Category: games
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A Puzzle In Microid’s Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express
In Microid’s Agatha Christie’s The Murder on the Orient Express, there’s a minigame where you turn dials on a briefcase lock. A click sounds plays as you pass each number, with a louder sound played on the correct number for each dial. The dial is surrounded by a white oval which becomes squiggly as each…
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Paratext – columns at Joystick Division and Unwinnable – 2011-2013 (with two post-Paratext pieces from 2014)
“From 2011-2014 I wrote some columns called “Paratext” for the websites Joystick Division and Unwinnable. These are those columns.” is a collection of columns I wrote for Joystick Division and Unwinnable. The rest of this post is the same as on my other zine pages. Have fun! You can download the PDF above, and then…
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I read Marie-Laure Ryan’s Beyond Myth and Metaphor – The Case of Narrative in Digital Media about a week after finishing playing Immortality
https://www.gamestudies.org/0101/ryan Beyond Myth and Metaphor* -The Case of Narrative in Digital Media by Marie-Laure Ryan Games Studies Issue 01 Volume 01 and Immortality, the game by Half-Mermaid I read this piece after reading Aarseth, Juul, and Frasca’s contributions to this initial issue of the Games Studies journal. It is gutsy and important, I think, to…
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Montage
I found this markdown document in a drafts folder, dated June 2022. I didn’t look at it at all, just copied and pasted into the CMS. Soviet montage theory. It’s pretty simple – the idea is that the images in cinema don’t produce meaning on their own. It’s the juxtaposition of images through editing, through…
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Despelote (2025)
This was beautiful and sweet and I am so glad it exists and I could not hold my attention on most of the soccer-playing* but damn that 3D scan of the area from 2024 was great *until the final scene ** but then when the camera shifted into the ball, two of the characters were…
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Clair Obscur (spoilers obvs)
I chose the Maelle ending. I think it’s kind of weird that the ultimate takeaway here appears to be: Maelle and her mother were unable to process their grief and move on, her father and the fictional version of her brother were right about that. It feels maybe a little disappointing? to spend all that…
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Remember Me
2013, dontnod 8/3/2025 – 8/8/2025 replay notes game cws: suicide, false memories, memory manipulation, how the power to do all of that Affects a Person; “madness”, addiction, lip-service being paid to those not being a person’s moral failing that is not borne out by visual, audio, or interactive aesthetics what a tragic waist I accidentally…
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Occlude Thought
Last week I blasted through Pantaloon Software’s Occlude (“A Game of Occult Solitaire”). I got all the endings and all the coins in like six hours? I told multiple people that my brain is broken in the right way for it – like oh so many puzzle games, sometimes you can just see what to…