By Omar Elaasar Sufficiently Human’s latest guest post comes to us from Chicago-based writer, artist, video producer, and Editor-in-Chief of clickbliss.net , Omar Elaasar. You can find him him on Twitter, Medium and YouTube as @siegarettes. In this piece, Elaasar discusses the aesthetic and expressive potential of drawing from theater, particularly the set and stage, in […]
It’s about time I addressed this as an essay. When I mean to refer to a game’s internal consistency, logic—or lack thereof—I say “(in)coherence.” When I mean to refer to the unification of a game’s moving parts—or lack thereof—I say “(in)coherence.”
I’ve been wondering about genre labels like “first-person action-adventure procedural puzzle game with platforming elements” for some time now. I’ve been wondering if they describe anything in particular anymore. I’ve been wondering for some time now what a platform does for a videogame that’s different from what, say, parataxis, does for verse. I don’t mean […]
[This piece contains heavy spoilers!] It would feel like a categorical mistake to focus on SURREALISTa as a “puzzle platformer.” Strictly speaking, it contains both the ludic devices of puzzle-solving and platforming, and so one inclined to focus on its value as a game may be tempted to lavish attention on these qualities. But—and I […]
At the beginning of Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde, art historian Susan Best discusses her methodology for tackling the “neglected” area of subjective experience in art criticism, writing, “Assuming the custodianship of feeling in this fashion might seem inevitable or even retrograde given the traditional alignment of femininity with feeling and emotion as […]
By Brian Crimmins Sufficiently Human’s latest guest post comes to us from Brian Crimmins, a game critic focusing primarily on older Japanese games. You can check out more of his work at Unwinnable, Hardcore Gaming 101, and most frequently at Indie Haven. You can also read more of his reviews over at his blog, […]
[TW: This piece describes themes of suicidality, extreme loneliness and depression, and insensitive misuse of pronouns.] This short story is a stylized description of a playthrough of eoeoeo344’s sci-fi Ren’Py visual novel, The Midas Project. In this version, Midas is lonely. Midas is the sum total of all human knowledge, ingenuity and innovation. This inorganic […]
By Lulu Blue Sufficiently Human’s latest guest post comes to us from game designer, critic, musician and illustrator, Lulu Blue. In this essay, Blue brings their concise yet powerful insights to bear on the surprising humanity to be found in the world of Majora’s Mask, and the lasting impact the game had on them as […]
In this, our seventh episode, Zolani and I have a late-night chat about a diverse handful of recently-released small games, ranging from the surreal and poetic to the more familiar but still pretty surreal and kind of terrifying. We discuss the intersection of games with poetry, and Zolani provides us with a rousing dramatic reading […]
[TW: This piece discusses death, violence and fear of the sea.] I was convinced, the first time I fired up my Ecco the Dolphin ROM on my SEGA emulator, that the whole of the game consisted of the first screen in Home Bay. Perhaps it was my own bias toward free-form experimental games, but for […]