Held up in some abandoned Soviet mining facility was the enemy, a Templar-esq secret society called Trinity with ties to the Vatican and roots back at least as far as the Crusades.  They may not have been as nefarious as the Nazis that other archaeologists frequently faced, but for Lara the conflict was personal: one…

Chaos already dominates enough of our lives. The universe is an endless raging sea of randomness. Our job isn’t to fight it, but to weather it together, on the raft of life. A raft held together by those few, rare, beautiful things that we know to be predictable.  -Abed Nadir, Community Episode #304 “Remedial Chaos…

The trail for the herbalist’s apprentice had led Geralt to a village all but abandoned, save for a lone elderly couple.  They confessed to having seen him a few days prior, but heard the wolves howling that same night. With the conversation over, the in game quest log automatically updated.  Geralt was to report to…

Much adulation has been heaped upon Destiny since the debut of the 2.0 patch and the release of the Taken King expansion.  The changes both bring to the game as it existed in its first year are universally agreed upon as positive. However, the extent to which such improvements mend the broken state of the…

Often acclaimed as the Citizen Kane of games, the first nascent step in legitimizing the medium as art, the original Bioshock constructed a compelling critique of Randian Objectivism. The sequel, however, wisely avoided repeating the message of its predecessor, instead deconstructing the polar opposite philosophical system, Collectivism.  The two games taken together then were thematically…

The Beginner’s Guide (from Davey Wreden, co-creator of The Stanley Parable) stands apart as the game which most clearly holds a thesis, an argument that it’s trying to make to the player, while simultaneously being the game whose message is most difficult to discern.  The most prominent interpretation I’ve happened across so far is that…