malvasia bianca

Some notes on Apple Arcade games that I’ve played: Guildlings This is super good. The writing is charming and funny and moving, but also there’s really interesting rethinking of what it means to be an RPG. Directly addressing the “hero who saves the world” trope; rethinking combat / spell mechanics in interesting ways. And managing […]

Gorogoa felt right to me from the very beginning, from this screen that begins the game:     The picture in the window is lovely, drawn with care; but look at the texture and slightly off-white color of the paper that makes up the boundary of the screen, and look at the untextured white of […]

Monument Valley 2 is basically just what you would expect from a Monument Valley sequel, with the added twist that the second character that they’ve added to it has the most amazingly charming movement animation that I’ve ever seen. I could try to go on about it for hundreds of words, but ultimately: if you […]

My basic takeaway from Tengami is that it seems that Monument Valley is part of a genre, that that’s a good thing, but also that Monument Valley is quite impressive. Tengami really is a pretty game, the puzzles are fine, and the atmosphere is relaxing. But it just didn’t come together quite as well for […]

Earlier this summer, I stopped my playthrough of BioShock because, frankly, I was getting angry at the game. I didn’t want to spend my time going through grandiose facilely unreflective morality plays: I wanted to play games that were more closely crafted. I’d seen screenshots of Monument Valley and heard good things about it: I […]

After my unpleasant experience with System Shock 2, I moved on to BioShock. I wasn’t worried that I might have the same problems with BioShock that I had with System Shock 2: I remembered from my prior experience that BioShock took the Easy difficulty setting seriously (enough so that I was thinking of trying Normal […]