Year: 2015

Eric Swain External Sources

Challenge and Abstract Narrative in Adventure Games

I continue off a thread I left hanging last week by addressing adventure games need and use of challenge. Where last week I used the example of The Charnel House Trilogy as a game where easy puzzles and clear direction made of a good experience of playing the actor in a script. It challenges the dichotomy of the adventure game and the point-and-click subgenre specifically. Having my mind opened to this new lens, a way of viewing information that had already been bubbling around in my head, I looked at the other end of the scale. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

What is ‘Jazzpunk’?

This week we discussed Jazzpunk on the Moving Pixels Podcast. Jazzpunk was one of my favorite games of last year. It was a pleasure to talk about it on the podcast. Listening to the podcast again it made me appreciate how dense and how deep the game is. We talk for over an hour and we don’t manage to scrape the surface of the material. There’s plenty we didn’t get to dive into and what various elements say about the creators, video games and culture in general. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Adventure Games As Theater and ‘The Charnel House Trilogy’

My weekly PopMatters post is up on the newly redesigned site. I talk about The Charnel House Trilogy and the thing that stuck out to me the most about it. I’ve had this idea of point-and-click adventure games as a form of theater without the script given to the player ahead of time for a quite a while. The static nature of the frame of the point-and-click just makes the concept of performance to an outside observer more apparent than other game genres where the camera moves. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Critical Distance Confab – Minisode 2 – Interactive Fiction and Object Toys

Another month, our second minisode on the Critical Distance Confab. I really like this series. I like getting to just chat about games and this is a good outlet for trying to foster conversation. Win/win. As a result, I have been really excited for the past two weeks as I waited for the release date to finally come. The minisodes are still a work in progress. During the recording of this episode Zoya, while talking about CHYRZA, mentioned a piece I had just written about another of Kitty Horrorshow’s. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

The Ghost of ‘Murdered: Soul Suspect’

This time on the Moving Pixels Podcast we are looking at last year’s AAA 3D adventure game, Murdered: Soul Suspect. I think we had a pretty good discussion on the game. We cover a lot of ground, mostly non plot related, if you’re worried about us spoiling the mystery. Instead, we spent our time focused on the context surrounding the main plot. We look at the tone, the genre mash up, the investigative design, the quality of the writing, character functions and a nice sized chunk of a discussion at the end of the asylum, one really problematic element I didn’t notice the framing of the first time through. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Critical Distance Confab – The History of Everyday Games

This month I was joined on the Critical Distance Confab by Zoya Street. For those of you who might not know, he is the author of both Dreamcast Worlds and Delay: Paying Attention to Energy Mechanics as well as the editor-in-chief of the free e-zine Memory Insufficient. Interesting thing I noticed while editing this month’s interview: every single person I’ve interviewed so far has, at some point, apologized for rambling. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

‘The Cat Lady’ and the Terror of Loneliness

This time we podcasted about The Cat Lady, an indie adventure game from 2012 about suicide, death and living. This is not a game that gets a whole lot of talk about it. It not hard to see why. It came out during a year exploding with great indies of … (This post is lost beyond this point.) Moving Pixels Podcast: 'The Cat Lady' and the Terror of Loneliness » PopMatters "While I'm gone, think of a vegetable." | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Itch.io Spotlight Beginnings

A while back I tried to organize myself better and get to writing at least some criticism on a weekly basis. I tried a few things, the better of my ideas was a series called Indie Games Spotlight. Here I’d take a small game and write something about it. You … (This post is lost beyond this point.) Itch.io Spotlight: Sunset Spirit Steel by Kitty Horrorshow Itchio Spotlight: The Last Night by Tim & Adrien Soret Itchio Spotlight: Tuesday/404 Not Found Itch. | more

Eric Swain External Sources

Slaughtering a Sacred Cow, Revisiting ‘Grim Fandango’

I’m back to writing criticism in my weekly PopMatters’ posts, starting with an evaluation of Grim Fandango. I’d like to take this chance to expand upon one point that I didn’t really explore properly in the piece: why Grim Fandango gained the title as “greatest adventure game of all time” in the first place. I do mention that resonance and evaluation of the game was elevated over time thanks to the all the attention and praised heaped on it by its fans. | more