Time to round up what I have been up to for the past two weeks since I skipped last week. The reason for the lack of a weekly roundup is that I was traveling for work so I could play Final Fantasy 16 (which I can say I have played but can’t elaborate on for the moment).
It has also been another fucked week for games journalism with the death of Waypoint. I’ve talked a lot about the depressing state of games journalism before but Waypoint’s death truly feels like the end of an era. Something I think about a lot is that people often ask me where I want to go next in my career and a year ago, I would say that I wanted to work at Launcher, Fanbyte, or Waypoint because they represented the best of what this line of work had to offer. Now none of those places exist. That’s all I really have to say here, don’t want to be too much of a bummer.
Anyways RIP Waypoint and as always - Fuck capitalism, go home.
X-Men is my hyper fixation
I promise I won’t plug Girl Mode every week, but two episodes back we switched things up and I began the long task of summarizing the entire history of the X-Men for Robin who knows pretty much nothing about Marvel’s marvelous mutants. Listen, it’s nearly an hour-and-a-half-long episode and we only cover about 15 years of X-Men history but boy is it fun.
I love the sad nun visual novel
So far, the most interesting games I have played this year have been small itch.io visual novels. I already waxed poetic about how much I liked Life After Magic and now Misericorde follows suit. Following an anchoress thrust into a murder mystery, the visual novel is filled with some of the most enthralling and emotionally resonant writing of any game in recent memory (except maybe Citizen Sleeper). [Article]
I don’t love the return of Coffee Talk
As much as I enjoyed the dream-like haze of the original Coffee Talk’s barista sim gameplay, Coffee Talk Episode 2 managed to dispel that fog. While not very different the charm just seems gone, and retroactively reveals what was always wrong with the original. Putting on your own Spotify playlist and doing the endless modes still feels relaxing beyond belief though. [Article]
See you next week.