By Ronald Gordon

Hello and welcome back to the Roundup! This is one of a series of articles dedicated to highlighting the brilliant works of our Members and Interns alike! This time around we’ve got a two-part story on Beatdown City Survivors, our Circle Efforts being rewarded with a NEA Grant, Playing with Purpose Student Work in a museum, the start of Xbox’s mass layoffs, Obsidian Entertainment pivoting to Fallout, and so much more! 

As May was rolling in, our Founder Harold received an interesting proposition: an exhibit was being curated by fellow author Kathy Z Price, and she wanted to feature student work from our Playing with Purpose program. Of course, Harold agreed, and now anyone who is interested can take a look at our part in the Woodstock Artists Association Museum until August 6th! The work featured is some of the best we’ve gotten from former students, slideshows of their brilliant ideas printed and posted along the walls of the museum. Definitely take a look if you’re interested, it’s great stuff! 

To start us off, we at the Circle are elated to announce that we’ve been awarded our first NEA Grant! The National Endowment for the Arts is the largest independent funder for the arts and arts education, and has been ensuring the spread of creativity for over 50 years! After another successful year of our in school Playing with Purpose program bringing forth creative minds like Osaze Okungbowa, we’re more than ready to continue the spread of journalism to even further expansions. Thanks again to the NEA for trusting the Circle’s initiative, and helping to push Playing with Purpose out to parts of Hudson Valley in the near future! 

Next up, here’s one of the Circle’s first two-part articles! Those who’ve been with the Circle in recent years may remember a budding indie developer named Shawn Alexander Allen, a former contributor to the Circle, who debuted the riveting Treachery in Beatdown City before 2020. Since then, he and his company NuChallenger have been working on the New York-centric roguelike Beatdown City Survivors. As an homage to a longtime friend of the Circle, we had two talented writers share some thoughts about the game! 

Osaze Okungbowa thoroughly enjoyed Beatdown City Survivors, not just because of the NYC focus, but because the game made dying fun. Osaze plays games to analyze them, to understand deep down the strategies that make gap between success and failure even wider than it was at the start. Beatdown City Survivors gave him every opportunity to analyze, which he mentions as he writes, “What’s truly fascinating about Beatdown City Survivors is how dying can teach you more about living than living does. My first death against Gloopy Yang, the giant, green first boss, was a turning point that emphasized the idea of spacing. The rule of thumb in the beginning of each level is to get up close and personal with the mobs but Gloopy taught me that it’s ok to run when you’re outmatched or outnumbered. I almost beat the subway level on my first try. But I got taken out by a speeding train. It was truly a shock at first but from that death onwards I would analyze the entire screen, not just where the mobs were coming from.”

“Native New Yorkers will confidently confirm the existence of zombies in the city.” Says Kimari Rennis, returning to thrill about the NYC focus of Beatdown City Survivors. She says, “They can be seen lingering in the middle of a busy walkway, taking pictures of a Macy’s storefront, pretending to be licensed taxi drivers outside of JFK airport, or, as they flail around, refusing to place their burgeoning backpack between their legs on a crowded subway.” Despite it depicting her home of NYC being infested by gross hordes of undead, Kimari felt that Beatdown City Survivors couldn’t have been any more real than it already was. It grabbed her, alongside Osaze, with its roguelike aspects and kept her captive with the chance to play as an adorable Shiba Inu named Shibuya. Kimari is eager for the chance to unlock the character, commenting on her spent time as she writes, “At the time of writing this review, I have clocked 13 hours, and I haven’t even reached the stage where Shibuya can be found! I have a long journey ahead of me before I’ve earned the right to play as the token dog character, but I know it’ll be worth it, and enjoyable. I don’t care if it takes 13 more hours or 30. I will unlock Shibuya.”

Linette Marte reviewed the colorfully chaotic Saros, an enthralling sci-fi roguelite! When first looking at the trailer, you may notice that despite the grim dark scheme of Saros’ cinematics, the gameplay is surrounded by brightly colored bullets and neon blasts, all of which pulled Linette in with its shocking start. Almost as quickly as she was thrown onto the ever dangerous Carcosa, she throws the reader into her mindset as she writes, “A colorful, sci-fi world. Running and gunning weird and grotesque creatures. There’s no time for slowpokes in the high intensity rougelite, Saros. You are dropped into a planet called Carcosa where creatures are hostile and intense and a solar eclipse could mean your possible death.” But of course with every Roguelike, there comes a time when you die, and that’s okay. Linette encourages feeding into the loop as she writes, “Don’t be afraid to die in this game; it is the best way to learn. Your knowledge of the creatures and environment will improve every time you go out to start a cycle, so try new techniques and enhance your power ups to make every next one just a little bit easier.”

Founder Harold Goldberg wrote all about American history depicted in games for America’s 250th anniversary. From exploring the American Revolution in Assassin’s Creed III, to the potential future that nuclear war may bring in Fallout: New Vegas, Harold shared brief thoughts on every game that personified the American dream. One of the most intriguing were his thoughts on Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption II, which he describes as he writes, “The drama of the cowboy Arthur Morgan and his band of outlaws facing cruel humanity and worse weather is not like a typical John Wayne film. It attempts to address issues the United States dealt with at the turn of the 20th century: industrialization overwhelming the pioneer spirit; the systematic marginalization of Black people, Native Americans and women; and the rampant spread of disease.” There are a plethora of varying perspectives on America’s history and its eventual future, and Harold does his due diligence to try and capture some of the most profound stories to come from these ideas. 

Moving onto member works, Stephen Totilo speaks on the recent Xbox layoffs and their immediate effects on developers like Obsidian and id Software. With many of the Texas and based jobs being cut, DOOM developer Id Software would end up taking a massive hit, with their office located in Richardson losing over 90 workers in total. Obsidian, a legendary developer behind Outer Worlds and Fallout: New Vegas, would take a similar blow, as Stephen describes, “A WARN notice in California, received by Game File this morning, indicates that role-playing game specialists Obsidian Entertainment is losing 52 workers. That includes 43 based in Obsidian’s California offices and nine in-state remote workers. Obsidian was purchased by Microsoft in 2018 and last year released three games (Avowed, The Outer Worlds 2 and Grounded 2).” The cuts may be devastating, but they’re all in the name of saving Xbox, as mentioned by Stephen who writes, “These cuts are part of the 1,600 layoffs announced by Xbox CEO Asha Sharma on Monday, themselves part of 3,200 jobs Microsoft plans to cut from its gaming division by the end of June 2027. Sharma cited an unhealthy Xbox business for an overall 20% downsizing of the Xbox gaming team.”

Beyond the Circle

In an invigorating twist on the earlier announced layoffs, Obsidian Entertainment has not called it quits just yet, pivoting to creating a brand-new Fallout sequel. After losing a quarter of their workforce, and cancelling several games because of it, Obsidian has now moved to working closely with Bethesda to launch a brand-new game in the Fallout series. Jason Scheier of Bloomberg talks briefly about this pivot as he writes, “Under the new plan, studio design director Josh Sawyer will lead a new title in the Fallout universe — a series of roleplaying games that take place in an alternate history in which the US has been ravaged by nuclear war. The emerging strategy is still in flux, the people said, and could still change.”

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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