall, it seemed like all three of us had a pretty good time. Regardless of whether my visiting friend gives TTRPGs another try with his home group, it’s always an immense privilege to welcome my friends into the hobby. Let's play together again soon!

On Silksong and Savoring

2025-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
My favorite games are not the ones that I can’t put down.
The games that draw me into fixation, that keep me sat in front of them for hours or afternoons on end, are generally not the ones that I count among the my personal pantheon of all-time favorites. I wrote last year about Satisfactory and the particular sharpness of the hooks it dug into me, and just last month I wrote about how Donkey Kong Bananza felt like it was dragging me along through its colorful and overstuffed stages. If I can’t put a game down, it’s usually for reasons unrelated to pure delight.
No, my favorite games are most often ones that I find myself savoring. They’re ones I almost don’t want to play, don’t want to continue for too long, don’t want to let go of even though I see their conclusions approaching.
In November of 2017, I attended Day of the Devs in San Francisco, a delightful little games expo that showcased a smattering of upcoming indie offerings and featured an equally delightful live set from Darren Korb and Ashley Barrett of Supergiant Games, playing music from Bastion, Transistor, and Pyre (this was before the release of indie juggernaut Hades).
They stayed along to sell and sign copies of the incredible Pyre soundtrack, and when I briefly spoke to them, I found myself awkwardly admitting that in the 5ish months since Pyre had released, despite diving into it immediately, I had only just finished working through the game’s story days prior (I can't imagine they really cared how long it took me).
Everyone who knows me well is sick of hearing about it, but to this day Pyre sits among my favorite games I’ve ever played. I didn’t want it to end, especially given Supergiant’s track record for emotionally compelling endings, and that's not an experience that I'm prone to in the slightest. I’m not usually that kind of person! I love finishing things and moving onto the many many others that I’m interested in. I crave variety and breadth, and when I linger it’s almost exclusively despite myself.

</img> </div>
Okay fine we can talk about Silksong now</div> 
So, what am I trying to say here? Well, I’ve had several folks ask me to share my thoughts on Silksong with them as I work my way through it. As a hobbyist critic, it’s deeply heartwarming to see people being preemptively interested in my impressions just because they know what I like and what I’m excited about. It’s rare that I really get to feel like an authoritative analytical voice, if only from the perspective of a genre and series enthusiast.
And here’s the thing: about a week and a half beyond launch, I’m barely 8 hours into Silksong; way less than I might have been if I’d gotten truly absorbed into it. That doesn’t mean I’m not having a good time; in fact, it means that I’m having a great time.
I do have some impressions, for those who have asked. I’m really enthralled by the ways that Hornet’s movement and attacks are in conversation with the original game while still branching out, elaborating her movement to feel just as snappy but also a little more acrobatic and expressive. She has a little ledge get-up that makes it easier to clear gaps, and she can cancel it into a full-height jump for speedy ascents, which is a small but greatly-felt change.
The first new movement ability I picked up was multifaceted, interacting in distinct ways with grounded movement, aerial movement, jumping, and attacking. In turn, the subsequent movement abilities I’ve found have been much simpler, giving me space to work them into an already-intricate movement kit without being overwhelmed. I think I'm mostly on the critical path, and that this pacing is intentional; for me, it's worked quite well.
Silksong's earliest moments exude confidence and clarity of vision; where the original Hollow Knight sent you through an hour and a half of dreary stone tunnels before opening into the bubbling harps and bright foliage of Greenpath (the second major area), Silksong’s opening hours begin with color and light, and they move much faster. They draw the player through several distinct areas with strong visual identities and a slew of unique characters to meet, all with Team Cherry’s signature stellar character design. There's a lot of space provided to establish core ideas, and the developers save the first real difficulty barriers till a bit later on, giving players more time to get familiar with the movement and explore the world around them.
Unlike the Knight of the previous game, Hornet is not a silent protagonist. She banters back and forth with the bugfolk of Pharloom as she investigates the forces that imprisoned her and brought her here. She’s written to be a bit stoic and flat (she reminds me of the one player in the D&D party who stops goofing off and tries to be well-behaved in character, offering polite and over-formal greetings, explaining her goals directly, and asking narrative-furthering questions). But despite the stiffness of her writing, the choice to make her a dialogic agent and an active participant, especially in a story that begins with her capture, is ultimately a sound one. It produces more direct storytelling, but it doesn’t leave behind the sense of mystery and decay that characterized Hollow Knight (and which clearly draws inspiration from Dark Souls before it). Conversely, it seems to be gesturing towards resilience, reclamation, and survival and community amid the ruins, something that was largely absent from the dreariness of the previous game.
I think that’s all I’m ready to talk about. I’m excited to circle back when I finish the game some weeks from now and have a bit more to say. For now, I’m taking my time.
As a coda to these thoughts, I want to point out some interesting discussion about Silksong’s release and Team Cherry’s decision not to provide a pre-release review period for critics. The game hit storefronts for everyone at the same time, assuming you could get your purchase to go through. I highly recommend that folks read Grace Benfell’s thoughtful lamentation on Endless Mode</a> about the implications of this choice, as well as Kaile Hultner’s equally thoughtful response</a>. Both pieces articulate a lot of insightful points and both are worth the read.
The latter of these articles positions folks like myself as parts of a loose collection of disparate, independent critics who don’t have to play by the rules of publishers and media outlets. I’m a little conflicted about it, because it’s a luxury that I have time to do this at all, but I also read it as a provocation to leverage my position as a separately-financially-stable hobbyist towards striving to write thoughtful and incisive analysis, of a kind that could not flourish under the pressures of marketing and enthusiast press. As I play games at my own pace, I hope to keep in mind the latitude this affords me and use it to make my work sharper, distinctive, more impactful.

PAX West 2025 Recap

2025-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
Well, here it is. I’ve finally attended a single event that spans both of the two key interests that I write about on this blog. PAX West is a video game expo, first and foremost, but it harbors a healthy (and, as far as I understand, growing) collection of tabletop and board game events and spaces. My partner and I spent two days exploring PAX and a couple more exploring other parts of Seattle.
Here’s a quick roundup of the things I played and, yes, the shopping I did.
Games I Played (Plus a Panel)</h2>
For the sake of the argument, I’m counting the couple of games that I watched my partner play. Here's the roundup:
Arcane Eats (Video Game)</h3>
Arcane Eats</a> is a roguelike deckbuilding game about feeding various fantasy meals to various fantasy customers. There are a ton of games in the deckbuilding genre nowadays and it’s hard to stand out, but this one was cute and made a positive impression on my partner, whom I watched play it. She said that she appreciated the management angle to the encounters and saw some hidden depths in the deckbuilding even from a quick demo. Personally, I also liked that it was a game that wasn’t about combat, but also wasn’t going out of its way to be cloyingly “cozy”.
Fantasy Fantasy Football (Video Game?)</h3>
These folks are working on building a sort of meta card game around actual fantasy football, using actual football stats. It’s kind of absurd and it’s certainly ambitious from a design and balance perspective, but I can see the appeal almost instantly. You could get a lot of mileage you out of building deliberate meta-mechanics on top of fantasy sports scoring. Hell, fantasy sports scoring rules are already a rabbit hole of their own. I can’t really say whether this game will be for me, but it’s totally for someone.
Truckful (Video Game)</h3> The developer demoing Truckful</a> asked me “have you played Dredge? It’s like that, but on wheels.” It's a game about driving a truck with finicky controls along roads full of various obstructions, while periodically loading and unloading cargo into the truck bed. Its certainly not easy despite being very simple. I found it a little bit plodding, but it may be that it just doesn’t demo well at the scale that I played; after all, the game's store page alludes to an eldritch mystery to unravel.
Rivals of Aether II — New Character (Video Game)</h3>
I’ve recently been mildly obsessed with Rivals of Aether II</a>, the indie Super Smash Bros. clone that has wonderfully functional online features and a tight roster of characters with deep and diverse kits. The upcoming new character, Galvan, has been described, quite literally, as a sequel to an existing one (Kragg) who’s already my favorite. I didn’t get too much time to experiment and I haven’t figured him out even a little, which suggests that his kit will be somewhat elaborate and very fun to learn.
Triangle Agency (TTRPG)</h3> Triangle Agency</a> is a game of corporate horror about regular people who are plucked out of everyday life (after a brush with the supernatural) and employed by a powerful and secretive organization to keep those supernatural forces in check. It takes cues from SCP, the X-Files, and (most familiar to me) the video game Control. Most of what I’ve heard about it is about how its rules text puts details behind “playwalls”, in which in-game milestones must be reached before more of the book is “unlocked”. This phenomenon both discourages and (subtly, in an act of rebellion) invites a would-be GM or player to read ahead. I’ve not looked closely at the book, so I can’t really opine on that yet, but I did have an interesting first-time play experience.
My partner and I played together with a group who were (I believe) all new players of game, but with varying familiarity. We had a reasonably good time with it, but I found the game clumsy to teach in a convention setting. It leans heavily on multifaceted character concepts and multiple pages of instruction text that go along with it, evocative of overbearing corporate paperwork in a way that might land better in a longer form game. The GM (a volunteer, and one running multiple games) had a packet of materials available for him to run the game out of, but it still wound up being clumsy in a lot of major ways. As with most decent tables we found our way to fun and success without too much trouble, but I came away understanding the game itself less than I hoped. Still, it was an encouraging dip of the toe into a somewhat elaborate game with some interesting push-and-pull mechanics that govern its flow. I’d like to get a closer look at it and I’d certainly consider bringing it to a table at some point.
Demonschool (Video Game)</h3>
Demonschool</a> is a game operating in the Persona design lineage that focuses on high schoolers tasked with preventing an impending apocalypse by banishing demons and solving mysteries. Its writing is a little overly pithy but generally had me rooting for its characters, and the combat system is a tight little tactical game that has some fun nuances to it. I don’t know if it has enough progression to give it long-running RPG longevity, but I don’t necessarily need it to. Demonschool numbers among the several indie games that have delayed their release</a> to avoid falling victim to Silksong’s hype, which I have complicated feelings about, but it seems like the game has what it takes to be a standout.
RollerGirl (Video Game)</h3>
RollerGirl</a> is a game about skating around a neighborhood and running errands for neighbors. I don’t generally love the conceit of a game built entirely around doing fetch quests, not because that’s a fundamentally bad thing, but because it heaps incredible pressure onto the writing and the locomotion of the game. The writing seemed charming enough, and the locomotion had its moments, but overall I found myself losing interest. I did, however, love that the game was loaded with delightful music from indie musicians local to the devs’ home of Toronto; that rules.
Slay the Spire: The Board Game</h3>
I’m not the biggest board games person but I’ve been trying to explore them more lately. The board game adaptation of Slay the Spire</a> is an elegant but straightforward recreation of the video game, with its core twist being that it involves cooperative play with a crew of several focal characters. It’s a very well-thought-out product that hits a lot of the best strategic notes of the games. It’s hard to say how alienating it might be to someone unfamiliar with the video game (as my partner points out), or how arbitrary its rules may feel, but it’s pretty successful at making the basic ideas of Slay the Spire into tactile little cards, tokens, and square beads moved around cardboard tracks.
Draco and the Seven Scales (Video Game)</h3>
Draco and the Seven Scales</a> is a Zelda-like adventure about a sea-faring captain, his ship, and a quest to save someone dear to him. It utilizes a pixellated mono-color palette reminiscent of old gameboy art styles, but with occasional pops of other colors. It was charming, if a little rote and a little flat in its writing, but I’d be interested to see more of it when it’s out, and the dev assured me that the full game will introduce all sorts of additional mechanical ideas as it progresses.
Rivals of Aether II (Video Game) — Fight a Dev</h3>
In addition to trying out the new character, I showed up for a scheduled event in which one of the developers (whose name I didn’t catch) demolished several fans in one-on-one bouts. I managed to get one stock off of him, but that might have been pity. Fortunately, all the contenders were awarded a cute little branded guitar pick for their troubles.
For All Mankind (Board Game)</h3>
For All Mankind</a> was pitched as similar to Settlers of Catan, but with space colonies. It was a fairly snappy little game that we nearly finished in the hour or so of available time, including instruction. It featured a series of planets on pegs that moved between slots on a big radial grid, simulating the rotation of the planets and complicating decisions by creating varying distances between planets (thus changing the resources necessary to reach them and build colonies there). Outside of the planets’ movement, it was a fairly straightforward rush for resources and colony construction, hemmed in by players’ capacity to buy nukes that could destroy opposing colonies. I don't gravitate towards competitive board games generally, but it was interesting to see how the engine of the game worked and how it descended into antagonism as some of the players approached victory. My partner was one of those near-victors, and she had a pretty good time with the game overall, appreciating its simplicity in spite of the tedium of remembering to shift the planets.
Personally, as someone with a fondness for game mechanics that are intentional ideological statements, I often find myself a little alienated in the board games space, where notions like casually dominating the solar system and slinging nukes at one another go largely un-interrogated. Intriguingly, the game’s starting bases on earth cannot be nuked; game balance, surely, but also a particularly twisted sort of idealism that imagines earth as unassailable while the solar system becomes the battlefield of the space-faring future. I’m suspect that I'm thinking too hard about these things and maybe being pretentious, but these sorts of unquestioned tonal details always stick in my craw.
Noclip Panel</h3>
The only panel that my partner and I went to was the one for Noclip</a>, the video game documentary studio that’s been doing solid work for (somehow) nearly a decade now. The hosts had a good level of energy and they brought in some guests with interesting insights, including Frank Cifaldi of the Video Game History Foundation, who showed some wonderfully strange clips from 90s TV ads that were part of their growing library of archival footage. It’s cool to see that stuff not only dredged up, but digitized and publicly hosted for posterity. At the end, there was a Q&A where fans pitched documentaries that the studio should do; delightfully, the hosts met each suggestion with a lot of thought and curiosity, even the ones that they admitted to having heard many times before.
Things I Bought</h2>
First, the things I bought at PAX itself:

</img> </div> 
Kragg Plushie</h3>
Kragg is my main in Rivals of Aether II: he’s a big rock-elemental stag beetle man and just. Come on. Look at him!
Two Hand Path</h3>
Slugblaster creator Mikey Hamm wrote a solo RPG called Two Hand Path</a> about playing weird wizard Yahtzee with a varied collection of dice and tattooing magical symbols on your traced handprints (or included book pages) to give your wizard new powers. Or something to that effect. I haven’t played it yet but it looks rad and I’ve wanted to for a while.
Fabula Ultima</h3>
Readers of this blog (and knowers of me IRL) are aware that I’m an avid appreciator of Friends at the Table, a long-running actual play podcast who bounces between systems and settings with each season. The latest season is in a fantasy world inspired by Dreamcast-era JRPGs using the Fabula Ultima</a> system, which is designed to play, you guessed it, tabletop campaigns reminiscent of JRPGs. I’m behind on the pod, but I’ve been wanting to peruse the rulebook for a little while now.
Desperation</h3>
I’ve heard a lot of praise for Desperation</a>, but the key things I believe to be true about it are that 1. it involves pre-built playsets with pre-generated characters, 2. various events will happen to various pre-generated characters that may shift their fates, 3. things will almost certainly go badly for the characters, and 4. it was designed by Jason Morningstar (of Fiasco fame) so those other 3 things make a hell of a lot of sense. I love Morningstar’s work in general and I’ve wanted a copy of Desperation for a while, so now I have one!
Some Dice</h3>
I am by no means a dice collector. I bought these because they were affordable and I knew I could use a few more sets for playtesting a game I’ve been working on that uses one set of dice per player. I don’t think I’m likely to test it on this very trip (though I’ll see friends tonight, so there’s a chance!) but they’re good to have and they’re not from the ever-dominant Chessex, so that’s nice. I bought these from Foam Brain, which has lots of collections, but if you want something like the pride dice they’re advertising now, I might direct you instead to (shameless friend plug incoming) Heartbeat Dice</a>, who have been in the pride dice game for a long while and put their money where their mouth is by contributing to charities with every purchase.
For the Queen</h3>
My initial impression with For the Queen</a>, from Gen Con last year, was pretty middling. But I’ve since played and greatly enjoyed it, and independent of my play experiences I adore its incisive simplicity. I have a relatively small selection of “backpack games”, the kind I could carry around and bring out ready to play whenever I like. For the Queen is one of the most perfect backpack games around.
The World We Left Behind</h3>
I’ve read Anamnesis by Sam Leigh, but I’m less familiar with their broader body of work. I like to occasionally pick up something I know very little about, and The World We Left Behind</a> fit the bill: a GMless game about space-faring explorers that takes inspiration from Outer Wilds, Together Among the Stars, Cartograph, Wreck this Deck, and some other eclectic influences. It seems like a fascinating mix of ideas and I’m excited to flip all the way through it.

And now, the bonus shopping! My partner and I explored a number of book stores and game shops in Seattle, and I bought some things from Mox Boarding House and Blue Highway Games:

</img> </div> 
Mothership</h3>
Mothership</a> has become a whole phenomenon. It’s a highly lethal science fiction horror game with a sturdy coating of hellish space capitalism and I’ve heard almost exclusively praise for it and its many modules, including the couple that come bundled in. I’m long due to run and play more games in the OSR tradition, and this is one that excites me enough to get me off my ass to do so.
Little Katy’s Tea Party</h3>
I had never seen or heard of Little Katy’s Tea Party</a> before, and I’m unfamiliar with designer Edoardo Cremaschi (a.k.a. Nuclear Manatee). Even its multitude of included scenarios feature quite a few designers I’m not familiar with. It seems to be a very light system that tells stories about the trials of a little girl’s childhood through the tea parties of her imaginary friends. It weaves a ritual around tea-drinking into its key conflict resolution. It sounds very neat and I’m excited to read it more closely.
An Altogether Different River</h3>
I’ve only recently followed Aaron Lim’s work; he’s a very active personality in the story games spaces that I’m aware of and a top-tier poster</a>, no less, but I haven’t actually managed to engage with any of his work. Now, I have no excuse! An Altogether Different River</a> is a storytelling game about defining a place by both the people who have moved on from it and those who have returned to it after some time away. Hopefully planning to play this one at some point.
The Slow Knife</h3>
Jack Harrison is a designer I’ve followed for a while now. I mentioned last year that I bounced off of Koriko (his solo RPG about a young witch on an adventure) despite it’s undeniably gorgeous presentation, but I retain a deep fondness for Artefact (his solo RPG about the history and many possessors of a magic object) and I’ve been hoping to get Orbital (his Belonging Outside Belonging game about a neutral space station in the crossfire of a galactic war) to a table for a while now. The Slow Knife</a>, as far as I understand, is nothing like any of those. It’s a story about patient revenge against dastardly villains, told through the perspectives of those villains as the hour of their comeuppance approaches. As with most of Harrison’s work, it’s dripping with style, and I’ve been wanting to read it for ages now.

That’s it for the overlong recap! I don’t know for sure if I’ll go back to pax, but I’ll certainly play more tabletop games if I do!

Designer Commentary - Alone in the Loop

2025-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
This post is a design commentary about a game I wrote. The game itself is short (shorter than this post) so to encourage folks to read along with the commentary, I'm also making it free for the next week. Please go download a copy</a> and follow along!

At the beginning of the year, I published Alone in the Loop on itch.io. It’s a solo journaling RPG that hacks Takuma Okada’s incredible Alone Among the Stars</a> to tell a story about a lonesome time traveler trying to shift the tides of fate. It pivots on themes of isolation, despair, and hope in the face of a trial that must be undertaken alone. The time traveler may, if they’re lucky, be able to convince someone of the truth of their situation, but with each new loop, all that effort will be unravelled once again. They may, if they’re lucky, meet another time traveler, but that other traveler may be aloof and mysterious, wrapped up in some grim mission of their own.
Whether by choice or by circumstance, the time traveler must avert a disaster or shift the timeline in some particular way before they can return to linear time. And even if they succeed, they’ll leave the experience profoundly changed by it.
I have a deep fondness for the lonely time traveler trope. I love the grandiose tragedy of the traveler’s descent into despair in the face of failure after failure, all underpinned by an enduring hope that somehow, some way, the world can be changed for the better. It’s existentially brutal and beautifully idealistic all at once, and its all heightened by the way that its stakes play out only in the mind of the singular protagonist. I badly wanted to make a game about it, and what better format than a solo journaling game.
The System</h3> To do this, I hacked Alone Among the Stars, a brilliantly simple engine driven by a single die and a deck of cards. Play alternates between dice rolls and card draws, with players describing what their character finds on a journey through space. Each card represents a unique discovery, divined by combining the suit (a category: people, flora, structures, etc.) and the rank (a bit of imagery or context: rivers, canyons, oceans, etc.). The game is so short, smart, and freely available</a> that you should read it — or even play it — right now if you’re not familiar (and pay the suggested price if you can). It’s a powerful and adaptable system, an elegant combination of context (Alone) and place (Among the Stars).
In adapting it for Alone in the Loop, I chose to focalize loneliness rather than peaceful solitude. To transpose it into a plot contrivance instead of an aesthetic space, I made three of the suit categories focus on the metaphysics of the time loop while most of the card ranks describe the events and people encountered during the loop. Player characters’ interactions, even ones with other people, are contextualized by what can be learned about the loop itself. These people and events are only ephemeral details to be washed away when the loop resets, until the time is right to end it.
To reinforce this loneliness, the fourth suit (Clubs) is all about contending with the isolation of the loop. It might involve your character lashing out, breaking down, or otherwise faltering in their resolve. It plays up the tragedy of being unable to meaningfully seek help, unable to relate your struggle to another person. It’s heavy, but it strikes the right note for this kind of story.
"Establish the Loop"</h3>
Alone Among the Stars is a toolset for wandering around within an aesthetic palette, with suits and ranks characterizing the surroundings. It treats beginnings and endings loosely, inviting players to linger on individual moments along their journey. But Alone in the Loop centers on a plot conceit rather than an aesthetic identity. To help with up-front ideation, I introduced a setup phase before ongoing play begins. Players use the suits of drawn cards to determine the details or choose freely from the options.
First, players establish the nature of their time travel capability, which roots their story within genre. Time travel powered by invoking a deity suggests a mythic setting, while time travel driven by a high-tech device suggests something more science fictional. Lines will certainly blur, but it’s helpful to start somewhere. Each option also asks a brief question (How do they contact the deity? Who built the high-tech device?) to get the player thinking about the details of their loop.
Second, players establish a reason for repeating the loop. This provides personal stakes for the story; a time traveler who’s trapped in the loop will pursue different ends than one who repeatedly chooses to go back so they can save someone from a tragic fate.
Finally, we establish the length of the loop. The range is wide, using suits and ranks to define a period of time between 5 minutes and 13 weeks. Since this choice dramatically effects the scale of storytelling, I have players draw three cards and choose their favorite option. The time increment (minutes, hours, days, or weeks) will also determine the number of key events (Inflection Points) that occur in each iteration, borrowed from how Alone Among the Stars uses a die roll to determine how many discoveries will be on each new planet.
Once these details are established, the player begins journaling their experience of the loop, starting after the first instance of turning back time. By skipping over the inciting incidents of the loop, they leave narrative gaps to fill as the story unfolds. They also skip straight past the novelty of the time loop, to a moment where the time traveler’s resolve might start to waver.
"Live the Loop"</h3>
During the story, players draw a set number of cards for each time they go through the loop; that number represents the amount of Inflection Points they’ll encounter, important events or details that shed light on the nature of the time loop.
But stories about time loops often play with pace and timing. They swing big and lean into themes of trauma, memory, and causality. Because the clock will roll back, they deploy things like shocking death, sudden violence, cruel words, and queasy foreshadowing. The imprint of the events upon the mind of the time traveler are all that will remain, so they can become heightened and stark, akin to nightmares.
To this end, Alone in the Loop has two special affordances for shifting pace. The first is simple: when it makes sense, restart the loop early. If your character reaches a dead end, encounters an impending tragedy before it’s due, or even finds themselves mortally wounded, the loop can be cut short to shift the pace and escalate the dramatic momentum. At any time, things can go horribly wrong in new ways, making the loop feel volatile, dynamic, and malleable. Despite the trauma of premature tragedy, it’s also a source of hope: it’s proof that there are avenues yet unexplored, changes so dramatic that they can derail the story entirely. That breadth of possibility means that what the traveler seeks is still attainable.
The second affordance allows players to montage a number of iterations together. The set of cards they draw for each iteration (for example, 4 cards for a loop measured in days) can be repurposed to allow each card to represent one crucial event in the entire iteration. As the stakes escalate and the hero becomes more desperate to change their fate, one way to articulate their despair is to accelerate the pace of the story and depict failure after failure in quick succession, culminating in a breaking point that helps them find a new approach. The montage rule is directly inspired by the media that inspired this game, and provides a way to mechanize that story beat.
"End the Loop"</h3>
Ending the loop is a tricky storytelling maneuver. It’s most successful if there’s just enough setup to show it’s possible, but lingering suspense around the execution of the plan. After all, if it works, the final loop is permanent; anything that happened, any sacrifices made, can’t be undone without undoing the work of resolving the loop’s key problem. To wrestle with that drama, I instruct players to decide at the beginning of an iteration whether or not it’s going to be the final one. This way, there’s still an uncertainty about how to actually accomplish the conclusion they have in mind with the story beats they get along the way.
Since there’s always a possibility that the final iteration goes awry in some way, the game presents four possible endings. As before, you can either draw or choose freely. The choice to include several endings was important to me because it helps to visit some of the themes one last time. One ending is failure; tragedy unprevented or an existence trapped in the loop. Another is a restoration, a single choice or compromise that realigns the world and sets things right, leaving room for its own sort of sadness depending on what the player chooses to give up. The others involve finding a solution, but they emphasize different ways that the player character has been changed by the ordeal.
Even after everything has been resolved and the world is allowed to move on, the time traveler remembers it all. There’s a rich, existential sadness that they must be left with, bearing the weight of remembered traumas that were ultimately undone, but were entirely real when they happened. Perhaps those events still reverberate through some alternate timeline. To reach the end of the time loop is triumphant, but also bittersweet.
If I Could Go Back…</h3>
I’ll likely revise this game at some point. I can already see little things I might change: some wording is too terse, I’d like to more strongly justify why I invite players to choose options directly instead of drawing cards during certain steps, and I could do more to make the rank descriptions more evocative and enticing; right now some are utilitarian or bland.
I could also realign the suits for the endings; the most tragic ending should align with Clubs, the suit that contends with despair and isolation. This would also make the safety advice at the beginning (which suggests removing the clubs cards before playing through the loop in order to avoid the darker emotional themes) more effective in the ending phase.
Conclusion</h3>
Alone Among the Stars is fundamentally about a sense of place, about an observational experience while alone in nature. Adapting it involved some relatively heavy scaffolding to repurpose its system towards inhabiting a plot trope instead, but I feel that the adjustments pull their weight, and I’m proud of the game on the whole.
This post ran quite long, even after revising, but it was great fun to write! A lot of tiny, invisible choices go into game design. Articulating it in detail helps me bubble up some of the subconscious choices and re-evaluate what I works best. Some of my thoughts here might even be worth distilling into play advice and other revisions if I choose to revisit this project at some point. Either way, the exercise was fun and I highly recommend it to other designers; tell me about your work!

The Bananza Never Ends

2025-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
So, I’ve been playing Donkey Kong Bananza.
It’s an immaculately designed game, full of both ambitious ideas and the proper affordances to make them approachable. The developers have crafted fascinating levels and their mastery of complex 3D terrain is indisputable. The game has fluid, elaborate movement that lets players freely climb most surfaces or chain together techniques to fling themselves across gaps, which is great fun.
Bananza comes from the designers of Super Mario Odyssey, the most recent 3D Mario title, which has been occasionally critiqued for having too many of its primary collectible item. I didn’t share that criticism at the time, and I assume the developers also disagreed, because Donkey Kong Bananza doubles down. They’ve built dense, lavishly complex worlds of destructible terrain, tucked collectibles into every conceivable nook and cranny, then somehow conceived of more nooks and crannies to put more collectibles in. It’s genuinely impressive how well they’ve constructed these 3D spaces.
But… I wish I liked this game more? Or maybe less, alternatively. I’ve stumbled into a completionist impulse that I can neither justify nor fully explain. The game is filled with flashes of brilliance, but even a lot of its clever design winds up rendered into mind-numbing fluff that leaves me disappointed.
Across its dozen or so levels, Bananza has nearly 1500 collectibles, consisting of “banandium” gems and hidden fossils stamped around the world. I keep circling back to prior levels to track them all down, exchanging resources for map markers indicating items I’ve missed (an admittedly elegant solution). It’s taking forever, but instead of abandoning this quest, I’ve been putting on podcasts and plugging away. Annoyingly, the game has achieved a seamless blend of clever puzzle platforming challenges and shiny, brain-off, button-spamming nothingness.
Now, I am aware of my own habits. I regularly begin games with a meticulous approach only to falter later on, either putting them down or sprinting to the finish. My completionist ambitions arise despite myself, and they’re often something to be shed when the time is right rather than clung to. Earlier this year, I played Demon Turf, Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo, and several others exactly like this, each time eventually giving up on the 100% Life and satisfying myself with end credits.
But with Bananza, I can’t shake it. And the texture of the gameplay only makes it worse; to put it simply, Bananza is a monkey game for monkey brain gaming. It provides near-constant dopamine through its collectibles and its abundant primary resource (gold ore). This pursuit is accompanied by an onslaught of visual glitz and an invitation for rapid inputs; you’ll spam buttons to punch through terrain, mash the “clap” button locate nearby collectibles with radar pulses, and burst through veins of gold that shower the world with shiny globules to collect. Everything’s bright, colorful, and toyetic. I suppose there’s also some other nonsense happening along the way, something with talking rockfolk, animal transformations, a girl who’s shy about singing, and- OH, BANANA.
The 3D platformer scaffolding of the game does largely hold. The bits of story and dialogue writing are unremarkable but clearly crafted with love. There are boss fights, story-related MacGuffins that gate level progress, special abilities, and so forth. It’s not just nonstop bashing and bananas. But the amount of visual and tactile stimulus is so escalated that it feels like profound spectacle inflation, a sharp uptick from Super Mario Odyssey's mere moons and coins.
Bananza's design insists on avoiding dull moments and, more importantly, avoiding any lingering moments at all; the delightful (finding cleverly hidden collectibles) and the dull (smashing through layers of terrain to get somewhere) are all stirred together into a stew, where everything happens explosively and briefly. Most banana collectibles gesture at intended ways to find them, but a huge amount can also be found by just randomly spamming DK’s radar pulse and then digging your way out to them, a tool that becomes largely automatic since it's the same way he collects nearby gold.
It’s very old-man-yelling-at-clouds of me to say this, but it does remind me of TikTok, of YouTube shorts, of Twitter feeds. It's a game for the modern attention economy, reminiscent of short-form, rapid-fire pieces of digital popcorn that form the “just scrolling” entertainment that all of us get sucked into. Bananza is built with so much more intention and care than this, but the produced effect is still one of rapid attention shifts, tiny bursts of feeling and interest that are quickly moved on from. The bright colors and cascades of glittering gold reduce clever design to a vapid vividness.
I expect to finish this game. The psychological conditioning works; I want those damn bananas. If remain untethered from my own will, I may even 100% it. The later levels are honestly better! They corral DK through them in more interesting ways and expand on the interactions between the terrain materials he slings about. But it took so long to get here, and its still driven by so many empty collectibles that fail to excite me. I’m curious (or maybe apprehensive) to find out if I'll manage to abandon my completionist quest.

I Don't Know How to Read (TTRPGs)

2025-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
I have a problem familiar to TTRPG nerds: my shelf runneth over with games I’ve not found time to play or read. It’s a privileged problem, of course, but it imparts the same shame as unread books and unplayed video games.
When I find time, I enjoy reading RPG rulebooks even if I don’t get around to playing them; there’s a lot to learn about how different designers approach different subjects, themes, systems, and information architectures. Whenever I run or facilitate a game, I typically read it cover-to-cover in advance so I can come in as prepared as possible.
But I read slowly, and I can’t read everything so thoroughly, especially my ballooning digital library. A close read can also be more dense and muddying than a quick, crisp overview. There’s a difficult balance to strike between skimming and perusing, and there‘s no single answer to the question of where a given game’s “heart” or “core” lies.
But the shelves (physical and digital) still stare disdainfully back at me, and I need new ways to read them. I want to learn to do incomplete (but still enlightening) RPG reading.
Learning to Read</h2>
Today, as an experiment, I picked 3 untouched RPGs on my shelf and dedicated 30 minutes to each one, hoping to see what I could glean and discover how much more closely I’m inclined to read.
I knew these books largely by their pitches; I had not read or played them and I knew little about their systems, besides all three having a traditional GM role:

Interstitial 2e</a> by Riley Hopkins — a modestly-sized RPG (80 pages) about interconnected worlds, inspired by Kingdom Hearts</li>
Deathmatch Island</a> by Tim Denee — a medium-sized story game (200 pages) inspired by the popular death games trope, based on AGON’s system (which I’ve not read or played either)</li>
Coyote & Crow</a> by Connor Alexander — a hulking (maybe) trad game (470 pages, large format) designed around a setting and system built by indigenous creators</li> </ul>
Interstitial 2e</h2>
How did I approach it?
I checked the table of contents, then skimmed through largely in order. My time ran out right before I got to the appendices. I read the overview of playbooks, but only looked closely at a couple of them. I paid the most attention to the basic rules on Moves and Links and parts of the GM section.
How did it go?
I was able to get a good grasp on the overall system and what player characters are made of. It helped to understand Interstitial's shared lineage (Powered by the Apocalypse) with games I'm more familiar with. I also managed to form notions of how I think the game might play relative to those others.
I also had time to get to know the writing voice. Being familiar with core touchstones also helped me understand the tone it was going for.
What did I learn?
Games that are built on systems I already know are much easier to read, and the important focus is often where they deviate or elaborate. Because of the commonalities, the differences take on additional significance in my understanding of the game and its intentions. Voice and tone of instructional writing is also a good source of guidance.
Deathmatch Island</h3>
How did I approach it?
I browsed the table of contents, then again worked through from the beginning. I spent time up front (more than I should have) trying to understand some of the smaller-scale procedures for individual steps of play. I didn’t really get to the back half of the book.
How did it go?
I didn't get as complete of a picture for this book, and that's only partly because it was longer. Deathmatch Island runs on a system I don't already know, and it features a lot of different procedures for various phases of play. Putting it all together without moving ahead to the actual play material was a lot harder; I internalized far less than I did with Interstitial. I did, however, appreciate how much the layout and design helped highlight information.
What did I learn?
Obviously, unfamiliar systems take more time to understand. I also learn better by example, so I'd likely consult the included play example next to help solidify my understanding. Play examples are rarely thrilling to read, but it would be worse for them to be absent.
Coyote & Crow</h3>
How did I approach it?
I focused on the broad strokes and learning how the book was organized. I jumped around quite a bit between table of contents, intro text, explanation of the dice system, the worldbuilding section, character creation, and back to the remaining system explanation and the GM guide following it.
How did it go?
I got a relatively sturdy understanding of the core dice mechanics and the structure of the game. I looked at the stats, skills, and character creation alongside the blank character sheet at the back, which helped me get a good sense of what characters are made up of. I also got several glimpses of the book's ideological approach and how it intends engage both native and non-native players.
What did I learn?
Coyote & Crow is built in a more traditional style, not dissimilar from modern D&D (this style is often called "trad games"). That format meant that I could expect to find a big section on the setting, a section on making characters, a section explaining the core mechanics, and a section with GM advice and material for GMs to use in play. That structural familiarity was a huge benefit to understanding the game, and it gave me time to focus in on learning how dice rolls work and how to create characters.
I also realized that world-building sections are much harder to skim effectively. I got bits and pieces, but I was daunted by the sheer amount of it.
In Conclusion</h2>
I recognize that reading the quantity of RPGs I would like to is an uncommon pursuit, but it’s one that I find rewarding as a designer, GM, and enthusiast.
None of the impressions above constitute a review, or really any degree of considered criticism, of the games in question (apologies to these designers for experimenting on their work like this). I found that deliberate skimming and jumping around can accomplish quite a lot, and came more naturally than I'd have thought. I learned that I’m already attentive to where a book is easy to refer back to, and where I might need to read closely and build an understanding ahead of time. I also found that my familiarity with a rulebook's systems (obviously) and format (less obviously) make a difference in how quickly I can understand its information architecture.
I don't plan to continue reading in strictly-timed intervals, but it was refreshing to spend 90 minutes surveying several books rather than getting partway through one. I do, however, plan to skim more deliberately and skip around more liberally in my future RPG reading.

Mosh Pit Musings

2025-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

Photo by Eashwar Mohan</div> </div>
I saw the metalcore band Architects this past weekend and I’ve been thinking (as you may suspect) a lot about game design lately.
See, I recently read through a very long Discord thread discussing this blog post</a> about how story games often expect players to move between the roles of portraying characters and adding detail to the setting or scenario. I don’t really relate to the friction with context switching that the post’s author describes, but it did get me thinking about when, how, and with what level of awareness we context switch during play.
Mosh pits are, surely, at least game-adjacent. Maybe they’re even a role playing game, if your definition is expansive enough. There are rules, enforced by a play culture, and often instructions (this may be true of a lot of dance culture, but I’ll stick with what I know).
I’m not well-studied on the wide world of metal culture, but I’ve been around metalcore scenes for almost a couple decades, enough to have a solid grasp on this particular space. For the uninitiated, here are some things that you can do within the social fabric of a metalcore show:

Push people around in the pit; that’s the moshing!</li>
Clear some space and hardcore dance</a> (depending on the genre and crowd)</li>
Stand on the edge of the pit, pushing people back in when they get propelled out — you’ll also make openings for people trying to leave and form a barrier between the pit and the folks who aren’t trying to participate in it</li>
And of course, stand away from the pit and do your thing: headbang, jump up and down, or be real cool and only nod very slightly to the music</li> </ul>
At a metal show, live music is the catalyst by which participants slip into a “play” state, where they focus primarily on their embodied experience of the music.
But the “play” mode is only half the puzzle. In the pit, people fall over, drop hats, lose shoes, or catch stray elbows. Pit protocols form around genre, venue, location, and the subcultures that all of these things foster, but there are some common facets of a good mosh pit, where the crowd broadly cares about mutual enjoyment and safety. When someone falls, you pick them up. When someone loses something, you help them find it (or help found items get back to their owners). When someone gets hurt, you make space for them and get them out if needed. People in the pit have to be doing this in tandem with "play"; the people on the outer edge of the pit are doing sort of a hybrid.
Mosh pits can also shift in response to the performers' direction; anywhere between simple riling like “I wanna see you guys get wild!” and direct commands like “Open this place up and get a circle pit going!” Sometimes they’ll set a tone (“I want it to look like a fuckin warzone in here”, “if somebody falls, help them up!”), emphasizing the culture they want to foster and incrementally replicating it to inexperienced attendees.
But while the performers can instruct, they aren’t the ones facilitating the experience. Crucially, at any moment during “play”, the majority of folks are also ready to switch gears to a “facilitator” role focused on social awareness and upholding rules. We’re better at doing this than we think! We can move pretty fluidly in and out of having an embodied experience based on the social demands of the moment, not dissimilarly to how we might steward each others’ experience at a game table.
So there it is: rules, instruction, play culture, and distinct player and facilitator roles. I suspect LARP designers and enthusiasts are (rightly) grumbling that similar phenomena are well-explored in the LARP scene. Still, I had fun thinking about it in the context of a cultural niche that's near and dear to me.

Success and Failure with Spire and Heart — Part 2

2025-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
This is the second part of my 2-part blog series on Spire and Heart (Rowan, Rook & Decard), and the ways that failure and consequences intertwine with the stories we tell at the table. Check out part 1 here</a>.

Last week, I discussed how Spire: The City Must Fall initially left me a little cold, wrong-footed by how my expectations conflicted with the way the dice hit the table. Meanwhile, the relative lack of friction didn’t cause my players much consternation at all; they were simply progressing through an adventure.
For me, the pursuit of flavorful failures and meaningful consequences is a huge part of the joy I find in tabletop RPGs, whether I’m running them or playing them. I like to see characters struggle as much as I like to see them triumph. I like to know what happens when plans go awry, when villains gain ground, when prices are paid and stakes are raised. In many popular games and play cultures, failure often manifests as nothing more than "the thing you want didn't happen"; and I feel like that's a disservice to the storytelling potential of dice.
I’ve not returned to Spire since my initial brush with it, but I’ve had an enduring curiosity about its followup, Heart: The City Beneath (also written by Grant Howitt & Christopher Taylor). This year, I pitched another group on Heart and we're now well underway. Heart is in many ways a rare TTRPG sequel (as pointed out by E.R.F. Jordan on BlueSky</a>): it iterates meaningfully on system and setting, and it draws focus away from certain aspects of the world of Spire and more tightly onto others.

</img> </div>
Art by Felix Miall, Image © Rowan, Rook & Decard</div> 
From Spire to Heart</h3>
Heart veers away from revolution, instead establishing itself as a horror-fantasy twist on the already-fantastical and already-horrifying world of Spire. To do this, Heart takes players deep beneath the base of the titular Spire into a cursed subterranean land called The Heart. The Heart is named for the unfathomable anomaly at its center that twists and sunders reality around it, spilling forth grotesque beasts, bizarre landscapes, and incredible secrets. Its draws inspiration from Roadside Picnic, Annihilation, Bloodborne, and more. The world of Heart is harsh and lethal, but it’s also deeply alien, in ways that can be just as existentially beautiful as they are terrifying.
This thematic shift turns the protagonists from stoic freedom fighters into a morally broad collection of explorers, survivors, peace-keepers, and truth-seekers. Heart’s main characters are “delvers”, people compelled (either intrinsically or extrinsically) to seek deeper levels of the Heart’s strangeness and uncover its greatest mysteries. Many kinds of folk can be found in the Heart, and survival and subsistence is so all-consuming that the racial and cultural tensions of the world above are (perhaps a bit awkwardly) pushed into the background.
Systemically, Heart takes loose inspiration from hexcrawls, a style of crunchy map exploration characterized by traversing tile to tile and finding monsters and secrets as you work towards broader objectives. Heart asks players to descend into strange landmarks in search of valuable resources or knowledge, leaning more on the grim fantasy setting of Spire than its topside political turmoil. To sell the treacherousness of the Heart, it adds a crucial twist to Spire’s mechanic for added difficulty: while Spire reduces the number of dice in the pool you roll with (e.g. 3d10 → 2d10*)*, Heart leaves the pool untouched until after rolling, and then cruelly culls the highest value from the results (e.g. “10, 6, 2” → “6, 2”; this makes a meaningful difference</a>).
Heart’s Stress system works similarly to Spire’s, but its locations and adversaries classify the amount of stress that they might incur more directly. In Heart, any degree of additional difficulty will steer players sharply towards Stress and Fallout. But there’s a good reason for this: Fallout is a key part of the narrative rhythm of the story. Spire’s three-ish pages of Fallout options cover straightforward events like bleeding wounds, favors owed, a bounty on your head. Heart, meanwhile, dedicates a whopping ten pages to describing all the fucked up things that can happen to player characters. Fallout can establish plot hooks or intrigue, and many of the options can be “upgraded” into more serious problems. Some are just unapologetically upsetting, like vomiting up a handful of parasites, suddenly losing a light source in the dark, or having “reconfigured physiology” (I’ll let you just imagine that one).

</img> </div>
Art by Felix Miall, Image © Rowan, Rook & Decard</div> 
At the Table</h3>
This sounds like good fun and all, but it did take my group some time to acclimate; even Heart’s gentlest areas have the capacity to be harsh, so when difficult rolls appeared, Stress started to accumulate and Fallout loomed. The players were making progress, but felt a little caught off guard; they questioned whether the stress I was inflicting was too much for the early game. I assured them that, per Heart’s advice, the players were in control of their ultimate fate; the consequences that I was holding over their heads could slow them down and even change them, but only the players could decide when their doom arrived.
After a while, Stress began to turn to Fallout and the group started to see what the game actually looks like. What at first seemed overly harsh took on a different color under the light of Heart’s twisted setting and its delightful variations on Fallout. While both games’ lists of Fallouts provide a mixture of plain old debuffs and entirely new problems, Heart’s are more geared towards advancing stories and making the world feel more treacherous and interesting. Some Fallouts, if left unattended, could easily entwine with the party’s overall pursuits or become central to their story. Others become little whispers of unsettling detail, causing very little immediate trouble but shifting a character’s relationship to events as they’re unfolding.
Meanwhile, presenting Fallout via a Great Big Menu of Options is a potent way to simplify GM responsibilities (even if it can result in a bit of a pause to scan the options). Not only that, but the list of options is an object over which to negotiate. Players are encouraged to work with the GM to determine which Fallout they ultimately take, giving them a reason to peruse the list themselves and imagine the possible ways their story could shift. As my group began to learn the rhythm of these exchanges, players were able to meet Fallout with a rueful grin rather than an exasperated groan.
This is one of the things that makes Heart so interesting to me as a GM. It’s a structure built upon permission and feedback, where the game’s rules are just sturdy enough to give me clear guidance and a reasonable alibi when assigning consequences, but negotiable enough that the players still have tools to adjust or argue for themselves. It’s a tidy little mirror of Heart’s Beat system, which allows players to signal to the GM which mechanical and plot elements they want to engage with, and then earn advancements when they pursue those elements. When prepping locations, NPCs, adversaries, and imagery, I look to the players’ chosen Beats. But once the board is set, the tango of difficulty ratings, Stress, and Fallout do a lot of work to make obstacles feel daunting and failure feel dramatic and meaningful — without being nearly as punitive as sheer lethality.

</img> </div>
Art by Felix Miall, Image © Rowan, Rook & Decard</div> 
Story Game Structure</h3>
In story games, there will always be a critical space between where the dice fall and the narrative that GMs and players unravel out of those dice rolls. Many of the games I’ve run embrace this open-ended approach, providing generic maneuvers that help the GM tell a good overarching story. Negative consequences of rolls should “fail forward”, emphasizing the stakes of the scenario, provide intrigue or novelty, and leaving players with ingredients they can turn into dramatic comebacks, clever solutions, or compelling reasons to shift their focus.
While there are certainly gaps in Heart’s GM materials (and Spire’s too, for that matter), the ridiculous menu of alarmingly specific and nasty things that might befall the players makes for a potent tool. The game encourages GMs to invent their own Fallout if none of them fit, but the options provided will reinforce themes and cover a wide range of scenarios. Many of them also leave space to further elaborate.
Running story games can be challenging because they encourage minimal planning and discourage prewritten story structure, but they often still provide some kind of shape to fit it all into. If the goal is to tell (and be surprised by) the story as you go, you don’t want predetermined events or outcomes, but you do want ingredients on hand and a loose idea of what you’re going to do with them.
The other games I’ve run in this lineage build narrative within broad templates or rhythms: Masks: A New Generation uses “Arcs” help build and pay off drama, Apocalypse Keys has “Mysteries” with a “Complexity” score to guide pacing, and Blades in the Dark cycles between heists, downtime, and free-form investigation. Heart uses a lighter touch with overall structure and instead leans on flavorful character abilities, location and enemy descriptions, and consequences that can pitch players into interesting plots and spiraling problems.
I’ve not yet finished the Heart campaign I’m running, so I may yet have more to conclude. But for now, Heart’s amorphous and pulsating world is a fairly successful demonstration of how story can be shaped by both the PCs’ strange abilities and the world’s horrifying reactions when they risk too much or reach too deep. If your players really hate failing rolls, they might not have much fun. But if your group is willing to take Heart’s blood-slick hand and let its lurid writing guide them, it might just take them somewhere more exciting and memorable than they expected.

Success and Failure with Spire and Heart — Part 1

2025-07-23T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
This is part 1 of a 2-part blog series on Spire and Heart (Rowan, Rook & Decard), and the ways that failure and consequences intertwine with the stories we tell at the table.

About three and a half years ago, I ran a short campaign of Spire: The City Must Fall, a moody, angry, fantasy TTRPG about upending popular tropes around dark elves (or Drow). Spire casts the Drow as a subjugated people, invaded and lorded over by deeply unsympathetic high elves (or Aelfir) and fighting desperately to fuel the flames of resistance. It’s a setting that’s grim, gross, and strange.
It’s a bit of a layer cake of tropes and subversions, beginning with humanizing the Drow by reconstructing them from ugly tropes by adding humanity, nuance, and community. Then, it introduces a colonizing force who levels those same cruelties and stereotypes against them. Finally, it casts the players exclusively as those Drow and tells them to fight back: against occupation, against subjugation, and against a cruel mischaracterization of what a people like themselves are and can be.
I do have a few qualms about how Spire approaches its subject matter, but I can’t deny the effort that designers Grant Howitt and Christopher Taylor put into delivering on their pitch. Character playbooks are strange and distinct from bland fantasy tropes, the megacity of Spire is loaded with fascinating places that are described with a light touch and pocked with holes for imaginative GMs to fill, and the book commits to a certain notion of revolutionary intrigue across its mechanical design, narrative framing, and GM advice. The game reminds you that the resistance is bigger than you, and that you can’t know the big picture lest your capture or failure jeopardize it. The game reminds you that everyone you fight is a thinking, speaking person with a reason to oppose you, but that those reasons probably involve maintaining Aelfir hegemony and you might just have to kill these guys. There are no mindless beasts, but that doesn’t mean there are no monsters. It’s hard-hitting and it means what it says.

</img> </div>
Art by Adrian Stone (sans my stupid meme edits)</div> 
But despite Spire’s strong pitch, I had some difficulty running it when I tried a few years ago. The gaps it leaves are great for imagining the details of its world, but provide no real scaffolding for staging stories of daring resistance within it. I turned to an adventure module (Eye of the Beholder, by Christine Beard) to assemble a space for the players to explore and some problems for them to solve. Along the way, though, I struggled to introduce meaningful challenges to a group of players who were reticent to do any check where they didn’t have multiple extra dice. They breezed through some obstacles, and when they were stifled by others, it often felt artificial, like I’d leaned too much on the scale against them. The way that Spire deploys its supplemental difficulty mechanic (which would help me increase the challenge) felt a little too arbitrary, a little too flat.
The system has a certain rhythm to it. On any given roll, players will either succeed or fail based on the best result in a pool of D10s. A result of 6 or greater is a success, and it’s fairly common to approach a task with 2 or more dice in hand (that’s at least a 75% chance to succeed). Results below 8 accrue Stress, which can land on several different tracks and remains there until healed circumstantially or ultimately detonated by Fallout: every time Stress is added, a die is rolled to check if Fallout occurs. Stress is abstract, Fallout is concrete. When fallout does finally occur, it incurs both narrative an mechanical penalties that can reduce the PCs’ effectiveness or invite additional trouble. Players work their way through problems, picking up bits of Stress largely inconsequentially at first, until things begin to come undone and Fallout rears its head.
It’s a system designed for tension, where greater consequences are meant to loom before they land. I knew that it was designed to work this way, but I wasn’t quite prepared to push through my players’ cautious play, and I rarely enticed them to engage proactively unless they could maneuver into additional dice. Throw in some remarkable luck (very few failures and very little stress accrued) and we ended up with a 5-session campaign where fallout kicked in maybe once or twice ever. The adventure was dark and exciting, but the friction felt insufficient to make the story really sing and carry the weight it wanted to.

</img> </div>
Art by Adrian Stone, Image © Rowan, Rook & Decard</div> 
I put Spire back on the shelf with a feeling of mild disappointment, hoping to revisit it someday but making no concrete plans (I still haven’t run it again yet). In my mind, it was a decent little campaign, but an overall flop in GMing on my part, a failure to deliver on the stakes as written. I didn’t collect player feedback for this adventure; my regular group of old college friends are more keen to play something and hang out than they are to dive deep into reflection and metacognition about everything we play; for some of them, giving feedback is a chore at best (which is entirely understandable).
While writing this post, I asked them what they recalled about this game; nobody seemed to remember how much friction or consequence they encountered. What they remembered, generally, was the bizarre abilities and the more vivid details about the setting and the scenario.
The fun for them, as far as I can tell, existed outside of the challenge or consequences. It was instead about exploring the setting and seeing the adventure through, occasionally using cool abilities along the way. This is probably incredibly obvious to most people, but I was prepared to show them what they were really up against, to give them difficult choices and real danger. I had conceived of these characters as desperate revolutionaries taking enormous risks to stop an injustice, not smooth operators on a clear-cut rescue mission.
Spire is ultimately quite vague about the what goals players might attempt to accomplish, and its advice about campaign structure is very high level. The presumption is that PCs will be gathering resources and allies for the resistance, disrupting injustices where possible, and uprooting seeds of corruption. More dour or tactical goals like taking down a turncoat or installing a sympathetic councilman still have a vaguely heroic bent, given the context. What I hadn’t accounted for was that even if Spire thematically positions itself as dire and grim, its overarching inclination is towards hope and justice, unattainable as they may seem.

</img> </div>
Art by Adrian Stone, Image © Rowan, Rook & Decard</div> 
See, in Spire, character advancement happens whenever the PCs change the world in some way, small or large: to me that reads as fundamentally hopeful (even if the game makes it clear that the change need not be positive for it to count). Some playbooks even have a bit of superhero feel to them. At my table, Spire wound up being a game about heroic triumph, not heroic sacrifice, and it felt like it undermined its own themes a bit. But it worked fine for the players, who were satisfied to do some good in a setting that they understood to be brutal and unjust.
In other words, Spire is simply not an engine that requires negative consequences to produce an outcome that felt natural to my players, at least not when it left room for unambiguously heroic acts (as was the case in the scenario we played through). What was lacking to me didn’t register as an issue to players, especially not this particular group who likes to progress and succeed. It’s probably worth admitting that, as a GM, part of my enjoyment comes from challenging players with complications and consequences.
I still have a real fondness for what Spire achieves in its world-building and writing. But I believe that Spire’s followup, Heart: The City Beneath, does thrive on failure in a number of ways. More on that next week.

Backtracking: Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg (2003)

2025-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
Backtracking is a blogging project that I began in 2024 in which I will play one game from each year since I was born, up until the present. My goal is to engage with games I’ve never played and divert some of my attention away from new releases and towards older titles. I hope to cross off some major backlog items, learn more about the influences and intertexts that informed the games I grew up with, and practice my analytical skills. I’m using US release dates as the relevant year for my selections.

Why I Chose This Game</h2>
3D platformers must have been my earliest video game fascination. As a child I played whatever I could get my hands on, but in my early elementary school years, I always gravitated toward bright, colorful platformers.
Like Mario, right? Banjo Kazooie? Well, not quite. I can’t explain why, but I always was a PlayStation kid growing up. My favorites were Spyro the Dragon and Crash Bandicoot and their lesser-known peers (anybody remember Croc?), not to mention a parade of underwhelming Disney-branded platformers in various styles. When I had an occasional brush with Mario 64, I found it too slippery and complex. When I puttered around in Ocarina of Time’s opening moments, I found myself baffled and frustrated by the lack of a dedicated jump button. Platformers were my fundamental lens for understanding 3D games.
By 2003, I had moved onto the PS2. The path I had chosen pointed firmly towards Jak II, the hilariously edgy sequel to beloved classic Jak and Daxter. Looking back, I can see that embracing the moody, desaturated teenager-targeted era of Naughty Dog (Jak II and Jak 3) and Insomniac (Ratchet & Clank) informed the trajectory of my interests, a shift that was amplified by my dad introducing first person shooters to me on the PC.

</img> </div> 
If I’d been a GameCube kid, I likely would have wound up playing Billy Hatcher instead. Would it have been the last of the bright and colorful platformers that dominated my attention? Or would I have spent a lot longer in the saturated Nintendo sunshine? It’s in this sense that I see Billy Hatcher as a purely circumstantial inflection point in the evolution of my own taste. So for 2003, I sampled from an alternate timeline of my childhood.
What I Thought</h2>
Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg is an adventure through a series of big playground-like worlds in which Billy must rescue Morning Land from the villainous crows. It’s a goofy hodgepodge of chicken and egg imagery, drawing from all the video game tropes you’d expect: hatching monsters out of eggs, bowling enemies over with eggs, equippable rooster combs that have different powers, and the like.
Being developed by Sonic Team, it’s no surprise that the core feature of the game is its movement. Rolling around eggs, bashing them into enemies, slamming them on the ground, and launching forward to clear gaps; all of it is fiddly and strange at first, and it takes some time to get used to it. With enough attention, though, it does have interesting texture, and reasonable capacity for advanced techniques and mastery. In many ways, movement in Billy Hatcher is about starting, stopping, and controlling your momentum.
The level design isn’t groundbreaking or particularly elegant, but it does accomplish its overall goal: big sandboxes with a bunch of interlocking paths and barriers that can be shifted around to craft different routes and challenges. Each stage takes place in one of the worlds and has some particular objective; rescue a supporting character, defeat a number of enemies, reach a particular spot, etc. The later stages lean much more heavily on instant-death pitfalls that can become very tiresome, and create a level of deeply unearned difficulty. In some ways, the problem of escalating difficulty is always touchy in platformers like this, where the technical mastery of movement is confounded by factors like imprecise physics and clumsy camera movement. I found the difficulty of the later stages to be irritating; the limited lives made long levels more tedious than necessary.

</img> </div> 
Difficulty aside, though, most of the game is what I might call playful; throughout the stages can be found dozens of different eggs with patterns to distinguish them, each hatching into different kinds of powerups and pets. Hatching an egg involves rolling it over collectibles found around the level and dropped by defeated enemies. The pets can be used to attack and are often more effective against bigger enemies than bashing them with eggs, but they vanish after they’ve been activated 5 or 6 times. Other powerups change the comb on Billy’s rooster costume to imbue the eggs he rolls with elemental affinities or extra damage. Finally, there’s a slot for one-time-use powerups that do things like make Billy invisible or invincible or heal him a bit. Since few things last, and there’s always something a little better, you’ll always be rotating between different powerups to get the most out of them.
None of these different abilities is substantially unique or dramatically better than others, but they are all there for you to seek out, experiment with, and choose favorites from. The elemental aspects are barely used, the various wearable powerups are neat but never utilized, and, infuriatingly, boss fights use none of these elements. The boss fights are mostly forgettable and utterly uninterested in the broader mechanical space of the rest of the game, using only the default eggs (no pets, powerups, elemental damage, advanced movement techniques, etc.).

</img> </div> 
Ultimately, this disappointing simplicity gives a clearer picture of what Billy Hatcher is. Layered on top of its relatively interesting movement is a relatively uninteresting toybox of monsters and powerups, each unique enough to be distinct but not deeply embedded into the design of the enemies and challenges in the surrounding game. And… that’s fine? It’s nice that there’s a double jump ability — even if it’s never actually useful. Because when you find it, it’s cool! But it still leaves me wishing for more.
To reinforce the toybox appeal, everything comes in a brightly colored package; each world begins in night, and changes into daylight after rescuing the sage. This means that most of your time spent there will be in the sunny, saturated version of the world. The soundtrack is similarly playful, upbeat and frenetic and full of blasts of brass and busy melodies over jaunty beats.
Overall, I found myself… whelmed. It was fun to see what the game was all about. I like some aspects of its core movement, but its difficulty in the later stages was profoundly annoying. It’s bright, pleasant, and fun to move around in, but the delight wears off quickly as the shallowness of the surrounding systems become evident.

</img> </div> 
Reflections</h2>
Recently, I’ve picked up a few 3D platformers from the modern indie resurgence, complete with their throwback graphics and undergirded by strange, distinctive, and expressive movement systems. A lot has changed in the past two decades, and the people who are making this style of game now were in love with the deepest nuances of the platformers they played in their youths. They build movement toolkits that emphasize depth above all else.
I don’t come to 3D platformers for sheer challenge like I do with Dark Souls and the like. There’s something delightful about engaging with art that’s almost nostalgic, that feels adjacent to things you’re actually nostalgic for, but is still wholly new to you. My takeaway, though, is that I may have more fun replaying games like this that I still love than I will playing ones that passed me by.

Backtracking: Fatal Frame (2002)

2025-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
Backtracking is a blogging project that I began in 2024 in which I will play one game from each year since I was born, up until the present. My goal is to engage with games I’ve never played and divert some of my attention away from new releases and towards older titles. I hope to cross off some major backlog items, learn more about the influences and intertexts that informed the games I grew up with, and practice my analytical skills. I’m using US release dates as the relevant year for my selections.
First, an important aside. My original choice for 2002 was The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. I had started into it and made some solid progress. But while I was underway, the BDS movement singled out Microsoft (owner of Zenimax → Bethesda → Morrowind) as a priority boycott target. You can (and should) read their reasoning here</a>. Obviously, I don’t expect my readership to actually move the needle, but attention is attention, and the idea of giving anyone any reason to keep their Xbox Game Pass subscription didn’t sit well with me. Maybe in the future I’ll write about Morrowind, but not right now.
Why I Chose This Game</h2>
Fatal Frame is a cult classic survival horror game, drawing from the lineage of the Resident Evil and Silent Hill series’ and their more esoteric predecessors. Truth be told, I don’t gravitate towards supernatural horror (zombies, ghosts, etc.). And while I do dabble with horror games, my forays involve summoning a lot more courage and composure than I would naturally have on hand.
So why pick Fatal Frame? Just to challenge myself? Well, maybe a little. Horror more broadly has been a growing interest for me over the years, especially when it intersects with science fiction. I’ve greatly enjoyed indie horror titles like Mouthwashing</a> and Iron Lung</a>, and I had keen enough affection for the stylish and terrifying Signalis</a> and the doppelganger nightmare ECHO</a> to write about them in past years.
So, despite my ambivalence towards ghost stories, Fatal Frame felt like a viable pivot: a glimpse at the beloved PS2 era of strange and experimental survival horror titles. There are, admittedly, more esoteric ones than Fatal Frame, but it strikes a nice balance between obscure and beloved. And while its sequel is probably the most well-regarded, anyone reading along with Backtracking knows that I’m loathe to start a series anywhere but the beginning.

</img> </div> 
What I Thought</h2>
Fatal Frame follows Hinasaki Miku, a teenage girl with a sixth sense for the supernatural who ventures to a strange, remote mansion in search of her missing older brother Mifuyu. The dilapidated mansion, which we learn is called Himuro Manor, turns Miku’s search into an investigation into the past, delving through a grim history of mysterious deaths and brutal rituals that haunt the place.
While exploring the manor, Miku learns of traumatic events that befell several generations of inhabitants, from the recent research of a novelist in search of inspiration, to the prior investigations of a folklorist, all the way back to a history of occult rituals decades prior. Each of these unfolds as distinct layers of the mystery, uncovered piecemeal through notes about notes about rituals, found while gradually exploring the manor.
The layered structure of the story works well. Slowly unearthing an ever deeper and darker past helps break the game into acts, draws parallels across the time periods, and brings the story further and further into the surreal folklore and occultism at its roots.
More importantly, Fatal Frame delivers all of this with spectacular atmosphere, drawing liberally from the Japanese cinematic horror tradition that emerged in the 80s and 90s to unnerve and terrify. Restrained jump-scares intermingle with haunting camera tricks, unsettling background elements, and enemy designs that are unique and striking (despite being filtered through the same spectral aesthetic). The sound design is profoundly upsetting throughout, incorporating a variety of unsettling ambient noises, creaking floorboards, haunting moans of the damned, and so on. The English voiceover is admittedly as corny as you might expect from this era of translated survival horror, but to me it truly has its own sort of charm.

</img> </div>
Fixed cameras give space for all sorts of spooky tricks.</div> 
Fatal Frame's distinctive camera is the only tool Miku has to keep the undead spirits at bay, making it not only a plot point, but a load-bearing facet of both the mechanical elements and horror direction of the game. When controlling Miku normally, we see her walking around in 3rd person, flitting between fixed camera positions that often unnervingly obscure what’s ahead of her. When she holds the camera up to her face, though, the viewpoint changes to 1st person, her movement slows, and she can look around through the camera's stark, grainy viewport. This helps Himuro Manor feel like a fully-formed 3D space, complete with all the ominous, shadowy corners one might expect.
During encounters with spirits, the camera is a double-edged sword. Enemies will circle around the room, glide through walls, and fade in and out of view. The longer you can keep them in your viewfinder, the more you can charge up your shot before finally snapping the shutter and dealing damage. But with the limited field of view through the camera, you’d better not lose track of that enemy, lest they sneak up on you. This wonderful, disjointed duality between aiming and moving is a staple of survival horror, an iconic element of early Resident Evil titles — but the perspective switch adds a unique, disorienting layer that helps escalate the tension of these encounters. Seeing Miku from the outside but also through her eyes has an interesting effect on how the player is positioned relative to the terrors she encounters. It blurs the role of guiding our character and embodying her, which I found to be evocative towards situating me within Himuro Manor.
The perspective switch adds another little bit of spice: having emerged in an era before the ubiquity of console first person shooters, Fatal Frame’s control scheme is… odd. There’s an awkward shift between the 3rd person mode (left stick moves) and the 1st person camera mode (left stick aims, right stick moves). It’s easy to see this as a fault, but I loved it; it made the earlier encounters in particular just a little bit more harrowing as I found my footing. After all, if games like this can use constrained movement to ramp up tension, who’s to say they can’t also benefit from a bit of control scheme jank?

</img> </div>
The camera's view is terrifyingly narrow.</div> 
Survival horror’s other key facet is resource scarcity; scraping by with limited ammunition and healing items as you attempt to solve mysteries and fend off threats as efficiently as possible. Eventually, infamously, many of these games begin to crumble under the weight of carefully-stashed resources that a cautious player inevitably retains. The horror aspect wears thin as this overstocked player trivializes the later moments of the game. In my case… well, I would say that I was less cautious and more meandering, arriving in the later parts of the game with dwindling resources just when the manor became extremely sparse with replenishments. I had a hell of a time with some of the late-game fights, but I did find them ultimately conquerable with enough patience and attention. Oddly, the overall effect was similar; the horror wore off for me on a frustrated attempt #10 in the same way it might for a player who trivialized attempt #1. This unevenness is not unexpected for survival horror, but it was an unfortunate lurch in my playthrough that I probably should have anticipated, and maybe speaks to my inexperience with the genre.
All told, though, I enjoyed my time quite a bit. Fatal Frame was consistently creative with its storytelling, compelling with its art direction and sound design, and clever with how it used the strange and shifting space of Himuro Manor. This one was worth gritting my teeth through to the end.

</img> </div>
Yeah dawg I think it was lol</div> 
Reflections</h2>
Horror can be very hit or miss for me, and I’m unlikely to reach for survival horror in particular. I would have had a much worse time finishing Fatal Frame without a couple of emulator affordances here and there that helped me overcome my late-game resource lacks. Brief peeks at a guide helped me get past a couple of esoteric progression moments as well. I'm glad I had the tools to see it through to the end.
As always, the theme I keep coming back to is this: putting in the effort to stick with games that are less familiar (or not as accommodating as I’m used to) continues to be rewarding. It feels like I’m developing my taste — or even my skill — as a thoughtful, critical player. I expect the games in this series to become (understandably) a little less unyielding as I move through the years, but I hope that the patience and attentiveness I’ve built up will continue to aid my insight and enjoyment. Plenty of art deserves a little bit of effort and grace in order to comprehend and appreciate it.

Managing Momentum in Eat the Reich

2025-04-22T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
In the last month or so, I had the chance to run a 4-session game of Eat the Reich, the recent ink-drenched, ENNIE-winning, nazi-slaughtering vampire adventure from Grant Howitt, with art by Will Kirkby, published by Rowan, Rook & Decard. It’s intended to be played as a high-octane no-prep action movie 3-shot (ish) in which a squad of vampire commandos treks through an alternate-history nazi-occupied Paris to put a bloody stop to Hitler’s conquest.
To accomplish its action-blockbuster concept, Eat the Reich stacks its design with mechanisms that produce and maintain momentum, angling for a bombastic ultra-violent romp that barrels headlong towards a ridiculous and spectacular conclusion. These mechanisms are both indulgent and clever, locking the game into a tight structure akin to turn-based combat encounters in traditional TTRPGs without quite eroding the narrative-driven sensibilities.
Despite this, I encountered a number of challenges running the game, edge cases that threatened or undermined the crucial sense of momentum and left me trying to plug holes. As I’ve found with several of Grant Howitt’s games, the book implies a lighter lift for the GM than my own experience at the table bears out. With Eat the Reich in particular, the structure and rhythm at the game’s core is refreshingly straightforward. But across several sessions, it became a more concentrated effort to keep intensity high and creativity rewarding.
My overall experience with Eat the Reich was pretty positive, and my players enjoyed the change of pace and the over-the-top premise. But it left me thinking a lot about what makes turn-driven encounters tick and why the game’s myriad ways of maintaining inertia still created odd pitfalls at our table.
All Gas, No Brakes</h2>
Eat the Reich uses of a level of structure that traditional TTRPGs often apply specifically to combat encounters. To some degree, nearly all of Eat the Reich could be describe as one of three things: a combat encounter, a quiet start to a soon-to-be-combat encounter, or an action or intrigue set piece with the intensity of — yeah, a combat encounter.
This is a little reductive, as there are generally non-combat objectives that are centered, but I think the comparison still fits. Players of D&D or other trad games in its lineage can attest to a problem that frequently occurs with combat: the pace of actual events occurring in the game slows down so much that the momentum of play stalls and the game becomes a rather tedious math exercise. Even players who do their best to stay engaged may lose focus when it’s not their turn to act, especially when playing virtually. While Eat the Reich gains clarity and simplicity by slotting in a classic turn structure, it also risks producing the kinds of problems endemic to 3 or 4 sessions of straight combat encounters.
Howitt clearly knows that this risk is present, and the system is designed to (forgive the pun) combat that kind of repetitiveness. It’s driven by the Havoc Engine, a resolution system initially conceived for Howitt’s Havoc Brigade (a trope-inverting fantasy game about chaotic orcs). In its Eat the Reich incarnation, it’s driven by pre-generated player characters with arsenals of dramatic vampiric weapons and abilities. During a turn, players choose an action (most often BRAWL or SHOOT, but also including things like SEARCH and TERRIFY), start with their stat in that action, add bonuses for weapons and abilities they’re using, and roll a big pool of D6s. Each 4 and 5 is a success; each 6 is a crit (which can mostly be used as two successes instead of one). Each success is allocated towards dealing damage to opposing forces (called Threats), completing the Objective for that area, stockpiling Blood (a resource for healing injuries and activating abilities), and deflecting damage generated by the GM’s dice pool.

</img> </div> 
There’s a mischievous joy to cobbling together elaborate actions, trying include as many boons as possible, and it allows a fun degree of variety between any two turns based on the situation, focal objective, context of the scene, and the toolkit of the acting character.
Beyond the expressivity of individual turns, though, is a stack of broader systems that keep the action surging forward. Players only stay at a given location until the Objective (with a given number of points) is cleared. Any Threats that players eliminate will “respawn” by way of reinforcements arriving at the end of the round, a weakening but never-ending assault. Players can freely share Blood, the resource that drives their healing and abilities, as long as their characters are roughly nearby one another. Once per session, each player can re-roll a poor result by invoking a Flashback: they narrate some history between their character and another, and then roll again with 2 extra dice. Players take injuries if they fail to (or choose not to) block damage, but they won’t see any consequences from them until they’ve taken several. And while Equipment and Loot all have limited uses, the final use typically grants an extra die — a little extra incentive to use that final charge instead of hanging onto it.
Overall, the pressures add up for players to build big, wacky dice pools, focus on objectives rather than killing every enemy, and accept occasional injuries rather than fixate on blocking damage. All of these forces keep players moving through each location without lingering too long. Right?
Brakes, After All</h2>
At the turn level, it quickly became apparent that a fight can stagnate whenever the Threats facing the party roll well against them. Players may feel that they need to spend all or most of their successes simply blocking incoming damage to stay on their feet, and their turn may come and go without progressing Objectives or whittling down Threats. Once my players got their footing, they started to push harder to make their own dice pools bigger to counteract these stalemate, but a particularly dangerous set of threats always risked producing a lot of nothing-happens turns unless players were more willing to take injuries.
And while there was certainly plenty of creativity involved in crafting an interesting action for a given turn, our table found some actions (and by extension, some characters) felt limited by their options when they were not in situations that overtly invited those actions. Eat the Reich’s 7 action ratings can be easily divided into two categories: the obviously useful ones (BRAWL, SHOOT), the occasionally useful ones (SNEAK, TERRIFY), and the rarely-used leftovers (CON, FIX, and SEARCH). Beyond being less applicable to the most common situations, these last three also needed to stretch a bit farther to justify applying them to certain objectives or threats. In the end, it became clear that some characters had very easy ways to combine their best stats with most of their equipment and abilities, and some simply didn’t.
Beyond individual turns, Eat the Reich has similar structural edge cases. Each location on the map of Paris provides a brief description of what’s going on there, the kinds of Threats and loot to be found, and an Objective to complete before moving on. A few locations contain Ubermenschen, powerful supernatural nazi experiments that pose especially dire threats to our squad of vampire anitheroes (and the world). Defeating one of these area bosses allows everyone to choose an Advance from a short but tantalizing list of powerful additional abilities. This is the only progression that the game offers, so my players were obviously drawn to seek one out.
Naturally, boss enemies are one-of-a-kind, so they’re explicitly exempt from the rules for reinforcements. That means that anywhere that an Ubermenschen can be found, players may be implicitly incentivized to focus all their energy on defeating that threat (and claiming their hard-won advance), which leaves the actual objective and any straggling minor Threats feeling extremely perfunctory once the boss is defeated.
Moreover, the big picture elements of the setting benefit from a context and foreshadowing, and in fact the Ubermenschen each suggest imagery that might foreshadow their appearance. But the majority of play was so focused on each location’s scenario that it was difficult to keep this in mind, and it was unclear how to guide or constrain the party’s decisions of where to visit next.

</img> </div> 
If You Don’t Like it…</h2>
In the (relatively brief) “Running the Game” section, there’s a note directly encouraging GMs to abandon or change any rules that aren’t serving their table or making the game fun. If I’m encountering issues with the rules, why not change them, right? Well, I did! A little! I don’t personally find it easy to change rules on the fly for a game this short, but I did what I could to adapt it to my table. In a few cases, I twisted and bent the rules to generate more tension, provide a bit of relief, or reward ambitious play. Any deeper changes felt like they might cheapen the creativity and resource management that players had done up to that point.
As we were feeling out the system, enemies with high attack ratings felt like brick walls. I started splitting their attention. For example, this Sniper Team can only focus on 3 out of 5 of you, and you all get to decide based on your action if you’re drawing their attention or doing something else while your teammates keep them busy. This turned out to be a nice way for players to strategize as a team, either volunteering to distract or taking opportunities to to push objectives with less opposition. As we progressed further and players started to push their characters harder, I dropped that modification. It felt like a good set of training wheels to add and remove as needed, but I might have better telegraphed it with precise language (perhaps a Sniper Team that split its attention could later have been swapped with an Elite Sniper Team that had no such restriction).
Later on, we encountered our first Ubermenschen. The fight felt insurmountable at first, but after a tough battle and some effective use of abilities, the players were victorious. Once it was over, they were left with a somewhat plodding push through an Objective that was (reasonably) untouched by the time the fight ended; I wound up introducing more minor Threats just to keep some pressure on, but it ultimately dragged out the escape, without actually making it any more harrowing. In retrospect, I ought to have taken a particular bit of advice in the “Mission Structure” section: “If there’s nothing particularly interesting happening in a location, hand-wave past it and progress onto the next exciting thing that happens.” But it was tough to justify just skipping the Objective when it seemed to be about escaping the current location.
Towards the end, several players had been taking on a lot of injuries, but didn’t want to slow things down by “farming” Blood, as it were, before pushing through Objectives. To balance this back out, I let players heal one injury each time they moved between locations, as their vampires had a moment to catch their breath before the next big encounter.
And finally, at the end, after we skipped past a couple of locations in order to wrap up our final session, the players dispatched a surprisingly underwhelming “final boss” Ubermenschen. Trying to reignite a bit of drama, I pulled out a stronger enemy that they hadn’t encountered, had it absorb one of the abilities of the defeated Ubermenschen, and gave the players one last challenge in between them and Hitler-murdering satisfaction. This didn’t give them too much trouble, but it did help make the ending more bombastic, and I was happy with the adjustment.

</img> </div> 
Hacking at the Table</h2>
I don’t typically like to hack games apart at the table to adapt them to my group or my concept. I like to hold rules close in hand and try to experience and engage with what those rules produce. My home group is curious and flexible, and they’ve let me bring a lot of different games to the table over the years. When we play something new, we tend to want to play that thing, not massage it into whatever fits our rhythm. Rules are written in particular ways for particular reasons, and sometimes adhering to them more than we intuitively might is a good way to understand their intentions and strengths. Giving a game’s rules attention, patience, and grace can encourage different kinds of play than my players and I might typically gravitate towards, and it’s one of the reasons we like to try out different games.
I really like a lot of things about Eat the Reich, especially its size and scope. It’s a fairly lean 70-page book designed for short, explosive campaigns. It occupies a rare niche between small games that I can read in a half hour and play in a session, and hulking campaign games designed for hours of perusing and hundreds of hours of play. And even in its brevity, Eat the Reich manages to spill a lot of ink towards helping players and GMs thoughtfully handle its subject matter. The advice in this book on how to portray nazis, vampires, accents, violence, and the possibility of harm to innocents is all remarkably strong, measured, flexible, and specific.
In a game so dense and so brief, there’s a lot of pressure to make the right changes for your table if you choose to fiddle with the design on the fly. In the end, as with all games, running them makes you better at running them. I have ideas of which alterations I’d keep and which I’d drop for future play, and I’ll now remember important details that are easy to forget or overlook. If it's your first time running Eat the Reich, though, be ready to get a little bit creative to help your table stay entertained and engaged.

Building Partial Worlds

2025-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
This post is a little bit “play report”, a little bit game critique, and a little bit of reflection on play culture, gm-ing, and game design. I don't think it's my most cohesive and clear-cut writing, but I’m challenging myself to write more frequently and less monolithically. Not everything has to be a full-formed critical essay.
In Search of Mysteries</h2>
About a month ago, I wrapped a campaign of Apocalypse Keys by Rae Nedjadi, which I ran for a small group somewhat intermittently from April 2024 to February 2025. Earlier last year, I shared my impressions</a> from running my first Mystery (basically, the first story arc) and upon revisiting it, most of those impressions remain true. Since I started with a prewritten mystery from the book, I was glad to be able to get my bearings and focusing on learning the system and getting to know the player characters.
But after that, I found myself looking past the pre-written mysteries in the book; they’re certainly well-written and evocative, but none were quite suited to my particular party of player characters. Luckily, the Apocalypse Keys is designed to make mystery-writing approachable. It’s essentially a template to fill out, with some guidance on all the ingredients that are necessary to make it work. Not only that, but the prewritten ones make for great examples to follow and pick over for ideas.
So I wrote a new mystery. I gave it a higher Complexity score than our introductory one, which affects the overall pace, and we played through it over 9 sessions. We had a good time and met some memorable characters, but I generally struggled to pace the mystery well across sessions after session. The Complexity score determines the number of clues that must be gathered before the mystery can be fully solved, and the ways our story went confounded the curve of tension and drama that a monster-hunting story ought to have. We got there, but I was dissatisfied with the length and the pacing of my mystery. By the end, the little rural town in which it took place felt simultaneously incomplete and already-picked-over for every detail of interest.

</img> </div>
This chapter helps a lot with understanding how to run prewritten mysteries, too!</div> 
So, for the following mystery, I sought a bigger canvas. I wanted a setting and context that felt wide and explorable, but still distinct and specific. I wanted a plethora of mysterious threads that could be pulled on to keep the wider mystery gradually unraveling, a less isolated and singular space than those first couple mysteries.
The Conservatory</h2>
This is around the time when I attended Big Bad Con, and happened to meet Devin Nelson and pick up a copy of one of their games: The Conservatory. At the time, it was one game in a big pile of stuff I’d excitedly accumulated during the convention.
But when I flipped through it at home, it occurred to me that it was exactly what I was looking for: not a mystery setting, but the perfect procedure for building one together with my players. So instead of a new mystery, I brought it to the (very agreeable) table.
The Conservatory is a GM-less storytelling game about occult institutions, their triumphs and defeats, and the ways they intersect with their surrounding communities and change over time. To be quite honest, I might not have had a good grasp on it if not for delving into the Hellboy comics and movies ahead of Apocalypse Keys; in my mind, the genre spaces fit together well. Since we’d already established our setting a little bit, I was optimistic that my players would be along for the ride, at least for one quick session in between Mysteries.
The Conservatory adapts the basic structure of Avery Alder’s The Quiet Year to tell the story of an institution engaged in mysterious occult research. On each turn, players choose from a set of actions that elaborate or change the conservatory, like introducing new “Keepers” (key characters), adding “Wings” (parts of the building itself that carry distinct purposes), and modifying “the Work” (the mysterious occult phenomena or practices that the conservatory pursues). Some actions can be used to introduce new curiosities or embellish existing details, which are interesting choices in their own right, but also make for perfect fallbacks when inspiration is slow to strike.

</img> </div>
A tiny slice of the shenanigans we got up to...</div> 
In addition to an action, each player will also draw a card on their turn and resolve whatever events or questions it brings into play. The Conservatory trades away The Quiet Year’s playing card deck in exchange for a tarot deck, using its breadth and thematic flavor to round out the various moving pieces of the game. Face cards introduce new Keepers, ensuring that the enigmatic cast grows, and major arcana introduce Harbingers, impending disasters that the conservatory can attempt to mitigate and must eventually face (also, an amusing terminological overlap with Apocalypse Keys). When enough Harbingers pile up, that “Era” of the conservatory’s history ends and the consequences must be resolved.
The structure of the game gave us a good runway: we set our story nearly a century before the modern day, and we built our strange institution across decades. We placed our conservatory in the LA hills during the golden age of Hollywood: a bizarre dance studio and talent agency obsessively learning dances that would inflict curses upon other people and reality itself. Our story intersected with real-life history in various absurd ways. What I had hoped would be one solid session turned into three enthusiastic and fruitful ones; we constantly delighted in each others’ increasingly strange ideas and characters. By the end, we had an 11-page google doc chronicling our cast of odd characters, the conservatory’s checkered history of careless experimentation and ill-considered manipulation, and a number of unresolved problems that seemed very likely to reassert themselves at some point.

</img> </div>
An apocalypse? You don't say...</div> 
Cursed (Complementary)</h2>
Once we put down The Conservatory, it was time for me to go write that new Mystery I’d been putting off. This time, it was easy. There were dangling threads that I could pull on, characters I could bring back and others I could leave mysteriously absent, echoes of the conservatory’s past that were sure to rear their ugly heads. I had all the ingredients I needed, and it was great fun to balance recurring details that players would be excited to revisit with wild extrapolations that would surprise them.
Moreover, the transition to and from storytelling game was smoothed over nicely by Apocalypse Keys’ preexisting affinity for player-contributed detail, something I praised about it in my initial impression. The mysterious sources of otherworldly forces that drove our conservatory’s research meshed excellently with Apocalypse Keys’ focus on cosmic, unknowable, and unpredictable powers.
In some of the most visible surfaces of indie TTRPG play culture, world-building games often supplement campaign-driven play by forming a foundation. The Quiet Year, in particular, has been played on several high profile Actual Play shows as a way to establish a setting full of evocative details, material problems, and enigmatic story hooks. I’ve been drawn to this approach in the past as well, but I find that it heaps a lot of pressure onto a world-building game that may or may not produce something that the whole group is excited to continue exploring.
My experience with The Conservatory and Apocalypse Keys suggests an alteration to this strategy: build partial worlds. Take a few sessions away from an in-progress campaign to collaboratively build a setting for just the next story arc. Do it after you’ve got your campaign underway and all of your players have established their characters, goals, and motivations. They’ll be able to build a setting in anticipation of their character interacting with it, and they’ll be able to weave in themes and ideas that they know their character will be interested in.
Most of my game groups are not recording podcasts or embarking on huge campaigns with months of runway to ideate and prepare. The most planning we tend to do is in choosing games to play and creating characters. I like this partial-world-building approach because it alleviates pressure; if your world-building game just doesn’t quite hit, you can easily leave it on the cutting room floor or scavenge it for parts when you resume your campaign. Or maybe your world-building game was an enormous success, but doesn’t quite fit your ongoing campaign; that’s still fine! Put it in your back pocket. Borrow a character or two for a silly cameo. Write it into your setting, but don’t go there straight away.
Coda</h2>
As I understand it, The Quiet Year was never explicitly designed to be a “session 0” game. It’s built with very deliberate edges and its text is abundantly clear about when it invites elaboration and when it encourages fruitful ambiguity or uncertainty. In my opinion, these things make it a stronger game and emphasize its thematic ideas about small communities. But it’s so easy to see why folks play The Quiet Year and want to explore further. Its structure inevitably produces unfinished projects, unresolved mysteries, and uncertain fates. Letting it lie is part of the game… but then the game ends, and maybe you’d like to know more after all.
The Conservatory borrows a lot from The Quiet Year, but one thing it does differently is explicitly invite players to use their conservatory as part of a bigger story if they so choose. I see a lot of world-building games used to start campaigns, but The Conservatory, and certainly many others, can (and should!) be used to augment and revitalize ongoing campaigns too.

Backtracking: Max Payne (2001)

2025-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
Backtracking is a blogging project that I’m embarking on in 2024 in which I will play one game from each year since I was born. My goal is to engage with games I’ve never played and divert some of my attention away from new releases and towards older titles. I hope to cross off some major backlog items, learn more about the influences and intertexts that informed the games I grew up with, and practice my analytical skills. I’m using US release dates as the relevant year for my selections.
Why I Chose This Game</h2>
Max Payne might not be the most popular of the classic shooters from the early aughts, and it's likely not the most beloved property from Finnish studio Remedy Entertainment in the wake of their latest successes. But it is one of their earliest titles, beloved for innovative mechanics, and certainly a crucial part of their legacy that's worth exploring.
But more importantly (to me, at least), it's a game I remember my dad playing. I don't know how much of it he played, and I don't think it was a favorite series of his the way Tomb Raider was</a>, but it was in the mix of shooter game boxes that I remember finding by his desk in the early aughts. Unlike Tomb Raider, I don't think he ever suggested that I try Max Payne. Maybe that's because of its brutal opening moments or its more real-life setting and tone. I doubt he'd remember why he never put it in front of me; maybe he did, and I'm the one forgetting.
Regardless, this fuzzy category of "dad games" has a certain gravity in my mind. He doesn't much enjoy shooters nowadays, and has some trouble communicating and remembering things due to some health problems. Sometimes, I feel like playing these games might let me learn something about him that I don't already know.

Going into this, there was really only one thing I knew about Max Payne: it revolved around doing dramatic bullet-time diving manuevers while gunning down opponents. Something so firmly rooted in a turn-of-the-millennium aesthetic novelty seemed like it would be fun to explore today.
What I Thought</h2>
Max Payne, stripped to its barest components, is a game about diving for cover while desperately spraying bullets at a room full of enemies. It's about pushing through armies of mobsters and cops in a desperate quest for revenge, barely hanging on, doing whatever it takes to unravel the machinations behind the violence that upturned Max's life. Max still has his wry wit, but revenge is what keeps him going: dive after desperate dive, betting that he can kill you before he hits the ground and has to pick himself back up.
These diving bullet time manuevers make up the core mechanical conceit of the game. It does certainly stretch itself a little thin by the end, but combined with a variety of weapons, it tends to be pretty fun and unique throughout. Most of Max's weapons have very poor accuracy, so the diving and dodging serves as a mechanism of tipping the odds in your favor. It makes Max a smaller target and it helps him keep sustained gunfire on his enemies as the slowed-down seconds tick by. The combination of desperate lunges towards cover, bullet-time slow-mo, and low accuracy weapons makes for a messy and grimy struggle, an apt canvas for a story about crime, drugs, and revenge.

The writing, credited to Sam Lake (now creative head of the studio), is as melodramatic as one might expect, constantly indulging in lurid metaphors and brooding machismo. It's a charming style throughout, never failing to make me smirk even as other aspects of the story wear thin. The plot itself is hard to grasp onto, careening from hunting down mob bosses to stealing weapons caches to uncovering grand government conspiracies. In many ways, Max Payne feels like an enjoyably campy action movie that's got one act too many, eventually dragging itself over the finish line with a brutal gauntlet of a final level that barely ties off it's story (just enough to tee up a sequel) and leaves the melodrama of Max's descent into violence a little bit threadbare.
True to its noir and action movie stylings, Max Payne's writing also treats women poorly and wallows too often in the violence done to them (typically intending to reinforce Max's own trauma, no less). I'm caught halfway between "it comes with the territory, I had no reason to expect better" and "I was hoping for more from this studio, even at the time". The storytelling in general is so over-the-top, so full of scenery-chewing mobsters and Max's own gritty narration that the misogyny probably arises primarily from an exaggerated commitment to established genre tropes, but it was still exhausting after a while.
That said, the aesthetic of the storytelling generally won me over. The plot functions like another aesthetic element, a flurry of tropes and conspiracies that's hard to keep up with. I adore the strange multimedia format that delivers the story in lieu of cutscenes: comic-book-styled sequences crafted from stylized, edited photos of the game's developers (and even their families</a>) posing with props and making exaggerated faces. The panels fade in one by one, fully voiced and narrated immaculately (by the late James McCaffrey) as if told in brooding monologue by Max himself after the fact. Even if the story itself began to dull, the stylish delivery never lost its charm. These comic book panels feel like the game's clearest signifier of Remedy's offbeat, multimedia artistic lineage.

Max Payne released in a time of emerging 3D realism, when even the campiest games had an underlying sincerity and self-seriousness, especially when drawing heavily from film genres. Sure, the game knows it's pretty goofy, but it also knows that it's pretty fucking awesome, and it isn't trying to pretend it thinks otherwise. In the end, I'm pretty forgiving of this kind of tone, even if I wish it reproduced less of the most eye-roll-worthy qualities of its inspirations. And in case it wasn't clear, bullet time is still cool as hell; there's a reason why it grew to become an action gaming staple, stretching onward from F.E.A.R. all the way to Tears of the Kingdom.
Reflections</h2>
Playing some of these old titles that my dad interacted with when I was younger feels like exploring a snapshot of his taste. As I get farther into the aughts with this project, the "dad games" dry up. He kept playing games, but I got older and simply played more of the ones he handed down to me. As I grew to a more appropriate age and more capable player, I also became more voracious and curious. I eventually got brave enough to endure the horror elements that characterized so many shooters in the aughts. I might revisit those games someday, but they don't haunt my backlog.
Max Payne is probably a good sendoff for this type of Backtracking selection, but it certainly feels a little bittersweet. Moving deeper into the aughts, I'll be choosing from games I couldn't get my hands on them, didn't have interest in, or didn't have a console for. Max Payne may be the last of these games that missed me, rather than ones that I missed in pursuit of other things.

Backtracking: Shenmue (2000)

2025-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

</div>
Backtracking is a blogging project that I’m embarking on in 2024 in which I will play one game from each year since I was born. My goal is to engage with games I’ve never played and divert some of my attention away from new releases and towards older titles. I hope to cross off some major backlog items, learn more about the influences and intertexts that informed the games I grew up with, and practice my analytical skills. I’m using US release dates as the relevant year for my selections.
Why I Chose This Game</h2>
Shenmue made its way to my list in a different way than most of the other titles. It's influential, of course, a notable influence on games like the Yakuza and Grand Theft Auto series'. But I haven't played any of those games. It was also the most expensive game ever made at the time of its release, which is fascinating to compare to today's ultra-expensive games. Shenmue is also famous for its hilariously clumsy English voice acting and goofy investigation sequences around things like finding out where sailors hang out</a>.
None of those things are reasons that I played Shenmue. No, the reason I played it was a trio of video game critics whose writing and commentary are influential for me — specifically, the hosts and guest of the Shenmue episode of Abnormal Mapping</a>: Jackson Tyler, Em Marko, and Dia Lacina.
Following compelling critics with whom I disagree has been a fundamental part of my own growth as a writer. Jackson seems to hate everything I like. Em invites chaos seemingly on purpose with a number of hot takes (just listen to the opening of that episode). Dia regularly comes out swinging against beloved mainstream titles (and tends to be entirely justified in doing so), and sings the praises of games that are often a little obtuse for me. I disagree with these critics probably more often than I agree. All of that said, they're some of the most incisive, thoughtful, and earnest people in the space. And when they find something they truly want to celebrate, it tends to really deserve the attention.

What I Thought</h2> Despite being drawn in by a recent critical evaluation, I went into Shenmue largely fresh. I didn't listen to any of the aforementioned Abnormal Mapping episode until after I'd rolled credits, though I knew the gist of the hosts' overall impression from comments on Twitter and Dia Lacina's writing</a>.
It's hard to get far without realizing that this game is loaded with mechanical ideas that are loathed by modern gamers: real-time clocks, missable side stories, quick-time events, gacha machines (alright, fine, this one is a joke), and lots of tedious interactions with busses, phones, and Ryo's notebook full of reminders. Shenmue tends to be meandering, awkward, and occasionally inscrutable. It's also, despite it all, really damn good.
Despite drawing heavily on the martial arts movies during its cutscenes, most of Shenmue's moment-to-moment play is grounded in daily life. Throughout the game, players contend with a real-time clock that slowly advances as they guide teen protagonist Ryo Hazuki as he looks for the man who killed his father by interacting with the people and places in his hometown. In the early parts of the game, Ryo will frequently have to wait until a particular hour before he can continue his search, meaning that he'll need to find ways to kill time. The clock builds the sense of anticipation as you move between steps of Ryo's investigations, but it also builds a rhythm of daily life. You might kill a few hours at the arcade, practice martial arts with Fuku-San, or stop by the store to buy a treat for the injured kitten that Megumi is nursing back to health. Despite Ryo's distance from his loved ones, who might resist his fixation on revenge, elements of his daily life still intercede.

This relationship to time changes as the game progresses. Ryo Hazuki begins the story distant and aimless, reeling from the death of his father and unsure how to proceed beyond a single-minded fixation on finding the man responsible. Ryo follows a meandering sequence of tasks in the early part of the story, inching closer to his goal with each curious question he asks of those around him. In between these connected dots, he continually brushes off those closest to him, stepping into their lives only to defend them from direct harm.
As Ryo gets closer to the dangerous elements who were involved in his father's murder, the story escalates and the underutilized combat system begins to come into play more often. Ryo's loved ones fret over his safety, and he becomes increasingly frustrated with and estranged from them. Ryo is drawn farther and farther from what was once his daily life, and goes to increasing lengths to pursue his revenge.
This crescendos when Ryo gets a full-time job just to draw out his enemies. The function of the in-game clock inverts; now, every day is subsumed by Ryo's work responsibilities, turning about 25 minutes or so of real-life gameplay into pure forklift operation. The plot events begin to unfold around Ryo's workday, and though he can still explore in the evenings and nights, the sense of disconnection from the people in his life is made even more palpable. As his pursuit entangles him in machinations bigger than he understands, the reins of the story are gradually taken away. By the end, Ryo is locked into increasingly scripted cutscenes and gameplay sequences, as if carried off by a river of destiny that he was so determined to wade into. Some of the later moments of the story include fond (yet stilted) goodbyes with characters that Ryo assumed would be fixtures of his hometown, people whom he could always come back to when this was all over. It turns out, instead, that some of them have aspirations of their own.
in the first 2 discs of shenmue the game moves lightning fast as days become an interconnected weave of linking clues and understanding the space. in the final disc things slow to a crawl as each day brings little new events. this is an accurate portrayal of “getting a job”— yuuko from nichijou (@headfallsoff) October 20, 2023</a></blockquote>

Thoughts About Games

Backtracking: Resident Evil 4 (2005)

Play Report - Moonsailors

The Unanswerable Question of Cairn

Mothership, OSR, and One Shots

Unbeatable - Beautiful Distractions

TTRPGs and Being Online

Delusion of Choice - Player Choice in Dread Delusion

2025 in Review — Tabletop RPGs

Best Video Games of 2025

Honorable Mentions</h2> There are a few games that didn’t make the list but needed a bit of special attention for one reason or another, so here are some honorable mentions.</p>

Uncommon Resolution Mechanics

Guns, Whips, and Fists in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

Holiday Games

Expedition 33 and Refusing to Let Go

KublaCon Fall 2025 Recap

Backtracking: The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay (2004)

TTRPG Promptober Retrospective

Pacing and Progression in Roguelites

TTRPG Promptober Check-In

Hades II - The Safety of Sequels

Designer Commentary - Dump Stat

An Ill-Advised Dip in the Poison Swamp

On Introducing TTRPGs

On Silksong and Savoring

PAX West 2025 Recap

Games I Played (Plus a Panel)</h2> For the sake of the argument, I’m counting the couple of games that I watched my partner play. Here's the roundup:</p>

Things I Bought</h2> First, the things I bought at PAX itself:</p> </img></p> </div> </p> Kragg Plushie</h3> Kragg is my main in Rivals of Aether II: he’s a big rock-elemental stag beetle man and just. Come on. Look at him!</p>

Kragg Plushie</h3> Kragg is my main in Rivals of Aether II: he’s a big rock-elemental stag beetle man and just. Come on. Look at him!</p>

Designer Commentary - Alone in the Loop

The Bananza Never Ends

I Don't Know How to Read (TTRPGs)

Mosh Pit Musings

Success and Failure with Spire and Heart — Part 2

Success and Failure with Spire and Heart — Part 1

Backtracking: Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg (2003)

Backtracking: Fatal Frame (2002)

Managing Momentum in Eat the Reich

Building Partial Worlds

Backtracking: Max Payne (2001)

Honorable Mentions</h2>
There are a few games that didn’t make the list but needed a bit of special attention for one reason or another, so here are some honorable mentions.</p>

Games I Played (Plus a Panel)</h2>
For the sake of the argument, I’m counting the couple of games that I watched my partner play. Here's the roundup:</p>

Kragg Plushie</h3>
Kragg is my main in Rivals of Aether II: he’s a big rock-elemental stag beetle man and just. Come on. Look at him!</p>