The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. If you're reading this, then you've survived both the clocks going forward and April Fool's day, two events designed explicitly to kill the exhausted and the middle-aged. Your reward is this long weekend of rest, relaxation and reading about some of the best writing about videogames from the past week.

It was nice of PC Gamer to write some fan fiction about us, with Jeremy Peel producing an ode to eurojank, both the "wonky yet wonderful projects of yesteryear, and their modern successors".

In the same way, ‘eurojank’ is an insult well-meant. On the face of it the term appears to condemn a whole continent's games as laughably buggy and low-budget. But speaking as a proud European, who has had the privilege to spend their working life flying to Frankfurt and Ghent and Uppsala to meet studios punching above their weight, I can tell you that eurojank—a term thrown around often in PC gaming circles in the early 2010s—is a byword for ambition.

Games like Balatro, Luck Be A Landlord and Raccoin don't literally let you bet your money away, but they and many other games have used gambling as inspiration for everything from aesthetics to systems of player retention. For This Week In Videogames, Francisco Dominguez spoke to developers, publishers and academics to discuss whether indie gaming has a gambling problem.

“In indie development, there’s been a quest for retention for quite a long time,” Kilduff-Taylor says. “Really smart developers, particularly those working on roguelikes, have found certain patterns, certain reward schedules, certain ways of presenting things, lend themselves to retention. Some of those are overt mechanics taken from casino games and gambling. Now it’s become almost a joke: which casino game is gonna get a roguelike next?”

I grow weary of performative dunks on AI. That doesn't mean people should stop writing them, but that perhaps I shouldn't read so many. Hamilton Nolan at least delivers some pithy lines in his takedown, in which he urges his competitors to use AI as much as they please.

The tepid, conformist nature of your AI-assisted prose will only make my unexpected bons mots stand out more sharply. While you lean on a technological crutch of grammatical mediocrity to drag your essays over the finish line, I’ll be metaphorically zipping past you on my “magic carpet” of words emerging directly from my own declining and unpredictable brain. Over time, the intellectual box into which AI has seduced your creative process will suffocate you, leaving your bereft readers little choice but to drift into my subscription base.

Baby Steps fans think the game might secretly be a fan-made Uncharted 5. How can you not click on a headline like that? Rebekah Valentine explores the fan theories for IGN:

In one of these dreams, Nate is referred to as "Nate D" and Nate "Dumbass" - he also goes by "Nathan Bake" at one point when he flirts with being a DJ. Through other scenes, particularly optional phone calls with Nate's dad, we learn that he has a sister named Cassie, and that he's a "junior" - his dad is also named Nathan. And per the credits, his mom is named Elena. If that's not enough out the gate as proof, dataminers have found that Nate's model is just referred to as "Nathan Drake" in the game's files (as shared by Caleb (monkeylicker) in the official Discord.)

I think this week's Bathysphere might be the second time Christian Donlan has referenced Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide To Getting Lost, and it was enough that I succumbed and went and ordered myself a copy. You may be less suggestible than I am, but you should still read Donlan on roaming, parks, and videogames.

Like many children born in the 1970s, I roamed dangerously far and wide, and while I look back on that now and think about the horrors I avoided without knowing it, I also think of fabulous days and evenings spent somewhere weird and far from home, far from other people, doing nothing really, having no thoughts, just moving through the world like an idiot breeze.

We've had plenty of our own to say about Marathon in recent weeks, but we're obviously cooler on it than most. I enjoy reading the more specific takes from those deeper into the game and its community. For example: only cowards complain about the knife, argues Ethan Gach for Kotaku.

“As many have said, the knife is the great equalizer,” wrote user mirrorvacation on the Marathon subreddit. “If you get outplayed to let someone be close enough to you with a knife, it’s on you for losing that fight, not that the knife is ‘overpowered.’ The root of the problem is not that the knife is OP, it’s that players are not showing the knife enough respect.

I haven't had a chance to play Nova Roma yet, but I really want to make time for the citybuilder, which places a heavy emphasis on water systems. In the meantime, I'll have to live vicariously through Luke Plunkett, who has played it for Aftermath.

That's how most city-builders work: you snap everything on a grid, and it makes designing and planning your city easy. But when it comes to aqueducts in this game, whoah, hold on, suddenly, things are not on a grid. You've got complete freedom of movement here, able to swing your concrete waterslides 360 degrees in rotation, and you can even adjust their height as well. Not only does this make building them a more intricate task, I just find it extremely funny that so much of the game is bound by these very conventional rules and then when it comes to precious water it's like oh, oh no, this stuff, you can build it however you want.

Music this week is Every Color In Blue, the final track from Brittany Howard's 2024 album What Now. I hadn't listened to the album until this past week when YouTube again recommended that one, extremely popular Alabama Shakes live video from 2013, and I thought, hey, what are these folks up to now? I'm glad I did, because "solo work" was the answer, and What Now is great.

Sleep well, videogames.