We’re back with another somewhat regular episode of Unlimited Rail Works! Sans John, Rose has been rewatching some isekai of yore, Maverick has been rocking with Science Saru, and Elvie checked out the retro Red River while revisiting some old faves.

Our theme song is by Kirsten Carey, who can be found at @kircarey.bsky.social!

Send questions to podcast@gamesline.net, with a subject denoting it’s for URW!

The post Unlimited Rail Works Episode 142: Summer Vacation is Over appeared first on Gamesline.

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Crystal, Lily, and Rose discuss Bungie West’s Oni, a 2001 third-person brawler-shooter with intense difficulty, intricate controls, and anime-inspired artwork. Please note that this is a full-spoilers episode.

Next month’s Game Club will be about Castlevania: Lament of Innocence!

If you like this Game Club format, let us know! You can voice your feedback and suggestions at our our Discord channel gamesline.chat or our email podcast@gamesline.net!

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Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Edited by Crystal

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 106: Oni Game Club appeared first on Gamesline.

Maverick went to Anime NYC, and he had a nice time all-around! However, he did have some thoughts about the overall evolution of conventions in a more corporate age. Is it possible to still find real connections while being so heavily advertised to? Plus, we all love the Major and Ghost in the Shell, Rose needs an intervention on isekai, and John’s sinking deeper into Digimon.

Our theme song is by Kirsten Carey, who can be found at @kircarey.bsky.social!

Send questions to podcast@gamesline.net, with a subject denoting it’s for URW!

The post Unlimited Rail Works Episode 141: Da Anime of New Yawk Baybee!! appeared first on Gamesline.

In a sea of games showcasing technological advancement through facial pores and scope creep, this was a surrealist Shoot ‘em Up where you watch all your millions of projectiles bounce around and collide with complex enemies in high-definition space. It was incredibly impressive to see, and had me cheering at what people so often call “next-gen” tech for one of the first few times in my life. 

It’s not the hardest game, nor is it the most interestingly unique mechanical sandbox ever created. At the same time, however, I was consistently drawn in by the mystique the game gradually unwound without ever fully answering. Returnal isn’t a game you solve; it’s an experience you meditate on and engage with as you explore its hostile, impossible alien architecture.

All this prologue is to say that when Saros was unveiled last year, and seemed to be a more mechanically nuanced successor to Returnal, I was incredibly excited! Returnal with parrying, shields, and The King in Yellow? Hell yeah sister, pass me some of that! Expanding upon the established baseline with more dynamic environments and a more considered meta progression seemed like one of the most straightforward slam dunks in gaming.

Unfortunately, even though it succeeds at so many of its goals, Saros disappoints specifically because of how safe it feels, a concept completely antithetical to the uniqueness of its predecessor. 

Saros takes place in a future where a hyper capitalist Earth ruled by Mega Corporations has ventured out to colonize and pillage the rest of the known universe. You play as Arjun Devraj, an enforcer for the Soltari Corporation who’s been sent out to investigate three waves of colonists and research teams that have gone missing on a mysterious planet named Carcosa (one has to assume that The King in Yellow doesn’t exist in this world, or else the old adage about the Torment Nexus has held true). Upon arriving, Arjun and his team quickly realize that the situation is far more dire than they could have imagined, as they face down an ever-changing landscape, horrifying bio-mechanical creatures, and eldritch forces corrupting their bodies and minds. 

If you’ve never read The King in Yellow (which you really should), Saros will probably come across as an incredibly original game, much in the way Returnal’s fooling around with cosmic horror felt fresh and bold. If you have read it, or anything directly inspired by it, you can kind of guess the broad strokes of where Saros’ story will go. There’s corruption, confusion, gestures towards romance and time foolery, so on and so forth.

As one intimately familiar with surrealist horror, The King in Yellow has always stood out to me as a particularly influential work. Yes, of course, the concepts of corruption and paranoia, alongside pivots towards breezier themes, can be found in countless works throughout history. Its specific portrayal of an almost “frame narrative” conceit with its titular play feels so astounding for its time, and has clearly influenced nearly everything like it that’s come after. Think of every creepypasta about a cursed movie, something like The Ring, cursed object narratives; they all take concepts and executions directly from the 1895 collection. It was an incredible breakout hit, and at the time there just wasn’t much like The King in Yellow.

However, it is no longer 1895, and we have access to pretty much every successor you could dream of in the far flung future of 2026, which hurts Saros in ways Returnal never quite had to deal with. 

Returnal is ultimately a story about trauma and loss, and it tells this story not through traditional cutscenes, but with first-person exploration sequences through mundane locations that instantly feel out of place in its setting of an overgrown alien world. Finding a contemporary and perfectly intact house in the middle of the wilderness, going in to slowly explore and experience things in a different perspective…it hits all of my strikezones as someone who pops off at all those times NieR suddenly becomes an isometric Zelda game. The spaceman is fantastic as well, a featureless observer stalking you through the world, adding mystique and ever more questions; effective for a game with exactly one character.

Saros delivers its take on the Returnal narrative quirks via gradually unlocked sequences where you slowly walk through surrealist contemporary environments with light visual storytelling (things like magazines with keywords, or clubs named “The Yellow Club”). The perspective doesn’t shift from the standard third-person method of play, instead slowing you to a crawl as you make your way through alleyways, hotel rooms, and apartments. It all comes across as incredibly banal; something you could find in literally any other big budget game.

Coupled with this, Arjun is not alone on his foray into Carcosa, and works alongside several Soltari employees who he has the option to talk to in between the exploratory runs into the mechanical wastes. These conversations are delivered in the classic style of stilted one-off conversations where rhetoric and quotations are spouted off, and the only back and forth dialogue is half-hearted “stay safe out there”s. Though I appreciate a different direction from the isolation of Returnal, where main character Selene only has herself to talk to (both literally and figuratively), Arjun’s aping of the static NPC interactions from the Horizons and Ghost of Tsushimas of the world doesn’t quite fit for a work so ostensibly absurdist.

But the story is such a minor part of both Returnal and Saros that it feels secondary to the real meat of the experience: its run-based roguelike center. If you played Returnal, you know exactly how Saros is structured. You enter a biome, explore along a Metroid Prime-esque map with side rooms and optional challenges that serve to bolster you with artifacts that can modify your play style, randomized variants of a few different guns, and, if you’re lucky, base stat upgrades that make you stronger as you go on.

To repeat myself: if you’ve played Returnal, you know exactly how Saros is structured. This isn’t just a hit on the same old rocky space Giger-inspired world, but that so many of the game’s procedurally generated rooms are almost 1:1 copies of several found in Returnal. There were countless times where I would walk into a ramped room and immediately flash back to fighting my way through as Selene, letting me predict what enemies will spawn and where with ease. On the surface, this feeds into some ludonarrative resonance with the mystique of just how many times Arjun has been experiencing his cycle of death and rebirth and how much his body remembers versus his mind. But, from a tangible gameplay perspective, it makes me realize just how little Saros has meaningfully evolved from its predecessor.

Which isn’t helped by an inherited problem also suffered in Returnal; rocky ruined terrain is great for making a wide open space a video game takes place in, but it’s not exactly super compelling to look at. The unique biomes in Returnal were a desert, a mechanical forest, and an underwater grotto; the pivot from grey to red to blue worked reasonably well for keeping things fresh. Saros, unfortunately, is less inventive with its biomes, and thwarts its own attempts at colorization. 

The first area of the game is a ruined marble palace on cliffs with lots of red flora peppered around. When you initiate one of the game’s core mechanics (“the eclipse”) to progress further into the level, everything is immediately subdued into a brownish-yellow sludge that removes all pastoral vibrancy. This goes for the areas with more muted colors as well: a mechanical mine glows more sinisterly yellow, a swamp becomes even more brown and yucky, the sea becomes orange and…you get the picture. 

Once again, in terms of thematic resonance this is a great mechanical execution—we see Arjun accept power that dulls the world around him as a means of fitting the role he must—but as players we also unfortunately live in a world of brown and gray sludge games literally everywhere since the advent of 3D titles. Coupled with the level design familiarity for players of Returnal, Saros falls into one of the worst pitfalls of modern big-budget gaming: an experience that quickly becomes samey and uninteresting.

Which is a shame, because a lot has been tangibly improved from Returnal. You no longer rely entirely on the modern action classic of dodging for survival, since Arjun has a shield that allows him to absorb most projectiles (while charging his weapons), and a parry that can be used to negate several attacks. This allows the gameplay to feel more interesting than Returnal in terms of how you engage with each encounter, without sacrificing the speed and impact of what you can do. There’s an illusion in games that shields go hand in hand with a slower and more methodical method of play, but realistically, shields should allow a player to execute on ideas with a speed otherwise not afforded. The best offense is a good defense, as they say.

I also appreciated the guns a lot more than Returnal’s arsenal, though much of it feels comparatively streamlined. You still have your shotguns, pistols, and assault rifles, but the new chakrams and crossbows feel really good to fool around with. Instead of a set of 8 or so traits on a weapon, Saros opts to create 3 core variants of each weapon, with two different sets of passives slotted on top. My favorite of these traits auto-fired my bullets directly at any enemy nearby, letting me focus on dodging and parrying over actually aiming. The way Saros is about quicker levels you deliberately choose to go to rather than the “One Big Run” format of Returnal means that having a greater variety of guns that may prove potentially useful compared to a deluge of Rotgland Lobbers with useless defensive modifiers is incredibly welcome. There are definitely still bad guns, but the ratio of good to bad, and how fast you’ll get them, changes the game substantially. 

Now, more divisively, I have to get into my Rosarie Rant that may or may not alienate you, the reader.

To me, Returnal was an absurdly easy game. I defeated almost every boss on my first attempt, and much of my time spent in the game was on the more repeatable post-launch DLC tower and co-op with friends. That first foray of exploration was intriguing and intoxicating, but it was also over in about 8 hours (with 6 extra for trophy cleanup). There wasn’t much meta-progression, and a lack of modular difficulty options meant I was left pining for the scary Shmup experience that could have been.

Saros is just as easy, if not even easier than Returnal, and the two features I was pining for have done little to mitigate this. 

The improved meta-progression allows you to become significantly stronger as you continue to play the game, meaning that players who are struggling with specific breakpoints can almost “grind” their ways out of frustration, but very little has a meaningful engagement with how you play the game beyond this. When I think of a game like Hades—one that inspires you to progress through interacting with different weapons, different passives, and building up your home base—I can see how people dump hour after hour into such an experience, because things feel increasingly different over time. Saros doesn’t create a meaningfully different experience with its progression, it just makes an easier one.

On the flip side (or perhaps, alongside), the modular difficulty options and sliders we’ve come to see in games like The Last of Us Part II or Doom: The Dark Ages are here in the form of Carcosan modifiers. These modifiers let you make your experience even easier, or more difficult. For the most part, there’s no deep or tangible reward to this, unlike something like the Tales of series’ encouragement to crank up the difficulty while grinding for better drops. There’s a balancing act of sorts where you aren’t allowed to launch into a run if you’ve made the game too easy, but you aren’t really getting anything out of making the game harder other than personal satisfaction.

This would be fine if the imposed challenges were actually interesting, but in practice they’re just making Arjun more fragile, or your enemies beefier. There are a couple more interesting limiters like losing weapons and passives over the course of your run, but those only went so far. I’m glad they tried more with Saros, but it really feels like their focus wasn’t on making unique experiences for players interested in an easier or harder time, but rather catering specifically to a mass production ideal of players. On the surface, modular features for difficulty seem like a no brainer, but in practice, you lose out on the curation of level design and tuning that’s had people trying to 1cc their favorite shmups for decades.

Another problem I have with Saros is, dear God I’m going to say it:

I don’t care about angry men.

I’ve been beating the drum of how dull and insipid the worst parts of Sony’s catalogue have been for the last decade or so, and it just seems to get worse every year. God of War does a “character redemption” by turning Kratos from a parodical avatar of rage into the realistic avatar of rage; your dad. The Last of Us Part II couldn’t stop its cast of mostly female characters from fixating on the past and present futures created by angry men. Ghost of Tsushima is almost entirely about angry men getting mad at you, and Ghost of Yotei threw in your brother just in case you thought you were finally free. Indeed, it’s almost harder to name a Sony game that doesn’t have the stereotypical rage of a masculine force as a major theme, and Saros is no exception. 

Arjun is an interesting character for sure, and gradually eking out this backstory, and the absurd directions things take on the larger scale, has a degree of intrigue to it. Compared to Returnal though? A story about cycles of maternal abuse and self-reflection? Hearing about a guy who’s upset he fumbled his ex-wife is not exactly the most compelling narrative experience for me, especially when it’s wrapped up in the absurdity of a Lovecraftian draping. I get it, a lot of the creatives behind this game are men, and the same goes for much of the medium of game design, as the machinations of Patriarchy and its intersections with Capital collide to consistently exile women from most things. That said, however, was there really nothing more interesting you could have Rahul Kohli do than yell about how he needs to find his ex-wife? Like, that’s the depth of the emotional nuance we get out of him for 95% of the game? 

At the end of the day, the most damning thing I can say about Saros is that you could find its experience almost anywhere. Its blend of high budget and roguelike is still unique, and if you didn’t pick up Returnal, it’s probably still a very distinct experience in a lot of ways compared to the slurry of genericism you’ll find elsewhere in the AAA gaming space. I expected more though, and I will continue to expect more. Housemarque has consistently shown with games like Resogun and Super Stardust that they have the shmup chops and technical know-how to make something really interesting. Seeing something truly compelling like Returnal become just like everything else in its sequel is an unfortunate disappointment. 

The post Don’t Stare at the Sun Too Long – Saros (PS5) Review appeared first on Gamesline.

I’m not going to say “back again at last” or anything like that.

The crew finally had time to get back on the mic and looked at the ever enjoyable seasonal charts of upcoming anime! Will you follow the “Insipid Prince”? “The Villager of 999”? Or will you finally realize that “Oh Boy, Was I Wrong About Her”?

Our theme song is by Kirsten Carey, who can be found at @kircarey.bsky.social!

Send questions to podcast@gamesline.net, with a subject denoting it’s for URW!

The post Unlimited Rail Works Episode 140: Summer Season 2026 appeared first on Gamesline.

John and Rose are back to talk about the week in gaming. This week, John’s been playing Touhou: Mystia’s Izakaya and Dangeresque: The Roomisode Triungulate. Rose continues to play Mina The Hollower alongside Wuthering Waves, Zero Parades for Dead Spies, and the Elden Ring Convergence mod. In the news they go over the chaos around Love and Deepspace‘s new character drop and the Sony disc manufacturing situation.

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on social media @gamesline.net, John, and Rose.

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, and tell a friend about the show!

If you want to send in questions, send them to our email podcast@gamesline.net!

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Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Edited by Lorelai

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 97: The Mega Powers Unite appeared first on Gamesline.

The trailer shows a continuing focus on the “one camera” cinematographic presentation that Santa Monica Studios has been consistently proud of. Sequences seamlessly transition from gameplay, to quick time events, to minute-long cutscenes. This was one of the most talked about aspects of the 2018 game’s design, commonly referenced with the words “immersion”, “scale”, or “consistent”. This approach mostly works with the presentation of the game as a road trip-esque trek across a fantastical Scandinavia, mainly because Kratos as a character is built like a tank you literally could not stop. You don’t need to worry about time’s passage, fatigue, or moments of enforced rest when your character is the quintessential angry guy who’s going to rush his way through every conversation and situation.

It works a little less when you’re a woman who is alternating between resurrection, doing air combos on plant monsters, stumbling down hallways, and being imprisoned as she’s held down by enemies she’s going to unmake within moments.

This is not a problem unique to the one camera format of the post PS3 God of War games, and it’s not even a problem inherent to the AAA cinematic approach that Sony has made their bread and butter over the last decade and change. While Ludonarrative Dissonance is perhaps best known by its usage in discussions around characters like Uncharted’s Nathan Drake and his propensity to alternate between quippish “I’m just a little guy” routines and the slaughtering of dozens, it’s a problem continually plaguing games big and small year after year. In all the years since, this situation hasn’t improved in the slightest..

Part of this is caused by video games’ propensity towards violence. While every medium has expressions of conflict, video games—being a mechanical and heavily interactive format—are understandably dominated by replications of the most visceral form of human engagement. People have always yearned for the physical sensation of impact (take a look at any sport to understand this), and gaming functions as an extension of this. We yearn for the crunchy hit stop, and the particle effects of collision and destruction. 

The other, more simple answer, is that in any creative field, people are going to rely on shortcuts or “standard” solutions to any problem they run into. We expect all fighting games to have a move list, so it becomes inherent to the genre; visual novels should have a text log; live service games demand a battle pass, and so on. Often these conventions are desired, but just as often we run into ideas that exist simply because it’s viewed as a necessity, e.g. the deluge of open world games adding loot systems straight out of Diablo even when designed to be static, or gacha games 1:1 copying the UI of Genshin Impact half a decade out from its release. 

The most egregious of these obligatory concepts to me has always been what I colloquially refer to as “the microwave hallway problem”, after Metal Gear Solid 4’s scene where a suffering Snake pushes his way through a hallway that’s killing him with radiation, as the imagery jumps from perspective to perspective.

In Metal Gear Solid 4, this scene is about Snake, as an old man, pushing himself through absolute misery for a moment of heroism. MGS4 itself is a fairly slow game focused on stealth, so a paced and deliberate moment like this doesn’t feel too out of place, and matches the artisanal tone that director Hideo Kojima has historically gone for. It’s iconic and remembered for plenty of reasons, especially for its place in gaming at a time when the average storytelling for mainstream titles was done through a purely divorced cutscene and gameplay split.

Unfortunately, this concept has been used again and again throughout countless games in the decades since MGS4’s release, and typically without much direction beyond the surface level. 

Cyberpunk 2077 is a game ostensibly about the dying V, a struggling mercenary whose brain is being torn apart by an entire other identity forcing its way through them. Aside from the consistent interjections from a ghostly Keanu Reeves, this fact is mostly removed from the player’s standard means of engagement, in favor of the expected techno-power fantasy… except for the random moments at ends of quests (and similarly-timed event triggers), where V will suddenly double over with a pixelated and messy screen, and start to move at 0.25x speed, before immediately regaining full and complete motor function without the slightest inconvenience. 

On the surface, this is the visual and mechanical language we have come to expect from cinematically driven video games, many of which are often free-form and non-linear. Developers, of course, can’t plot a set course with moments of defined strength and weakness if they’re providing you a venue with which to do things in any potential order. At the same time, however, is anything truly being gained from these moments of appropriate tonal resonance amidst a sea of completely untethered gameplay? Are these moments of weakness displaying a peek into the intended narrative, or are they showcasing just how limited the language of the common game is?

Countless games follow this format. There’s Red Dead Redemption 2’s concept of tuberculosis that involves the occasional cough and hallucination in between hundred-man slaughter sprees. There are several Resident Evil games that do this, but most notably this year’s Requiem, where Leon Kennedy’s T-Virus infection temporarily makes everything slow, blurry, and blue, before restoring perfect parry and suplex potential almost instantly. Even Kingdom Hearts 3, a game I broadly love for its absurdism, isn’t immune to forcing Mickey Mouse through a slow moving facsimile of the microwave hallway.

To reiterate: what do we gain from these moments of control? Indeed, putting the player behind the wheel of an ailing character is a powerful tool of empathy and connection, but when you jump away from that almost instantly, does that empathy persist beyond a fleeting moment? Does the dissonance not showcase the cracks and limitations of what you’re trying to do with the medium, and fall back on the base expectations of what a video game is rather than what you want it to be? 

It’s easy for me to armchair game design over here from my ivory tower of gaming critique, but we don’t have to conceive of new and innovative ways to fix these problems, when they’ve been executed on in multiple games since the genre’s inception. 

The Fear and Hunger series has a constant potential for characters to lose limbs and abilities as you face down the many horrors of that world. Kenshi, or freeform sandbox games like Dwarf Fortress and Caves of Qud, are able to showcase all sorts of gameplay systems related to loss of power by changing the means of engagement in a tangible and permanent way. Action oriented titles like Sifu or Eternal Sonata are able to demonstrate the gain and degradation of stamina and means of engagement as their characters go through various stages of life. Hell, many FromSoftware games are predicated on the concept of an “unpowered” or “hollowed” form that can only be temporarily salved. Even games like Final Fantasy IV, a mainstream RPG from 1991, work with the concept of mechanical and narrative intertwining through the character of Tellah, an old man pushing himself to the brink with dwindling stats on each level up. 

Indeed, an argument posited against many of these examples in the wake of their larger budget contemporaries would be that they’re more elaborate or hardcore games for niche audiences, despite games like RimWorld selling over 4 million copies, and persisting in popularity many years down the line. Another could be that these moments of disconnect function fine as abstraction; surely the core act of playing a video game is abstraction from reality enough that we can accept these limitations (this one I’ve seen in opposition to discussions on ludonarrative dissonance consistently). 

Regardless of reasoning, I believe these limitations come not from the medium of games, but from the nightmarish production management of many modern titles, as well as the expectations of capitalism; from operating under the belief that the market is truly something that exists, and not an artifice propped up by manufactured evidence and stubborn belief. 

When we look at how games are made, especially when it comes to titles with larger budgets, the creation process reinforces this issue. That need for a common language—a blueprint that can easily be executed on—becomes a requirement when we think about how many games are being created by contract workers. 

Looking at something even midscale in budget such as last year’s Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, we can see that hundreds of contractors were hired temporarily to work on things like art, rendering, sound, and quality assurance. If we look at Halo Infinite’s development, we have consistent reporting that workers were limited to 18 month contracts and then placed on a 6 month cooldown before being re-hired, to suit arbitrary leadership requirements and skirt labor laws that would afford these employees more rights in their workplace.

It’s not hard to imagine the difficulties faced by these contract workers in a broad sense, especially when it comes to getting to grips with the project they’re working on, or asserting creative agency over it. They have to learn the toolsets, the project outlines, the deadlines, where the last contractor was forced to leave work unfinished… so on and so forth. In the process of all this, there’s also the unending fear that they could be laid off on a whim, so there’s not going to be much of a desire to shake the boat with more radical creative interjections. From the side of more stable employees as well, things are consistently in a state of flux from the hands working on a project having to be retrained, with pipelines consistently altered like the Ship of Theseus. 

Taking all this into account, it’s easy to understand exactly how so many games end up eerily similar, or formulaic to a fault. Sure, this applies to things like Unreal Engine 5 becoming dominant throughout the medium as workers are able to pick up that shared understanding of how something works, but it also applies to how these works end up being made. If you’re pushing through a logistical nightmare, why wouldn’t you rely on the most commonly used or easy to understand tools? Why wouldn’t you frame a scene as so many other scenes have done before because that’s what’s easiest to convey to your detached creative team? Management has to be appeased as well, so there is a pressure towards showing them something that wouldn’t feel out of place in another successful game, matching the tone of another rather than cultivating it organically through the creation process. 

This is made worse through the intersection of marketing, management, and manipulation. When we talk about the artifice of things like focus testing or evaluating what an audience might “want” (an unrealizable notion, given that the “audience” isn’t a real group of people, but rather a handy abstraction of guesswork), it’s not an exaggeration to refer to it as an “unreality”. There are lessons to be learned through experience and inquisition, but they cannot be done through the means of our current economic and creative climates, lest we continually repeat the sins of things like the hastily edited ending to the theatrical release of Blade Runner.

When we surrender to the idea that games should be more than pure idealized “fun”, or more accurately, when we give in to the notion that fun can only be defined by unlimited player control and power, we limit the ideas of what the medium of games can be. Fun can be had in planning around and experiencing things like a dismemberment in Fear and Hunger. There’s joy to be found in those moments of overcoming the challenges of a game like Demon’s Souls. Not everything is killstreaks and SSS combos; sometimes a power fantasy can come from overcoming incredible odds, situations, or indeed even the way we control a video game.

A few years ago, I had a lot of fun with the presentation of Citizen Sleeper; a sci-fi game about functioning as a being trapped within a proprietary and expensive robotic body, trying to make ends meet and solve problems inside of an old space station. The conceit of the game is great—balance the needs of your mechanical body (allegorical of chronic illness), the needs of your community, and the imposition of societal pressures working against you—but in practice, it unintentionally becomes this oddly weightless and almost dismissive work. 

Within an hour of starting the game, the idea of balancing meters, or struggling against any sort of representation of chronic illness, can be thrown out the window with relative ease. Minigames let you play the stock market and gamble for infinite money. You can get a trait to start repairing your body infinitely with very little effort or risk, eliminating any chance of experiencing the detriments of disability. You can solve the issues of every NPC you meet, and complete the main story without friction or fear. On a certain level, I admire the game’s willingness to take the conceits of an economic manager and try to instill the idea that it’s all artifice and can be changed with luck, but it’s also limiting and ineffectual as an experience. 

I don’t expect every game to be Marathon—a complex and punishing game wherein the core experience is determined by a mechanical conceit that suits the type of narrative they’re trying to tell—but we can do better than serving (and in some respects, outright conditioning) an audience that exists in our most insecure assumptions. It’s understandable to rely on what’s easy and known, but we show the most interesting parts of ourselves when we mold what’s known into something only we can.

There will always be abstraction and ludonarrative dissonance in video games. There will always be that struggle to separate what a character should be able to do within the bounds of the narrative versus what makes an engaging and interesting game to play. However, this does not mean we should accept the absurd compromise that these patchwork microwave hallways provide. The medium of games allows for collaboration between creatives and viewers in ways other art forms could only dream of, and we should be trying to cultivate that charm, instead of abruptly ending the dialogue out of convenience.

The post In Cutscenes, You Can’t Double Jump appeared first on Gamesline.

It’s a full house this week on the Gamesline Podcast. John is joined by Lorelai, Maverick and Rose to talk about the last week in gaming. John’s still obsessing about Pikmin when he’s not playing Digimon cards or Pokémon Channel. Lorelai was Final Fantasy pilled at the Final Fantasy XIV Fan Festival which got her playing Final Fantasy XI again while also digging in to Vampire Crawlers on her long road trip. Rose of course played more Marathon, Mina the Hollower, Saros, and Forbidden Solitaire while Maverick played a bunch of Hades 2.

In the news, we go over the interview Mike Fisher gave where he annihilated Yuji Naka, The Witcher 3 is getting more DLC, and a bill addressing the Stop Killing Games initiative is moving forward in California. In other news, Dark Horse Comics is unionizing after their new Embracer overlords started shutting down Things From Another World and shifting focus to Games. If you’d like to sign the petition to support the unionization effort, you can do that here.

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on social media @gamesline.net, John, Lorelai, Maverick, and Rose.

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, and tell a friend about the show!

If you want to send in questions, send them to our email podcast@gamesline.net!

You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Edited by Lorelai

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 92: Fantasy Solitaire appeared first on Gamesline.

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