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More blogs!

A collection of friends, peers, and just stuff that I personally recommend! I'd like to keep up the chain of game crit having a space people know where to find. Click around!

faearie

Faea is a contemporary and big inspo to me: we both tend to write about game design as structure, and structure as atmosphere

• Faea's Monthly Journal: August '26

• Makai Toushi Sa・Ga for the WonderSwan Color

• MOTHER and Childhood Through Play

MOTHER feels like the story of a make-believe kids’ adventure in a world much bigger than them: it carries the feel of danger and the excitement that comes with it, but offsets any genuine threat by giving help that feels very gentle rather than overbearing, like being watched over by someone trusted who cares about you and your safety: someone who lets you stumble around and get bruised a little, but not let you the way of genuine harm; and the way the lack of difficulty often manifests through the ease of escaping a tight situation feels like having the security to lean on that person whenever needed.

Pang (birthbydrip)

Pang is great at drawing lines across rules, and identifying where they most strongly intersect

• Full Stack of Flapjacks: '80s Arcade Platformers

• Want to Learn Arcade Games? Start a Club!

• Tetris – The Absolute: The Grandmaster 2

Any alteration to a variable will trip up a player with no prior experience. Pieces that once fit in a window now slip out of one’s grasp, affixing themselves to awkward places in the stack and refusing to rotate on a late input. The sloping stack necessarily guides pieces towards the well.

HotPocketHPE

• For The Love of Terminals

• Long-Standing Problems of Monster Hunter as "Nature Simulator"

By the way, both HPE and the aforementioned Pang are apart of a podcast, if you want some listenable stuff

blazingwaters

Oh, and shoutouts Jason....surely, he's got some good resources on Kingdom Hearts and Pokemon, if you're into my coverage of those series

• Kingdom Hearts ReChain of Memories: To Lose Is To Find, To Find Is To Lose

max @ Forest of Illusion

• Big Walk

• The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening

A single instrument in an octet is brilliant enough. Why I’ve never done this is not a mystery to my hurried, always-anxious self - but the fact that you can listen to technically eight, feasibly six variations of the game’s literal swansong just by waltzing up to your final destination and playing however many of the instruments you have on you evokes the kind of fake-tactile material that video games and dreams are made of.

deemoncove

Deemon writes with dramatic gravitas, reminiscent of some of my more theatrical reviews.

• Living the Dream, and the art of self-expression

• A Book Called The Hundred Acre Wood, And What Kingdom Hearts Says About Change

Fiction cannot adapt, at least not the majority of it; its own nature is static, a fragment frozen in time that keeps playing out for as long as you remain and go back to. The pages rot, the movie players break with the VHS still inside, PCs and consoles go bust, but the stories are all the same.

STEEL on BONE

curse da goat

• Etrian Odyssey

Demon Souls

Dragon's Dogma 2

ScenicSystems

• Reclaiming the World in Boku no Natsuyami 2

But play, on its most fundamental level, is a revitalization of the world. Play beckons life back into these objects and reinterprets them as extensible surfaces. We can take a ball – not even a ball, but any round, bouncy object – and throw it around, pelt it into a hoop, make entire rule systems in our head: that ball is ours now. This sounds so trivial, but I think we forget about the fundamentals sometimes.

Ham's Hamsite

• Monster Hunter: Wilds (Or: The Difficulty Paradox)

• All Work And All Play

On some level I can see where the thought comes from. If I were writing dystopian fiction based on the modern world, I would include a worldbuilding note like "every videogame is a simulator meant to prepare you for labour and anything else is banned". Said out loud, the very notion of video games - something often associated with a very bland and straightforward ideal of 'recreation' - being built around things people do as a job just sounds dystopian. What punches a hole in this train of thought is that games have been asking you to 'do work' for decades.

Cloudrei @ starlightmusings

An artsy approach to video games, often intertwined with general multi-media.

• reflective musings – Final Fantasy VII

Glass @ demonedaway.net

• Ocarina of Time ...but this time I played the PC port

The world of Hyrule feels much smaller than it did when I was but a wee baby boy, but it still has this thick atmosphere about it. The countless hidden grottos that lay hidden beneath the surface, the morning sun rising again every four-ish minutes, the sound of Link's sword rattling on his back as he walks and his footsteps changing in pitch as he walks along all sorts of surfaces... all these little details are just so comfy to me. It's like coming back to a second home.



Shoutouts Critical Distance. they sure shoutout me
Rather than an individual blogger, they are a site dedicated to curating weekly lists of all the noteworthy video games journalism they were able to find. If you're like me, and hate algorithms - just wanna find concrete, static lists of articles - even just skimming their weekly pages can help you find someone to permanently stick into your bookmarks.






I'm also hosted on Warp Point!! It's a neat lil site, compiling a bunch of new-gen video game bloggers onto one organized place. You can finds lots of blogs with RSS, too!

By the way, if you wanna do something similar to this, here's the code to easily embed a button link to my site. Equally - if you're lost on how to make a standard button - just steal this code, and replace it with an image and URL that represents you...

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oh and here's my friend abby. she doesn't have a site but she wanted to be here