Everybody's Talking at Once

Kenny Lee is the less-frequently-interviewed half of the two-brother team that founded Cellar Door Games, the studio behind (most famously) Rogue Legacy and (most recently) Full Metal Furies. He's also a fan of Ganbare Goemon and Mischief Makers and therefore a megaconnoisseur and the greatest game—so people should really interview him more, happy as I am to get the scoop. We discuss the remarkabl...

Zach Barth is back to talk about Opus Magnum and SHENZHEN I/O, the latest in each of Zachtronics' semi-distinct trademark genres: games where you make things that makes things, and games where you actually code or script, respectively. We talk about how these two parallel tracks came to be, where their audiences do and don't overlap, and what some yet-to-emerge third order of zachlikes might look...

Joel Corelitz drops in to discuss his work on GOROGOA, TumbleSeed, The Unfinished Swan, and Eastward, along with the broader design philosophies behind those games. Even more broadly than that, we talk about the layers of audience engagement in music, in games, and especially in music in games—not to mention the good, bad, and ugly of conservatory culture, the (excellent) reasons why TumbleSeed do...

Garry Schyman scored all three Bioshocks, all three Destroy All Humans games, Resistance: Retribution, Front Mission Evolved, and that oddly engrossing God of War clone based on Dante's Inferno —and that's just scratching the surface of his video game music, to say nothing of his enormous body of work for film and television. Peep the gentleman's IMDB page, if ye doubt the claim . In this episode,...

Greg Kasavin stops by to discuss Supergiant's latest, the party-based purgatory-escape-'em-up Pyre. We also find some time to discuss Bastion and Transistor, not to mention the limits of "naked allegory," the largely untapped potential of diegetic Game Over states—and more generally, of game designs that allow for and accommodate failure—and the ballsy magic of filling a game with material that mo...

Medievalist, archnerd, and outspoken Persona -enjoyer Adam Osborn returns to discuss Persona 5 —as well as visual novels, waifus, and Pope Joan, though not always at the same time and not necessarily in that order. Thrill as we trip over each other trying to remark on everything remarkable about this mad JRPG opus. Persona 5 is an odd beast, even by the series' lofty standards of oddness. It's at...

Drew's good buddy Adam Osborn, PhD-pursuer and self-described archnerd, stops by the discuss the Persona games in anticipation of Persona 5 finally coming out next week (but no, really for real this time ). Starting at the 01:08:24 mark, I should mention, this one does get a TRIGGER WARNING for suicide ideation, because there's no way to do Persona 3's imagery justice without going there. And once...

Last week, Richard Terrell outlined his framework for taxonomizing and evaluating game criticism, and we spent some time using that framework to disagree vociferously about whether Arin Hanson is any damn good at talking about Zelda . This week we get into the weeds about the Zeldas themselves, and here's the crux of the issue: Richard feels about Dark Souls the way that I feel about Skyward Sword...

Richard Terrell returns to talk about Design Oriented, his attempt to categorize, catalog, and (here's where things get interesting) rate game critique. What's being measured there, and how is he measuring it, and to what end? Last time, we talked about what games are, what art is , and why he considers those questions so different (whereas I really don't). This time we discuss the purpose of crit...

Following on our bummer of a conversation about the most joyful show on television , this week we have an exuberant and hopeful conversation about a series of games focused on violence, failure, and ends of days. Go figure. Yes, it's time to discuss Dark Souls, and the fandoms attendant thereto. This week's episode unfortunately comes with a TRIGGER WARNING for sexual assault, since we follow up o...

Lucio and I are both fans of Steven Universe , but we're not exactly members of the Steven Universe fandom—or fandoms , plural, each with its own social norms, its own orthodoxies about what the series means, and its own articles of faith about where the story is headed. The people most conspicuously enthusiastic about Steven Universe sometimes seem to be watching a different show than we are. Whi...

Dan Teasdale returns to discuss No Goblin's sophomore effort, 100ft Robot Golf, a game about (wait for it) hundred-foot-high robots playing golf. This being a No Goblin game, of course, there's more to it than that. It's a deeply personal and proudly goofy admixture of influences that maybe shouldn't even be called an indie game so much as a farm to table game, as Dan jokingly said. (Joking aside,...

Chris McQuinn stops by to discuss DrinkBox Studios' latest, the touch-based first-person dungeon-crawling amputate-'em-up Severed. You're a warrior named Sasha, seeking out your lost family in an ever-threatening and arrestingly otherworldly environment. Monstrosities stand in your way (of course) and monster parts get sliced off (as the title suggests) and things only get weirder from there. Chri...

The whole Question Games team stops by to discuss (and to discuss the discussion surrounding) their debut project, The Magic Circle . Their debut project as a team, that is. It's not the kind of game that anybody would or could make without some experience in the world of making games, and specifically of making them on an ambitious, possibly-even-impossible scale. The game tries to balance betwee...

Zach Barth sits down to complete our interview triptych. Having already covered the art of the anti-puzzle and the question of whether it's even possible to spoil Infinifactory , we focus this time on the softer launch that Steam Early Access provides, the conversation alchemy of developers discussing development with developers on The Zachtronics Podcast , and Zach's fearlessly esoteric new proje...

Action Henk is out (of Steam Early Access) today, and to celebrate, here's my conversation with Roel Ezendam of RageSquid Games . Action Henk is a game about momentum, perfectionism, and making things that actually are as amazing as we remember things being in our childhoods—not just recapturing former glory, but surpassing it. Or to put it another way, Action Henk is the game that we all expect S...

Zach Barth returns for a spoiler-centric look at a game where spoilers arguably don't even matter, his absolutely delightful engineer-'em-up Infinifactory . Mechanically, the game is in one sense unspoilable. Sure, seeing a solution to a given puzzle takes an open-ended head-scratcher and turns it into a set of IKEA furniture, but there's still a process of building, and at least potentially a pro...

Erin Robinson of Ivy Games stops by to discuss Gravity Ghost , her work teaching game design at Columbia College Chicago, talking animals, not-talking animals, and the previously untapped power fantasy of terraforming planets with one's long, beautiful hair . I was really taken with Gravity Ghost from the first time I played it and, as I mention in the interview, the ending made me feel the need t...

Infinifactory feels like SpaceChem for the world that Minecraft hath wrought—which makes sense, given that it's the latest from Zach Barth, who both masterminded SpaceChem and ushered in the Blocks 'n Voxels Age with his seminal "infinifranchise" (Zach's competitive mine-'em-up Infiniminer was the direct inspiration for Minecraft, and well, after Minecraft came the flood). "They're all terrible,"...

Dan Teasdale stops by to talk about Roundabout , the debut game from his newly-founded two-person indie studio No Goblin . We discuss the game (which is awfully good), his previous work on Destroy All Humans! and the Rock Band series, and why we both love The Jackbox Party Pack . And yes, he does divulge the origins of the name "No Goblin." I then proceed to get kind of obsessed with Dan's colloqu...

When I interviewed Jack Lawrence Mayer for UChicago Arts back in 2102 , he was about to launch Single Long , his seven-episode digital series for HBO. His latest project, LA Famous , follows the same basic format—but he's produced it without the backing of HBO or, for that matter, any other network or studio. So this week, Jack Lawrence Mayer stops by to discuss his work, his overall mission "to d...

Zac Burns of Ludeme Games joins me to discuss his studio's digital adaptation of Chess 2, which is out on OUYA, and as of today, on Steam as well. Along the way, we talk about the challenges of translating tabletop games into videogames, the (many) problems with modern intellectual property and copyright law, and why the OUYA has been and remains such a welcoming space for first-time independent g...

At first glance, A Wizard's Lizard doesn't seem like a roguelike-alike , but more specifically like a  Binding of Isaac -alike , what with its distinctive combination of Zelda and Smash TV . But on closer inspection, A Wizard's Lizard is a fairly different beast, owing more to A Link to the Past than to the original Legend of Zelda, and not exactly riding Isacc's nightmarish coattails—more drawing...

Self-described Actor/Writer/Comedian/Musician/Plant-Owner Lila Newman stops by to discuss her piece-in-progress about Ora B. Nichols—one of the most influential artists of early radio, and specifically of early radio sound effects. You've heard Nichols' work if you've ever heard the the 1938 version of The War of the Worlds. You know, the one produced by Orson Welles and The Mercury Theater on the...

Transistor is Supergiant Games' follow-up to Bastion —not a sequel, and definitely not a rehash, but just as definitely an iteration, a more refined approach to the same set of themes and gameplay ideas. This time, the the skill system is a dizzyingly intricate mutation of Materia , rather than a more standard weapon combination system. This time, the beautiful ruined environment is a cohesive cyb...