KRITIQAL: selected essays, volume 1

A collection of 9 critical essays originally published on Kritiqal. All essays remain free to read, but purchasing this zine will help keep the site going. Includes epub, mobi, and pdf formats.

Contents

Anarcute, Tonight We Riot, and the Optics of Revolution

With so many games being conservative or loosely liberal, it's exciting to see one which openly embraces anarchist politics and centers around liberation from capitalist imperialism and the carceral state. So why, then, does the game itself feel tepid and predictable when its politics are so exciting?

The Loneliness of Heroism in Hyper Light Drifter

The idea of a drifter often carries a romance with it. A life spent traveling, moving freely through the world, not held down by the demands of modern life. At some point, especially during adolescence, I think we all aspire to be drifters, to liberate our bodies from a particular place. But the Hyper Light Drifter is more restrained than ever.

Anodyne 2: Return to Dust is human-made magic

Games can often feel like some kind of sorcery, impossibly complex and created by people with inhuman ability. But they’re just people. Highly talented people, but still. Anodyne 2 is not sorcery, but it is a kind of magic, an ordinary magic that is all the more exceptional because of it.

Signs of the Sojourner and the limits of conversation systems

Had Signs of the Sojourner allowed the player to fail without having the door slammed in their face, it would be easier to forgive some of the flatness present in its card system or the brevity of its script. But by framing conversations as games to be won without anticipating how often they’d be lost, huge chunks of the game become sequences of frustrating nonsequiturs.

Wandersong and the Major Arcana

Wandersong may not reference tarot cards directly, but its thematic questions are such that they map almost too well to be purely circumstantial. Whether you believe tarot cards hold any spiritual power or are merely a useful tool for introspection, I hope this analysis helps you appreciate how cleverly Wandersong employs and subverts archetypes that have existed for generations, and, more broadly, how tarot cards can be used to explore narrative and the act of interpretation.

Pathologic 2 challenges what it means to be a player

Pathologic 2 is a game that is fundamentally about rejecting the expectation of amusement, of player centrality, and of the ability to shallowly strip-mine the game for content. From the beginning, the player is told that Artemy’s fate is doomed, that they cannot save everyone, and that things will happen outside their control and beyond their view. The player cannot “win” so much as they can continue to exist.

Every civilization's treasure is Lara Croft's trash

Rise of the Tomb Raider never reconciles where the line between archeology and blatant theft actually lies. Between her many firefights, Lara spends most of her time picking through garbage, opening chests, and murdering endangered species, all in the name of exploration. But as is always the case with colonialism, what Lara is after is not really answers or the objects themselves, it’s money for a new gun upgrade and a bigger bag for furs.

Can Tacoma have a happy ending?

With Tacoma, it begins to feel like naive optimism might be getting in the way of the message that actually needs to be heard. Unions and activists groups can change the world, it is not just a matter of working together that is needed for these systems to change. To borrow from father Marx, “there are no happy endings under capitalism.”

Mutazione's small-town tragedies

Mutazione imagines a beautiful and complex life founded on small, self-sustaining community and a respect for the natural world. It is charming and warm but also plain about the challenges of sustaining a community like this. It reckons with the contradictions of colonialist greed and asks if things couldn’t be rebuilt without hierarchies and violence.