Year: 2013

Eric Swain External Sources

Reviews For November/December

In this time of reflection and end of year lists, I’m going to take a moment to reflect instead on the games I wrote reviews for in the past two months. I’m doing it early because PopMatters is on hiatus until the new year and the rest of the reviews I have lined up will go up then. What is there left to say about the PSN downloadable title Rain? No, seriously what is there left to say. I was struggling to fill out the word count on this one. On a purely aesthetics level, the game is a wonder to look at. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

The Indifference of ‘Kentucky Route Zero’ to the Platonic Ideal of Video Games

My last post of the year went up on PopMatters today. This is one of those posts that started from a kernal of an idea and in the process of writing it sort of blossomed out as I was writing. I wanted to end the year on a post of Kentucky Route Zero and was trying to figure out a way to approach it. The game just does things so differently than any other game I’ve ever played and not in obvious ways either. Its differences are subtle and spawn from a more fundamental place. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Baiting the Hook

Didn’t realize my PopMatters post went up today until I saw someone else recommending it to Critical Distance. I wanted to write something about Rain after I finished my review of it. It’s not a game many or really anybody talked about and for some reason I felt like somebody should. But I didn’t have anything to say. It’s visually evocative and nicely constructed in places, but there isn’t much else to say. In a way this is my attempt at purging the game from my mind. | more

Eric Swain Game Essays

Memoria Review

December 11, 2013 | Filed under: Game Essays, Recent Posts and tagged with: Memoria, Review This review has quite a storied history. I accepted the game for review from a PR contact with the purpose that it would go up on PopMatters. I didn’t know that someone else was already doing the game and had a review in the pipeline. So began my trek to find this review a home. After a number of dead ends, one editor said he’d look into it, though by that time it was too late to be paid for. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Beyond the Point-and-Click Adventure

We finally get around to talking about David Cages latest piece, Beyond: Two Souls, on the Moving Pixels podcast. I’m going to admit right off the bat that I perhaps harp on the problems brought up by the anachronic storytelling of Beyond a bit too much in our discussion, but there are just so many issues that keep popping up because of it. I liked Beyond, but I wanted to like it even more than I did. The pieces where there for a great whole, but they were arranged poorly and execution matters more than the ideas at play. | more

Eric Swain Thoughts

The Revolution is Over

December 8, 2013 | Filed under: Recent Posts, Thoughts and tagged with: Indie Game, VGX Ignore the title. I suck at titles. Last night Spike’s VGX awards ceremony was broadcast all over the internet and as expected it was the cultural travesty we’ve all come to expect from it. I’m not really interested in how they can remedy the situation and fix the awards show, instead I want to use it to point at a larger trend that seems to be taking place this year. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

‘Memoria’: Stories and Truth

For my Thanksgiving week column, I decided to go back and write about Memoria. I don’t feel like I’ve done the game justice here. I really liked it and I really would like others to share in my joy. Daedalic Entertainment’s output and I have not really gotten along. For all the praise they seem to get all I see are mediocre to downright awful point and click adventure games. Given the size of their output I can only assume they have multiple teams and that Memoria was made by a different team than Deponia, A New Beginning and The Night of the Rabbit. | more

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Neon Noir Fairy Tales

The next episode of the Moving Pixels podcast, the first in what is sure to be a series, discussing The Wolf Among Us. I am an unabashed Fables fan. I spend much of the time on the podcast resisting the urge to spew continuity all over the place. The angle of Telltale has chosen to work with the subject matter has so much to work with and benefits greatly if you know the details about the world. And from what my fellow podcasts have said, it works even if you don’t know the world that much. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

The Anachronic Mixup of ‘Beyond: Two Souls”

It’s a day late, but my post discussing Beyond: Two Souls is up on PopMatters. I wanted to expand upon a point I made in my review of the game, which was the anachronic nature of the game’s presentation. David Cage decided that it would be a good idea to present the story of this woman’s life out of order for some reason. At the end, an in-game fictional excuse is given for why the game is presented as it is, but it doesn’t matter as it doesn’t work in the real world with me as an audience member experiencing it. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Playing the Gigolo: ‘Killer is Dead’ Changes the Pace of the Game

I want to start out by saying I chose neither the title nor the picture for the Killer is Dead piece. I am terrible at titles and sometimes leave it up to editors to come up with them for me. You can see what I put in the title field in the back end in the URL. There’s a lot of craziness going on in Killer is Dead, which I guess is standard for a Suda 51 game. But it does something I wish more action games would do. It gives the player an area to play taking a break. | more