Critical Play: Firewatch- Jessica April 17, 2026 Information provided in a game should be prioritized considering both the game mechanics and the target audience. Firewatch was created by Campo Santo for…
Jinhyo – Critical Play: Competitive Analysis of Wing It April 17, 2026 My team is prototyping a collaborative story-building, roleplaying, analog tabletop game referred to as Playwright for 4-10 people ages 8+, where each player’s assigned…
Critical Play (Comparative / Competitive Analysis) — Coup April 17, 2026 My team is designing a social deduction game similar to Avalon, where votes are a resource that can be traded for uncertain information. Thus,…
A Critical Play of One Night Ultimate Werewolf April 17, 2026 One Night Ultimate Werewolf. A game where identity is secret and where the villagers have one shot at deducing who the monster is. The…
Read, Write, Play: Slay the Princess – Krystal Li April 17, 2026 This week, I played Slay the Princess, which is a psychological horror visual novel created by Black Tabby Games. The game opens with a…
RWP Week 2: Slay the Princess and How Evil Should a Video Game Allow You to Be? April 17, 2026 Playing Slay the Princess marks my very first experience playing a psychological thriller visual game involving a choice-driven narrative where the lines of reality,…
Critical Play: Competitive Analysis (Incan Gold) April 17, 2026 My P1 group is working on a game we call High Rollers, which aims to integrate gambling mechanics into a very light dungeon crawler. Naturally,…
Critical Play: Competitive Analysis April 17, 2026 Texas Hold’em Poker is a card game with origins traced to Robstown, Texas in the early 1900s, with no single credited inventor, though figures…
Competitive Analysis – Patently Stupid April 17, 2026 For this critical play, I played Patently Stupid from Jackbox Party Pack 5 from Jackbox Games. This game is played using a host PC…
Critical Play: Competitive Analysis April 17, 2026 I chose Skribbl.io, a free online multiplayer drawing and guessing game played in the browser created by ticedev. Its target audience is broad, but…
Critical Play: Competitive Analysis – Raft vs Rock-It! April 17, 2026 For my critical play, I played Raft Survival: Multiplayer, a cooperative survival mobile game where you and your team drift on a small raft…
Critical Play: Competitive Analysis April 17, 2026 Losing for Fun: Social Dynamics in Tragedy of the Commons “Deep Sea Adventure” is an initially simple experience. The 2014 board game (with later…
evil should matter April 17, 2026 Video games have always had a strange relationship with morality. They give players freedom: the freedom to explore, to experiment, and sometimes to do…
Maybe We Should Be Evil: Slay the Princess April 17, 2026 I used to think that however horrible the content in novels, it wasn’t really possible for a book to be evil, per se: its contents…
The Princess You Get Is the One You Believe In April 17, 2026 Video games are so well known, loved, hated, and conflicting because of their very purpose to give players an opportunity to immerse themselves and…
The Art of Hopeless Surrender to Artistic Violence April 17, 2026 From the get-go, Sarah Stang takes on a strong stance on how she believes that “interactivity is a debatable concept which has been so…
Critical Play: For the Queen April 17, 2026 For the Queen, designed by Alex Roberts (II) in 2019, is a story-building card game in which players collaboratively construct a narrative centered around…
Fiona – Critical Play: Competitive Analysis April 17, 2026 Social deduction games thrive on suspicion, performance, and incomplete information. As someone drawn to these mechanics, my team’s prototype, tentatively titled The Murder Game,…
Choosing Evil in Slay the Princess April 17, 2026 Slay the Princess is a game that allows, no encourages its players to perform acts of evil. It at first offers justification for these…
Absurdity in Slay the Princess: An Essay on Violent Contrasts April 17, 2026 Introduction “This is a love story”, proclaims the trigger content warning screen as the game opens. Haunted by lilting piano melodies – us, the…