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Paradigm Shift: On Finally Getting Past Final Fantasy XIII-2

This project has been such a strange experience for me. I feel my relationships with these games and with the rest of the Final Fantasy franchise constantly shifting as I learn more, do more reading, finish more of the core games I’ve decided to take a look at. My reaction to the misogyny in Final Fantasy XV no longer feels like just some vague feeling of unease at the way certain characters were…

I wanna talk about penguin colony

I wanna talk about Penguin Colony. Let’s talk about Penguin Colony. It’s the new game from Origame Digital (Umurangi Generation) and Fellow Traveller (1000xResist, etc.) and it’s a Lovecraftian tale reimagined, where you are a penguin waddling through the Antarctic wastes (your home) as you watch people who are not from Antarctica—nazis, namely—lose it and freeze to death (if they’re lucky) as…

I just want people to give a shit

I’ve been an anarchist since I was a sophomore in high school, so I am fairly well-acquainted with people not sharing my politics, broadly or specifically. But the thing that bothers me more than whether or not someone is ideologically aligned with me is whether or not motherfuckers can be bothered to care. I know I can’t make anyone give a shit about something but Jesus Christ, dude, it’s been…

Coming soon: the ABCs of Ludic Anarchism

Hey y’all. I’ve been feeling pretty down lately just with the state of the world and everything going on. I’ve also felt kind of dissatisfied with the work I’ve been doing and my contributions to discourse overall. The short version of it is really just trying to reckon with how my work (and criticism more broadly) gets subsumed by capitalism, how everything is just kind of sucked back up into…

Review: Zero Parades (For Dead Spies)

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. —Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?“ Repetition and first time, but also repetition and…

Review: Mixtape

I don’t like Mixtape (Beethoven and Dinosaur, 2026). I am going to be a hater in this review. If that’s not something you’re looking for, I have good news! Quite a few other critics adored this game. IGN’s Simon Cardy gave it a 10/10. Game Informer’s Charles Harte gave it a 9. Over at GamesRadar+, Rollin Bishop gave the game four stars, calling it a “nostalgic, vibes-based experience set to a…

First Impressions: Last Flag

As I mentioned in my Marathon review I am not actually a very big PVP person, despite earning a PVP-related title in Destiny 2 and having spent time in games like The Finals, Apex Legends and, of course, Fortnite. But when I was younger and I was a lot more locked into the so-called Valve ecosystem of games, I did play quite a bit of Team Fortress 2. Ever since seeing the Last Flag (Night Street…

Marathon: The First Week

My relationship to live service games has been almost exclusively defined by Bungie. Yes, I’ve played the other “classics” of the category, like Fortnite, PUBG, Apex Legends, The Finals and so on. But in those games I was a dilettante, a tourist, someone who popped in to see what all the fuss was about and, upon not getting it, left the scene immediately. I’m not a veteran of Overwatch or League…

Marathon Has the Style, but Does It Have Any Substance?

This weekend, after a tumultuous handful of years in development including a very rocky alpha period, hefty allegations of stolen artwork, multiple delays and repeated layoffs, Runners will finally get to play Bungie’s first new title in almost a decade: Marathon. It’s a hybrid PVPVE extraction shooter where players will have to use more than just raw firepower to navigate the hostile world of…

First Impressions: Zero Parades (For Dead Spies)

For the first time in my games critic career I have to put a possible conflict of interest disclaimer here before the rest of the post: I received early access to the Steam Next Fest demo code for Zero Parades: For Dead Spies. I am also friends with a worker at ZA/UM. This friendship has likely unavoidably colored my thoughts about the studio and everything that has gone on around it since 2022…

Harvestella Review: Sometimes the best gourmet meals are the simplest dishes

I don’t know what it was about the height of the pandemic that caused everyone to suddenly get invested in the culinary arts, but it was around the time that we were all sheltering in place that I started watching cooking shows in earnest. Before the pandemic I dabbled, of course; the Bon Appetit channel was a favorite of mine until it turned out that Condé Nast was being predictably Condé Nast…

I'm perfectly content just beating the first layer of Animal Well

After somewhere in the area of 16 hours, I have beaten Animal Well (Shared Memory/Bigmode 2024. And by this I mean: I have beaten the first of four layers of Animal Well: the vanquishing of the Manticore and the restoration of peace to the world of the well. If I wanted to, I could now focus on completing any of the other three layers, including opening all the rooms and discovering all the eggs;…

Ruminations on Skate Story

There is something inherently anarchic about skateboarding. For all that the world has done to try to mold it into an organized sport for Olympic prestige and major sponsorship deals, it has largely remained unchanged at its core: pushing a board around places you’re not supposed to go. I was devastated when I figured out I didn’t have the drive for skating as a young kid. I couldn’t do an ollie…

Take a breather with these short indie experiences

The world fucking sucks right now, and while escapism has never been something we at No Escape support (it’s in the name, I guess) sometimes it’s nice to take a moment with a meditative experience, take some deep breaths, and re-center yourself for the fight ahead. Here are some indie titles we saw on Itch that might help you do that. dazOS_, by Daniel Moreno This is a clicker game, and like…

Searching for Ghosts in Pacific Drive

Something flashes in my periphery. Another pneumatic dropbox. My storage containers are getting kind of full, but there’s always a chance something interesting is in one of these dropboxes. I mechanically put my car in park as I’ve done multiple thousands of times before and head over to it. I look inside the tube. Some scrap metal, duct tape, and a note. Paydirt, I thought. It’s the note I’m…

A Game About Chicken Fillet Rolls Hits Emotionally—And In The Stomach

We don’t have chicken fillet rolls in the United States—at least, there isn’t a deli counter within 50 miles of me who’s ever heard of such a thing. Like another Irish innovation, the similarly-elusive-in-the-US spice bag, the chicken fillet roll makes an obscene amount of sense once you’ve heard about it even once: take a baguette and fill it with the fried chicken of your choice, slap on some…

Part 1.8: A sidebar about Kingdom Hearts 3 and 4

I was watching Patrick H. Willems’ latest video on the radical possibilities of letting shit end and I got hit with a brainwave that sent me back to the end of 2019 and my first “Game of” article for the site, which “rewarded” Kingdom Hearts III for being “an incredibly cynical game, devoid of joy and a raison d’être” and “an attempt to cash in on nearly 15 years of nostalgia and speculation,…

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