By Ronald Gordon 

Hello and welcome back to the Roundup, a column created to gather the works of our members and interns alike to give them a shout out! March has been an eventful month, filled with plenty of great games to play and cover. This time around we’ve got stories featuring Romeo is A Dead Man, I Hate This Place, Resident Evil: Requiem, AI Slop and Harold Goldberg’s new book, “The Skinny.” 

RESIDENT EVIL REQUIEM

The newest addition to the Resident Evil franchise, Resident Evil Requiem, rocked Saniah’s world with horror and action galore! Despite this being the newest installment to a fantastic franchise, Requiem served as Saniah’s entry to the world of horror games made with dread in mind. This extended to even the sound of the game as a whole, which Saniah expresses as she writes, “As for music beyond singing, there isn’t much music in Resident Evil Requiem apart from the sounds that signal you should be on alert. As apparent as it is, some may count Grace’s perpetual heavy breathing as part of the soundtrack. Sound contributes to an important aspect of the gameplay. Some areas, like the sewer, are not very well lit, forcing you to rely on sound.” Requiem is more than just another game, it’s a love letter to fans both old and new as it encapsulates the best parts of Resident Evil: Spine chilling body horror and action with Leon S. Kennedy! 

Harold Goldberg gleaned similar thoughts from his interview with Koshi Nakanishi, the Director behind Requiem for the New York Times. He quotes Nakanishi’s words on the game’s design philosophy as he writes “‘If someone is continually exposed to the same kind of experience, they become numb to it,’ he said through an interpreter. The key is ‘to vary the tempo and the rhythm to create a sense of unpredictability.’”

STILL THINKING ABOUT DICE

GDC has been everyone’s cup of tea as of late, but Harold is still thinking about  DICE 2026, and everything the expo had to offer! While it may have been a month ago, DICE 2026 had a lot to offer seasoned journalists like Harold, including meetings with industry faces he had grown to appreciate. One such person was Chris Kohler, who Harold mentions as he writes, “I was especially happy to see Chris Kohler, who used to be a games blogger for Wired. But now he’s the editorial director for Digital Eclipse. This game studio has published a series of remastered games in anthology form, and those anthologies include deep dives into art, narrative and how games get made. They’re particularly valuable, I think, for young students who want to know more about video game history.”

FOUNDER HAROLD GOLDBERG’S NEW BOOK

And speaking of mystery and horror, Circle Founder Harold Goldberg’s  “The Skinny,” his first novel, comes out next Tuesday. You can get Harold’s book via Amazon – or online via your favorite local bookstore. This creepy noir mystery that takes place in 1990’s New York City is influenced a lot by games like Alan Wake, L.A. Noire, Grand Theft Auto, and many others. 

I HATE THIS PLACE

“There is nothing I love more than women in horror.” Jade Entien begins their review of I Hate This Place with jubilation at another example of women surviving horror scenarios, “I love my femme fatales, my evil-doing women, and most of all, my final girls. In the past, we had only helpless damsels in distress, female characters who were victims while their male counterparts took the glory at the end. Now, though, we have the powerful ‘final girl,’ the last woman to confront the killer and the movie’s sole survivor.” After a brief look into the history of the Final Girl trope, Jade speaks at length about I Hate This Place and what parts of the game make or break the experience for them. In their final statement, Jade summarizes with the following, “Overall, I’m a fan of this game: its artstyle, colorful characters and enemies, sound design and crafting/survival system. I Hate This Place is mostly wonderful, but in need of some work. I would love it if bugs like the lagging audio and motionless cutscenes were fixed, I would enjoy more maps to explore, and I would appreciate not being one-shotted by a spider. But I can see how much passion went into this game, and I’m not opposed to giving it another try once the bugs are squashed. Ultimately, though, I feel like this $30 game needs a bit of a tweak before others see its worth.” 

ROMEO IS A DEAD MAN

The story of Romeo and Juliet has been told through various lenses, but the new Romeo is a Dead Man may just be the strangest rendition yet! Khloe Wilkerson had the pleasure of playing through this whacky action-adventure game, finding time to enjoy it despite its outrageous antics. In one instance, she even learns to grasp the game’s overwhelming combat as she writes, “In terms of gameplay, Romeo Is a Dead Man feels fast and intentionally chaotic. Combat emphasizes constant movement over careful defense. Romeo uses a mix of melee weapons and firearms, allowing you to switch between two depending on the enemy type. Melee combat focuses on chaining light and heavy attacks while dodging. While it isn’t overly complex, it feels satisfying when executed well. Gunplay becomes essential against stronger enemies, especially those with visible weak points. One enemy that stood out to me was ‘Every Day Is Monday,’ a massive, grotesque, headless creature that felt nearly impossible to take down using only swords. Once I targeted its glowing weak points with firearms, I realized the fight wasn’t as bad as I thought.”

SPACE WARLORD BABY TRADING SIMULATOR

As if organ trading wasn’t enough, intern Tina Lam was subjected to trading alien babies, and the fun that may follow in Strange Scaffold’s newest simulation game. Life in deep space is hard enough as it is, but it gets even crazier when you throw alien baby trading into the mix. This wasn’t enough to stop Tina, however, who writes, “The first time I played Space Warlord,  I felt like ripping out my own hair. I mean, I made so many avoidable rookie mistakes that cost me so much money! When I first saw the baby’s value drop, I immediately felt anxious and sold too early. Seeing the price skyrocket just a few seconds later felt like watching my own blood pressure rise. Was this game frustrating? Absolutely. But it also felt like a genuine learning experience that taught me how to time myself and also control my emotions at the same time. (That’s probably key to investing in the real-life stock market, too.) I guess you could say that my beginner mistakes were just skill issues.”

METROID PRIME 4: BEYOND

Isaac Espinosa has long awaited Metroid Prime 4, having been a fan of the Metroid series for as long as he’s been playing games. Even still, after finally getting his hands on the game he’s waited nearly a decade for, he took the time to ask himself a very important question: “So was Metro Prime 4 worth the eight year wait, or does it fail to live up to the monumental expectations placed upon it?” After running through all that the game has to offer, both good and bad, Isaac leaves the reader with a vital piece of information straight from Nintendo’s Kensuke Tanabe. He quotes the Senior Director as he writes, “Tanabe, translated by NintendoEverything, responded to a question about the toughest obstacles: ‘In the end, the game took much longer than expected to finish, and we realized that players’ impressions toward open-world games had changed. That being said, development had already been reset once before (when we started again from scratch with Retro Studios) so backtracking development again was out of the question, and we resolved to move forward with our original vision.’”

DRAGON QUEST VII REIMAGINED

Luis Aguasvivas published more than just his thoughts on Dragon Quest VII Reimagined on Unwinnable, he questioned what it meant to be a critic in the first place. It’s a common fact nowadays that sometimes games are going to catch hate, either for valid critiques that people have or simply because it didn’t meet another’s expectations. Yet Luis seeks to bring a different thought process to the forefront of everyone’s minds, pleading for change as he writes “I will not waste my time discussing if game criticism is dead, because as we know everything that functions and works through capitalist logic is undead. And this article is not really about Dragon Quest VII, but about what it means to write criticism in a moment where we are all that yellow cartoon dog inside the burning house. The structure has yet to collapse; it does not function but it still stands. In a house aflame expressions must change.” 

CRIMSON MOON

Giovanni Colantonio got a first hand look at the upcoming Crimson Moon, a breathtakingly badass roleplaying game! As a standout that caught his attention from Sony’s recent State of Play, Giovanni couldn’t ignore Crimson Moon’s vibrant art style and unique approach to presenting gameplay as a non-Soulslike. The developer, Subotnick, seemed very finicky about the genre, as Giovanni quotes “‘We don’t use that word, and intentionally,’ Subotnick said. ‘When my friend was making a Star Wars game that got labeled that, they didn’t come out and say, ‘Hey, this Star Wars game is a Souls game.’ They were making a really good action RPG in that world, and we’re doing the same thing. Were we inspired by Dark Souls and Elden Ring? Yes, it’s obvious. Where we’re slightly different is… it’s hard, because you don’t want to say, ‘We’re an accessible game!’ because then you turn off all the Souls players. But we are more [approachable] than that, traditionally.’” Crimson Moon has a lot of promise, putting all of its eggs into the basket of accessibility rather than challenge through repetition, which sounds a lot more agreeable than most games in the genre. 

BEYOND THE CIRCLE

Gaming as a landscape is always changing, constantly shifting to adjust to the newest technology or recent trend. This change can sometimes be beneficial, leading to brand new consoles or innovations within games that have yet to be seen. Other times, it can lead to what the internet has been calling “AI Slop,” such as the recent announcement of Nvidia’s DLSS 5 program. James Bentley of PC Gamer covered this issue, sharing the opinions of developers found on social media after the news hit the public eye, and how unhappy many were with Nvidia’s new AI-Led technology. James quotes the words of two figures on X as he writes, “Over on X, New Blood co-founder Dave Oshry shares a meme calling the tech ‘Pure Slopium’, a reference to AI slop. ‘Is this a 3D model?’, an account dedicated to teaching X users about 3D models, similarly, labels DLSS 5 a ‘slop filter’ and calls Nvidia ‘an absolute joke’. The word slop is used a lot in regard to Nvidia’s announcement. Indie developer Guselect says, ‘bad ending: now every game is AI slop.’” 

Ronald Gordon is a New York Videogame Critics Circle Member and Mentor. He was the first of our writers – or any intern anywhere – to complete an internship at Rockstar Games.

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