The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. I've been frantically laying track in front of a moving train for too long, and today is the day that changes. Today is the day I plan ahead, get things in order, and build myself a less hectic week. That or I spend too long in bed reading and then spend the rest of the day playing videogames. Hm.

Nicole Carpenter spoke to the creators of Hidden Folks for The Verge and considered the microgenre of "searching" games (their term) that have followed in its wake, including the gorgeous Lost And Found Co. which released this week.

What makes a good hidden object game, both de Jongh and Lee agree, is playtesting. You can have a great art style, clever sounds, and a nice story, but if the game doesn’t work well, it won’t click with players. “It took us years, and it was just trial and error,” Lee said. “Someone who makes a level has a very hard time understanding how difficult or easy it might be for someone else. You just have to keep workshopping and testing.” Playtesting is what made Hidden Folks so satisfying to play. De Jongh said it’s core to what he does as a game developer. “You put it in front of someone and you will learn a million things,” he said. “I think I’ve watched over 200 to 300 hours of players playing the game and changing little things based off what I saw players do.”

Videogame artist aurahack wrote about why Marathon isn't for her, the ways its systems encourage combat and cruelty, and how that interacts with her experience being trans.

Marathon’s heroes and kits teach you that the primary mode of interaction with the world is not “exist as a person” but engage. There is no peaceful way to use a shoulder-mounted missile and, maybe more cynically, there is no good reason to assume that a gamer will look at a button with an ability and not just press it when given the chance. It’s free. It has a cooldown, but in a game of punishing pertinence to its weaponry, these are the one thing you will always and forever have. You are given a language to speak with and it’s not proximity chat.² The game is not literally telling you to be hostile but how does it facilitate other venues?

Abram Buehner, senior editor at Lost In Cult, wrote about his own Marathon combat experiences, some of it on the other end of the barrel.

Conscience tightened one hand around my throat. The other slapped me. Forehand, shame. Backhand, guilt. They didn’t have to die. Downed Runners can’t shoot back. Downed Runners get to exfiltrate too. Maybe players killed for no reason throw their controller or rage quit the game or just feel sad.

I’m so sorry.

Rogue, one of the several independent games sites launched following layoffs at Polygon, is re-tooling its subscription offering and launching new regular features. Sounds good!

Eurogamer experienced its own round of layoffs this past week, including its entire video team. EG's deputy editorial director posted a goodbye message to all those leaving on BlueSky, including brief examples of some of their work. Ian Higton is going to do more on his own YouTube channel Platform32, Zoe Delahunty-Light will do the same on her videogame lore channel, and Alex Donaldson will have more time for RPGSite, among other projects.

It's obviously been a tough time in games media for, oh, forever? I do not know of any time that was not tough. This makes it all the more galling that Grammarly's AI tool now allows users to seek "expert reviews" of their writing from the simulated personas of various games journalists without those journalists' knowledge or consent. This Verge article on the topic mentions that former RPS editor-in-chief Katharine Castle is one of the people whose work has been co-opted so that Grammarly can offer suggestions of how she, supposedly, would edit your writing. I've never used Grammarly before, but I downloaded it to check and sure enough, I also received suggestions from approximations of Edwin Evans-Thirlwell, Alec Meer, Simon Parkin, Keza MacDonald, Heather Alexandra, Carolyn Petit and several other names you might know. Worst of all, after a short period of use, Grammarly throws up a paywall. They want to get paid for the work of games journalists even as many of those same journalists struggle to find work themselves. Appalling.

I had cause this week to, yet again, read the late Neil Kulkarni's 10 point guide to being a music critic. Particularly this part:

The biz will use you if you say what they want, if you don’t they won’t — be mentally clear about your own utter irrelevance before you even start or be ready for a steady diet of disappointment your whole working life. Might seem such pre-emptive knee-chopping action on your ambition might wither the writing down to meekness — quite the reverse: only by first accepting your inability to change pop, your lonely impotence amid the cogs and gears, do you realise that your words shouldn’t be measured, considered, or anything approaching reasonable. The self-abasing degrading shame of being a critic doesn’t paralyse, it frees you up to write what the fuck you want rather than what you feel the ‘job’ demands, disconnects you from anything approaching favours, but keeps your overarching pomposity (for if you don’t have this what the fuck are you doing being a writer anyhoo?) in check. You have no favours to grant, no friends to keep, no partner to find, absolutely nothing to lose except your own idea of yourself, your own relationship with your style, taste and ego. This has nothing to do with whatever PR has sent you the record, whatever ‘readership’ your publisher is aiming for or any ‘help’ you can give to a band or artist you deem worthy of your reverse-Midas messing. This is between you and the plastic and the mirror you have to look at yourself in and nothing else. There is no career ladder. Only a downward spiral from the first thrill of seeing your name in print.

On a similar theme, Kelefa Sanneh in The New Yorker on how music criticism lost its edge.

The idea of poptimism sometimes bled into a broader belief that it was bad manners to criticize any cultural product that people liked, whether it be a pop song or a superhero movie or a romance novel. This is not a new idea—on the contrary, it evokes the Latin adage “De gustibus non est disputandum” and its modern analogue, repeated by kindergartners and, less excusably, by people who are no longer kindergartners: “Don’t yuck my yum.” The idea that people’s tastes have a right not to be criticized is, of course, quite fatal to the idea of criticism itself, as many critics have noticed. In the literary world, where reviewers are often authors themselves, writers have long complained about excessive coziness. “Sweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene,” Elizabeth Hardwick observed, in 1959.

And for The Observer, Simon Parkin on how people lost their taste for the vicious restaurant review.

Gen Z came of age in an online world saturated with scathing takedowns, rushes to judgment, the hot-flush righteousness of mob-cancellation (sometimes justified, but often with the unpleasant aftertaste of a puritanical witch-hunt). “Be kind” emerged as the corrective refrain, acceptance and affirmation the preferred stance. Against this backdrop, the Gill-like critic began to feel not merely outdated but indecent. We are now far more attuned, thanks to TikTok reveals and behind-the-pass confessionals, to the anxieties of the chef watching timorously from the kitchen, and the pot-washer, whose rent money depends on the chef’s reputation.

Those articles both contain strong examples and fair reasoning, but skirt around whether the loss of edge or viciousness is good or bad. This sent me running back - also, yes, again - to Tom Scocca's 2013 article for Gawker "On Smarm". Like the Kulkarni article, I've never linked this in The Lie-In before so it counts as new.

Over time, it has become clear that anti-negativity is a worldview of its own, a particular mode of thinking and argument, no matter how evasively or vapidly it chooses to express itself. For a guiding principle of 21st century literary criticism, BuzzFeed's Fitzgerald turned to the moral and intellectual teachings of Walt Disney, in the movie Bambi: "If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all."

"It's time for Nintendo to free the RPG geniuses at Camelot from Mario sports games", argues Dia Lacina at The AV Club. I like this article a lot, although the wider argument about Camelot edges close to what people used to say about the Looking Glass veterans who went on to work on Guitar Hero. If you make something narrative and systems-heavy, like an RPG or an immersive sim, then that is a worthy use of your time and skills; if you make a party game, or a game for families or children, then this is assumed to be a prison.

Perhaps, after decades of almost nothing but tennis and golf games, Camelot is tired; there’s only so many ways you can Mario Party tennis without actually Mario Party-ing tennis. Who wouldn’t be tired after making the same kind of games over and over? Even if Camelot itself isn’t aware of how tired of Mario Sports these last three games feel, I am tired of it exclusively being the visionary behind sports party games. It’s not healthy for a studio to make almost nothing but the same golf and tennis game for nearly three decades. Honestly, borrowing from Super Mario Wonder and special rackets that do AOE status effects to the court? This is what happens when you try to feed a T. rex a goat in a paddock for too long.

I enjoyed this hour-long video about the early history of Falcom, the Japanese studio behind the Trails and Ys series.

On Game Informer, Kyle Hilliard spoke to Matt Johnson, director, co-writer and co-star of Nirvana The Band The Show The Movie, about how videogames influence his work. I should watch something Johnson has made other than Update Day.

Yeah, and it shows because it's why everything in that film is so perfectly executed. And the film never drops you because they worked so that you would never drop you. Whereas someone like me, I need to find a contextual change that is going to allow me to make movies that can't necessarily compete with these movies, but will be able to hold audiences' attention for different reasons. And it is that Jonathan Blow thing. That's exactly what I'm looking for.

Next Fest is over, but many of the demos remain available. Niv M. Sultan wrote a roundup of some of what he played. A strong opening paragraph.

Wading through this absurd historical moment, and the absurdity of playing videogames in it, I have found myself increasingly drawn to demos. Beyond being gentle on my time (and my wallet), demos for games that are still in development are works in compelling states of flux. They often reflect visions that have yet to fully bloom: They're rough and unrefined, rife with the thorns that tend to get stripped over the course of production. Grab these roses; let art bleed you.

Last week's music pick was The Sim by Jam2go. This week Jam2go released a video explaining how he recreated the Sims look in Blender, with lots of fun details about the making of the music video.

Did we do it? Did we survive the Jonathan Blow jumpscare and make it to the end of the article? Well done, all of us.

This week's music is Milk Talk's The Bay. A lot of city pop leaves me cold - and here in 2026, has me checking for disclosures about AI generation. Neither is true of this track, thanks to a snappy bass line and a music video that looks like it was shot on an old camcorder. If you like it, consider supporting them on Bandcamp.

Sleep well, videogames.