Spoiler warning for several older games, including the Bioshock series and Silent Hill 2, as well as the movie Memento. Memento, an early Christopher Nolan movie, is a well-executed example of a familiar writing trope: the unreliable narrator. The audience experiences the events of the movie from the point of view of the main character, […]
Trust No One: Unreliable Narratives in Games Read More »
I had a tight group of friends in high school and college who were all, to one degree or another, gamers like me. We had a few places where we hung out, including the local shopping mall (it was the eighties, after all) and the basement of one friend’s house, where we spent hours playing
Remarkable Roaming: A Roguelike Roundup Read More »
My fourteen-year-old son likes games. I guess it’d be hard for him not to; most of the time, if his old man isn’t working on games, he’s playing them. He grew up in a house filled with toys – Lego, board games, Warhammer miniatures, and D&D books. He’s seen both his dad and his mom
What’s Old is New: Games and the Nostalgia Factor Read More »
After my parents divorced, I spent summers and holidays with my dad and stepmom for several years. Since my dad lived in an Atlanta suburb and I lived with my mom in the northeast, I became an early frequent flier. Air travel was different in those long-before-9/11 days. I’d travel alone on a two-hour flight,
Game Retrospective: The Year of Dark Tower Read More »
Phantom Liberty, the recently released DLC for Cyberpunk 2077, is great. The story is compelling and lengthy, a masterclass in how to seamlessly add post-ship content into the middle of an existing narrative. The 2.0 patch for the game, which launched shortly before the DLC, overhauls and improves many of the game’s core systems, including
The Price of Redemption: When Bad Games Go Good Read More »
I’ve finished Starfield’s main story and one of the faction lines, and I think I’m done with the game for the moment. I’m intrigued by their clever NG+ gimmick, and I’ll revisit it after a patch or two. Overall, I’d rank it as a solid game – perhaps an 8/10 – but it never got
Finding the Thread: Building Strong Narrative in Games Read More »
Warning: spoilers for the midgame of Starfield, including some companion details. The first game I can remember playing where I cared about a player-centered romance storyline was Bioware’s Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn. The romanceable companions each had a deep storyline that ran in parallel with the main plot. Though there were a few
Equal Measures Tragic and Creepy: A Starfield Love Story Read More »
Warning: light spoilers for the first several hours of Starfield. I have a lifetime of fond memories of Bethesda games. I say this to provide full context for my criticisms below. After the first fifteen hours or so, I’m critical of aspects of the game and its design, but this shouldn’t be read as a
Yep, a Bethesda Game: Starfield First Impressions Read More »
For my entire career, I’ve been an advocate of procedural systems in games that generate endless content. Procedural generation has been a design pillar of some of my favorite titles – going all the way back to my early days playing Nethack and the original Civilization, with its evocative random maps. From a production perspective,
Berries on the Hill: Lessons in Procedural Game Design Read More »
I can’t help myself – I have to spend another week’s worth of digital ink on Baldur’s Gate 3. (This blog is spoiler-free, minus whatever the screenshots give away.) After 25 hours of play with the full version, I’m confident in saying Baldur’s Gate 3 is the masterpiece the hype suggested it would be. So
The Familiar and the New: Design Takeaways from Baldur’s Gate 3 Read More »