malvasia bianca

If I’d played Trauma before Dominique Pamplemousse, I’d probably have ended up writing the same blog post, just about a different game. Because Trauma is also a very good game, and one that impresses me in a way that I wish I didn’t find so out-of-the-ordinary: it’s one person’s singular vision, it’s very compelling, it’s […]

I’d been a little curious about Versu ever since it came out, and a talk I heard at GDC this year did nothing to reduce my enthusiasm. So I figured I’d try it out on the plane ride to Japan. Unfortunately, there was a flaw in my plan: when I downloaded the game, I realized […]

The iPad version of Mirror’s Edge seemed like a pleasant enough game: mostly good enough mechanics (albeit not ones that particularly excited me), good level design. I played through it once and then went through the first few levels again trying to get speed runs. Having said that, there was one mechanic that I didn’t […]

It’s been a month since I got back from Japan, and I still haven’t written about my trip here! Which isn’t a sign that it wasn’t a great trip—it was, I’m very glad we went. That silence is instead more a sign that I’m not a travel blogger; it’s also a sign that I’ve been […]

I can’t say that I understood Starbloom. It’s nice enough to look at and to listen to; there’s a bit of gameplay there, but that gameplay didn’t grab me in terms of the game’s explicit goals. (Either in thinking about how to approach those goals or in the mechanics of carrying out that approach.) Which […]

When I first heard about Dominique Pamplemousse (or, to use its full title, Dominique Pamplemousse in “It’s All Over Once The Fat Lady Sings!”), it sounded charming: what’s not to like about a claymation musical adventure game? Even so, I was blown away how much I cared about the finished product. And I wasn’t the […]

One of the better talks I went to at the first GDC I attended was by Randy Smith, so I was curious about the studio he co-founded. Unfortunately, their first game didn’t grab me; their second game, Waking Mars, sounded like it might have mechanics that were a bit more to my taste, so while […]

I played The Dreamhold on the plane ride to Japan. I guess these days the genre label that the game fits within (or the mechanics label—I’m not entirely at peace with how the term “genre” is used with games) is “parser-based interactive fiction”? Which is something I played a lot when I was growing up; […]