There is something very Studio Ghibli about Songs of Glimmerwick. It may not seem apparent at first—the musical twist on a welcoming Harry Potter world does little to suggest something like Kiki's Delivery Service or Princess Mononoke—but beneath the magical school trappings, it is a heartwarming coming-of-age story about community. Songs of Glimmerwick, at its most mechanical, is a life sim. You'll create a character, gain admission to the Etchery, the magical school that teaches you to cast magic spells with a flute, and quickly become the maintainer of the school's garden. You'll buy seeds, help villagers, sell baked goods, go swimming, fish, and explore the untamed wilderness surrounding the Etchery and Wick, the bustling village. But, as a student, you'll also attend classes that unlock new potions, spells, or skills, you'll meet a diverse array of students and ghosts, explore the Fairie woods, and do a whole host of events, quests, and foraging. I'm at about 50% completion at the time of writing, and the only expected life sim things I haven't seen yet are any form of character romancing or combat trials. And honestly? I love the game for it. I grew up directly in the crosshairs of the Harry Potter boom; I was reading the books as they were released, my age almost perfectly lining up with Harry's. And, while J.K. Rowling's status as Chief Garbage Person has basically tarnished that world for me forever, I still do have fond memories of dreaming about Hogsmeade or running to class to learn the new coolest thing. That majesty, that _dream_ , is revitalized in Songs of Glimmerwick, a game so much more concerned with how magic affects the world and the people within it than any Chosen One narrative. The quests you complete will keep the mill running or supply fish to a werewolf retiree who just wants to paint. Sure, you can chuck your crop of marjoram into the well in your garden to get paid the next day, but when crops are worth the same price no matter where you sell them, why _wouldn't_ you take a trip into town to chat with the seed vendor instead? Glimmerwick, by design, wants you to poke and prod at its corners, unpestered by the systems and mechanics of most life sims, including the two most aggravating progress gates: time and stamina. Songs of Glimmerwick has a clock that, usually, ticks from 6AM to 10PM. However, after 10PM, the game simply switches to Night. You can spend as long as you'd like at night without consequence. You won't pass out from exhaustion, the shops remain open, and you're free to explore any area unrestricted. On days with events—whether it's a class, a game of Forests & Fairies, or the end-of-season festival—time will progress to the event and then stop. You'll never forget—or just miss—the Sea Festival because you were too busy watering your crops. > I can just live in this moment and experience the beauty before me I can conjure up a player or two who may be frustrated by this forced involvement in the game's events. They'll exclaim, I assume, "I just want to farm marjoram! Why must I meet the merfolk and swim and learn a spell that does something really cool!" The answer, dear reader, is quite obvious: because it's _fun_. Classes are quick, typically provide you with a new tool to use in the world, and end with mini games. Bigger events like the end-of-season festival in Spring are filled with items to buy, new spells to learn, and plenty of fully-voiced dialogue between students and residents. Every bit is an absolute delight. You can end the events whenever you'd like, but, especially with the Forest & Fairies events, I'm enthralled. The voice acting is incredible, the music is evocative and beautiful, and the writing is _good_. And, because the game pauses time during these events, I'm never afraid I'll miss something or feel this urge to mash through dialogue to get to my crops before I pass out. I can just live in this moment, experience the beauty before me, and learn more about the people, places, and cultures of this delightful world. Some of the only friction comes from its stamina system, a much kinder, more relaxed version of the one you'd find in a typical life sim. Most farming tasks are done via magic. Cast a spell with key presses on your flute (like Ocarina of Time, actually) or select an option from the quick select menu, and you'll use mana to dig holes, chop down trees, or break boulders. But, besides a few spells needed for traversal or finding hidden items, this is where the stamina pressure ends. Harvest plants, brew as many potions as you'd like, bake bread, or spend the entire evening fishing to your heart's content. You can, in a beautiful piece of player friendliness, water your plants free from stamina costs. The spell that makes it more efficient will consume mana, but picking up your trusty watering can is free. Truly, the only full stop block I've run up against in Songs of Glimmerwick are when I've exhausted all the quest steps or harvested all the ingredients, fish, and diving holes for the day. Which is very much by design because, odds are, your Herbotany class the next day will unblock something and help you progress...which then provides experience points to unlock new skills (like a new carpentry level or the ability to speak to frogs??). There are plenty of spaces for self-expression and skill mastery, though. There are plenty of fashion options, a mirror that lets you change your personal experience at any point, and event-specific items to find or buy. How you lay out your farm can be as random or orderly as you'd like; I've found myself placing lavender bushes around my stone pathways, instead of neat, orderly rows, but if an orderly row or a ring around a sprinkler plant is more your speed, you can do that too. Everything up to this point is the best life sim I've played. The loop of farm-to-sell-to-seed-to-farm is engaging and as deep as I need it to be. When farming isn't exciting—or rain waters everything for me—exploring or questing fills in and keeps things engaging. In Stardew Valley, I've had too many multi-hour sessions inevitably turn into "Factorio, but farms," instead of a charming escapist adventure that would make Thoreau drool. Songs of Glimmerwick has nailed that low-impact homesteading, but what keeps me coming back isn't the farming; it's the story. You learn in the game’s opening sequence that there is a rich history magical history in this world, one that was horrifically ended by a Cult of Silence. The cult swept up all the musical instruments and sought to police and end all magic. Even humming and whistling were outlawed. There was a resistance led by a prominent figure who ended the reign of silence by burning down the forest that fed the world’s magic. You also learn that this reign of terror only ended a handful of decades ago. Some of your classmates lived in this era. Some of your classmates’ parents are still practicing members of the cult. Your path through the game is, yes, partly to chart your own way as a student and a gardener, but you also are gallivanting into the magical forest to diagnose its disease. There is charm here: cute little owls in vests hop around the mushroom-filled forest, but there is also the clouds of spores so thick you choke. Overwhelmingly, I want to spend time in Songs of Glimmerwick for the escapist fantasy of being a young student who can, truly, make a difference in this world. I’ll help the miller un-curse his mill; I’ll help that beekeeper witch get her bees back; and I’ll do it all while choosing to not scam this wizard at market day and solve the mystery at the heart of the forest. I practice the Rock Band-esque spell minigame because it is fun, yes, but also because it makes sense to pursue excellence in a world where magic was outlawed only forty years ago. The lack of a romance mechanic begins to make a lot more sense when the stakes of the world revolve around acceptance and community action; I’m not here to feed blueberry buns to one person to fill their meter and trigger the marriage cutscene. I’m here to be a part of a community. The same could be said for the lack of a combat space (at least around the halfway point); Glimmerwick isn‘t interested in violence or duels. It’s interested in building the proper habitats in your garden to welcome pets. Wick has a tarnished past—one that resurfaces early on—but every quest, every person, every interaction is about moving forward together. I continue to be amazed by how tightly designed Songs of Glimmerwick is. Around every corner is a fun story to discover, an awful joke to hear (lovingly), or way to wile away the hours as the crickets endlessly chirp. I can’t put Songs of Glimmerwick down. The town theme plays in my head constantly and I’m always excited to see what is going to happen—or what I’ll learn!—this week. And really, when was the last time a game made you excited to go to class? Songs of Glimmerwick __was released on September 30, 2026 on PC. This game was reviewed on Steam Deck with a copy provided by the publisher__.

As a big tabletop project begins to come together (coming soon 👀) and I'm booking my travel for a December trip to Philadelphia to attend PAX Unplugged, I've had dice on the mind. Specifically, I've been perceiving aspects of everyday life through the lens of the dice games I can't quite stop thinking about. The typical Dungeons and Dragons style of dice rolling is mostly ubiquitous in culture these days: 1. Your character encounters a challenge or a task they want to complete, 2. You negotiate with the Game Master to determine which skill or attribute will be tested by this challenge, 3. The Game Master sets a number goal commensurate with the challenge that your character must roll over to succeed 4. You roll the die to determine how well you succeed or fail at your goal. But, as they say, tabletop games have come a long way since D&D or Candyland, even if the little doo-dads we chuck across a table haven't. What has really stood out to me, especially in the games I'm going to talk about today—Citizen Sleeper, Amberspire, and Mothership—is how the value of the dice roll is less about success or failure, and instead has deep storytelling potential. Image: Jump Over the Age ## Citizen Sleeper asks: What will you do _with_ your initiative? Take Citizen Sleeper, a dice-based narrative adventure game where you play as a Sleeper, an emulated consciousness in a synthetic body just trying to make their way among the stars. In Citizen Sleeper, you pre-roll your die every morning. As the "turn" refreshes, you roll up to six six-sided die. > How well can you succeed, _even when you wake up feeling like shit?_ The pre-rolled dice in Citizen Sleeper (and other similar games like my personal favorite Duskpunk) is not just enumerating your ability to succeed or fail at a task, but is functioning as a mental health pool _and_ a sneaky little bit of characterization. The core question of each action in Citizen Sleeper, unlike D&D, isn't "Is this ploy worth gambling a dice roll on?" it's "What action today do I _need_ to succeed on...and what must I fail at to make that happen?" Because you (and your decaying body) can't do it all. The point isn't to get the perfect run; it's to _continue_ the run. Image: Jump Over the Age Citizen Sleeper is, through its dice, telling you one of its core themes: there is so rarely a moment in life where you stumble upon a truly random critical success. **You wake up every day with whatever capacity you have to do the things in front of you.** Sometimes, you roll all fours, fives, and sixes, and sometimes, it's just six ones in a row. How the dice fall, before you're even able to _do_ anything, influences how you approach your day, and, after a few days, you begin to internalize that. This is a "good day" or a "bad day" simply based on the dice rolls when you wake up. As clocks tick down, are you willing to accept a mixed success now, or gamble on getting a six tomorrow? The story you roleplay in Citizen Sleeper becomes a tale of overcoming the adversity of your body, not the arbitrary difficulty ceilings of the world. How well can you succeed, _even when you wake up feeling like shit?_ Oh _,_ wait, maybe that's not Citizen Sleeper anymore. You have to make do with what you have: there are only so many times you can go back to bed after rolling straight ones before life comes knocking. Image: Jump Over the Age The greatest moment in a game of D&D is, after two minutes of dissembling, you and your group of goofballs conjure up a ridiculous scheme (often using that fifty feet of rope) to do something unexpected (and usually mundane). Dice enter the game _after_ the planning, and they inform _how_ that plan plays out. Sure, there is always an opportunity for things to go drastically sideways, but, broadly, a typical tabletop experience involves seeing a challenge, planning actions to solve it, and then finding out whether you do or not. The dice enter at the end. Citizen Sleeper inverts this, forcing players to greet the unknown with their finite capacity for action. There's no amount of stuff in your Adventurer's Kit that is going to change a one to a six. You just have to play the day as it comes. Image: Lunar Division ## Amberspire's culture of serendipity I've talked at length in my Amberspire review about how I love the game's approach to dice and how the game allows you to creatively explore a city's culture by its outputs, but since completing that review, I still can't stop thinking about it. In Amberspire, you build a city on a mausoleum moon, placing buildings, growing the population, and collecting resources. Unlike your typical city-builders, Amberspire's buildings produce a random assortment of resources, laid out on a six-sided die. At the end of each turn, you roll their resource die and see what this particular Teahouse provides this turn. Is it, as you expect, Tea? Or perhaps this turn, I gain Music. > I can't stop thinking of the places I go in the terms of an Amberspire location. It is so easy to think of spaces like Teahouses or Libraries as places with a single material export. One thing they provide. But the beauty of Amberspire, the thing I can't quite let go, is the beautiful poetry of _immaterial_ exports. Coffeehouses in your community provide coffee and pastries, yes, but that open mic night provides Music, the bulletin board provides Opportunity, and the gentle clamor of laughter provides Joy. Or perhaps it's a college coffee shop that provides Knowledge or Study. Image: Lunar Division I can't stop thinking of the places I go in the terms of an Amberspire location. A college: Knowledge, Conflict, Friendship, Ambition. A community kitchen: Warmth, Sustenance, Peace, Sonder. _These_ are the things a place is born from, not the bricks this brick factory outputs. And, back to the Citizen Sleeper example, I love how every day is different. Maybe today the brick factory _does_ just output Bricks. Buildings need to be built, after all. But tomorrow is a new day. Maybe it's the day of Unity. Amberspire is clearly a city-builder first, but the more I play it—the more I think about _my_ city—the more I couldn't help but imagine it as a culture simulator, watching the machinery of the material and immaterial create _life_ as much as _structure_. The building blocks of a city, community, or society, stacked high atop a handful of six-sided dice. Image: Tuesday Knight Games ## The true horror in Mothership is failure Mothership is a horror tabletop game that allows you to play out your fantasy (?) of appearing in an Alien film. It's a game that asks the question: "What could a normal person in the awfulness of a sci-fi horror film on their way to being eviscerated?" The answer, resoundingly, is get _stressed the fuck out._ Back to the D&D example. When you try to do something in Dungeons and Dragons, and you fail, there are a handful of outcomes: you don't do the thing, you do the opposite of the thing, you get hurt. Unless there is a lasting status effect, a typical failure won't linger. You can't scale the wall, but clamber through the window. You move on. A handful of modern indie tabletop games have tried to commodify failure in delightful ways, making those bumbled jumps, failed speech checks, and catastrophic misses _mean something._ One of my favorites is Monster of the Week, a role-playing game where you get to play as the main cast in Buffy or X-Files. When you fail in Monster of the Week, yes, you don't do the thing you set out to do, **but** you also gain an experience point. In fact, failure is the _only_ way to gain the experience points you need to level up. Image: Tuesday Knight Games My current favorite TTRPG failure mechanic, though, is in my beloved Mothership. When you fail in Mothership, you don't gain an experience point; you gain _stress_. Stress is a soft and hard mechanic. Like Citizen Sleeper, it is a known value that can shape your role-playing experience. I think we all inherently have an idea of how someone experiencing 2/20 stress compares to someone experiencing 16/20 stress. It's also telling that no character, not even a brand new one, begins the game with 0/20 stress. The _baseline_ in Mothership is 2/20. > Stress comes from the inside, after all. How that stress manifests as it grows is partly up to the player, but it's also something (like stress itself) that's constantly on everyone's mind at the table. Stress makes you do weird things. It distorts criticism into combat or hunches into paranoia. Stress in Mothership is something a Warden (the Game Master role) can prod at: "You're responding very rationally to this latest setback, but I see you're at 13 stress." It's also a number that players can increase at any time, whether they fail or not. Is the scenario getting pretty tense, and you think your character would be stressed by this? You, as a player, can decide to gain one stress, just like that. Stress comes from the inside, after all. Image: Tuesday Knight Games The hard mechanics of stress, the part where stress becomes truly dangerous, is when you _critically_ fail. Normal failure is stressful. Critical failure is catastrophic. Whenever you roll a critical failure in Mothership, you also roll a twenty-sided die called the Panic die. If you have 2/20 stress and roll a four on the Panic die, nothing happens. Goody for you, this failure didn't cause a panic. But Mothership is a game _about_ stress. It's about normal people pushed to their max, trying to hold it all together in the face of impossible odds and the horror all around them. Even in a one-shot scenario, you can expect your stress to be closer to twenty than zero, and sooner or later, you'll panic. > There is truth in Mothership's panic system. When (and it _is_ when) you panic in Mothership, you take the number you rolled (let's say you have 12/20 stress and roll a 3) and check the Panic Table. Ranked from "best" to worst, the Panic Table gives you roleplaying and mechanical descriptions of how bad you panic. If you manage to roll a one, good job, you got the only good panic response: an adrenaline rush. Somehow, you managed to dump all your adrenaline in this moment to improve your chances of success. If you roll a twenty, though, whoopsies, you panicked so hard you died. You can spiral (17), you can feel doomed (10), you become jumpy (3), or you gain a death wish (13). Image: Tuesday Knight Games Each of the twenty panic effects (yes, including death) offers rich fodder for roleplaying, but, just like Amberspire's dice reflecting community, and Citizen Sleeper's dice mirroring daily life, there is truth in Mothership's panic system. _I_ have spiraled, _I_ have felt doomed, _I_ have been paranoid, jumpy, and suspicious. And some of those stress responses have manifested _this week_. Stress in Mothership carries over from session to session and is _damn hard_ to let go of. That suspicion will narrow your eyes at comrades long after the danger has passed. And, of course, the longer you play, the more stress you gain, the more likely you'll panic and make it all worse. But the inverse is true too. * * * _This_ is modern life. The pain and the beauty of seeing the world through the multi-faceted faces of a die roll. Life is stressful. You will wake up having rolled six straight ones. That is the cosmic chance of probability. Some days, the greatest output of you, your workplace, or your home is a material good enriching something or someone else. Your stress counter goes up. You hover on the precipice of panic as you get another mixed success on that Big Presentation. But sometimes, you roll a six on cooking dinner and generate Harmony, not Food. Your stress goes down. You lose the Overwhelmed condition. You go to bed, more hopeful—more likely even—that it'll be a three sixes day tomorrow.

A few years back, Mike Monteiro, a UX Designer and man-about-the-convention-speaking-circuit, put on a barnburner of a talk titled “How Designers Destroyed the World.” It’s a talk (and now a book) about the ethics of design and how, even with the best intentions, designers are slowly, catastrophically destroying everything around them. In his talk, he focuses on UI decisions for Facebook privacy settings, but, if you’ve ever tried to take a nap on a public park bench, you’ve experienced the power of design. By DC - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0 The world—both physical and digital—is designed and it is designed for a reason. Design is, at its most basic, a choice. As designers, we like to think of ourselves, typically, as altruistic: we’re helping the “user” complete an action. But, every pixel, every button, every piece of information architecture is another slice of everyone’s lived experience that is often painstakingly (or not) designed to get you to _do_ something. Your house was designed, your desk was designed, your sidewalks, billboards, car handles, door handles, the flow of UI screens for unsubscribing from Amazon Prime. It’s all designed for someone, but most likely it’s designed with a motive. I don’t want to misrepresent things too much; there are plenty of designed things in our world meant to bring joy, happiness, or ease, including many of the video games we play. There are plenty of delightful (oh how the designer loves to surprise and delight) quirks in parks or architecture. But, as Victor Papanek states in the opening line of his 1971 book “Design for the Real World:” > There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them. And, if Victor’s point wasn’t quite made, he doubles down a few paragraphs later: > As long as design concerns itself with confecting trivial “toys for adults,” killing machines with gleaming tail fins, and “sexed-up” shrouds for typewriters, toasters, telephones, and computers, it has lost all reason to exist. Papanek spends the bulk of his book explaining how design is more than the decorative. Especially in the modern era—but always present throughout human history—design is existentially in need of an ethical lens. Sure, that door that doesn’t obviously signal how to open it isn’t a _huge_ ethical quandary, but cars designed for style over safety, or concrete buildings that remove surfaces for resting on _are_ physical manifestations of unethical design exerting real world power on humans. Your normal day is filled with moments shaped by the design decisions of others and, while many of them are unethical, few burgeon on being truly evil or nefarious. Not in a grand sense anyways. Each design decision reinforces the power of a little fiefdom. What has really stuck with me though, especially as we all navigate what the United States has become in 2026, is design being used as an instrument of unethical, intentional evil. The nefarious use of design is, like unethical design, nothing new. Few regimes understood this relationship between power and design more completely than Nazi Germany. From grand state buildings, to city planning, to the typography of memo letterhead and the uniform code, the Nazis understood the utility of strong design. There’s a symbiotic relationship between the explicit power of bombs and airplanes and the implied power of a well-designed, cohesive appearance. The Nazis had ideology, yes—a lot of it—but they also had symbols and styles. They were, unfortunately, excellent designers. This is, somewhat, why Wolfenstein feels so believable: the design elements of the Nazis are easily recognizable, even within the context of the 1960s. Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus When we think of power, it is easy to conjure images of _force_. Guns, bombs, airplanes, and tanks are symbols of the force behind the power. These objects are symbols of potential; the last resort of power unacknowledged. On their own, weapons are powerful, but they are not power _itself_. Power itself is keeping those planes piloted, the tanks crewed, and the guns held. > When power is the function, design gives it form. One of the most used pieces of the Nazi regime was the memo. As a highly hierarchical group, the Nazis—like many corporate-style organizations—loved a memo. Taken at face value, the memo only has a few component parts: 1. Letterhead 2. The body of the message 3. A name of authority at the bottom Nazi-era memoranda typically featured official party or state insignia, intentionally standardized typography, and symbols of state authority such as the eagle and swastika. It immediately signified the memo as official, elevating the text within to a decree or commandment _of_ the party, not just from a person within it. Like many bureaucratic documents, Nazi memoranda often used formal administrative language that obscured individual agency and emphasized procedure; if a name was mentioned it was one of authority. It was often a summary of a thing that was done or an event that occurred. More “for your information” than “let’s discuss this together.” And the whole thing was sealed by a signature. Put together, the memo becomes a powerful instrument of bureaucracy. It communicates authority, signals that decisions have already been made, and creates distance between decision-makers and those carrying out orders. The memo becomes a designed artifact that reinforces the bureaucracy that is backed by the threat of violence. Inside the London Nautica The Nazi state ran on decrees, directives, memoranda, forms, and reports moving continuously through its bureaucracy. Armies were mobilized, cities redesigned, labor organized, and the logistics of the Holocaust administered through an endless flow of paperwork. It’s likely that the Nazi Party understood the power of cohesive design based on the piles of graphic standards and directives published by the Ministry of Propaganda and the German Labor Front, detailing symbol standards, typography guidance, and requirements for Nazi office letterheads. Fraktur is out, Antiqua is in Those graphics guides weren’t just for design cohesion though. The Normal Type Decree of 1941, written by Martin Bormann, Private Secretary to Hitler, falsely claimed that the Fraktur-style typefaces used by Nazis up to that point had Jewish origins and thus banned from usage on any party documents. The typefaces used on official memos were to change overnight because a simple design element was imbued with political and cultural power quietly being reinforced with every memo. The authority of the memo was supported by the guns and bombs, but it was the boring and formulaic nature of the memo that fueled the Nazis. It made the machinery of oppression and subjugation as boring as the “we’ve updated our privacy policy” emails you receive daily in your inbox. The power remained immense, but the artifact carrying it looked ordinary. Germania's Volkshalle If the memo is an outward manifestation of power at the bureaucratic level, then the Nazis’ fixation on urban-development and city-planning is the manifestation of power at the societal level. Bulldozing homes to pave new streets or make way for supersized party structures was a way to make the mundane authority of the memo written into the daily experience of everyday citizens. Albert Speer, chief Nazi architect, and many other German architects were charged with reimagining the skylines of Germany, filling the cities with classical structures meant to last as long as the Third Reich: millennia. These buildings and grand boulevards weren’t just structures, they were arguments for German supremacy, the inevitability of their victory, and the cohesion of its people. Every grand monument to the Nazi Party, ministry building, or housing complex was designed to exude control within Germany and strength and power without. Albert Speer and Adolf Hitler survey the German Pavilion for the 1937 World's Fair Speer and his contemporaries understood the propagandistic strength of urban development as tools—like the memo—to control the population, shape culture, and incorporate Nazi ideology into the lived environment. In Speer’s memoir, _Inside the Third Reich_ , he talks often of the Germania project and the buildings he designed, saying: > I saw all these buildings with Hitler’s political eyes. Much of Germania and its designed societal power was never realized, the project ending in the destruction of thousands of homes at the Nazis hands and the destruction of the few state buildings built at the hands of the Russians. But, what if they had succeeded? What would it feel like to live in a world so thoroughly, rigidly designed to control and oppress? Wolfenstein screenshot. Probably a main street with large flags From the memo to the thoroughfare, Wolfenstein: The New Order presents a world where that vision succeeded. The game imagines a society where authoritarian design is no longer aspirational or theoretical but total. Every wall, corridor, sign, and monument was designed to reinforce the power of the regime. > Absolute design is an extension of total war. If power requires form, then games offer a unique opportunity to examine it. Every building, street, document, and interface can be shaped to reinforce a particular vision of how the world works. The spaces you wander are, by virtue of their creation, intentional. Every in-game memo or concrete texture in Wolfenstein: The New Order was a design decision. The totality of design’s control in Wolfenstein: The New Order is only truly possible because it is a game. Speer’s Germania would’ve been at the whims of Berlin’s soil conditions, the quality of materials available, and the labor conditions within Germany. But in Wolfenstein, those things don’t matter. Germania exists simply because an artist created it. Wolfenstein’s Third Reich, more than would ever be possible in real life, is a cohesive machine with seemingly absolute power. If we take away the frenetic gameplay in Wolfenstein: The New Order and linger in the levels and designed spaces, players can feel the oppression. Even in the calm before the gunfights, the built Nazi environments are foreboding. The Berlin Hotel Room (interior) From BJ and Anya’s hotel room in Berlin, the designed manifestations of Nazi power are on full display. The interior of the room is covered with cream wallpaper and rich red carpet, a comfortable arm chair sits in the corner. It is a typical hotel room, complete with a glass paneled door—one of the only ones throughout the entire game—leading out to a balcony. This is, perhaps, the Berlin we expect. Lavish and adorned. Modern. A far-cry from the rigidity and ancient walls of Deathshead’s Compound. The moment you walk out onto the balcony, the entire tenor of Berlin changes. It becomes immediately clear that BJ and Anya may be staying in one of the only remaining old-world buildings in all of Berlin. The first image BJ and the camera linger on is the jewel of Speer’s Germania: the Volkshalle. Remember though, the Volkshalle was meant to be so much more than just a landmark. Like every monumental buildings proposed by Speer, it is an argument constructed in concrete. It was to be a political building of gargantuan proportions meant to last millennia. A potent symbol of Nazi cultism that loudly proclaims to the world the Third Reich’s permanence, inevitability, and scale. Searchlights—echoing Speer’s Cathedral of Lights during Nazi Party rallies at Nuremberg—flank the massive dome, along side towering concrete pillars, most windowless spires. Zeppelins perambulate across the sky, hulking gunmetal gray mechs walk the sidewalks, and an armored car surrounded by SS soldiers idles in the hotel parking lot. The moment you leave the security of the hotel, you are assaulted by concrete grayness and countless blood red banners emblazoned with swastikas. The Volkshalle shot, showing the entire expanse My point isn't that Berlin has been redesigned in steel and concrete. It’s that Nazi power has leapt from the newsreels of our reality and extrapolated to its world-dominating end goal. The ideology woven into every memorandum, decree, and civic redevelopment plan that never was, now towers above the player in concrete, steel, and stone. In the heart of Wolfenstein’s Berlin, Nazi power is absolute. That power is visible in the architecture and city-planning, with barely a gun visible from your high perch. With Speer’s Germania complete, with Nazi world supremacy cemented in the very earth, massive displays of potential violence are no longer required. For as sprawling as Berlin appears, it also feels empty. In our world, Speer’s grand plan of Germania was to be completed in 1950; assuming he succeeded, it has been ten years in Wolfenstein’s world for Berlin’s new structures to be populated. The structures though, tiny windows alight, are carrying out their purpose as concrete prison cells for the citizens. All of Berlin is cowed beneath Speer’s Volkshalle, every citizen, by design and the implied force behind it, _less than_ the symbols of state. A grand scheme of oppression written in concrete. The empty parking lot You feel the weight and authoritarian oppression of all that concrete, the planned output of bureaucracy and control, with fewer than ten people visible. The parking lot, except for Anya and the SS soldiers she is trying to distract, is empty of life and filled only with the same black, unmarked sedans. There are no sounds of other guests in the hotel, nor a sign of anyone staying there. A single black, unmarked car drives around a city block forever, the only sign of traffic on the roads. The sidewalks have two more soldiers assaulting the only civilian you see. The beautiful bit of game design in this moment though, is that, as BJ, you have run roughshod through three levels of the game already. You’ve most likely come very close to mowing down a triple digit amount of enemies. But here, when exposed to the grand scale of Nazi power, all you have is a knife. The power fantasy crumbles for a moment; long gone was the elation you felt killing the last enemy you fought: two towering, laser-wielding robots. Here, in Berlin, you are meant to feel the same crushing despondency the citizens of the world do. You’re meant to ask the all-important question of Wolfenstein: how do you defeat a foe that was powerful enough to make all they planned a reality? Throughout Wolfenstein, you’ll return to this feeling constantly. Every hallway can barely fit two abreast, sharing more in common with bunker fortifications than the corporate buildings they’re meant to be. Board rooms and office spaces are confined by windowless concrete barely eight feet tall, uniform furnishings, memos, and posters plastering every wall and desk across the entire game. Even the spaces meant to inspire awe—namely, the projection room in the London Nautica displaying a several-stories tall projection of the moon ringed by museum exhibits—is encased by concrete. There is no wonder in this space, no telescope or window to look up to the stars in awe; the room is designed to make us feel one thing: even in this building in the middle of London, the Nazis have captured the moon. It is held within their iron grasp simply by design. If there's one thing I'd like you to carry with you through the rest of this collection, it's that power rarely appears as power. To be felt, to be tangible, it must be given form. The abstract beliefs of manifestos are made real not by a triumph of the will, but with pencil lines on a blueprint, a typeface chosen for a letterhead, a city plan, or a memo. The pieces that follow examine those forms from different angles. Through architecture, typography, game design, and the worlds we inhabit, they all return to the same question: > How does design give power form? * * * ## Explore more of the collection: The Design of PowerWelcome to The Design of Power, a collection of essays, criticism, and videos exploring how power is created through design. New pieces will be released over the coming months, examining themes of totalitarianism, architecture, typefaces, and more through the lens of Wolfenstein: The New Order. Letter from the Editor In70% CompletePhil BothunThe Most Powerful Weapon in WolfensteinBekijk je favoriete video’s, luister naar de muziek die je leuk vindt, upload originele content en deel alles met vrienden, familie en anderen op YouTube.YouTube70% Complete ## Be the first to know Want to know when the next essay, video, or podcast is available? Sign up for our newsletter, complete with additional behind-the-scenes thoughts! Get notified Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. Typically, once a month or less, and ****only related to these story collections.**** Unsubscribe anytime.

Hello early subscribers and welcome to Year 3 of 70% Complete! It's a lot of the old 70% Complete, but with something new, something we're calling: Collections. This is the beginning of the Design of Power, a collection feature video essays, written essays, and (tangential) podcast discussions digging into design, power, and Wolfenstein: The New Order. Over the next few months, new videos and essays will be rolling out on the collection's landing page. Today, you can read the foundational essay below, as well as watch The Most Powerful Weapon in Wolfenstein, my latest longform essay digging into concrete, architecture, and weapons. The launch of collections also coincides with a new positioning statement for _what_ 70% Complete is: An independent publication exploring power, philosophy, and play through games. We continue to want to talk about games and use them as gateways, but if you're a long-time listener, that probably doesn't sound all that different. That's because it's not! And lastly, we've launched the Patreon! If you want these essays, videos, and podcasts to continue, support us on Patreon. All paid tiers will gain 48-early access to all future videos, extended cuts of the 70% Complete Podcast, and a ton of behind-the-scenes stuff, including storyboards, version 1 scripts, and Zero to Seventy, a casual chat podcast about making the videos and running 70%. It's a show I've always wanted to exist and it's been a ton of fun to make. You can learn more (and listen to the 15 already existing episodes!) on Patreon. Alright, that's enough jabbering! Welcome to the Design of Power. * * * ## Power Made Visible A few years back, Mike Monteiro, a UX Designer and man-about-the-convention-speaking-circuit, put on a barnburner of a talk titled “How Designers Destroyed the World.” It’s a talk (and now a book) about the ethics of design and how, even with the best intentions, designers are slowly, catastrophically destroying everything around them. In his talk, he focuses on UI decisions for Facebook privacy settings, but, if you’ve ever tried to take a nap on a public park bench, you’ve experienced the power of design. By DC - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0 The world—both physical and digital—is designed and it is designed for a reason. Design is, at its most basic, a choice. As designers, we like to think of ourselves, typically, as altruistic: we’re helping the “user” complete an action. But, every pixel, every button, every piece of information architecture is another slice of everyone’s lived experience that is often painstakingly (or not) designed to get you to _do_ something. Your house was designed, your desk was designed, your sidewalks, billboards, car handles, door handles, the flow of UI screens for unsubscribing from Amazon Prime. It’s all designed for someone, but most likely it’s designed with a motive. I don’t want to misrepresent things too much; there are plenty of designed things in our world meant to bring joy, happiness, or ease, including many of the video games we play. There are plenty of delightful (oh how the designer loves to surprise and delight) quirks in parks or architecture. But, as Victor Papanek states in the opening line of his 1971 book “Design for the Real World:” > There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them. And, if Victor’s point wasn’t quite made, he doubles down a few paragraphs later: > As long as design concerns itself with confecting trivial “toys for adults,” killing machines with gleaming tail fins, and “sexed-up” shrouds for typewriters, toasters, telephones, and computers, it has lost all reason to exist. Papanek spends the bulk of his book explaining how design is more than the decorative. Especially in the modern era—but always present throughout human history—design is existentially in need of an ethical lens. Sure, that door that doesn’t obviously signal how to open it isn’t a _huge_ ethical quandary, but cars designed for style over safety, or concrete buildings that remove surfaces for resting on _are_ physical manifestations of unethical design exerting real world power on humans. Your normal day is filled with moments shaped by the design decisions of others and, while many of them are unethical, few burgeon on being truly evil or nefarious. Not in a grand sense anyways. Each design decision reinforces the power of a little fiefdom. What has really stuck with me though, especially as we all navigate what the United States has become in 2026, is design being used as an instrument of unethical, intentional evil. The nefarious use of design is, like unethical design, nothing new. Few regimes understood this relationship between power and design more completely than Nazi Germany. From grand state buildings, to city planning, to the typography of memo letterhead and the uniform code, the Nazis understood the utility of strong design. There’s a symbiotic relationship between the explicit power of bombs and airplanes and the implied power of a well-designed, cohesive appearance. The Nazis had ideology, yes—a lot of it—but they also had symbols and styles. They were, unfortunately, excellent designers. This is, somewhat, why Wolfenstein feels so believable: the design elements of the Nazis are easily recognizable, even within the context of the 1960s. Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus When we think of power, it is easy to conjure images of _force_. Guns, bombs, airplanes, and tanks are symbols of the force behind the power. These objects are symbols of potential; the last resort of power unacknowledged. On their own, weapons are powerful, but they are not power _itself_. Power itself is keeping those planes piloted, the tanks crewed, and the guns held. > When power is the function, design gives it form. One of the most used pieces of the Nazi regime was the memo. As a highly hierarchical group, the Nazis—like many corporate-style organizations—loved a memo. Taken at face value, the memo only has a few component parts: 1. Letterhead 2. The body of the message 3. A name of authority at the bottom Nazi-era memoranda typically featured official party or state insignia, intentionally standardized typography, and symbols of state authority such as the eagle and swastika. It immediately signified the memo as official, elevating the text within to a decree or commandment _of_ the party, not just from a person within it. Like many bureaucratic documents, Nazi memoranda often used formal administrative language that obscured individual agency and emphasized procedure; if a name was mentioned it was one of authority. It was often a summary of a thing that was done or an event that occurred. More “for your information” than “let’s discuss this together.” And the whole thing was sealed by a signature. Put together, the memo becomes a powerful instrument of bureaucracy. It communicates authority, signals that decisions have already been made, and creates distance between decision-makers and those carrying out orders. The memo becomes a designed artifact that reinforces the bureaucracy that is backed by the threat of violence. Inside the London Nautica The Nazi state ran on decrees, directives, memoranda, forms, and reports moving continuously through its bureaucracy. Armies were mobilized, cities redesigned, labor organized, and the logistics of the Holocaust administered through an endless flow of paperwork. It’s likely that the Nazi Party understood the power of cohesive design based on the piles of graphic standards and directives published by the Ministry of Propaganda and the German Labor Front, detailing symbol standards, typography guidance, and requirements for Nazi office letterheads. Fraktur is out, Antiqua is in Those graphics guides weren’t just for design cohesion though. The Normal Type Decree of 1941, written by Martin Bormann, Private Secretary to Hitler, falsely claimed that the Fraktur-style typefaces used by Nazis up to that point had Jewish origins and thus banned from usage on any party documents. The typefaces used on official memos were to change overnight because a simple design element was imbued with political and cultural power quietly being reinforced with every memo. The authority of the memo was supported by the guns and bombs, but it was the boring and formulaic nature of the memo that fueled the Nazis. It made the machinery of oppression and subjugation as boring as the “we’ve updated our privacy policy” emails you receive daily in your inbox. The power remained immense, but the artifact carrying it looked ordinary. Germania's Volkshalle If the memo is an outward manifestation of power at the bureaucratic level, then the Nazis’ fixation on urban-development and city-planning is the manifestation of power at the societal level. Bulldozing homes to pave new streets or make way for supersized party structures was a way to make the mundane authority of the memo written into the daily experience of everyday citizens. Albert Speer, chief Nazi architect, and many other German architects were charged with reimagining the skylines of Germany, filling the cities with classical structures meant to last as long as the Third Reich: millennia. These buildings and grand boulevards weren’t just structures, they were arguments for German supremacy, the inevitability of their victory, and the cohesion of its people. Every grand monument to the Nazi Party, ministry building, or housing complex was designed to exude control within Germany and strength and power without. Albert Speer and Adolf Hitler survey the German Pavilion for the 1937 World's Fair Speer and his contemporaries understood the propagandistic strength of urban development as tools—like the memo—to control the population, shape culture, and incorporate Nazi ideology into the lived environment. In Speer’s memoir, _Inside the Third Reich_ , he talks often of the Germania project and the buildings he designed, saying: > I saw all these buildings with Hitler’s political eyes. Much of Germania and its designed societal power was never realized, the project ending in the destruction of thousands of homes at the Nazis hands and the destruction of the few state buildings built at the hands of the Russians. But, what if they had succeeded? What would it feel like to live in a world so thoroughly, rigidly designed to control and oppress? Wolfenstein screenshot. Probably a main street with large flags From the memo to the thoroughfare, Wolfenstein: The New Order presents a world where that vision succeeded. The game imagines a society where authoritarian design is no longer aspirational or theoretical but total. Every wall, corridor, sign, and monument was designed to reinforce the power of the regime. > Absolute design is an extension of total war. If power requires form, then games offer a unique opportunity to examine it. Every building, street, document, and interface can be shaped to reinforce a particular vision of how the world works. The spaces you wander are, by virtue of their creation, intentional. Every in-game memo or concrete texture in Wolfenstein: The New Order was a design decision. The totality of design’s control in Wolfenstein: The New Order is only truly possible because it is a game. Speer’s Germania would’ve been at the whims of Berlin’s soil conditions, the quality of materials available, and the labor conditions within Germany. But in Wolfenstein, those things don’t matter. Germania exists simply because an artist created it. Wolfenstein’s Third Reich, more than would ever be possible in real life, is a cohesive machine with seemingly absolute power. If we take away the frenetic gameplay in Wolfenstein: The New Order and linger in the levels and designed spaces, players can feel the oppression. Even in the calm before the gunfights, the built Nazi environments are foreboding. The Berlin Hotel Room (interior) From BJ and Anya’s hotel room in Berlin, the designed manifestations of Nazi power are on full display. The interior of the room is covered with cream wallpaper and rich red carpet, a comfortable arm chair sits in the corner. It is a typical hotel room, complete with a glass paneled door—one of the only ones throughout the entire game—leading out to a balcony. This is, perhaps, the Berlin we expect. Lavish and adorned. Modern. A far-cry from the rigidity and ancient walls of Deathshead’s Compound. The moment you walk out onto the balcony, the entire tenor of Berlin changes. It becomes immediately clear that BJ and Anya may be staying in one of the only remaining old-world buildings in all of Berlin. The first image BJ and the camera linger on is the jewel of Speer’s Germania: the Volkshalle. Remember though, the Volkshalle was meant to be so much more than just a landmark. Like every monumental buildings proposed by Speer, it is an argument constructed in concrete. It was to be a political building of gargantuan proportions meant to last millennia. A potent symbol of Nazi cultism that loudly proclaims to the world the Third Reich’s permanence, inevitability, and scale. Searchlights—echoing Speer’s Cathedral of Lights during Nazi Party rallies at Nuremberg—flank the massive dome, along side towering concrete pillars, most windowless spires. Zeppelins perambulate across the sky, hulking gunmetal gray mechs walk the sidewalks, and an armored car surrounded by SS soldiers idles in the hotel parking lot. The moment you leave the security of the hotel, you are assaulted by concrete grayness and countless blood red banners emblazoned with swastikas. The Volkshalle shot, showing the entire expanse My point isn't that Berlin has been redesigned in steel and concrete. It’s that Nazi power has leapt from the newsreels of our reality and extrapolated to its world-dominating end goal. The ideology woven into every memorandum, decree, and civic redevelopment plan that never was, now towers above the player in concrete, steel, and stone. In the heart of Wolfenstein’s Berlin, Nazi power is absolute. That power is visible in the architecture and city-planning, with barely a gun visible from your high perch. With Speer’s Germania complete, with Nazi world supremacy cemented in the very earth, massive displays of potential violence are no longer required. For as sprawling as Berlin appears, it also feels empty. In our world, Speer’s grand plan of Germania was to be completed in 1950; assuming he succeeded, it has been ten years in Wolfenstein’s world for Berlin’s new structures to be populated. The structures though, tiny windows alight, are carrying out their purpose as concrete prison cells for the citizens. All of Berlin is cowed beneath Speer’s Volkshalle, every citizen, by design and the implied force behind it, _less than_ the symbols of state. A grand scheme of oppression written in concrete. The empty parking lot You feel the weight and authoritarian oppression of all that concrete, the planned output of bureaucracy and control, with fewer than ten people visible. The parking lot, except for Anya and the SS soldiers she is trying to distract, is empty of life and filled only with the same black, unmarked sedans. There are no sounds of other guests in the hotel, nor a sign of anyone staying there. A single black, unmarked car drives around a city block forever, the only sign of traffic on the roads. The sidewalks have two more soldiers assaulting the only civilian you see. The beautiful bit of game design in this moment though, is that, as BJ, you have run roughshod through three levels of the game already. You’ve most likely come very close to mowing down a triple digit amount of enemies. But here, when exposed to the grand scale of Nazi power, all you have is a knife. The power fantasy crumbles for a moment; long gone was the elation you felt killing the last enemy you fought: two towering, laser-wielding robots. Here, in Berlin, you are meant to feel the same crushing despondency the citizens of the world do. You’re meant to ask the all-important question of Wolfenstein: how do you defeat a foe that was powerful enough to make all they planned a reality? Throughout Wolfenstein, you’ll return to this feeling constantly. Every hallway can barely fit two abreast, sharing more in common with bunker fortifications than the corporate buildings they’re meant to be. Board rooms and office spaces are confined by windowless concrete barely eight feet tall, uniform furnishings, memos, and posters plastering every wall and desk across the entire game. Even the spaces meant to inspire awe—namely, the projection room in the London Nautica displaying a several-stories tall projection of the moon ringed by museum exhibits—is encased by concrete. There is no wonder in this space, no telescope or window to look up to the stars in awe; the room is designed to make us feel one thing: even in this building in the middle of London, the Nazis have captured the moon. It is held within their iron grasp simply by design. If there's one thing I'd like you to carry with you through the rest of this collection, it's that power rarely appears as power. To be felt, to be tangible, it must be given form. The abstract beliefs of manifestos are made real not by a triumph of the will, but with pencil lines on a blueprint, a typeface chosen for a letterhead, a city plan, or a memo. The pieces that follow examine those forms from different angles. Through architecture, typography, game design, and the worlds we inhabit, they all return to the same question: > How does design give power form? * * * ## Explore more of the collection: The Design of PowerWelcome to The Design of Power, a collection of essays, criticism, and videos exploring how power is created through design. New pieces will be released over the coming months, examining themes of totalitarianism, architecture, typefaces, and more through the lens of Wolfenstein: The New Order. Letter from the Editor In70% CompletePhil BothunThe Most Powerful Weapon in WolfensteinBekijk je favoriete video’s, luister naar de muziek die je leuk vindt, upload originele content en deel alles met vrienden, familie en anderen op YouTube.YouTube70% Complete

A few years back, Mike Monteiro, a UX Designer and man-about-the-convention-speaking-circuit, put on a barnburner of a talk titled “How Designers Destroyed the World.” It’s a talk (and now a book) about the ethics of design and how, even with the best intentions, designers are slowly, catastrophically destroying everything around them. In his talk, he focuses on UI decisions for Facebook privacy settings, but, if you’ve ever tried to take a nap on a public park bench, you’ve experienced the power of design. By DC - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0 The world—both physical and digital—is designed and it is designed for a reason. Design is, at its most basic, a choice. As designers, we like to think of ourselves, typically, as altruistic: we’re helping the “user” complete an action. But, every pixel, every button, every piece of information architecture is another slice of everyone’s lived experience that is often painstakingly (or not) designed to get you to _do_ something. Your house was designed, your desk was designed, your sidewalks, billboards, car handles, door handles, the flow of UI screens for unsubscribing from Amazon Prime. It’s all designed for someone, but most likely it’s designed with a motive. I don’t want to misrepresent things too much; there are plenty of designed things in our world meant to bring joy, happiness, or ease, including many of the video games we play. There are plenty of delightful (oh how the designer loves to surprise and delight) quirks in parks or architecture. But, as Victor Papanek states in the opening line of his 1971 book “Design for the Real World:” > There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them. And, if Victor’s point wasn’t quite made, he doubles down a few paragraphs later: > As long as design concerns itself with confecting trivial “toys for adults,” killing machines with gleaming tail fins, and “sexed-up” shrouds for typewriters, toasters, telephones, and computers, it has lost all reason to exist. Papanek spends the bulk of his book explaining how design is more than the decorative. Especially in the modern era—but always present throughout human history—design is existentially in need of an ethical lens. Sure, that door that doesn’t obviously signal how to open it isn’t a _huge_ ethical quandary, but cars designed for style over safety, or concrete buildings that remove surfaces for resting on _are_ physical manifestations of unethical design exerting real world power on humans. Your normal day is filled with moments shaped by the design decisions of others and, while many of them are unethical, few burgeon on being truly evil or nefarious. Not in a grand sense anyways. Each design decision reinforces the power of a little fiefdom. What has really stuck with me though, especially as we all navigate what the United States has become in 2026, is design being used as an instrument of unethical, intentional evil. The nefarious use of design is, like unethical design, nothing new. Few regimes understood this relationship between power and design more completely than Nazi Germany. From grand state buildings, to city planning, to the typography of memo letterhead and the uniform code, the Nazis understood the utility of strong design. There’s a symbiotic relationship between the explicit power of bombs and airplanes and the implied power of a well-designed, cohesive appearance. The Nazis had ideology, yes—a lot of it—but they also had symbols and styles. They were, unfortunately, excellent designers. This is, somewhat, why Wolfenstein feels so believable: the design elements of the Nazis are easily recognizable, even within the context of the 1960s. Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus When we think of power, it is easy to conjure images of _force_. Guns, bombs, airplanes, and tanks are symbols of the force behind the power. These objects are symbols of potential; the last resort of power unacknowledged. On their own, weapons are powerful, but they are not power _itself_. Power itself is keeping those planes piloted, the tanks crewed, and the guns held. > When power is the function, design gives it form. One of the most used pieces of the Nazi regime was the memo. As a highly hierarchical group, the Nazis—like many corporate-style organizations—loved a memo. Taken at face value, the memo only has a few component parts: 1. Letterhead 2. The body of the message 3. A name of authority at the bottom Nazi-era memoranda typically featured official party or state insignia, intentionally standardized typography, and symbols of state authority such as the eagle and swastika. It immediately signified the memo as official, elevating the text within to a decree or commandment _of_ the party, not just from a person within it. Like many bureaucratic documents, Nazi memoranda often used formal administrative language that obscured individual agency and emphasized procedure; if a name was mentioned it was one of authority. It was often a summary of a thing that was done or an event that occurred. More “for your information” than “let’s discuss this together.” And the whole thing was sealed by a signature. Put together, the memo becomes a powerful instrument of bureaucracy. It communicates authority, signals that decisions have already been made, and creates distance between decision-makers and those carrying out orders. The memo becomes a designed artifact that reinforces the bureaucracy that is backed by the threat of violence. Inside the London Nautica The Nazi state ran on decrees, directives, memoranda, forms, and reports moving continuously through its bureaucracy. Armies were mobilized, cities redesigned, labor organized, and the logistics of the Holocaust administered through an endless flow of paperwork. It’s likely that the Nazi Party understood the power of cohesive design based on the piles of graphic standards and directives published by the Ministry of Propaganda and the German Labor Front, detailing symbol standards, typography guidance, and requirements for Nazi office letterheads. Fraktur is out, Antiqua is in Those graphics guides weren’t just for design cohesion though. The Normal Type Decree of 1941, written by Martin Bormann, Private Secretary to Hitler, falsely claimed that the Fraktur-style typefaces used by Nazis up to that point had Jewish origins and thus banned from usage on any party documents. The typefaces used on official memos were to change overnight because a simple design element was imbued with political and cultural power quietly being reinforced with every memo. The authority of the memo was supported by the guns and bombs, but it was the boring and formulaic nature of the memo that fueled the Nazis. It made the machinery of oppression and subjugation as boring as the “we’ve updated our privacy policy” emails you receive daily in your inbox. The power remained immense, but the artifact carrying it looked ordinary. Germania's Volkshalle If the memo is an outward manifestation of power at the bureaucratic level, then the Nazis’ fixation on urban-development and city-planning is the manifestation of power at the societal level. Bulldozing homes to pave new streets or make way for supersized party structures was a way to make the mundane authority of the memo written into the daily experience of everyday citizens. Albert Speer, chief Nazi architect, and many other German architects were charged with reimagining the skylines of Germany, filling the cities with classical structures meant to last as long as the Third Reich: millennia. These buildings and grand boulevards weren’t just structures, they were arguments for German supremacy, the inevitability of their victory, and the cohesion of its people. Every grand monument to the Nazi Party, ministry building, or housing complex was designed to exude control within Germany and strength and power without. Albert Speer and Adolf Hitler survey the German Pavilion for the 1937 World's Fair Speer and his contemporaries understood the propagandistic strength of urban development as tools—like the memo—to control the population, shape culture, and incorporate Nazi ideology into the lived environment. In Speer’s memoir, _Inside the Third Reich_ , he talks often of the Germania project and the buildings he designed, saying: > I saw all these buildings with Hitler’s political eyes. Much of Germania and its designed societal power was never realized, the project ending in the destruction of thousands of homes at the Nazis hands and the destruction of the few state buildings built at the hands of the Russians. But, what if they had succeeded? What would it feel like to live in a world so thoroughly, rigidly designed to control and oppress? Wolfenstein screenshot. Probably a main street with large flags From the memo to the thoroughfare, Wolfenstein: The New Order presents a world where that vision succeeded. The game imagines a society where authoritarian design is no longer aspirational or theoretical but total. Every wall, corridor, sign, and monument was designed to reinforce the power of the regime. > Absolute design is an extension of total war. If power requires form, then games offer a unique opportunity to examine it. Every building, street, document, and interface can be shaped to reinforce a particular vision of how the world works. The spaces you wander are, by virtue of their creation, intentional. Every in-game memo or concrete texture in Wolfenstein: The New Order was a design decision. The totality of design’s control in Wolfenstein: The New Order is only truly possible because it is a game. Speer’s Germania would’ve been at the whims of Berlin’s soil conditions, the quality of materials available, and the labor conditions within Germany. But in Wolfenstein, those things don’t matter. Germania exists simply because an artist created it. Wolfenstein’s Third Reich, more than would ever be possible in real life, is a cohesive machine with seemingly absolute power. If we take away the frenetic gameplay in Wolfenstein: The New Order and linger in the levels and designed spaces, players can feel the oppression. Even in the calm before the gunfights, the built Nazi environments are foreboding. The Berlin Hotel Room (interior) From BJ and Anya’s hotel room in Berlin, the designed manifestations of Nazi power are on full display. The interior of the room is covered with cream wallpaper and rich red carpet, a comfortable arm chair sits in the corner. It is a typical hotel room, complete with a glass paneled door—one of the only ones throughout the entire game—leading out to a balcony. This is, perhaps, the Berlin we expect. Lavish and adorned. Modern. A far-cry from the rigidity and ancient walls of Deathshead’s Compound. The moment you walk out onto the balcony, the entire tenor of Berlin changes. It becomes immediately clear that BJ and Anya may be staying in one of the only remaining old-world buildings in all of Berlin. The first image BJ and the camera linger on is the jewel of Speer’s Germania: the Volkshalle. Remember though, the Volkshalle was meant to be so much more than just a landmark. Like every monumental buildings proposed by Speer, it is an argument constructed in concrete. It was to be a political building of gargantuan proportions meant to last millennia. A potent symbol of Nazi cultism that loudly proclaims to the world the Third Reich’s permanence, inevitability, and scale. Searchlights—echoing Speer’s Cathedral of Lights during Nazi Party rallies at Nuremberg—flank the massive dome, along side towering concrete pillars, most windowless spires. Zeppelins perambulate across the sky, hulking gunmetal gray mechs walk the sidewalks, and an armored car surrounded by SS soldiers idles in the hotel parking lot. The moment you leave the security of the hotel, you are assaulted by concrete grayness and countless blood red banners emblazoned with swastikas. The Volkshalle shot, showing the entire expanse My point isn't that Berlin has been redesigned in steel and concrete. It’s that Nazi power has leapt from the newsreels of our reality and extrapolated to its world-dominating end goal. The ideology woven into every memorandum, decree, and civic redevelopment plan that never was, now towers above the player in concrete, steel, and stone. In the heart of Wolfenstein’s Berlin, Nazi power is absolute. That power is visible in the architecture and city-planning, with barely a gun visible from your high perch. With Speer’s Germania complete, with Nazi world supremacy cemented in the very earth, massive displays of potential violence are no longer required. For as sprawling as Berlin appears, it also feels empty. In our world, Speer’s grand plan of Germania was to be completed in 1950; assuming he succeeded, it has been ten years in Wolfenstein’s world for Berlin’s new structures to be populated. The structures though, tiny windows alight, are carrying out their purpose as concrete prison cells for the citizens. All of Berlin is cowed beneath Speer’s Volkshalle, every citizen, by design and the implied force behind it, _less than_ the symbols of state. A grand scheme of oppression written in concrete. The empty parking lot You feel the weight and authoritarian oppression of all that concrete, the planned output of bureaucracy and control, with fewer than ten people visible. The parking lot, except for Anya and the SS soldiers she is trying to distract, is empty of life and filled only with the same black, unmarked sedans. There are no sounds of other guests in the hotel, nor a sign of anyone staying there. A single black, unmarked car drives around a city block forever, the only sign of traffic on the roads. The sidewalks have two more soldiers assaulting the only civilian you see. The beautiful bit of game design in this moment though, is that, as BJ, you have run roughshod through three levels of the game already. You’ve most likely come very close to mowing down a triple digit amount of enemies. But here, when exposed to the grand scale of Nazi power, all you have is a knife. The power fantasy crumbles for a moment; long gone was the elation you felt killing the last enemy you fought: two towering, laser-wielding robots. Here, in Berlin, you are meant to feel the same crushing despondency the citizens of the world do. You’re meant to ask the all-important question of Wolfenstein: how do you defeat a foe that was powerful enough to make all they planned a reality? Throughout Wolfenstein, you’ll return to this feeling constantly. Every hallway can barely fit two abreast, sharing more in common with bunker fortifications than the corporate buildings they’re meant to be. Board rooms and office spaces are confined by windowless concrete barely eight feet tall, uniform furnishings, memos, and posters plastering every wall and desk across the entire game. Even the spaces meant to inspire awe—namely, the projection room in the London Nautica displaying a several-stories tall projection of the moon ringed by museum exhibits—is encased by concrete. There is no wonder in this space, no telescope or window to look up to the stars in awe; the room is designed to make us feel one thing: even in this building in the middle of London, the Nazis have captured the moon. It is held within their iron grasp simply by design. If there's one thing I'd like you to carry with you through the rest of this collection, it's that power rarely appears as power. To be felt, to be tangible, it must be given form. The abstract beliefs of manifestos are made real not by a triumph of the will, but with pencil lines on a blueprint, a typeface chosen for a letterhead, a city plan, or a memo. The pieces that follow examine those forms from different angles. Through architecture, typography, game design, and the worlds we inhabit, they all return to the same question: > How does design give power form? * * * ## Explore more of the collection: The Design of PowerWelcome to The Design of Power, a collection of essays, criticism, and videos exploring how power is created through design. New pieces will be released over the coming months, examining themes of totalitarianism, architecture, typefaces, and more through the lens of Wolfenstein: The New Order. Letter from the Editor In70% CompletePhil BothunThe Most Powerful Weapon in WolfensteinBekijk je favoriete video’s, luister naar de muziek die je leuk vindt, upload originele content en deel alles met vrienden, familie en anderen op YouTube.YouTube70% Complete ## Be the first to know Want to know when the next essay, video, or podcast is available? Sign up for our newsletter, complete with additional behind-the-scenes thoughts! Get notified Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. Typically, once a month or less, and ****only related to these story collections.**** Unsubscribe anytime.

In the first twenty minutes of Dimhaven: The Lost Source, you learn all you need to know about the game. You parachute onto the island, have your passport stolen by a Seagull (no one has sprayed Gull Guard on the parachute landing pad in ages, it appears), pick up a camera scavenger hunt, solve a puzzle in a port-a-potty, and open an inventory screen. If you have played Myst, or other Cyan Worlds games like Obduction or Firmament, you will feel perfectly at home in Dimhaven. Random DH Screenshot There's plenty to dig into (What's with that huge ancient wall? Is this spy fiction?! Family trauma, an ancient house, and a mad inventor??), but what kept me coming back to solve the increasingly tricky puzzles was the camera. Just like the screenshot map markers in Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, I imagine players will be clambering for Dimhaven's camera in any and all puzzle games going forward. And I get it. It's a genius bit of game design. Since the dawn of adventure puzzle gaming, there have been two things: pipe puzzles and notebooks. A distinction of difficulty when discussing puzzle games is _if_ you need a notebook for it. Do you need to track puzzle solutions or earlier information across time, or are puzzle solutions often situated among the puzzles themselves? I __still__ don’t know if this a spoiler or not One of my recent favorite puzzle games, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, demands a notebook, rewarding players for retaining (and combining) puzzle clues over hours to solve later puzzles. I love Lorelei so much for how well it sign-posts clues; go too obscure and you land in Blue Prince territory, where you're surrounded by information but only hints at what are clues; or go too hand-holdy and become a Seance at Blake Manor, where deductions can collapse into brute force puzzle solving. In all three games though, I found myself taking screenshots on my Steam Deck, my phone, or my iPad, hoping to collate and retain visual clues. I have thrown elementary school worksheets from Blue Prince on a massive digital moodboard, or tweaked the opacity of several images to overlay them. Puzzle games, then, have evolved—along with the smartphone—into multi-modal games: the game, the notebook, and the visual capture. But those same devices I use daily. I capture photos of my family, screenshots of dumb things dumb people say on the internet, take-out menus, and whimsical moments of life. My digital puzzle aids get lost in the flow of time and photographs. The camera in Dimhaven is the elegantly simple solution to that digital disorder and is, from the beginning, intrinsic to the gameplay design. At any point—whether you're just walking the level or in a puzzle focus state—you can pull out your camera and take a photo. You can then access your album of photos at any time, then use MS Paint-style tools to annotate, notate, or scribble on them. Draw a mustache on that sleeping cat! Put nerdy glasses on that annoying seagull! Or, test out every solution to that cable puzzle that weirdly only lets you move in Chess Knight patterns. Camera or Album photo Photos are ephemeral as well; take as many as you want, then delete them just as quickly when their purpose has been served. Some photos ended up being for information (how many volts does this windmill generate?), while others became spaces for puzzle solving far more than the actual puzzle was. I was able to replicate the "I just need to draw this pattern out" feeling I'd inevitably get in puzzle games, right there on my screen. I _love_ solving puzzles in games, but so often the mode shifts from game to notebook or game to iPhone Markup removes me from the game. That shift also builds behavior patterns that tend to compound: I take more photos with my phone because that worked last time, so I spend even less time in the game, and flock to my notebook to solve a puzzle. The game becomes an input machine filled with clever stage gates I need to figure out on my homemade worksheets. There is broken cohesion between the solution and the puzzle. > In Dimhaven, the puzzle and the solving are one. I played all of Dimhaven on my Steam Deck (it ran pretty well!), but I had to load it back up while writing this review because I didn't have a single screenshot to harvest. Every image I took was in-game, many of which were scribbled on. Because, and I'm so sorry to add this 500 words later than I should have, but there's one last magic photography trick Dimhaven pulls: you can hold the photos. This is one of the only spoiler-free scribbles I could share _This_ is how I played Dimhaven: The Lost Source: I find a poster on the wall that clearly has "this is a clue" energy. I take a photo of said clue. I walk around the environment and pick up an item similar to the one depicted in the previously mentioned poster. I now wander some more and find the place where the item I picked up can be inserted. I take a photo of the puzzle zone, combine that knowledge with the poster, and go about solving the puzzle on the _photo I took of the puzzle zone_. Once I have a workable solution, I then select the button that lets me hold the photo like a Polaroid in my left hand, and input the solution. Done. You can just hold your sketches! Genius! Every piece of iPhone photography and notebook work has been condensed into the gameplay experience, including not needing to do the tedious look up and down to your notes to make sure the solution is input correctly. I loved my time with Dimhaven: The Lost Source. I think it's a wonderful Myst-style game with a ton of exciting puzzle types that will keep you engaged and thinking throughout the full runtime. There are simple item-goes-in-item puzzles, there's a twist on a pipe maze (because of course there is), there's a Clue-like murder mystery puzzle, and that's not including the truly cosmic weird ones at the end. But, more than the story or the excellent worldbuilding, the thing that will remain with me long after I forget the phone number to call for a joke is the exceptional design decision to make the camera core to the gameplay. Dimhaven: The Lost Source __was released on June 23, 2026 on Steam. This game was reviewed on iOS with a copy provided by the publisher.__

Unlike _other_ prominent souls-like metroidvanias, MIO: Memories in Orbit just wants you (yes, all of you) to play it. Douze Dixièmes, the now shuttered developer of MIO, has created a game I want to explore every nook and cranny of, discover every tiny secret, and perfect the grapple-to-float-to-jump platforming chain. > Git gud? Go’on git. MIO _is_ a punishing game. You have a tiny amount of health, some truly harrowing platforming sequences, erratic robot enemies, and a player move-set _just_ different enough that even after 20 hours I’m pushing the wrong button expecting a dash. You will die a lot; that’s the point. You also collect nacre, a currency for purchasing upgrades that, upon death, disappears. No corpse-running, it’s just gone. This all sounds familiar; there are _so_ many of _these_ games that came out _this_ month already, not even mentioning the one we’re all thinking of: Hollow Knight. What MIO does _differently_ though, and what has allowed me to play it and find joy within its dour, cross-hatched spaceship, is let me play the game. There are three accessibility settings that people who aren’t reading this post will bristle at, but they are also settings that are genius solutions to the git gud crowd. Let’s break them down one-by-one and talk through why I think more games should explore similar options. Assist settings screen ## Eroded bosses Each assist does not mechanically describe itself outside of its name, so, keeping with the souls trappings of the game, discovering _how_ these assists actually assist you is tricky to discern at times. In game, the only difference you’ll visually see is when you die to a boss, instead of the harsh cut to black and respawn, is a momentary splash that reads “Boss has been weakened.” You’d have to flee to Reddit to discover _how_ much they’ve been weakened (and in my case, just to trust that they have been). Boss is weakened screenshot What’s actually happening here is, after every death, your base attack is increasing very slightly. After fifteen deaths, your damage output is capped at 200% your base when fighting that boss. Your damage output may be increased, but your survivability isn’t; MIO is a game as much about dealing damage as it is about doing the _right_ damage. Like many of these metroidvanias, combat is much more concerned with positioning and stamina management than raw damage output. Zooming out from the stats, I think the Eroded Bosses assist is really doing two important things: the first, and most important is giving you hope. Some of the bosses in this game are real bastards; one particular late game boss duo destroyed me before I could even understand what was happening. But, every time “Boss has been weakened” showed up on screen—even when I failed to land a single hit—I had hope that the next go-around would be marginally easier. Even in death, I was making progress. > I wasn’t focused on _winning_ , I was focused on learning. The git gud strawman I’ve constructed here will say that learning the boss is all the progress you need. To that I say, yes _and_. The _second_ thing this assist is doing is letting more players explore and appreciate the complexity of boss patterns. That hope and success I felt after each death compounded and propelled me forward. Every boss-run was a new chance to learn something; I wasn’t singularly focused on _winning_ , I was focused on learning, because I knew that no matter what, I was going to win in the end. I still needed to learn the patterns, I still needed to strategize how best to deal damage and avoid environmental hazards. The only difference is that assist-less players are driven forward by force of will, I was driven by hope. I did more damage with every death, but I’ll be real with you: if I had to throw myself at these bosses without the hope of things getting easier? I would’ve stopped after the second boss fight. Calderon is also one of the best boss themes in the game. The damage increase is so gradual that I found myself learning patterns far quicker than I was dying, typically only needing 3-5 runs to defeat a particular boss. Even on the bosses that gave me a real hard time (looking at you, Poltergates), I didn't _feel_ the assist, I just had to trust it was happening in the background. But, the reputation of these games (spending _hours_ trying to best this or that boss) has created enough of a wall that when I see signs of insurmountable odds, I'm just going to turn it off and go somewhere else, not lock in. I _only_ picked MIO back up after setting it down to review other games _because_ I knew the assists were there to help, this one especially. ## Pacifist The Pacifist assist turns almost all non-boss monsters docile, until you attack them, including enemies that appear when you open chests or locked-room combat challenges. Boss monsters, as well as boss-room minions will still attack you on sight. Have you ever been annoyed at taking that one hit when you got sloppy on the boss run-back? This is the one for you. I have been pretty outspoken about combat design in games and how the best games find a way to incorporate the combat _into_ the thematic or narrative core of their game. One of my (only) complaints about Metroid Dread was how unnecessary the enemy-dense levels felt when it was clear the game was more interested in the EMMIs. This assist solves that problem. It's quite telling how few of the press images for Metroid Dread feature the bog-standard enemies. Zipping around in MIO to do the things I love—the platforming and the exploration—is significantly more fun for me with the Pacifist assist enabled. I’m spending my time poking at corners, instead of fretting, at one health left, if I should be going back to the last Overseer checkpoint to try this again. The fear of dying and losing it all matters less. I still have to engage with the combat with the bosses and the locked-room combat encounters, but the tiny one-off enemies that mean very little in the grand scheme of the game no longer bother me. In fact, I think what works so well about the Pacifist assist is how much it _makes sense_ with the game. Over centuries (millennia?) these robots have been slowly degrading, losing themselves to decay. With the assist off, that is depicted as violence; with the assist on, it’s emptiness. Look at this friend. You wouldn't stab him in the back, would you? Especially in the locked-room combat encounters, you as the player must attack first. You must willingly choose to assault robots that are, for the most part, decayed and lost to themselves. As you find more lore items explaining what is going on on this ship, the Pacifist (what an interesting name!) assist starts to create an Undertale-esque exploration of violence and mercy. You meet robots who are still themselves, but you’ll even discover later that _these_ bots aren’t what they truly were when there were humans. You can explore these themes just as well without the Pacifist assist, but I’ve found that forcing myself to engage in the combat, instead of it being forced upon me, is resonating with the game’s message much more. And none of that is digging into the _gameplay_ ramifications of Pacifist mode. If you’re not fighting enemies, you’re not gathering the massive amounts of nacre you need to heal after punishing platforming challenges (more on that in a bit), nor are you able to buy the mods you need to defeat bosses or manage environmental hazards. Exploration of the world is easier, yes, but if you don’t engage in the combat as much as the game may expect you to, you will be at a disadvantage, even if the bosses are weakened. It’s almost starting to sound like the Pacifist assist is just as much a blessing as a curse, huh? Ground Shell has this gorgeous animation too ## Ground Healing The ground healing assist was the first I turned on almost immediately after starting the game. It’s also the only assist that is a mod you can gain in the late game. With the Ground Healing assist you are given an extra health pip that recharges so long as you spend a certain amount of time on the ground. This assist comes in clutch when you’re working your way through some pretty complicated platforming challenges because you’ll usually die, take one point of damage, then you can chill for a second, let your heart rate come down, recharge, and do it again. Platforming challenges are just as tricky as they are for non-assisted players, but you can, functionally, take as many runs as you’d like with minimal stress. This is an __easy__ platforming challenge. That’s not to say there’s no stress. Especially towards the end of MIO, many of the platforming challenges require attacking enemies to regain stamina to chain a few platforming abilities together to get through. So, even with the Pacifist assist enabled, you’re still engaging with the full platforming challenge. Add in that health only recharges after time on the ground and there’s a very good chance that you’ll take a hit or two from an enemy, then another from environment. You’ll still die quickly, you just have a bit of a buffer. The real magic of the Ground Healing assist is the push and pull in boss encounters. I’m bad at the dodge in MIO. I don’t like it, I don’t use it, and, when I do use it, it never works. But, when I’m dodging attacks left and right with double jumps and grapple jumps in a boss encounter, I’m _not_ recharging that health pip. If I want to maintain my extra health pip edge on the boss, I need to engage with a part of the game I decided isn’t for me: the dodge. Many—perhaps most!—of my boss deaths in MIO are from sitting on my last health pip, bobbing and weaving on the ground hoping that ground heal will pop and I’ll have my buffer back. The extra health is a boon for platforming, but more often than not, it’s a taunt for boss encounters. Ground Healing is a nudge as well: after a few failed attempts at using the dodge, I built new methods to do the same thing, but _hours_ after building those new methods (double jumps, hairpins, strider clings), I _still_ am trying to use the dodge as a last resort because if I pull it off the reward is worth so much more than a damage avoided. > The game, through its assist, is teaching me to pause. I’m finishing up MIO: Memories in Orbit soon, but as I’ve played I’ve turned on _more_ of the assists, not less. They compound and combine to make something gorgeous: a virtuous cycle of player choice and accessibility. Each assist gives the player something, while also complicating things as well; with all three active, the assists cover each other’s blindspots while shifting the player’s play style _around_ challenge, not away from it. When a boss can be weakened after every death, learning their moves so I can push myself to try the dodge again _to_ eke out another ground heal introduced a different kind of challenge than the raw boss encounter. I still die from hubris or getting greedy, but it’s greed for life, not damage. When I can fly through an environment safely because none of the creatures will attack me, I’m encouraged to attempt boss encounters more; the run-back isn’t demoralizing, it’s anticipation. When I can arrive at a platforming challenge without combat—and without nacre to heal—I still have to manage precision with jumps _and_ patience. Pausing to get that ground heal is still a long wait when I _know_ I can just pull this jump off. But that pause is also ground_ing_. The game, through its assist, is teaching me to pause. To let the adrenaline subside for a moment. Think about what you need to do. Yes, you can take as many attempts as you need most of the time, but, to succeed, you must greet the challenge with the same level of precision as everyone else. > Each assist gives the player something, while also complicating things as well. The developers have positioned these as assists, ways to “adjust difficulty,” but I don’t think that’s completely right. Especially when you discover the ground heal assist as an in-game mod, I think the assists become always-accessible mods to your play style, just as impactful as adding a new attack to your hairpin, or being able to see your health bar. It wouldn’t be surprising if MIO had mods for Pacifist or Eroded Bosses. There is a potent push and pull to each setting that feels just at home as Final Fantasy 16’s Timely Accessories that make parries easier, or Silksong’s jump modifications (or compass marker), or Elden Ring’s Spirit Ashes. There is, besides them being active at the beginning of the game, no reason these powers can’t be bestowed elsewhere in the game, just like Ground Healing. Mods screen Perhaps the most telling—if inconsequential—evidence for this, is that enabling any (or all) of the assists does not stop a player from gaining achievement progress or the true ending. I, as an assist player, have every opportunity to complete the game to its fullest extent as anyone else. So, sure, I have a few extra things turned on for my run through MIO, but my run is not _lesser_ for it; in some ways (especially Pacifist), I find the run to be thematically _more_ enriching than otherwise. There are, as they say, too many games. Douze Dixièmes is one of the latest casualties of that. But, it’s the flowering proliferation of difficult games hearkening back to Hollow Knight (and further) that have _evolved_ that type of game that gives me hope. "Is Nine Sols next?" is not a thought I'd be so ready to think, normally. I look to games like MIO, Constance, and Nine Sols with far more excitement than I do for Silksong or Hollow Knight. I’m sure those games are good and they certainly don’t need my $20, but I see it very unlikely that I’ll ever play them; **MIO proves it for me: games can remain difficult, thematically rich, and deeply rewarding, all while allowing more players to experience everything beautiful about the game.** MIO: Memories in Orbit is a delightful video game, made better by its thoughtful assists that _enhance_ the game in meaningful ways, not just to make it easier. Assists can deeply effect players and how they navigate, experience, and perceive the world and story around them; I’m not adjusting the difficulty, I’m shifting it to play an equally, but differently difficult game. When I look back on my time with MIO, _this_ is the memory I’ll have: of a studio making an incredible souls-like metroidvania that feels richer when you ask for help. Almost like that's a theme in the game or something.

“How, exactly, does time work in Norco” isn’t the mystery I expected my brain to latch onto while playing Geography of Robot’s 2022 masterclass point-and-click adventure game. And yet, a week on, I’m still thinking of the fourth flood. I haven’t finished Norco, though I think I’m getting close. I really like Norco. I _knew_ I would like Norco. That’s what scares me about it. Just like Kentucky Route Zero or Citizen Sleeper or Disco Elysium. These games are tapestries, rich, multi-faceted texts that demand analysis. They _require_ introspection and dissection. They are my favorite genre of games, the ones that remind me of that elated moment in sophomore English where I _discovered_ something. Those moments when you latch onto something and can’t let go for all your life. I’m still thinking of the fourth flood. You (Your character? Your perspective? Who is “you” in Norco is hard to determine at times) stand before a house. The main character, Kay, remembering the three times previously this house in southern Louisiana flooded. You recall three floods, flashbulb memories of tearing out drywall, of weeks in hotels or time with friends in New Orleans. Sweat and mildew and destruction. And then “you” are gone and “You” see the future. The Fourth Flood. > “The fourth flood will follow a slow hurricane and it will be a calamity. It will leave the entire region submerged as critical levees breach. How do we know this, though? How do get this information? _Who_ knows this and, of course, the nagging question of all questions: what does it _mean_ that we _know_ this beyond a doubt. The fourth flood _will_ follow a slow hurricane and it _will_ be a calamity. > There will be a massive blackout that lasts weeks. Much of the sewerage infrastructure will be damaged beyond repair. The authority of this voice is resounding. It is a bygone fact that the Fourth Flood will come, that, no matter the outcome of this story, the region will be lost. It is written as if it had already happened, as immutable as the passage of time. No help is coming, but the Fourth Flood is. > The embattled federal government will do nothing to assist. It will bankrupt the region. Kay weaves their way through this small-town story of capitalism and decay, but, in the grand scale, it means nothing. Nations and corporations move and manipulate the grand balance in Norco, but that is table-setting. That’s background noise. You are told in the opening half hour of Norco that this _place_ is not the story. You will not destroy the Mako reactors and bring peace and happiness to this world. The Fourth Flood will come. > Small militant enclaves will form along the high ground of the Mississippi River. They will take to piracy and hijack commercial shipping vessels. Private mercenary forces will retaliate in kind. You (again, which you?) see this violence already. Lucky holds a gun. Lucky _uses_ that gun. Private guards, faces covered with tessellated cyber-rhombuses use their guns. This is the reality of Norco, an area under constant threat of violence. Eminent domain is the corporate piracy, hijacking the homes of residents to expand their next franchise location. And yet, it doesn’t matter. > Slowly, industry will flee this hotzone. The Old River Control Structure will collapse from neglect and sabotage. The Mississippi River will again change its course.” It takes years for a river to change its course. Decades, even. How does time work in Norco? Who tells us about the Fourth Flood? And what does it tell us? Neglect and sabotage. After all of it, the floods and the fights and the failure of infrastructure, the river remains. Different, but indifferent to the passage of humans. The floods come like the tides, a rhythmic cleansing and time of transition. Sheet rock removed, new paint put in place. Waterlogged carpet and warped photographs. In Norco, none of it matters. The Fourth Flood will come. I haven’t finished Norco yet. I’m still not entirely sure what Norco is about, let alone what it’s doing with the Fourth Flood and it’s other gestures to the future and the passage of time. But it’s intriguing that a game that so meticulously phrases its sentences to be uncanny and arresting would spend so much time talking about the future. A future so far—or near—that is _repetitive._ After three floods, the levee still breaks. Time repeats. Homes flood. But this time, there is no rescue. Norco is failing, a town persisting in the shadow of extractive governments and industry, tossing de-regulated pollutants into the air to maximize profits and hasten the climate apocalypse. Nothing is done. The Fourth Flood _will_ come. It is inevitable. It is a bygone conclusion that nothing will be done for the people of Norco. Little has been done for them in the previous three floods. Perhaps what intrigues me most about the fourth flood is that we only assume it’s water. _Which_ part of what follows is the fourth flood, do you think? Is it the cataclysmic rise of water? Or, is the fourth flood the whole shebang: the water, the violence, the neglect and the sabotage? Is the flood simply the Mississippi changing its course toppling the stacks of the Shield refinery and burying the interstate and wetland-destroying bridges beneath silt and storm water? Just like the repetition of the floods, the Mississippi will change its course again. The cycles repeat. _All_ the cycles repeat: the exploitation, the violence, the neglect, the sabotage, and, yes, the natural. There may never be a fifth flood, but the fourth is guaranteed.

As a nineties kid, I grew up at the tail-end of arcades. I have memories of going to my local mall and feeding quarters into Time Crisis, Silent Scope, and Moto GP machines at Aladdin’s Castle a lot of weekends with my dad. But even those trips were shockingly light on what I’d now refer to as Arcade Games. We played games with interesting peripherals, not classics like Pac-Man or Galaga. > What you need to know about Luftrausers is that it kicks ass. I have no real nostalgia for arcade games, and it takes _a lot_ of praise for me to even look at games like Sektori, Vampire Survivors, or Balatro that feel like the modern equivalent of quarter munchers. I’ve realized that I’m just not a score chase guy. Well, except for one game: Luftrausers. What you need to know about Luftrausers is that it kicks ass. Built by Vlambeer (RIP) from the bones of Luftrauser, a Newgrounds flash game the Netherlands-based team built in 2011, Luftrausers (2014) is a hard-hitting run-based arcade plane game that melts minutes, not quarters. Luftrausers is a very simple game: you can rotate your ship left or right, accelerate, and shoot. It is a 1942-style bullet-hell game that controls like Asteroids, that has you dodging bullets, missiles, and other planes, all while you try to rack up as many kills as you can before you inevitably make a wrong move. You’ll pull off balletic twirls and high-speed near-misses…right until you can’t, and every move is _thrilling._ The genius of Luftrausers, though, isn’t the simplicity of the controls; it’s the incredibly deep stable of upgrades and builds you unlock as you go. Your ship is made of a weapon, body, and engine, each of which varies greatly from the previous options. All told, there are 125 different ship combinations you can make, each option with a bespoke name, unique in-level music track, and a series of missions to complete. Missions range from “kill 10 enemy planes” to “destroy 2 battleships with MAX combo,” making every run feel goal-driven and purposeful. It’s this little bit of direction that, twelve years later, has me continuing to come back to Luftrausers even when the run-based rogue-likes cup runneth over. I _need_ a goal to chase. I’ve long given up on the notion that I’ll be the top rank on a high scores leaderboard, so a game’s progression that is tied to _just playing the game_ is a godsend. > It’s impossible to leave a Luftrausers run without feeling satisfied. Each mission is tied to a specific part, not the entire plane build, but you don’t need to succeed at the goal _with_ that part. For example, I had a mission for my weapon to destroy 20 enemies without ending a boost. Easy enough to do with the continuous laser weapon, but I finished it in less than ten seconds when I equipped the engine that moved by firing bullets. There’s this creative calculus you’re able to do with the super simple ship options that can make any impossible mission much easier if you just use your noodle. The real trick of Luftrausers, the thing that has made it stick so hard for me these past years, is how much it’s a Vita game. Luftrausers is a mobile game with runs lasting anywhere from 10 seconds to a handful of minutes. There are no loading screens, and you start a level by hitting the up key. There is always something to do, always a new build to try, and always a new goal to achieve. It’s much more frenetic, but I’d compare Luftrausers much more to a game like Alto’s Odyssey (a Perfect mobile game) than a modern arcade classic like Sektori. I truly believe it’s impossible to leave a Luftrausers run without feeling some measure of satisfied. Maybe that’s because pulling off a cool move happens every seven seconds, or, more likely, the soundtrack rips. There are three-ish songs in Luftrausers, and there are 128 songs in Luftrausers. The main theme is slightly altered for each part you equip to your ship, and miraculously, every version is the best version. The music in Luftrausers is so good that I often die right when the music hits because of how much I’m tapping along to the beat. When AAA studios are pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into photo-realistic worlds that tend to blend, it’s refreshing—inspiring even—to see what can be done with sepia-pixel art, four buttons, and a title music track with minor permutations. Distilled simplicity is always so much harder to achieve than it appears, but Vlambeer managed to make the perfect simple thing with Luftrausers. Even a decade later, this bite-sized arcade-y plane game remains perfect. Luftrausers __was released on March 18, 2014 on Mac, Linux, PS3, and PS Vita. It is now available on Steam and Android. This game was reviewed on PC with a copy purchased by the author.__

I select my Kiln, two Crystallizers, Teahouse, Library, and a Sunmirror in the second season of Cycle 19. I roll their resource dice, yielding Bricks, Dust and Mirror, Music, Insight, and Weather, respectively. I give the Bricks to my landing pad to grow my city’s population. The Dust goes to my Cistern to push back the flood, and the Mirror is sent to the Bazaar for more influence. I needed other resources from the Teahouse and Library to continue building the structures in this sector of town, so they remain in the dice pool. The weather dice joins twelve others. Cycle 18 was tumultuous on the Sixth Moon of Amber; the encroaching flood and rust threaten to choke out more residences. Perhaps the third season of Cycle 19 will yield the resources I need to hold back the Rust. Though I can’t turn them into influence or use them for construction, I imagine the people of Amberspire happy and thoughtful with their Music and Insight. Perhaps Music flowing from the Teahouse provides some comfort in dangerous times on the Mausoleum Moon. It is stories like these that keep me coming back to Amberspire, the latest game from Lunar Division, makers of The Banished Vault. Each dice roll becomes an emergent tale of survival, culture, and adversity as you play. In Cycle 3, the fledgling city celebrated its first new landing port that brought goods and new neighbors from among the stars. Cycle 12 brought new alien settlers. In Cycle 27, the city’s first Cistern was destroyed, and the first garden was constructed. The Sixth Moon gives, and it takes; the city grows, built atop the dead, failed attempts to thrive buried beneath them. This time, the city will remain. Probably. In most city-building games, the “story” you tell is one of scale and infrastructure. The city center is sloppy and ramshackle, but as more building types and zoning tools unlock, you can build the perfect engine of industry. This is the Sim City, Pocket City, or City Skylines path of city building; games where the task is to optimize urban planning. The focus is often on infrastructure or the red/yellow/green sentiment of entire city sectors. Even in citybuilders that lean more toward science fiction and offer a person-level view of residents (I'm thinking of Surviving Mars, in particular), the story is one of survival by accumulating wealth, of overcoming and taming the land through excess. Amberspire is an engine of emergent culture: a city’s tone and tenor shaped by its seasonal dice rolls, as much as its layout and its buildings. > I see the streams of music and laughter refract in the sky, blossoming into aurorae above the theater and sending waves of joy to any that could see them. - A Pilgrim to Amber > - Amphitheater description, page 50 Mechanically, Amberspire is a dice-based city-builder where you slowly expand a city in a far-flung future, hoping to restore lost glory. You fight against the encroaching floods and rust of the surface and build upon the constantly falling surface of a mausoleum moon. You roll dice to build buildings, and those buildings allow you to build more buildings. That is what you _do,_ but that’s not what Amberspire _is._ There is a series of simple interconnected systems that poetically grow gangly and increasingly interconnected. Amberspire is a turn-based game; its play is split into four phases of a cycle. The first three phases are active. You select buildings to roll their resource dice, place buildings, grow your population, sell resources for influence, or alter the terrain. The fourth is the passive weather phase, where you roll any accumulated weather or instability dice. The surface of the planet will change; sometimes, rust or flood tiles will move or grow, or sometimes the very ground around you will fall away. > Water mixed with amber vgas congeals into a viscous substance, highly reactive to the planet's weather. On the moon, pools spread quickly but seem to be harmless. - Adanne geological report > - Cistern description, page 27 I love the weather mechanic, especially when some buildings can have a one-in-six chance to add a weather die to the pool. Oftentimes, I’ll end a cycle with anywhere between three and twelve weather dice that are constantly changing the terrain around me. Every few cycles, the weather on the Sixth Moon of Amber changes, providing new layouts for the weather dice and new environmental hazards to contend with. This rhythmic pattern of three action phases and one weather phase sucked me in quickly, creating a relaxing level of flow I haven’t experienced in a game since Dorfromantik. For the most part, weather outcomes aren’t catastrophic enough to require deep contemplation of resource expenditure, and I often find myself eschewing efficiency in favor of what feels right. My city is not optimized—though I know it could be—and I’m okay with that. The city I live in isn’t optimized either. Your goal in Amberspire is to grow your city and achieve Sovereign status (the game’s final tech level). To do that, you need to increase your population and accumulate enough influence to level up your city. Each time you level up, you’ll gain access to a varied collection of lovingly designed buildings, all of which come with their own resource dice that grow more and more esoteric as you play. Each turn, you select a collection of buildings and roll their six-sided die. Some die are simple, containing things like Metal or Scrap, while others contain Quiver, Ritual, Root, or Gathering. You spend these resources on new buildings, unlocking new resources, means to push back weather hazards, or sell resources for influence, all in the hopes of reaching that Sovereign status. > Three by three spoons, inlaid with Cetan silver. Bowls and saucers grown at the turn of the century. A plain kettle, a patina of vortices carved into it. - estate catalog > Teahouse description, page 36 You will need to build multiple versions of the same building as your city grows because, importantly, buildings have a confined radius within which their resources can travel. The Bricks from this Kiln cannot travel to the other side of the map, so you need to create an overlapping network of support buildings to make the new ones. Sometimes that means you’ll place a building where no buildings can support its growth. Luckily, Amberspire makes the necessary (or lacking) connections obvious, and there is no penalty for deleting an unconstructed building. Around the second level, you unlock the Events mechanic, which adds an entire third dice mechanic to manage. If you spend three resources that have a blue background, a world event occurs, which can include the appearance of a new alien, a problem with the city, or an event elsewhere that can impact the people or cultures that make your city home. You’ll use your influence to choose an outcome, or, if you lack the influence to spend, you’ll roll a number of dice and let chance decide. Especially in later game play, almost every cycle I’m contending with a new world event, but, as much as they draw on my city’s influence, the cadence of events never feels punishing or frustrating enough to get on my nerves. Many times, my city has been on the brink of rising from Ascendant to Influential, only for an entropic storm to sweep through the land or a Teahouse is destroyed. There are solid choices to be made, but I never _mechanically_ feel like I can’t claw back what was lost. What I love about each event, though, is how well they’re written and how each one shapes the people of my city. It’s a soft impact; gameplay is rarely affected beyond the event die roll, but choosing to lose a Ruster isn't an efficiency choice anymore, it's a roleplaying one. I couldn’t help thinking of Citizen Sleeper while playing Amberspire. Because of how the resource dice are formatted, I rarely got all the resources I needed to continue my public works project in one season, let alone a cycle. Often, you'll need to think on the fly, cashing in materials for Influence instead of construction progress. > Wealth is waste. - Old Imperial proverb > Palace description, page 60 But, paired together with how esoteric some of the resources are, my city was vibrant and alive, its streets filled with Gathering, Rituals, and Music. Resources are ephemeral, typically only lingering for the season, and yet they felt _seasonal_ to me. The resources became stories about the city, not just a means to an end. If you’re going into Amberspire expecting a robust city builder with complicated systems and expansive tools, I think you’re going to be disappointed. There’s just not enough fine control of city systems and zones—for instance, residences appear according to a favorability mechanic that is only slightly in your control—and I think that’s okay. Where Amberspire shines, and what keeps me coming back day after day, is the stories the game sets me up to tell of this bustling little town that sprung up on a mausoleum moon. > A small entropic storm struck the city. The laws upon which existence rests were unravelling, reforming, and dissipating. New realities were created and destroyed, and time bent into unrecognizable shapes. > - Random event from Cycle 16 Story is sparse in Amberspire, so you’ll often have to bring your own storytelling to its moment-to-moment play, but the moments that _are_ there are three-sentence science fiction premises that have my mind racing. When you combine the events or building blurbs written in the in-game manual with the esoteric resources bursting from your buildings, what’s left is a game deeply interested in the random mechanics of culture and life. It is a masterstroke how evocative a single paragraph about a new off-world faction can be. This is also as good a time as any to bring up the manual itself. Whether you plan to play Amberspire or not, I highly encourage a flip through the manual. You'll always have access to it in-game, but Bithell Games has also posted a free PDF including 90+ pages of rules, mechanics, lore, and gorgeous art. The manual also includes 50+ pages of Nic Tringali's development diaries (also available online), diving into the process of making this behemoth of a game. When I received the review code for Amberspire, I was traveling away from my computer, so, for probably the first time in twenty years, I was able to swipe through a game manual like a kid on his way home from Blockbuster. My time with Amberspire was improved by flipping through the manual, specifically the opening few pages. The tutorials are cludgy or brief, so going into the game with a working understanding of how dice and building construction work saved me a bit of frustration. Bithell Games sent me a copy of the physical manual (available on Amazon for $6), and while I don't think it's a necessary expense, I'm glad to have the artifact. I still rely heavily on the in-game manual, relegating the physical one for fidgeting moments, when my day could be enriched with a random bit of lore. I’ve seen middle-of-the-road reviews since the launch, all filled with valid criticisms about how the dice mechanics can quickly stymie the simplest of projects. And, while I agree that it can grow frustrating if you're playing the game to win, I actually think that Amberspire isn’t random enough. Often in the late game, you’ll be rolling six to eight resource dice, hoping to get the resources to build a Library or Sunmirror. You may get a few resources you can use, but it’s not uncommon that a few resources can't be used to build or turned into influence; they disappear into the aether. It can be defeating or just downright annoying to watch your Chapel roll Ritual for the third turn in a row when you really needed Crystal instead. That frustration isn’t about efficiency, though. Amberspire, by its heavy reliance on dice, is signaling to you that it is more of a tabletop game than citybuilder; the rich world and exquisite storytelling read like blurbs written on a collaborative environment-building game you play with a deck of cards. It’s this comparison, especially to something like _The Ground Itself_ by Everest Pipkin, that Amberspire feels lacking. The longer I play, the more I see moments a tabletop version of Amberspire would have accounted for: planet-scale clocks that tick up for weather that influence the people (too many floods force a canals-based city instead), or abandoned resources are secretly counted in the background and influence the sector of the city or events (what does it _mean_ that music is generated, then discarded in this part of town?). > I stood in the center of the armil, and suddently felt a perfect stillness, as if the universe rotated around me with the clearest rhythm. - Time and Void, fragmentary recollection > Clockworks description, page 44 I also recognize that asking the small team at Lunar Division to make such a culturally and environmentally rich world _reactive_ to dice dynamics like that is unrealistic. That is the realm of imagination and dreams. As such, Amberspire ends up being a game about filling in the gaps, both physically and metaphorically...and what a rich tapestry you can weave. There are just enough story beats and esoteric weirdness to light my brain up, dreaming up imaginative stories and ponderous questions I want to dive into. After a stressful day, I want to cozy up with Amberspire and roll the bones, seeing where cosmic chance and cultural happenstance take my city…and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Amberspire __was released on May 6, 2026 on PC. This game was reviewed on PC with a copy provided by the publisher, along with a physical copy of the game manual.__

An alternate title to this post is "Why are the Resident Evil 9 title screens so bad, when they're just doing the Control thing (that is so good)?" But _that_ title is too long and too mean. Really, though, why does Remedy get all the flowers for their title screens and style, but I look at the chapter titles of Resident Evil 9 and recoil? It's not about the size of your font, it's how you use it. ## Titles are more than text When you begin Resident Evil 9: Requiem, you first see an establishing shot of the FBI Midwest Field Office. You know this because you're shown a nondescript building that honestly reeks of federal construction, and then a GIANT title pops up informing you that, as you expected, this is the FBI Midwest Field Office. Pretty simple and, as some people on the internet have pointed out, mostly like inspired by the type treatments in Control and Alan Wake 2, both in their relative size on screen and the accompanying sound effect sting. And, while I agree there is probably some inspiration here, there's also some missed marks. First, let's ignore the typeface itself for now; let's talk color. The type in the opening establishing title, as well as future titles in Resident Evil 9 are this off-white color that struggles to stand out. The background image is knocked back in brightness, even though it seems to be a sunny day for the FBI. The off-white color of the title is blending with the background image. The I's both in "FBI" and "Field" are fading into oblivion; "FBI" into the clouds, "Field" into the fence post. If we swap the gray for a full white title, the text is more readable, but it's still not popping off the screen like we'd expect. Why? There's just too much going on. The title is long and tells us more information than we probably need to know. All text on screen is not presented equally; based on the hierarchy of the titles, "FBI" is more important than "Midwest Field Office," but the team still thought it important to ground the game in the Midwest. It's not wordy _per se_ , but it's odd to have two different levels of hierarchy here. I personally think that's less of a title problem and more of a failing of this establishing shot. There's nothing in this opening montage that distinguishes this building from being outside Chicago, Portland, or Boston. The titles need to fill in two gaps for the player: _what_ is this building, and _where_ is it? The other issue here is how boring the opening shot is and where the team decided to put the title. If you were to imagine this building as a place that truly existed, we could slide the camera a little to the left and keep the giant concrete sign that says "Federal Bureau of Investigation" in the shot where it would be readable. The text beneath it is hard to read, but one imagines it says "Midwest Field Office." Ah, the FBI Cincinnati Field Office, conveniently labeled for our establishing shot The purpose of the opening title in Resident Evil 9 is to tell you where you are, but say very little about the location, how we're supposed to feel about the organization, or its relation to our characters. Which makes sense! Within the opening cutscene, this location doesn't exist. You meet Grace's boss, Grace, see Grace's desk, learn about her trauma, and then boom, off to Not-Chicago you go. Does the establishing title need to exist in Resident Evil Requiem? No, probably not. But, let's say it does. Let's say, you open on the exact same establishing shot (ignoring my lovely direction to use the diegetic sign) and need to put this title in somewhere. Show the building, show the suits walking through the office, introduce Grace as a character, then, when she has left her cluttered desk overflowing with unfiled reports, hit us with the title (with equal hierarchy so you read it like a sentence and in a stark white). This title location _says_ something beyond what the words say. This is the FBI Midwest Field Office, yes. But it is a cluttered heap of bureaucracy that is burying Grace, just like the trauma she is trying to face. More than the _look_ of Control's titles, this is how Remedy would pull this title off. Except, it's not. This isn't how Remedy does it at all. Let me explain. ## How Control establishes its location First—and I might say this is valid for Resident Evil 9 as well—it doesn't matter _where_ Control takes place. It's a city. Probably New York City, but the location on a map isn't nearly as important as the location as a place: the Federal Bureau of Control's headquarters, The Oldest House. The first text a player sees in Control (minus the subtitles) is in the lobby of the Bureau's headquarters. The intro cutscene flies through a dingy nigh-time scene in a nondescript (probably New York City) city, then pans over—upside down, mind you!—the name of the building's tenant: Federal Bureau of Control. In roughly the same amount of time as Resident Evil's establishing shot, we gain the same information from Control without the use of a single title splash. A few minutes later, after you're able to explore the opening level, see the faces in portraits, and navigate an oddly empty bureaucratic building, you chat with a weird janitor and get your first quest with an odd title: Welcome to the Oldest House. Again though, this quest text is _not_ the establishing title card text Control is known for. This fluorescent yellow text is the actual first UI text you see on screen. The first actual appearance of the Control-style title splash is with the game's title reveal as Jesse exits the elevator into the Executive level to find the Director and, specifically after the game's entire TV show style opening credits. The title is matched to an elevator door opening and the ding of an elevator. No dramatic sound effect is playing yet, but the Oldest House is working overtime here to splash the title on a stark gray, white, and red background. When I'm reflecting on the big title use in a game like Resident Evil, I'm looking at a lot of stuff; it's the placement of the title, it's the restraint of when its used, what it's trying to tell the player, and, yes, does it look cool. The first time the title is used in Control—and the only time it isn't used to describe a location—is more restrained than it appears. The text is the largest it will ever be, but it took around 20 minutes to appear, and it occurs directly after the sickest opening credits I've seen in a long damn time. "Control" being splashed on the screen in this overwhelming kind of way, separate from the yellow quest text we saw first, is oppressive; it's an intention jump scare you cannot avoid. The title placement in Control is also thematic; the doors open up from black void onto a over-lit office depicted in three colors: white, gray, and red. The title font splits Jesse's head in half, as if the notion of control is colliding, but remains separate within her head (which it is). I want to return to something I mentioned earlier: part of the charm of Control's titles are their readability and their singular purpose. A title in Control tells you one thing: where you are. A title in Resident Evil Requiem, tells you two things...usually: _who_ you are, and _where_ you are. Except the first title, remember? That one tells you the organization and a nondescript location for said office. But, FBI Midwest Field Office _reads_ as a sentence, so you'd be remiss for thinking you are playing as Grace Wrenwood or Leon Raccoon City. If you've made it 1,500 words into this blog post about fonts, you're probably looking for two things. First, I actually don't think one game does the big titles thing better than the other. Don't get me wrong, walking into an all black room bathed in this haunting read light and a sound sting drops a stark white "DEAD LETTERS" on screen is so much cooler than introducing Leon Raccoon City. No contest. But, I want to be really clear: there's no copying or whatever the latest internet ragebait is claiming about this. "Big Title" is all over the place these days. It's in movie titles, video games, and book covers. Subtlety is out and the art of picking a kickass font is in. Resident Evil is using their big title cards completely differently than Control is, even though similarities are there on the surface. Control uses massive text on the screen to tell you a position in the world. They're loosely chapter markers tied to your in-game location, but not necessarily tied to progress. The titles also tell you something _about_ the world: crossing thresholds is dangerous. Most obvious when you cross the Firebreak for the first time—a literal void spanning a limitless chasm—each time a location title pops up on screen, all other interface disappears. Even in the middle of a firefight, you lose your aiming reticle, positioning information, and ammo counter. By crossing a threshold to a new place in the Oldest House, you are going in blind, the letters above the door the only thing preparing you for what's next. Resident Evil 9 is leaning more into police procedurals or tropes of the zombie genre. These titles are positioning you as a person in a place. Titles function as chapter markers in a book, telling the player that we've moved on from Leon _in_ Raccoon City to Grace _in_ Wrenhaven. Do I think think that that transition is usually obvious with the default state of each play-style being third- and first-person, respectively? Yes, but sometimes gamers need an extra nudge. The second thing you probably want to know is the actual typefaces. ## Okay fine, let's talk about typefaces Resident Evil 9: Requiem uses a modified version of Helvetica Neue Condensed. Control uses a version of ITC Avant Garde Gothic with tighter kerning (the letters are closer together; look at the two Ts in Dead Letters above to see what I mean). Both games use a few typefaces throughout the game. Resident Evil uses Helvetica Neue in its titles, but the title font of Requiem, as well as most in-game text, is a typewriter-style font. Control uses ITC Avant Garde, but its in-game documents and UI elements use different faces as well. I haven't gone too deep into Resident Evil 9 (this entire post was inspired after watching three minutes of a Stephen Hilger's playthrough on Into the Aether...and then stopping to write this), but if there's one more fun font fact I can leave you with about Control, it's not even about big title, it's about little text. ## Interstate, the typeface, not the road Remember that first piece of UI text we see in Control, "Welcome to the Oldest House?" The quest title UI uses Interstate, a font that is inspired by Highway Gothic or FHWA Series. FHWA Series was designed in the late 1940s for the Federal Highway Administration and is the typeface used on all federal highway signage. As an American, this is most likely the typeface you interact with the most in your daily life, including street signs, stop signs, and interstate exit signage. Control uses Interstate to direct you through the levels. The game is lacking a "good" map, but pathfinding is placed in the Oldest House at main junctions using the same font and color scheme as American interstate highways. That same font is also used in the more metaphorical pathfinding sense as well: the on-screen quest log. Are you lost? Look for the signage set in Highway Gothic! Do you not know what to do next? Look for the signage set in Highway Gothic! I love so much about Control (and can't wait to see where Resident Evil 9 goes), but what sets these two games apart (at least when it comes to fonts) is the level of detail Remedy put into choosing the right typefaces for the right purposes. Every typeface used in Control is broadly period accurate, whether that's Interstate being based on 1940s federal guidelines, or ITC Avant Garde hailing from the logo of Avant Garde magazine in the 1960s (no surprise it looks so good blown up, huh). I'm sure that the art team working on Resident Evil 9 had thoughts about the fonts they used—many of the letters are modified when you overlap them—so I don't want to characterize the work they did as easy. But, I do think their choices (or maybe just their treatments) leave a lot to be desired. Helvetica Neue, even in its condensed form, is relatively popular. So much so that the default font in many word processors is Arial, a font so similar you probably think its Helvetica. Helvetica Neue makes these otherwise monolithic chapter cards _feel_ generic, even when they're trying to be stylish. There are a ton of ways you can glitz up a relatively generic looking font, especially in pre-rendered cut scenes. I'd like to think matching the title appearance with an in-game motion (Leon stomps in a puddle), then flipping the color to a spooky red when the camera shot changes could be one way of doing it. And really, when we're comparing anything to Control or Alan Wake's font work, I think that's what we're really talking about: panache. Control's usage of period- and purpose-correct fonts in its titles and in-game text isn't easy, but it stands out in a way that Helvetica Neue never could. Especially in 2026. That date says October 31, 2026. Did you know this game takes place in 2026??

I **love** me a mystery. Who-dun-its, where-goes-its, and what-was-its are some of my favorite kinds of stories and, unsurprisingly, Steam is chock-a-block full of them. So, whether you're into grand mysteries, personal ones, or unraveling a massive conspiracy, this week's Wishlist Wednesday has got you covered. ## We Stay Behind Developed by Backwoods Entertainment, Application Systems Heidelberg Published by Application Systems Heidelberg Perhaps less of a who-dun-it, We Stay Behind is a third-person mystery game about a small town and why they refuse to leave when a comet is on a collision course. Billed as a mystery between dreams and reality, I'm excited to see where this story goes and meet the quirky characters of Laburnum Creek. Demo available now. Coming later. ## Will: Follow the Light Developed and published by TomorrowHead Studio During the Spring Steam Next Fest, I played about an hour of Will: Follow the Light and I was _over the moon_ with what I played. In the first hour, you learn to sail your ship, then solve some light puzzles to uncover a mystery at a fog-enveloped lighthouse. The game is gorgeous and I love the writing, but what really got me (no spoilers) is how that first stint ends. I think there's a lot more going on with Will: Follow the Light than the trailers and screenshots allude to. I can't wait to get my hands on this game when it comes out. Demo available now. Coming to Steam on April 28, 2026. ## The Ratline Developed and published by Owlskip Games Did you look at The Roottrees are Dead and think, man, I sure wish this game was less about dispersing money to heirs and more about hunting down a diaspora of secret Nazis? Well, do I have a game for you! Put your thinking cap on and unmask war criminals in this mystery deduction game. Read print-outs, scan photos, call a dentist's office, and do whatever you can to find the Nazis among us in this 1970s-era detective thriller. Demo available. Released on March 17, 2026.

You may not need to read this review—the game came out in 2021—odds are, if you are keen to try Metroid Dread, you already have. No, if you're a Metroid fan, you probably know Metroid Dread is great, along with all of the innovations and call-backs that passed me by. Feel free to hang out and enjoy this review as a victory lap, but this review isn't for you. Now, come close, Metroid-curious or Metroid-avoidant friends. Yes, you there who doesn't like 2D games, or you there who tried many a Metroidvania but can't find the one you like. Come close, Hollow Knight enjoyers, Dead Cell players, and even Castlevania denizens. I have brought the good word, and the word is: Metroid Dread is impeccable. The standout emotion of Metroid Dread—one that ebbs and flows through its nine-ish hour runtime—is fear. Heartrate-spiking, sweaty palms fear. The second emotion is the sweet release of tension as you breathe deep. I haven't played many 2D metroidvanias because I haven't found many that stick for me. Hollow Knight was too obtuse, Dead Cells felt too random, Castlevania games weren't My Vibe, and Metroid has always felt too old to me. I've tried Metroid: Zero Mission, and I made it halfway through Metroid Fusion, but my true love in the 2D metroidvania (if you could call it that) has been Blasphemous, a 2D souls-like metroidvania that took me more than 25 hours to complete. Blasphemous, besides its black metal Spanish Inquisition aesthetic and punishing mechanics, is a scary game. The main source of fear stems from the the tension of being greedy or not, whether in combat or traversal. I died so many times in Blasphemous, but as punishing as the game was, the world and the story were enough to pull me back in. The combat was tight, and I felt that the more I played it, the more my skill was growing. By hour two, I could consistently parry, by George! Pure terror On my Rookie Mode playthrough of Metroid Dread, I rarely felt that gambling tension of pushing beyond a save room. I only felt the strain of intense difficulty a few times (and those times were not enjoyable, Electric Beetle Guy). But what I felt constantly—and what kept me going throughout my nine hours—was the perfect pacing of intense fear and stress, then free-wheeling exploration. Metroid Dread is a modern marvel of pacing, perfecting the ups and downs of intense challenge while avoiding the EMMIs and the easier moments of exploring lovingly rendered environments. Throughout my entire playthrough, I was never **not** afraid of the EMMIs. The challenge always increased, whether it was the level layout that forced backtracking, the powers of the invincible EMMI units, or the additional power of Samus (of which there were many). But, dear reader, I would cheer and cheer when I pulled off the impossible EMMI counter or slid through an EMMI door moments before being spotted. > Every EMMI door is just a Dark Souls fog wall you can only escape from. These unkillable (until they're not!) murder robots are perfect horror creatures and truly sell the desperate state of Samus at the beginning of Metroid Dread, and they also make the game for me. I'd say most of Metroid Dread's non-EMMI content is fine, and, unfortunately, the parts of the game I enjoyed the least are probably the ones that resonate with Metroid fans most. Which is why this review isn't for them, right? I wish the game Chozo to tell me what this is The power-up system feels as dated as it is. Instead of scouring the environment for information that deepens your connection to the world, like letters, logs, or lovingly crafted dioramas that tell micro-stories, you'll collect missile power-ups that let you carry two more missiles (sometimes ten!). Instead of meeting cryptic, charming NPCs or stumbling across side story quests, you'll collect pieces of energy tanks to increase your health by 100. There are two distinct moments of exposition in Metroid Dread, and the story they tell is cool as hell! I just wish that I had seen more of it throughout the game. I couldn't explain the story of Blasphemous to you. I could try, but it'd be messy and complicated, and I'd miss so much stuff that I'd loop back into myself. But, in every area of that game, I felt that I was discovering something about the world and what my connection to it was. I can tell you the story of Metroid Dread; I have a crystal clear idea of the plot beats, but there didn't feel like much cohesion between the story and the world. Blasphemous' world—Hollow Knight's world!—is inseparable from the story they are telling. One of the most damning things I could say about Metroid Dread is that the environments are gorgeous, but in that generic shiny kind of way. The game didn't need _these_ exact locations; these were just the cold, hot, green, and cave levels they made. Don't get me wrong, they were fun levels to navigate, but I have already forgotten their names and never could understand my way around them. What’s up with this guy? I’ll never know if I already should know A lot of hay was made about the launch of Metroid Prime 4: Beyond and whether it properly depicted the "isolation" of the Metroid games. And, while I have no opinion on Beyond, I do think that there is a certain unearned grandiosity given to Metroid games because of their age. I don't think Metroid is a series inherently about solitude or isolation...they're just games with a single, mostly silent protagonist and a distinct lack of people. Their neon color schemes and cartoon-y creature design never leaned fully into horror, and I'd argue that for solitude to be a theme of your game, you need to show the absence of solitude as well. Other games develop a sense of isolation differently; Blasphemous' enemies _are_ people that you alone can defeat, and a major quest is populating a local town by completing side objectives, while Hollow Knight has Hollownest and the delightful NPCs you discover throughout the map. Every adventure into the wilds is isolating; a transition away from the village is a move towards the unknown, even if it's just moving left to right. Metroid Dread has an amnesia storyline and an AI you talk to sometimes (which isn't much different than Metroid Fusion). No, from what people have told me about SA-X in Metroid Fusion and what I've experienced in Metroid Dread, I think it's fair to say that the 2D Metroid games are much more interested in fear than isolation. A metroidvania is, inherently, a game about powers and abilities. As you play, you unlock more stuff that will, ultimately, make you an unstoppable killing machine. Double jumps, stronger swords, better attacks, a compass, all of these power-ups are built to propel you through doors out of reach or enemies that were too strong an hour ago. The genius of Metroid Dread—the thing that makes this game one of the best metroidvanias I've ever played (and damn near the best Nintendo game I've ever played)—is how the team at Mercury Steam made it almost completely meaningless against the EMMIs. Every time you enter an EMMI zone, you can do only one thing: run. Sure, you can cloak and bide your time, but there is no escape until you find the next EMMI door. You are trapped in a box with a deadly robot stalking you until you pull off the double jump or unlock that door to salvation. This is the triumph of Metroid Dread. Every EMMI door is just a Dark Souls fog wall you must escape from. Each EMMI encounter is a Souls boss, except that the environment is the boss requiring precise pattern recognition and timing, not the enemy. You have to time your cloak, jump precisely to avoid the drones, release your charge shot at the precise moment, and slide through the door for cinematic tension and celebration. And you must do it damn near flawlessly. I have never seen a metroidvania so handily hide a horror Dark Souls experience within its name-brand shell, nor have I ever seen a horror mechanic like this deployed in a 2D game that's primarily about hammering the Y button to blast little bugs. The EMMI rooms, the EMMI enemies, and the platforming puzzles you must complete to defeat an EMMI are perfect. I've never pumped my fist in the air when defeating a boss in Elden Ring, but I sure as hell did when taking down a couple of the EMMIs. At its core, I think Metroid is a series beholden to nostalgia more than most. As a player without any of that nostalgia, I find the power-up system uninteresting. The need to wait for the "you picked up an item!" music stinger to complete before I can try it out was frustrating. The double jump (and triple jump) sucks, and I never nailed the timing in a way that was satisfactory and _not_ stressful. The room you unlock the Omega Cannon in (I found out later), was a nostalgic reference to past games, but on its own, it was just annoying. For such a massive gap in development between 2D Metroid games, I had hoped that many of my frustrations with Metroid Fusion would be solved in Dread. They weren't. But that's okay because all of those complaints and quibbles and frustrations evaporated from my lizard brain as soon as a yellow radar ping echoed out from Samus when entering an EMMI door. I forgot about how often I'd shoot the wrong weapon the moment the camera jumped to third-person, and I was cooking the face shield off of an EMMI. I forgot the frustration of fumbling through the convoluted controls as I exited an EMMI zone, the finger confusion became just another part of the tension. The hook of a metroidvania _is_ the increase in skillsets and power, but as I rolled credits after defeating the final boss, all I could think of was a Metroid game without the suits (even though these are the best looking suits in Metroid) and the triple beam and 170 missiles. All I could think of was a game truly about solitude: Alien Isolation. My mind is alight at the idea of a Metroid game that bears few hallmarks of _Metroid games_. No chintzy SNES music cues or triple jumps and phantom dashes. No missiles, no power-up pickups. Just, in its most quintessential form, dread. I was waiting for an EMMI to stalk me into the countryside or have a terrifying Geiger-esque X-Parasite transformation. None of it came to pass, but the potential is there. I _love_ Metroid Dread, and I have high hopes for what the next 2D Metroid game is. I also am thrilled to see what games are inspired by the aspects of this game I love the most: the fear, the cinematography (my god, the fluidity from 2D to 3D and then back in miraculous), and the stress. The best thing a game can do is make me think about it days after I put the controller down. I think about the potential of Metroid Dread, about the world it built and the things it made me feel purely through its mechanics. Metroid Dread is not the emotional, narrative rich experience I gravitate to, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't hooked on this game for the handful of weeks I was playing it. It's not a perfect game, but I've rarely played a game where the soaring highs made the frustrations simply vanish. It's not perfect, but it sure is damn close.

You're online. You've noticed it too. There's a lot of _haters_ out there. The definition of a "hater" has certainly evolved in the nearly thirty years I've been online. At first, it was chatting with your buds about a thing you didn't like: pop music, Aeropostale polos, Mr. Mime. Then came MySpace, a personal, public front page with cobbled together middle school HTML enshrining your love for Europe (the band, not the continent), and your disdain for...Mr. Mime. Being a hater used to be a cute affectation that a middle schooler builds part of their personality on...to be trashed by the next school year and replaced with something new. The Platform(s) | Photo by Christian Wiediger / Unsplash And then came the Platforms. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Google+ (lol), Linkedin, all the great internet holes to loudly proclaim your thoughts and piss-takes. In 2012, I _generally_ still believed that takes and posts on the internet were typically general human beliefs someone held. The real downfall here, the part that is ruining the internet for us all, is the rise of the Content Destroyer, the specific category of content creators that exist purely to destroy, belittle, and disparage. I have a very love/hate relationship with the notion of being a "content creator." I think you should value the work you do, whether it's streaming, writing, video production, music creation, or interpretive dance, higher than simply content to be consumed. Maybe there's even smaller splits here—is a Bluesky post actually more than content to be consumed?—but, in general, you're more than someone who exists to create content for a platform. You're an artist, a writer, a performer, an editor, a personality. You're a person. The Content Destroyer | Photo by ALEXANDRE DINAUT / Unsplash Not so, with the Content Destroyer though. A Content Destroyer is the antithesis (and the _definition_) of a content creator. _They_ feed the platforms, shoveling in piles of calcified, compressed hatred into a flaming steam engine of rage. They are the soot-covered engineers of our current moment: a despotic spiral of fabricated outrage. Their power is, unforunately, quite real, but they are farcical to the man (and it is almost _always_ a man)...more Mega-Maid than Death Star You know a Content Destroyer within minutes of seeing one: they publish _so_ much _content_ , but _make_ nothing _._ Ragebait, clickbait, rants that could be categorized by words that end in "-istic," "heated gamer moments," and manufactured outrage at their lot in life. Gone are the days when these jackbooted idiots would decide the best way to avoid all this "injustice" is to walk into the wilderness to never be seen again. We'd hear about them from time-to-time, usually when they were eaten by a bear, trapped on a mountainside, or started a forest fire out of negligence. But now? Now, they have podcasts, talk shows, streams, and VODs. This person is __making__ something | Photo by Harry Truong / Unsplash As much as I am loathe to say it, content _creator_ makes sense to me: content creators are people _making_ _things_. They are additive at best, neutral at worst. They make things to share, to grow, to laugh, and to have a conversation. Content Destroyers only bring things down, you (and your twelve year old nephew) included. They want to grab a hold of you and drown you in their nightmare realm where they never got a shot in life, where someone else "took" their spot, where their delusions of grandeur were laid bare and they ignored them. Their somehow slighted past that refuses to acknowledge the millions they hoover up by making your nephew mad. The content a Content Destroyer publishes doesn't matter: it's all founded in the same juvenile, middle school level opinion about Mr. Mime you held 25 years ago. They never grew up, instead they watch the art around them shift, evolve, and grow beyond them and, instead of engaging with it, they hated it. How dare something force them to use their brain and reckon with their inadequacies? This is a __nice__ steam engine | Photo by Gary Doughty / Unsplash A Content Destroyer _is_ a steam engine of hate, chewing up culture and burning it in its antique, outdated engine. Many of the takes are _from_ the era of steam trains, just packaged up as defenses of "women's sports" or "traditional living," "issues" these dummies don't even care about or lifestyles they don't actually lead. It's all fake. I expect they're all assholes in real life and probably hold most of, if not all, of these opinions. But the outrage is fake. They've most likely never met a trans person or held a tomato they've grown themselves. They probably haven't even engaged with their "fans" outside a chat box. Isolation and fear of the outside is a hallmark of the Content Destroyer, after all. These people are millionaires. They are whiny, rich middle schoolers who never outgrew their AIM usernames. They masquerade as culture warriors, repeating the same slurs they said when they were twelve. They present as counter-culture, but are bought and sold by major corporations; their paychecks come from ad deals from shitty culture-signalling, alt-right leaning, morally-bankrupt astro-turfing companies (not to be confused with "corporations," in general), or the platforms they make home (which are _also_ major corporations). They glom onto cultural battles like barnacles on the Titanic, then move on quickly to the next sinking ship. Attention and outrage have a half-life measured in seconds on Twitter; these people stand for nothing more than what can make them a buck. * * * There's a well-known adage: "If you're not paying for the product, _you_ are the product." Sure, the viewer is still the product: your twelve-year-old nephew watching a forty-year-old man get angry at a female character _existing_ is the product: he's watching the ads; he's engaging. But the Content Destroyer is also the product. Platforms are pyramid schemes now. In the attention economy, he needs to get _more_ attention. In this metaphor, we're the camel looking away from the Pyramid | Photo by Stamatia Malai / Unsplash Your twelve-year-old nephew is _also_ more likely to spout his own bullshit on a platform, spreading the doctrine of the Content Destroyer until he, too, achieves fame as a bigot. Meanwhile, the top Content Destroyer engineers the outrage to pull more into his pyramid, a handsomely paid, but throwaway "personality" for a platform too cowardly to have standards of quality. And after all this plays out, nothing will have been created. Nothing new will have been said. An entire architecture of shit-talkers and idiots building a bigoted pyramid of bullshit, each side honed into a slippery slope to the bottom. We still hear about them after they hit rock bottom from time to time, usually when they SWAT a streamer, desecrate a holy site, or storm the Capitol.

Have you ever looked at a castle and thought...what if it had wheels? Or do you look at rolling green fields and imagine how fun it would be to stampede your castle across those great green spaces and gobble up that hamlet over yonder? Well, do I have a video game for you: Wanderburg. Wanderburg is a Vampire Survivors-style game where you pilot a castle on wheels, driving over archers, pickmen, cavalry, and, yes, hamlets. At the start of each level, you choose a starting weapon, including archers, cannons, and a ram. As you drive around the countryside, you'll gobble up enemies, absorb their coins, and then turn that currency into power-ups or new weapons. Oh, and your castle has nitrous. I have always struggled to enjoy Vampire Survivors, those beginning minutes always felt like a prelude to the fun. When you think of how fun Vampire Survivors is, you're probably thinking of the buildcrafting part where your Garlic and Wand start to synergize into something great, but in Wanderburg, the fun starts from the word "go." Sure, there seems to be a good amount of buildcrafting in the latter minutes of each session, but the squirrely controls, the delightful animations, and the speed at which the game plays get you into the fun immediately. Steering your castle is _hilarious_ : the towers and archers are always teetering on the edge of toppling over if you turn too drastically. As fun as moving around the world is, Wanderburg also makes it immensely clear that there is _always_ a bigger ~~fish~~ castle. At pre-defined moments in the level, a "boss" castle will appear, chasing you down incessantly, until you defeat it or, more likely, explode. You'll need to bob and weave across the landscape to pick up as many coins as you can to stay alive, upgrade, and defeat these monster castles. But, if you explode or get munched by a roving Neuschwanstein, jumping back in is as quick as you want it to be.

I've not been quiet about my excitement for 1348 Ex Voto. Ever since I saw the trailer last year, I've been enamored by everything about this game: the art treatment, the "historically-accurate" combat styles, and a mistaken belief that they're pulling on some Dante's Inferno stuff (alas, the woman you're trying to find is Bianca, not Beatrice). Here's the thing. 1348 Ex Voto rips. I love this game already, and I've only played the first forty minutes...twice. I've talked a bit about this in the past in my Sword of the Sea review, where I mention that Giant Squid is playing the same greatest hits while the indie scene that was inspired by their games has surpassed them. 1348 Ex Voto is that, but for the Sony house-style. Let me explain. The Last of Us, God of War (2018), and even the latest Uncharted were all the mainstream hits that touted their use of filmmaking methods (God of War's "one-shot" trick comes to mind) as core elements of the game's design. God of War also had a contextual HUD, meant to enhance the film-like feel of the game. Hell, I'd even point to The Order: 1886's letterboxing as a means of coopting film technique for game style. As time moved on, we see this in AA indies: The Banishers' uses very similar contextual HUD elements, while Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 uses melodramatic camera angles borrowed from film and painting. What is striking in most of these games, though, is their use of film techniques (intense close-ups, thematic background imagery, contextual HUDs for immersion, etc.) primarily in intensive moments. Cutscenes in Sony's house-style games feel like video game cutscenes because they are driven by action; Ghost of Tsushima features incredible scenes ripped from Kurosawa films, but most of those scenes are lovingly crafted battle-hype moments. Scenes of powerful people preparing to be powerful for the camera. God of War's kinetic cutscenes are a wonder to behold, but the cinematography is more akin to Michael Bay than the tender angles of an A24 director, even though they're trying to employ the same tricks. This is what I love about 1348 Ex Voto: it _is_ shot from those tender angles. The opening cutscene, a tutorial training scene between Aeta and Bianca, feels like an arthouse film opening. Bianca is framed in oblique angles, always keeping her golden pendant in view. Aeta is shot from a severe distance most of the time. So much of the Sony house-style of cinematography feels like a gimmick, but 1348's feels _important._ That feeling of melodrama isn't just in the shot composition; it's in the childlike melodrama between Aeta and Bianca as well. From Bianca's playacting of an Arthurian duel to encourage Aeta to fight her, to Aeta's demo-ending vow on his knees to find Bianca, surrounded by the roaring flames of his home, this game is _dripping_ in drama. It is damn near Shakespearean. The combat in 1348 Ex Voto is pretty simple in the demo, but there's a small skill tree to add additional moves (and maybe stances?) as you play. Not apparent in the marketing, but you could probably assume, 1348 is a bit of a Souls-like. Attacks are deliberate, and you'll spend most of your time chipping your enemy's poise meter down, hoping they don't land a strike on you and take away one of your precious five hearts. I died a few times in my two playthroughs, almost always because I was playing too fast. There are only ten or so opponents in the demo, but the scarcity really lets you sit with the combat and dial it in. I also can't overstate how _stunning_ the game looks. From the character designs to the woods you wander through, to the toppled and burning town you climb through, I couldn't believe how well-crafted and gorgeous every element of this game is. Even the sausages you use as health pickups are lovingly rendered. I haven't played Hellblade or Plague Tale (yet), but I can certainly see how 1348 Ex Voto is in that league already. I cannot wait to get back to this game when it launches in March. The Nextfest demo will be up until at least March 2, though with a release date of March 12, 2026, I wouldn't be surprised if this demo stays live until at least then. If you're a fan of medieval melodrama, slow, deliberate combat, or you just miss people saying "thou" and "thy" all the time, 1348 Ex Voto is Nextfest demo for you.

I don't _need_ a reason, but for an upcoming episode of The Content Mill Podcast (a show where four creators from four corners of the internet talk about what they're making and playing, now available wherever you get your podcasts), I'm doing another run through Arkane's masterpiece, Prey (2017). Prey (I will be dropping the 2017 now that we're all oriented to which one I'm talking about), without a doubt, is my favorite game of all time. But, for today, I don't want to talk about or (re)view Prey. No, I want to talk about a tiny thing Arkane did for their science fiction immersive sim: they made some really silly weapons. Prey is an immersive sim, a genre that is most easily described as a type of game that responds to player action and allows for player agency in problem-solving. I jokingly say that if you can read an email in a game, it's most likely an immersive sim...and that has mostly held true (casting some real side-eye at Atomic Heart). Immersive sim royalty includes games like System Shock, Thief, Deus Ex, and more recently, the Dishonored games. Each of these games allows players to approach scenarios in multiple different ways, and, generally, the game reacts to those player choices. Prey is a master class in immersive sim game design, allowing players to sneak through vents, repair broken pathways, or go guns blazing through the front door...then reacting to that choice in real time. But all of that player choice and exploration creates a unique game design problem: how do you facilitate players exploring that space, rather than experiencing it as a linear, flat Call of Duty level? Dishonored has its traversal powers like Blink (a teleport), and Thief has its reactive arrows system, but more science fiction-focused games have struggled to provide the same options as their gaslamp fantasy counterparts. Until Prey, it seemed that the best you could do was some form of box-moving, a Deus Ex mainstay. Today's post about Prey is about two specific weapons you get very early on and are, in my opinion, genius solutions to the mobility and magic problem a science fiction setting has: the GLOO Cannon and the Huntress Boltcaster. Let's start with the GLOO Cannon. In universe, the GLOO Cannon is a device built for dealing with environmental hazards. It is a weapon that shoots snowball-sized globs of foam to suppress fires or nullify electrical arcs, but the real utility of the GLOO Cannon is using its foam to encapsulate enemies (allowing for critical hits) or using the globs of GLOO to build platforms for traversal. Instead of needing magical teleport powers like Dishonored, you're able to use GLOO to build ramps to hidden areas above you or mountain goat your way down a steep drop. Prey is telling you a lot of things in the opening half hour, namely that everything you see is not as it seems, so it shouldn't be surprising that the GLOO Cannon is the first "gun" you receive. The GLOO Cannon and wrench combo is a deadly one-two punch for most enemies, but so is the ability to control the terms of engagement. Sure, you can GLOO that mimic in place for a moment, but what if you simply went over them to find better positioning (or avoid them completely)? By being the first distance weapon you discover, Prey is telling you a few important pieces of information: first, the wrench remains your primary way of dealing with enemies, and, since the wrench requires getting close (and probably getting hurt, since there's no block or dodge), maybe it's best to use this tool to _avoid_ combat. From the jump, Prey is telling you to question everything, including how you deal with enemies, which is doubly so for the Huntress Boltcaster. The Huntress is a NERF crossbow using foam darts that deal no damage. One of the first times you can encounter the weapon is in an office space with two adjacent desks, separated by cubicle walls. There's a note alluding to one employee using the Huntress to arc the foam darts over the cubicle wall to annoy their roommate. The tutorial text for the weapon also explains that the dart tips react with computer screens. Throughout Prey, you've been interacting with these really large, obnoxious computer screens with three main menus: Emails, Files, and Utilities. The 30+ inch displays are trisected by these menus, a seemingly odd aesthetic choice that only really makes sense once you pick up the Huntress. Emails contain, as you expect, messages between crew members, and the files section usually contains audio logs or schematics for the fabricator. Sometimes it's useful to read messages or download a schematic from afar, but where the Huntress really shines is its ability to trigger utilities: a menu that allows the player to open doors, toggle turrets on or off, or turn on important level distractions. You can run roughshod through Talos I, clubbing Phantoms and Mimics to death with the wrench you pick up in the game's opening, but it is _so_ much more rewarding to turn on a handful of turrets through an open window and watch, from the safety of the other room, as said turrets do your dirty work on those Phantoms. Heck, if the door is broken open, use your trusty GLOO Cannon to seal it up, _then_ trigger the turrets. Prey allows players to meet the level on their own terms, rewarding crawling through the vents as much as gathering the proper keycards and walking through the front door. There are always options, but both the GLOO Cannon and the Huntress make you look at level geometry differently. A second-story gantry is no longer out of reach, and each half-open window presents a moment to feel like the smartest person with a NERF blaster in space. Best yet, depending on how you play through Prey, it's possible that your first three weapons in the game are a wrench, the GLOO Cannon, and the Huntress, or their fantasy equivalents: the sword, the misty step, and the mage hand. You can spec your character into solving these problems in a ton of different ways, but I love how Prey managed to not only provide the vents, keycards, and box-moving abilities to get where you need, it was built in foundationally: from how the weapons are given to you, to what they do, to the actual environmental design of the computer screens. There are so many little, smart choices the team at Arkane made when creating Prey that I don't have enough room to extol them all (the pistol just starts out silenced?!), but if there's one takeaway, I wish more immersive sims—or games cribbing from the genre—would take a lesson from Prey and let me glob some gloop on the wall and climb it.

I'm still working my way through the early phases of Plan B: Terraform, an automation/factory game from Gaddy Games. After almost ten hours of play time, I've managed to finally perfect my hexgrid-based factory optimization, build a population of about 800 people on the surface of Not-Mars, and unlock the ability to mine water-ice. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Plan B: Terraform is a calm colonization sim that lets you build a colony on a planet that closely resembles Mars. You are the overlord of the colony, but instead of managing the colonist dynamics in something like Surviving Mars—or really having any interaction with colonists at all—you are the civil engineer, building clusters of resource collectors, depots for storing resources, and the pathways to get those resources where they need to go. As the colony grows, so too does the number of plates you're spinning. The gameplay is simple, following a predictable path: mine resources, store them, create intermediate components, and create final components. Because you are building a colony far from home, everything you place—from the extractors to the roadways—needs to be created on-planet. You can't mine more iron ore until you mine iron ore, send it to a depot, offload that ore into a factory to create steel bars, then send it to another factory to create an extractor. That may sound complicated, but when you have an entire planet to set your extractor/factory mega complexes on, there's a lot of room for experimentation. Not long after starting, you'll see resource and building numbers hit idle game levels of scale. In the "great divide" of factory games (Factorio vs. Satisfactory), Plan B very much falls within the Factorio bucket. You are making grand-scale factories and developing railways that crisscross entire hemispheres. Unlike Factorio, though, you're building all of these factories for life to flourish. Your progress isn't directly gated by resources collected, but instead by colony population. Provide the people with what they need, and you'll grow your cities _and_ your capabilities. At least early on, I've been able to steadily grow my cities without feeling rushed or frantic. The population seems to go up when the cities are fed the right resources, but if you take your time, the game doesn't punish you harshly. New York City 2 hasn't disappeared off the map because I dawdled delivering concrete. Each step up the tech tree unlocks newer components that mix and match with older ones. You'll unlock _reinforced_ concrete or _high-tech parts_ that are combinations of earlier base materials, allowing you to upgrade your road and truck networks into more efficient trains. I've enjoyed the tech-tree friction; it always seemed like the optimizations of trucks to trains or small depots to larger ones happened right around the time I wanted them. The build tools are simple; complexity is introduced by the materials you can gather or how they are combined, rather than adding a ton of buildings to use. Each level will add new materials you can gather (iron, sulfur, oxygen, carbon, etc.) and new ways to use them (larger depots, trains, recycling centers), requiring you to build bespoke factories and elaborate transportation networks to produce them. Since the game is at a planetary scale and you'll be managing a handful of colony cities at the same time, being able to scan the buildings you have and things they're making helps with scanability. You'll quickly drop down observation towers that allow you to label sections in orbit too, if you can't quickly ID a factory complex. The planet scale and multiple colonies may sound tricky to manage, but I've found it freeing. The great trick of the game is how much it encourages experimentation. When you have three colonies that require a particular material, you'll probably prioritize one colony just to learn how to create the material, but by the third go-around, you'll have a halfway decent optimized grid of interconnected factories and resource gatherers. _This_ is the part of the game I relish. I come to these factory games for the genius bits of "figuring it out" and cracking the code to the optimal way to build. I'd spend hours tearing down factories in Factorio just to properly weave a conveyor belt in a slightly more efficient way, but in Plan B, I have entire zones of the planet to test out new layouts. I need that space because my brain still struggles to wrap my head around the hex-based building system (instead of Factorio's square grid). It certainly helps that if you delete a building, you just get it back, instead of destroying it. I've just gone on for a decent chunk here on the parts of the game I've played, namely the early bits where you're still establishing a nascent colony on a big red rock in space. But I've left out half of the game's name: terraform. There is an entire _second part_ of this game I have yet to experience. As the colony grows and you gather materials, you are also tasked with shifting this barren rock into a livable new world for humanity. That starts relatively early when you unlock the atmospheric harvesters and generators, outputting greenhouse gases from materials you gather from the surface. Where I am in the game, I'm still raising the temperature and generating an atmosphere, but if you look at screenshots, you'll see a lush planet with intersecting waterways filled with shipping lanes. After ten hours in Plan B: Terraform, I've only managed to get my head around the basic methods of resource extraction and delivery, but I'm so excited to unlock more and watch the world change around (and under!) my machines. When you enter the scan mode that highlights resources, you also get a sneak peek at possible waterways as the map evolves, which I can already tell will be a problem for some of my factories. It's this level of map evolution that really gets me excited about continuing to play Plan B. As I achieve my goals and expand my factories in games like Shapez or Factorio, the challenge becomes handling complexity and optimization, but I can already tell the real challenge of Plan B: Terraform is the planet itself. No matter how successfully I optimize my factory layout, a river may change my plans in a few hours, _and_ those changes are signs of success! As the planet becomes more Earth-like, my goals change: how to build harmoniously with the evolving nature of the planet _and_ allow my society to succeed. Go check out Plan B: Terraform if you want a factory optimization game that isn't about blotting out the sun with a Dyson Sphere or filling the sky with noxious chemicals just so you can escape the planet and do it again. Plan B: Terraform is a fantastic, chill factory building game that rewards experimentation and encourages play over the crushing need to get it right the first time. Oh, and there's materials recycling. Surprise, it's a Phil Game.

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