really happy to share my first piece for Unwinnable, looking back on Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE for its 10th anniversary. a game whose absurd premise and world (complimentary) take root thanks to a surprising commitment to diegesis unwinnable.com/2026/03/05/t...

really happy to share my first piece for Unwinnable, looking back on Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE for its 10th anniversary. a game whose absurd premise and world (complimentary) take root thanks to a surprising commitment to diegesis unwinnable.com/2026/03/05/t...

Would the Founding Fathers approve of Trump's war in Iran? I won't pretend to speak for them. But in January, I pretended to speak with them.

Harrison Ford’s lifetime achievement speech has done me in

wrote brief thoughts on why I've been drawn to game demos lately, along with also brief reviews of eight recent demos nivmsultan.com/demos1/

Love a good capsule review. @nivmsultan.bsky.social was generous enough to write eight. "Less a demo than an apocalyptic text" is service criticism.

wrote brief thoughts on why I've been drawn to game demos lately, along with also brief reviews of eight recent demos nivmsultan.com/demos1/

I have started curating a folder of essays and reviews that elicit the first reaction here — would definitely recommend

reviewed Banquet for Fools, an RPG that crafts its world, and your passage through it, with immense confidence in its vision and in you. made me think of D&D (and of Dragon's Dogma, which makes me think of D&D) in what games can accomplish when they trust you www.slantmagazine.com/games/banque...

reviewed Banquet for Fools, an RPG that crafts its world, and your passage through it, with immense confidence in its vision and in you. made me think of D&D (and of Dragon's Dogma, which makes me think of D&D) in what games can accomplish when they trust you www.slantmagazine.com/games/banque...

wrote about mitski www.vulture.com/article/revi...

so you got kratos. the character. the icon. the brand. kratos is black. "hes like tanned mediterranean" hes not real. he's voiced by two black dudes, mocapped by a black guy, when they want to sell Kratos as a power fantasy, as an action hero you buy video games to control: he is black.

oof. and: among the show's many cowardly decisions (ex. not casting Christopher Judge as Kratos), I remain baffled by them not just hiring the voice actors who happen to be exceptional TV actors. you had Richard Schiff. you had Jeremy Davies

Nic Reuben's not on here, but, man, every piece he writes is revitalizing www.theguardian.com/games/2026/f...

everyone's talking about Browt, but what about getting browt to the polls

Vampire Crawlers will be studied as a feat of brain chemistry manipulation

waiting for the Vinson Cunningham essay on the BAFTAs

the cleric to the wizard

if I see this at age 8-11 it completely changes my life

Nioh 3 once again proving that snow is the best thing in videogames

this game rules, but those close-up face comparisons always kill me. line up the faces and guess which one is enhanced, like guessing if the mystery drink is coke or pepsi

increasingly of the opinion that the sanest way to use this place is to revert to the ur social media. I am eating a sandwich, I am playing a videogame

side note: my biggest issue with these videogame concerts is their insistence on playing montages from the games. can we not just enjoy an orchestra? love to go to the theater to replicate the experience of watching a YouTube video

uhhhhh are Sean Hayes and David Cale doing Alan Wake

eons of humankind culminating in its most ambitious political project yet: what if everything were worse

I don’t know what does and doesn’t make a game a Metroidvania, but I do know that clearing out a chunk of Nioh 3’s map tickles my brain in the same way that Silksong did. we’re just meat and electricity, man

so, Nioh 3’s music is gorgeous

counting down to the discourse about whether new Castlevania is a Metroidvania

introducing my column about resistance in fiction for @aftermath.site. I’m calling it THE WORK aftermath.site/oscars-revol...

Carolyn is perhaps THE person to follow for editing curmudgeonry (complimentary). words mean things!

this is the good stuff (and more seriously, this is an excellent example of how fruitful it can be to meet a text on its terms -- lunacy meeting lunacy)

my wife played a song from Ori and told me to guess the game

one of those pieces where, while reading, you start to see the miniseries it’ll one day be adapted into www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

A really interesting and very bracingly honest bit from this interview: unwinnable.com/2026/02/11/a...

still reading through this -- it's exceptional -- but found this immediately urgent. thank you @autumn-wright.com, @austinwalker.bsky.social, as always

feeling annoyed by how there are writers who have been enshrined as very good and thus their writing is automatically treated as very good even when it is not very good

excuse one more — shuffle clocked all the way in today

hate to excerpt the kicker, but sometimes you have no choice

finally got to @kellymerka.bsky.social's piece on puppetry -- really lovely stuff (what wonderful things can happen when the right person gets 500 words on the right thing) unwinnable.com/2026/02/02/s...

looking for a slow-burn RPG to play as a B game while I go through Nioh 3. should it be: 1. Dragon Quest XI 2. SMT V 3. Octopath 2

very begrudgingly going to work

Steven on Mewgenics is, like Steven on anything, very good

really pissed that the Odyssey adaptation isn't historically accurate

a couple of thoughts for the morning: 1. while washing dishes yesterday, I daydreamt about Bad Bunny covering Songbird (it was very good) 2. developing a theory that the legacy of Dragon's Dogma 2 will prove to resemble that Brian Eno quote about The Velvet Underground

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again. #Pinks #ProudBlue

a handful of videogames is, relatively speaking, an extremely easy thing to give up. think about what people are forced to sacrifice at the hands of the weaponry (broadly defined) funded by that millionth open-world RPG you just have to get. what's a game, any game, next to that, man