I'm a little late on sharing this one, but Mistfall Hunter is an interesting dark fantasy extraction game that might be able to keep gameplay loops feeling fresh with soulslike mechanics.

Mistfall Hunter Review: The Soulslike Extraction Game That Doesn’t Wear Out Its Welcome

Escape from Tarkov and ARC Raiders eventually start to feel like reruns. Mistfall Hunter’s borrowed Soulsborne dueling might be the thing…

medium.com

@fadingechogame.bsky.social is a fun game where you shape-shift water through lava, toxic waste, and more to solve puzzles across a fractured, broken-down world.

Fading Echo Review: Transformation as Chemistry, Not Costume

Transformation isn’t a new idea in games. But it’s water mechanics feel fresh.

medium.com

An absolutely brilliant piece from @mayorhere.bsky.social. Highly recommended even (especially?) if Housemarque games aren't your jam.

Gamers with Glasses@gamerswithglasses.bsky.social · 5d ago

@mayorhere.bsky.social on Saros: "Robert W. Chambers's Yellow Shore becomes more knowable in Saros than the original myth ever was, and something is lost in that. But the core idea survives: the horror was never the Shore. It was always the wanting." www.gamerswithglasses.com/features/sar...

@mayorhere.bsky.social on Saros: "Robert W. Chambers's Yellow Shore becomes more knowable in Saros than the original myth ever was, and something is lost in that. But the core idea survives: the horror was never the Shore. It was always the wanting." www.gamerswithglasses.com/features/sar...

Saros, Robert W. Chambers, and the Horror of Desire — Gamers with Glasses

Robert W. Chambers’ stories from The King in Yellow are often described as Lovecraftian by association - but, as Housemarque demonstrates in Saros, the horror of Chambers’ Carcosa goes deeper than Lov...

gamerswithglasses.com

Martian Gothic: Unification was probably my first sci-fi horror game, and despite the clunky controls and odd puzzle design, it showed me how scary space can be.

Martian Gothic: Unification — The PS1 Horror Game Built From Two Different Games

How a cancelled adventure game and a rushed deadline shaped a forgotten PS1 horror title

medium.com

I love the chaos of The Mound by @nacon.bsky.social from the endless harassment of the zombies to the hallucination of weapons being sticks.

The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu Review — Lovecraft’s Loneliest Story Reforged for Co-op

ACE Team’s extraction game borrows its mythology from an obscure 1929 Lovecraft novella.

medium.com

Halo is one of my favorite sci-fi franchises, and replaying it with a sprint button and the Flood’s return has been great. But it also leaves me wondering where the series actually goes beyond remakes.

Halo: Campaign Evolved Is a Faithful Trip Home That Doubles as a Warning

Halo Studios nailed the nostalgia on Xbox, but the game’s biggest achievement might be showing exactly what the series shouldn’t do next

medium.com

My copy of Perfect Organism from @lostincult.co.uk has arrived! I just finished Make Us Whole, and I’m excited to start this one next. Looking forward to diving deeper into the world and legacy of Alien: Isolation.

My favorite VR game returns by making the leap to a new format showing that it’s possible.

Playing Moss: The Forgotten Relic Without the Headset It Was Built For

Revisiting a VR classic on a flatscreen and finding the story never needed the headset to work

medium.com

Black Flag represents the tail end of Ubisoft’s golden age from the Xbox 360/PS3 era, and this remake proves it still holds up. But the same problems, like locked content and microtransactions, that have plagued Ubisoft ever since have crept in here too.

Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced Review: A Golden Age Remade, Warts and All

Before I ever got to steer the Jackdaw again, I had to sit through the Ubisoft hub, the menu that supposedly gives you access to basically…

medium.com

Sword Art Online was foundational for me growing up, so revisiting Aincrad felt like a dream come true. Echoes doesn’t deliver the same grandeur or stakes as its source material, though.

Echoes of Aincrad Review: A Death Game Missing the People and the Stakes

There’s a moment early in Echoes of Aincrad, still inside the closed beta, before Sword Art Online has even become the thing it becomes…

medium.com

As we watch AAA gaming implode in on itself, it’s worth looking back at 1983 and how the industry overcame past obstacles.

What 1983 Can Teach Us About the Games Industry’s Current Turbulence

In September of 1983, trucks backed up to a landfill outside Alamogordo, New Mexico, and buried a mountain of unsold Atari inventory under…

medium.com

The Adventures of Elliot pushes HD-2D into real-time combat with swords, boomerangs, and a screen that looks a painting.

The Adventures of Elliot and the Style I Can’t Quit

I’ve been chasing a specific feeling since I first played A Link to the Past as a kid, long before anyone had a name for it. It’s the…

medium.com

This is a follow-up to my Rule of Rose article from yesterday, focusing more closely on the plagiarized review that helped fuel the game’s censorship and influenced the public narrative.

The Plagiarized Review That Helped Get Rule of Rose Banned Across Europe

In March 2006, a seventeen-year-old Italian named Chris Darril got hold of an early Japanese copy of Rule of Rose through contacts he had…

medium.com

Rule of Rose was considered controversial for reasons that didn’t really exist. Instead of the underage eroticism and buried children that politicians panicked over, it was about childhood cruelty, institutional failure, and trauma.

Rule of Rose Retrospective: The Horror Game That Was Banned for the Wrong Reasons

I came to Rule of Rose already reasonably hardened. I had played the Silent Hill games. I had grown up during that stretch of the…

medium.com

This week: 21 picks on Titanium Court, XCOM 2, and, hold on, [checks notes] ["...are you sure?"] [shuffles papers] Fuck's Quest II: critical-distance.com/2026/06/22/j...

June 21st

Welcome back readers. Lots of good stuff to share this week–21 reads in all. A critical blackjack? No, no, not my best work. To support our best work–compiling and organizing a living t…

critical-distance.com

One of my first RPGs was Threads of Fate, and I still think it’s one of the most overlooked games of the PS1 era. It had what felt like a unique dual narrative, dual protagonist system for the time.

Revisiting Threads of Fate: Mint, Rue, and Why the Dual Narrative Still Holds Up

I didn’t know I was supposed to play Mint first. Nobody told me, there was no instruction making it explicit, and I was young enough that I…

medium.com

Finally, a game that answers the age-old question: “What if the orcs tried therapy?”

Don’t Kill Them All Is the Orc Game That Rewards Restraint Over Rampage

Orcs have a branding problem, and it’s one that fantasy media has spent decades reinforcing. Tolkien made them savage foot soldiers with no…

medium.com

If you're in game studies and you're planning a lesson, where do you find games that are free, browser-based, and engaging enough to invite meaningful discussion? We've compiled a list of about two dozen games that fit the bill, along with suggested reading. www.gamerswithglasses.com/gwg-recommen...

Games for the Game Studies Classroom — Gamers with Glasses

Class is coming up, it’s syllabus-writing season, and you’re getting ready to bring a game into class as the cornerstone of a lesson plan. Where could you find a list of games that satisfy all three o...

gamerswithglasses.com

The emotional qualities of And Roger come through in its scenes and gameplay. It's about caregiving, receiving care, and the difficulties of both. @optional.bsky.social shares his thoughts.

Communicating Disorientation and Care in And Roger — Gamers with Glasses

And Roger begins with scenes of disorientation, showing a girl alarmed by a stranger in her home. Routine tasks, from dialing a phone to eating breakfast, are strangely difficult. As the main charact...

gamerswithglasses.com

The Suffering (2004) about the atrocities of the American prison system that made every execution method into a monster and every moral choice into a confession. Unfortunately, the game was delisted in 2024.

Revisiting The Suffering: The Horror Game That Made America’s History Into Monsters

Carnate Island doesn’t exist, but it feels like it should. Ten miles off the coast of Maryland, home to a lighthouse, a crumbling asylum…

medium.com

Akatori's staff mechanic completely changes how you fight and move through the world. One of the most interesting metroidvania demos I've played this year.

Akatori Demo Review: The Staff Mechanic Changes Everything

There’s a particular kind of promise that certain games make before they’ve earned the right to make it. You feel it in the trailer, in the…

medium.com

Gothic Remake raises an interesting question: when preserving a classic, how much of the jank should be preserved too?

Gothic 1 Remake Review: Identity, Jank, and the Price of Faithful Preservation

In 2001, Piranha Bytes released a game that was rough by any standard available to it. Gothic ran poorly on most hardware, controlled…

medium.com

Yacht Club Games should make a Mina the Hollower guidebook like Vermis. Not a normal strategy guide, but a weird, atmospheric book full of monster art, maps, lore, and notes about the world.

This week: Mina, Mixtape, Marthon, and lots of things that don't start with M: critical-distance.com/2026/05/31/m...

May 31st

Welcome back readers. We’ve got lots of interesting stuff to dig into this week, so I’m going to limit this opening preamble to briefly plugging our Patreon, which helps us keep laying …

critical-distance.com

Mina the Hollower by @yachtclubgames.bsky.social is an absolute treat that should remind the industry that great experiences can be had by returning to its roots.

Mina the Hollower Review: Yacht Club Games Brings Back the Game Boy Zelda Formula

I grew up sharing an SNES with five siblings, thirty minutes at a time. The controller was always warm when you got it, worn out on the B…

medium.com

@mixtapegame.bsky.social by Beethoven and Dinosaur elevates music from environmental storytelling to identity formation in the sun-soaked teenage wasteland that is the ‘90s. While it may challenge what we consider to be a game, it is a rad experience worth listening to

Music as Time: On Mixtape and What Songs Keep

True nostalgia isn’t the replication of a specific place or time. It’s those flashes of emotion that transport us back into memories that…

medium.com

I love how @mayorhere.bsky.social describes this game. As someone who has always loved stories about machine intelligences who grow and change (From Short Circuit to Ancillary Justice) I think I need to play Replaced.

Gamers with Glasses@gamerswithglasses.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Are you ready to go on a journey? @mayorhere.bsky.social's review of Replaced gets to the heart of what it looks like for a game to ask genuine questions about posthumanism now, in spite of Big Tech's attempts to make us embrace a much paltrier vision of AI. www.gamerswithglasses.com/reviews/repl...

Are you ready to go on a journey? @mayorhere.bsky.social's review of Replaced gets to the heart of what it looks like for a game to ask genuine questions about posthumanism now, in spite of Big Tech's attempts to make us embrace a much paltrier vision of AI. www.gamerswithglasses.com/reviews/repl...

This Body Is Cold: Replaced and the Education of an Artificial Mind — Gamers with Glasses

In this comprehensive review, Spencer Johnson describes how Replaced flips the standard posthuman premise entirely. In short, this is not a story about a human mind uploaded into a machine. It is a ...

gamerswithglasses.com

If you're 007 on the brain right now, we've got something special for you! 🔫 [lock-on] 007 features a piece by James Batchelor on the multiplayer masterpiece Goldeneye! You'll explore the impact of the 1997 classic and see how it revolutionised the FPS genre 🪙👁️🔗⤵️