Lewis Gordon
@lewisgordon.bsky.social
Culture on computers, mostly | ✍ The Verge, FT, The Ringer, The Nation, ArtReview, Eurogamer, The Guardian, Vulture | ✉️ lewisjohngordon~at~gmail~dot~com | he/him
Here's something a few of you might dig: a wildly experimental "open-world album" from cellist and composer, Patrick Belaga. It was inspired, super obliquely, by The Legend of Zelda, so of course, I had to write a few words on it for @bandcamp.com. daily.bandcamp.com/album-of-the...
Patrick Belaga, “Solar Calf”
Inspired by "The Legend of Zelda," the cellist and composer bridges minimalism with video game music.
daily.bandcamp.com
Another lovely review of Big Walk:
Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon.bsky.social · yesterdayHere's my review of @househouse.com's Big Walk: an enchanting, if occasionally frustrating, paean to play and discovery; a balm for the pernicious attention-holding logic that shapes so much of online communication. Go play it! (if you're not already) www.theguardian.com/games/2026/a...
Here's my review of @househouse.com's Big Walk: an enchanting, if occasionally frustrating, paean to play and discovery; a balm for the pernicious attention-holding logic that shapes so much of online communication. Go play it! (if you're not already) www.theguardian.com/games/2026/a...
Big Walk review – larking around with mates elevated to an artform
The creators of Untitled Goose Game return with an online, open-world adventure that delivers slapstick silliness and bucolic majesty in nearly equal measure
theguardian.com
Boy, do I have the perfect couple of features for the virtual weather sickos out there. First up, a look at the making of extreme weather in video games, feat. Pacific Drive, Battlefield 2042, and Frostpunk. www.nytimes.com/2024/10/04/a...
Extreme Weather Gives Video Games a Powerful Adversary (Published 2024)
Designers are increasingly able to render weather conditions as not just evocative visual effects but phenomena that physically affect the player.
nytimes.com
"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux@bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 2d agoGaming thought of the day: a lot of games, because they're unwilling to impose much friction, miss out on the dramatic possibilities of weather. I was playing AC: Black Flag Resync'd and the new dynamic weather feels a bit wasted because storms don't really matter very much.
I want it on the record. Jacob has honed in on almost exactly the thing that I open my review with, though I wrote my lede late last night.
Jacob Geller@jacobgeller.com · 2d agoWatching two of your friends scurry across a field of reeds in a pitch black night, illuminated just by a glowing orb they're holding above their heads, is legitimately beautiful in a way I don't think I've experienced in a co-op game before
More Big Walk thoughts in lieu of my review going live. If you want to get a bit more context on where the devs are coming from philosophically, check out my piece on Melbourne-based crew (feat. some of the Big Walk devs) who cracked out into a RDR2 netherworld. www.theguardian.com/games/2022/m...
‘A giant grey cube floating above the landscape’: exploring the forbidden reaches of Red Dead Redemption 2
A new documentary chronicles the adventures of the Grannies, a group of friends who went looking for the glitchy event horizon of Rockstar’s virtual-western epic
theguardian.com
Great review from @schillingc.bsky.social that touches on something important: when night comes, Big Walk gets dark, like Dragon's Dogma dark. If you lose something (or one another) at that time, you're scuppered, at least until morning (which actually arrives mercifully quickly).
Eurogamer@eurogamer.bsky.social · 2d agoHouse House's Big Walk is equally smart as their Untitled Goose Game in the way it wields its silliness, similarly playful and exuberant, and stuffed with innumerable delightful little touches. Otherwise, it's not much like Untitled Goose Game at all. Our review: https://bit.ly/3RFnP49
This is a great essay by @cushac.bsky.social for @hearingthingsco.bsky.social that has been rattling around in my head for a few days now — on the overabundance of music, the impetus to soundtrack everything, and the dulled experience of an artform. hearingthings.co/stop-listeni...
Stop Listening to Music
...at least from time to time.
hearingthings.co
Hello, I wrote about intriguing space mining visual novel A Line Held Tight from Humble Grove and spoke to the team about games, unions and folk music www.theguardian.com/games/2026/j...
A Line Held Tight – miners, mechs and mismanagement on a distant planet
Deep underground the player joins a colony of ruthlessly exploited pit workers who could be taking on the bosses. How things play out will depend on you
theguardian.com
I come bearing fresh details on one the summer's most intriguing reveals: the terraforming, survival FPS, Haex, set in the wilds of the sub-arctic north. Also, add it to the growing list of games inspired by @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social. www.theguardian.com/games/2026/j...
Haex – a wilder, weirder open-world adventure
The debut from Scandinavian outfit Dead Astronauts promises shooting, survival, and, in a shake-up to the genre, seeds that terraform its pristine world right before your eyes
theguardian.com
This keeps happening. Someone at Steam just seems to pick indie games at random to give the full Spanish Inquisition treatment.
Molleindustria FUTURE? NO THANKS! DEMO OUT@molleindustria.org · 2w agoSome sad news regarding today’s release:
I love dice rolls in videogames, I love the way they invite the player to narrate their experience in relation to unexpected events, I love their connections to the history of chance as a storytelling tool, I love the way they attack the player's tendency to want everything their own way.
I read it as a kind of treatise on every generation's desire to leave their mark, be that as politics, goods, technology, or, in the case of the protag Reno, as tyre marks on the Utah salt flats made by a motorcycle hurtling at great velocity (petrol-head land art -- what a thing!)
Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon.bsky.social · 2w agoWhat to say about this except, 'It fucking rips'? Kushner delivers the most insanely readable meditation on the hopes and ills of the 20th century: modernism, revolutions, sports cars, rubber production, bullshit art scenes.
new writing from me for @artreview.bsky.social: on video games not just as wartime propaganda and recruitment tool but as burgeoning battlefield tech and new perceptual logic. artreview.com/how-videogam...
How Videogames Feed the War Machine
What’s happening is less the corruption of a sacrosanct form of play than the interactive medium’s return to, and reentanglement with, its military roots
artreview.com
D-topia asks big questions about the possibility of utopia in a world increasingly run by machines. But its commitment to coziness and comfort means that it never really confronts the thorny issues it only gestures at. My review. www.polygon.com/d-topia-anna...
Annapurna’s brand-new game is way too nuanced for its own good
D-topia puzzlingly avoids taking a stance
polygon.com
I had an interesting time with D-topia, a game that asks what if life were oppressively smooth, what if it was stripped of friction? The puzzles are straightforward to a fault; the daisy chain-style design lacks tension — and yet that is kind of the point. www.theguardian.com/games/2026/j...
D-topia review – cosy sci-fi mystery takes aim at AI
A soft puzzle game makes a sharp point about the over-optimised future ahead
theguardian.com
I’m so proud of the @glasgowindiegamesfest.org and all of our team, I had the best weekend ever ❤️ So many people had never been to Glasgow before and I’m honoured that their first experience was our festival and all the fantastic games on display GIGF27 next year let’s goooo 🔥
I wrote about The End of Everything & I think the paywall is down so: observer.co.uk/culture/book...
The visions of M John Harrison | The Observer
The End of Everything is a bravura, brain-melting sci-fi in which Britain comes under attack from the astral plane
observer.co.uk
hearing about the hot new extraction shooter/misery simulator Hunger for the first time thanks to @rogue.site. good lord, it sounds excellent: an unremittingly bleak good-bad time with tons of intentional friction and gorgeous visuals www.rogue.site/editorials/h...
One of the more insightful things I've read about the wretched Microsoft/Xbox layoffs is this graf from a blog by Jon Kimmich. For Microsoft, Xbox was always a means to an end, and it will remain that way, until the division no longer serves a larger purpose. gamesbeat.com/microsoft-xb...
This "too many games" rhetoric needs to stop. It covers up the real driving force of this crisis in the games industry which is tied to the larger structural organization and political economy of the tech industries and how they want to constrain and control the consumption of their products.
The issue is that not that there are "too many games for society to realistically support." It's that digital distribution has been monopolized by a few companies who have done everything in their power to construct deeply exploitative platform ecosystems.
Speaking of Mann and America (see last repost), Ebert really stepped up to the plate in his review of The Last of the Mohicans. It ends with an all-timer kicker (in my humble opinion), a perfect, almost horror-flecked appendage to the movie itself www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-...
Happy 4th of July, I wrote about the two Michael Mann movies that bookend American history for @brightwalldarkroom.com
Michael Mann's America: The Last of the Mohicans & The Insider
The Last of the Mohicans (1992) and The Insider (1999) bookend the history of the United States from Michael Mann’s perspective.
brightwalldarkroom.com
Yes to Cart Life, yes to KRZ. Surely The Sims has to be in with a shout, too — the (mostly) feel-good, 90s version of the American dream before those two games explored its wreckage post-crash.
Chris Plante@plante.bsky.social · last mo.What is the definitive game about America?
I posted my History of Games keynote: - A materialist reexamination of the canonical game crises from a developer's POV - Thoughts on the ongoing game industry restructuring - Indiepocalypse, AAApocalypse, deprofessionalization, games at the knitting stage www.molleindustria.org/HistoryOfGam...
A History of Games Through Mass Extinctions
A transcript of Paolo Pedercini’s History of Games Conference keynote (2026).
molleindustria.org
round 2 of concept art for my procedurally generated found footage turn-based multiplayer horror RPG game film a documentary about that thing in the woods. see if all of you can survive. or some of you. or one of you. live your best Blair Witch Project life #pixelart #indiedev #gamedev #indiegames
