Writing about fiction from a feminist perspective
I didn’t blog through the vast majority of 2018, but I was still reading, playing video games, and generally devouring media. I don’t know if I can do a traditional “TOP 10 X OF 2018,” partly because I’m only one person with quite a backlog of stuff to enjoy, so I didn’t watch or play …
Gris is one of the most visually stunning and emotionally evocative games I have ever played. And it achieves it with almost nothing. Minimal music. The sound of birds chirping, or the wind rushing. A green-haired girl in a floating black dress, exploring an initially greyscale world. The game has no dialogue, and no narrative …
It’s no secret that I love Undertale. I think it’s a masterpiece of heart, soul and meta gaming commentary, and I thought I’d never play a game like it again. At least, until Halloween this year, when the creator surprise dropped… something on Twitter. A demo. A first chapter. A three hour gaming experience. A …
Last week, Youtuber Shirrako uploaded a series of videos centered around torturing a Suffragette character in Red Dead Redemption 2. In the videos, with titles like “Beating Up Annoying Feminist” and “Annoying Feminist Fed to Pigs,” Shirrako found inventive ways to torment the campaigner for women’s votes, including throwing her down mine shafts and feeding …
Until the final chapter of Night in the Woods, I was convinced I was going to give it a rapturous review. The game follows the daily life of Mae, a girl who just dropped out of college for reasons unmentioned and returned to her small hometown. It’s mostly a slice-of-life visual-novel-with-minigames, as you explore the slowly …
Never Alone is a puzzle-plaformer game, based on folklore from the Inupiaq people of Alaska. The game was made as a partnership between Upper One games, the first indigenous-owned video game developer in the US, and the Cook Inlet Tribal Council, and is specifically designed to not only be a compelling game, but also to share Inupiaq …
Last year, I wrote a post gushing about why everyone should play the indie game Undertale, which you can read here if you haven’t played the game. This post is chock-full of spoilers. Read at your own risk. Maybe I have a bit of an analysis addiction. Because although Undertale is an amazing, heartwarming, heartbreaking, thought-provoking video game that I think …
Yup, I finally played Life is Strange. First, a quick spoiler-free review. Life is Strange is fantastic. It’s part mystery, part philosophical musing, part coming of age story, part time-travel adventure. And you take a lot of polaroids. You play as Max, an aspiring photographer with no confidence in her abilities who suddenly discovers that she has the ability …
Yesterday, the final episode of Telltale’s Game of Thrones game finally hit Steam. The game had a lot of expectations to meet — it promises, during every moment of gameplay, that your decisions will affect the story. After five episodes of strategy, manipulation and hard choices, players really wanted to see how they personally had affected the …
OK, I’m cheating here. There isn’t much to say about Undertale from a “feminist fiction” perspective. At least, not without spoiling the game, which I really don’t want to do. But Undertale is an absolutely amazing game, and I simply had to write about it. Don’t let that simple pixel-y look deceive you. Undertale is funny, fun, surprising …