Here is a question that sounds simple and is not. Why do some stretches of your life feel enormous in memory, vivid and long, while others, sometimes much longer ones, have simply vanished, collapsed into a blur you could not reconstruct if your life depended on it? A two-week trip somewhere new can occupy more … Continue reading Why Some Days Become Save Points
Emberosis
Games Know Failure Is Part of the Story
Here is something I never questioned until one day I did, and then I could not stop seeing it. Games are built almost entirely around losing, and we play them for fun. Sit with how strange that is. You buy a game to enjoy yourself, and the experience it actually delivers is mostly failure. You … Continue reading Games Know Failure Is Part of the Story
What Hard Mode Gets Wrong About Real Life
There is a particular argument that breaks out among gamers with total predictability, and it is worth paying attention to because the same argument runs, quieter and meaner, through the rest of life. A game adds an easy mode, or an accessibility option, or a way to skip a brutal section, and a certain kind … Continue reading What Hard Mode Gets Wrong About Real Life
When Rest Means Fighting the Same Battle Again
In a certain kind of game, beloved and brutal in equal measure, there is a mechanic that newcomers find baffling and a little cruel. When you rest at the bonfire, the thing that restores your health and saves your progress and lets you breathe, the entire world resets behind you. Every enemy you killed on … Continue reading When Rest Means Fighting the Same Battle Again