Category: Critical Play

Professor Layton and Pandora’s Box is a 2007 Nintendo DS game developed by Level-5, which plays akin to a puzzle book. While it’s noted to…

This week, I played Monument Valley, a puzzle game developed and published by Ustwo Games. The game is available on PC and mobile (I…

I played Escape the Room: Stargazer’s Manor, a cooperative board game designed by ThinkFun for 3–8 players, targeting families, casual players, and puzzle enthusiasts….

This week I played Portal 2, a classic of the puzzle genre and arguably gaming as a whole that up to now I never…

Portal 2 (Valve, 2011), a first-person puzzle-platformer available on PC/Mac/PS3/Xbox360 (played on PC) targeting puzzle-game enthusiasts, makes story far more than scaffolding around puzzles….

Putting Memories Together: How Gorogoa Turns Puzzles into Story One of the first things I noticed about Gorogoa was that it almost never used…

This week, I played Hades, a roguelike dungeon crawler developed and published by Supergiant Games for PC, console, and mobile platforms. Rated for teens…

For this critical play I played Undertale, a 2015 indie game by Toby Fox. Despite this game’s popularity and cultural significance, I hadn’t actually…

In Celeste, designed by Maddy Thorson and Noel Berry for PC and consoles in 2018, the mountain isn’t just a passive obstacle course for…