The Imaginary Engine Review
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A journal of video games criticism co-edited by @phoenixwritesdown.bsky.social and @gracemachine.bsky.social. We write from the margins to the margins.
dusting off this account for something im about to post in a few minutes to bring up that i wrote this!
The Imaginary Engine Review@tier-review.com · 4w agoKicking off our issue on Otome with an essay from Ludzu on sublimated eroticism, violence and realism, and anti-romance.
Kicking off our issue on Otome with an essay from Ludzu on sublimated eroticism, violence and realism, and anti-romance.
Morbid Curiosity In Club Suicide
Otome, a genre targeted to teenage girls and young women, often shows an unspoken paternalism in what it deems as proper representations of its subject matter for its audience. It’s most obvious in th...
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One of the things that is extremely lovely about @tier-review.com, as a project, is that whatever the industry's turmoils and trials, we can continue humming along, basically uninterrupted.
We wrap up our issue on Forget-Me-Not with a contribution from @gracemachine.bsky.social on video game dolls, agency, and labor.
A Doll's Eyes, A Woman's Hands
Protagonist Organa is something of a housewife, the invisible labor which makes Irene's organ plant shop function.
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@phoenixwritesdown.bsky.social starts off the Forget Me Not: My Organic Garden issue with a long essay about how @cavyhouse.bsky.social's satirical clicker is positioned within the storytelling tradition of the magic shop.
The Shadow Pricing of Forget-Me-Not
A lot of CAVYHOUSE's satirical clicker game Forget-Me-Not: My Organic Garden hinges on the concept of the shadow price. In accountant and poet Farah Ghafoor's debut poetry collection, titled after thi...
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Curious about what's up next for TIER's spring season? @gracemachine.bsky.social and @phoenixwritesdown.bsky.social report on what's in the works and what's inspiring us behind the scenes in our second report.
//TIER Report 002
Hello readers, First up, we have a couple quick announcements. Our next issue, releasing over the few weeks, will be on the satrical clicker Forget Me Not: My Organic Garden from developer CAVYHOUSE...
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@phoenixwritesdown.bsky.social interviewed experimental filmmakers Sonya Mwambu and Nada El-Omari about the multifariousness of the digital and pandemic era home and kinship.
Home is a Multiverse - An Interview with Sonya Mwambu and Nada El-Omari about +1-home
Phoenix interviews the artist duo working on the ongoing project +1-home, a multimedia art installation that shows how the concept of home is multifarious and based in kinship across time and space.
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FINALLY, I wrote about 24 Killers and its interest in good things grown from gunfire and unburied corpses.
The Imaginary Engine Review@tier-review.com · 5mo agoWrapping up our issue on 24 Killers, @gracemachine.bsky.social muses on its overgrowth of military infrastructure.
Wrapping up our issue on 24 Killers, @gracemachine.bsky.social muses on its overgrowth of military infrastructure.
A Corpse Opens Its Mouth
Home, an alien ghost hand, pilots Mawsynram, the corpse of a soldier. Mawsynram died, not in combat, but because he drank bad water, the kind of military malfeasance which must haunt bases regardless ...
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@phoenixwritesdown.bsky.social reflects on @stopcar.ing's 24 Killers piece and how the game exemplifies home as a concept that cannot be claimed or contained.
Home is not an Enclosure - A Reflection
The polluted island setting of 24 Killers is an effective microcosm for what the interrelationship of home and community could be like. The driver for this speculation is the game's absurdism.
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//TIER Report is a new series at our humble website where we talk casually and share future plans. Within are our conclusions from the recent reader survey!
//TIER Report 001
This is the first entry in a new (free) series at TIER.
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Librarian and researcher Talita Valle delves into "the rolling stacks of digital archives" and offers a nuanced analysis of B.J. Best's LAKE Adventure. They remind us of the importance of paratexts and Barthes' concept of the indexicality of a cultural object of expression, such as the IF.
The Punctum in LAKE Adventure and Mystery in the Digital Age
The interactive fiction game LAKE Adventure, by B.J. Best, is something that must be found and figured out, as well as played.
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Would you like to give us feedback on our last year and half? This reader's survey should take around five minutes to complete and should help us determine the future of our humble publication. We appreciate you and could not do this work without you. Thank you for your consideration.
2025 Reader Survey
We've prepared this small survey to poll you on the last year and a half of TIER.
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@stopcar.ing kicked off our last issue debut of the year with a piece on 24 Killers and what home really is. She effortlessly captures the strange, funny yet bittersweet themes of the game and its eclectic yet personal tone as well.
THE WORLD IS NOT MY HOME
As someone who has moved around a lot, across different states and even countries, I long for the stability of home, a house to call my own. Political and economic situations have dashed my dreams, or...
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@phoenixsimms.bsky.social reflects on why there was an increasing emphasis in the 2010s on IF storytelling via interfaces like desktops and apps.
IF's Retrofuturist Roots
Amping up retro technological friction encourages the player to decipher an IF game's interface as if it is an alien device with its own "emotional language".
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For our IF issue, Mazen Haggag explores the tortured logics of Horse Master and how the game creates terror out of a lack of agency.
“The world is sick and ugly”
The limitations of Interactive Fiction provide a unique avenue for horror. Text based games cannot replicate the kind of tension that many survival horror games thrive in. The possibilities for emerg...
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For our next contribution to our IF issue, @coledone.com joins to talk about interlinked form and the fundamental poetry of text games.
Game Poems, Doors to IF of the Moment
A digital poem that features both text and interactivity is a type of “Interactive Fiction” in the traditional sense.
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We interviewed @alienmelon.bsky.social and discussed text games, Interactive Fiction, social media, tech fascism, and lots more.
A Conversation with Nathalie Lawhead
Nathalie Lawhead joined us on Zoom to talk about their work, interactive fiction, internet subcultures, social media and lots more.
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For our second contribution, Kaelan Doyle-Myerscough reflects on their first entry into IFComp, the joys and problems of insular art cultures, and the boundaries of interactive fiction.
My Waltz into the IFComp
Just a month before I entered it, I had no idea what the IFComp was. The year was 2017. I was dealing with a triple-whammy spring season: I broke up with my long-term partner, lost my cat to kidney ...
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For the first essay in our Interactive Fiction issue, @highimpactsex.bsky.social writes about the shrinking available space for personal art through the metafiction of Repeat the Ending.
Repeat the Ending: Where Do Personal Games Go?
If anything, outsider art exists because our expectations of art are not at all inclusive. We don't need excuses like historical significance to justify the existence of personal games like Repeat th...
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For the first entry in our Interactive Fiction @highimpactsex.bsky.social writes about the shrinking margins where personal art can flourish through the metafiction of Repeat The Ending.
Repeat the Ending: Where Do Personal Games Go?
If anything, outsider art exists because our expectations of art are not at all inclusive. We don't need excuses like historical significance to justify the existence of personal games like Repeat th...
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Thanks to a grant from the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation, we are doing an mega-issue on the interactive fiction of the 2010s! This will be the first of many themed issues to come...
@phoenixsimms.bsky.social likens thecatamites creative mode and visual culture to Dada and the avant garde movement.
Killing Interactive Art…and Loving It!
At its core, AOTK has an anti-establishment philosophy, much like the avant garde. Especially with its penchant for remixing, and therefore subverting, bourgeois expectations of art objects and texts....
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@gracemachine.bsky.social divines the haunting nature of Anthology of the Killer's settings. She also compares and contrasts the game collection's notion of history against the film Tár and personal memory.
Every Second is a Narrow Gate
Any place humans have lived in for sufficiently long is haunted.
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For our first essay on Anthology of the Killer @phantomcobra.bsky.social explores its ancestral ties to adult cartoons like Home Movies.
Laughing at the absurd, the ugly, and the awful
An Adult Swim game for a more overtly bleak era, using cartoon violence, the surreal, and the absurd to satirize life after the End of History.
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Kicking off our issue on Anthology of the Killer with something a little different.
An Interview With SEQUENCEBREAK// Curator Nilson Carroll
SEQUENCEBREAK// is an in-person exhibit of "artist's games," showing until June 28, 2025 at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York. It includes work by Stephen Gillmurphy (thecatamites, th...
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i published a post about conversations i had at A MAZE, on an important topic… Conversations About Curation And The Future Of Games Crit: www.nathalielawhead.com/candybox/con... "The future is something wildly different. One that will function outside of these outdated norms and compromised values."
Conversations About Curation And The Future Of Games Crit (reflecting on this year’s A MAZE) – The Candybox Blog
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Phoenix Simms analyzes how the irreverent tone of Lovely Lady RPG often undermines its potential as a queer anti-capitalist narrative.
Consigning Meaning to the Void
Lovely Lady RPG's strongest narrative exists in the concept of the void, but the game's self-aware tone often sells itself short.
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We are launching our issue on Lovely Lady RPG with Grace Benfell on science fiction, memes, and idealized selves.
Difference Is Resonance
Even when Lovely Lady RPG strains toward complexity, it cannot leave its clichés behind.
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