By Ronald Gordon

Hello and welcome once again to the Roundup, an article dedicated to gathering the works of Members and Interns alike to give them a shoutout! There’s big news this week, including Solitaire Stories, Saniah’s time in San Francisco, Zhya’s first Splatoon experience, Marvel’s Wolverine, a puzzler similar to Portal, New York Games Week, and so much more! 

To start us off, I’d like to shout out our Charity Livestream which ran on Saturday, September 19th at 1pm! Please continue to donate. We had got a long list of gaming industry legends from Abubakar Salim and Cliff Bleszinski to familiar faces like Sherri L. Smith, Alyssa Mercante and Stephen Totilo! If you can, please Donate to our fundraiser today, to help us elevate talented writers through our award-winning Playing With Purpose program. 

Mary-Ellis Ryan is a connoisseur of mobile games, and has lots to say about Apple Arcade’s intriguing Solitaire Stories. Solitaire is a game that’s been rebranded and refurbished even more than Tetris has, but Apple Arcade’s newest rendition gives the game a much-needed twist. Mary-Ellis relishes this game’s change to formula as she writes, “If you don’t know, Solitaire Stories is a card game you play by yourself. You try to move all the cards into four piles which start with Aces and end with Kings. You can move cards around by putting red and black cards in order from biggest to smallest. This is the normal game of Solitaire. But Solitaire Stories is the same but with a twist. This game has special events, stories and plenty of customization, like different card styles, backgrounds, and music themes.”

Saniah Etienne recounts her time at Pokémon XP & Worlds in San Francisco! It’s no small journey to travel from D.C., where she’s in college, to San Francisco. But the trip gave Saniah fantastic sights to see and changed her perspective on video games as a whole. She reflects on her time at these events as she writes, “I knew I would have a good time at Pokémon XP and Worlds because I enjoy seeing people happy and Pokémon brings so much joy. But it’s deeper than that. Trainers don’t merely enjoy Pokémon because of the satisfaction it brings to win games. They fall in love with the world it creates. Videogames are systems of knowing. The system of knowing sounds academic but it simply just means they are ways we derive meaning.” 

As her first experience with anything Splatoon, Zhya Colon adored Splatoon Raiders for its beautiful character design. Raiders is a single player focused game, which varies from the regular multiplayer experience that most Splatoon games adhere to. Yet instead of the community found within a round of inky warfare, Zhya discovered the depth of Splatoon’s characters and the colorfully creative worldbuilding that goes into such a series. She references this as she writes, “The characters were the entire highlights. Unlike many Nintendo games, these characters don’t exactly have good morals. They don’t do things with a true virtuous purpose in mind. Their entire reasoning for staying on this island instead of leaving (which they could have done) was so they could steal every last bit of resources left! Really, they are just like money hungry popstars and influencers, and I love them for that. They were so fun to interact with and  I felt part of such an amazing experience going along the story with them.”

Harold Goldberg is no stranger to Remedy Entertainment’s many faces, featuring thoughts from the team behind Control Resonant in his latest article for the New York Times. Control Resonant took the otherworldly feel of the first game and expanded it all across Manhattan, twisting the bustling streets into a sanity-bending cityscape for players to navigate. While players may wonder where the inspiration for such a move comes from, Harold brings words straight from the game’s director as he writes “‘I watch ‘Twin Peaks’ once a year,’ Mikael Kasurinen, the game’s director, said in Los Angeles. Lynch adds elements to his stories that turn them upside down in unpredictable ways, Kasurinen said, adding, ‘He puts something in front of us that is utterly terrifying — and it comes out of nowhere.’” 

“Portal practically changed my brain chemistry in 2007.” Giovanni Colantonio starts his review of the trippy puzzler He Who Watches, with a bit of nostalgia, “The first-person puzzle game felt like an impossible magic trick at the time, and few games released in its wake have been able to outdo it. Now, nearly 20 years later, a lone developer has once again given me that experience with the mind-bending He Who Watches.” As a mind boggling puzzle game in which the world can flip on its head at the press of a button, He Who Watches captures that same unnatural feel that the Portal games evoked within Giovanni. The gimmick continues to impress, as Giovanni mentions when he writes, “What’s especially impressive about He Who Watches is that it’s not a one-trick pony. Rather than using its trick as a mere visual gimmick, Vanden threads in multiple ingenious puzzle ideas that play with gravity. Deep in my playthrough, I reached a series of chambers built around transport beams that push boxes along a green, glowing line. I soon learned that I could use boxes to jam that beam’s trajectory, turning it into a bridge I could freely walk over. A few puzzles later, I learned that I could do even more with that tool, practically gaining the ability to program machines that push boxes where I need them to be. The complexity keeps building gradually until you’ve become an engineer without realizing it.”

It’s no secret that Marvel’s Wolverine has sparked an enormous amount of discourse even before its release. Even still. Stephen Totilo comes to bring the facts: Wolverine is a linear hack-and-slash with romance in between. Wolverine is as simple as they come, he cuts through enemies, he tramples over obstacles, and maybe he gets a drink or two along the way, but there needs to be a touch more nuance to his character if he’s the centerpiece of a whole game. Enter Jean Grey, who Stephen references as he writes, “Will they? Won’t they? This is the reason to play Marvel’s Wolverine, a third-person action game of extraordinary technology and ordinary level design. It’s a game of familiar brawling that also chronicles the refreshing flickers of attraction between ferocious James Logan Howlett aka Wolverine and the powerful hurls-concrete-slabs-with-her-mind Jean Grey.”

Ashley Bardhan brings a somber story, the beloved indie studio Heart Machine may not survive recent layoffs. The recent trend of studios slowly hemorrhaging members seems to be continuing, as even now the studio behind games such as Hyper Light Drifter and Possessor(s) is reaching an all-time low point. Ashley references words from Heart Machine’s founder as she writes, “Studio founder Alx Preston writes in an announcement on LinkedIn, ‘I have very difficult news today.’ He explains Heart Machine’s publisher has suddenly dropped out of funding its next unannounced title, and, ‘without this key income for the studio, any other immediate prospects or other funds, nearly everyone at the studio had to be laid off.’” It seems now, with the gaming industry shifting the way it is, publishers and those with the capital to help games reach their release are moving more cautiously, much to the detriment of studios like Heart Machine. We hope that those who have unfortunately lost their positions find new placements soon, and that the industry recovers from this tumultuous time it’s found itself in. 

Beyond the Circle

If you’re wondering what the gaming scene really looks like in New York, mark down New York Games Week on your calendar now! From October 4th to October 11th, there’s going to be a mountain of different gaming related events both online and offline. New York Games Week is meant to highlight all things gaming within the city, and there are plenty of things lined up if you’re interested. Attend Dungeons & Drafthouse to learn all about D&D, or stop by Game-A-Palooza to see exactly what the Indie dev scene in NYC looks like. Each of the events has tickets on sale now! 

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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