Umurangi Generation is a photography game about being young and punk at the end of the world.

Unlike its inspiration, here we can’t be wholly insulated. Our ironic detachment breaks every time we miss a beat, thrust back into consciousness and the glow of our monitor.

This is the part that lingers with me. Not the particulars of mechanics, design, the allegories invoked and implied. I just remember what it feels like to hold the camera. To momentarily feel safe.

For all its glitz and extravagant, desperate cries for sincerity, Tetris Effect feels wholly artificial. In elevating itself to god status, Tetris Effect has made the world very small.

Death Crown’s simplicity is its draw and its curse, illuminating both fatiguing elements of the strategy genre but also how that reduction has created a game in search of itself.

As a transitional piece, Even the Ocean is one of the best modern examples we have of thematic development across games, made more interesting through Anodyne 2's parallels.

Lucah understands form is the message, that violence is messy and contradictory, and that games cannot simply adopt the language of film and literature and achieve the same ends.

The Last Survey is about coming up against the forces that could change things and being met with disinterest and justifications.

Ghostrunner can wrench nothing from this stone that has not already been ground up by other derivative works, and squanders its movement on inconsistent combat and weightless platforming.

Games of the Decade #5 I want to put this title through a shredder and reassemble it as a ransom note for whoever’s in charge of Sega’s branding department. Then I want to play more of the game.