2015 was a strange and not altogether good year for games (among other things). But, if nothing else, it offered up so many great little gems that I had to stop myself from letting this year’s roundup grow to unmanageable proportions.
[TW: This piece contains a reference to suicide and self-harm. Also, spoilers abound as always.] Homesickened is a cruel and beautiful game. In it, the player must embody the fixed, first-person role of an unnamed protagonist visiting their hometown for the first time in what I interpret to be a long time. The player begins with a […]
“All it takes is just a little change of perspective and you begin to see a whole new world.” -Bob Ross, The Joy of Painting The much-reported Twitch stream marathon of legendary PBS show, The Joy of Painting, introduced the perm, dulcet tones and painting expertise of Bob Ross to a new and perhaps unlikely […]
[TW: This piece discusses death, trauma, claustrophobia, panic and anxiety.] There’s this episode of The Twilight Zone called “The Hitch-hiker” from 1960 in which a woman named Nan Adams is driving from New York to California. At the beginning of the episode, a kindly mechanic is jacking her tire, making small talk, and instructing her […]
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, […]